The Mapuches, a tribe now numbering about 500,000 people in south central Chile are the descendants of the Araucanians of Spanish legend. Many still speak only their own idiom, which now shows much lexical influence of the surrounding Spanish. This paper is an exposition of Maria Catrileo Chiguailaf de Godo's research in her native language. It…

This study documents the instances of code-switching and interference in the speech of a bilingual child living in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

Explores the possible applications of text linguistics in the field of translation teaching, focusing on the analysis of discourse texture within Functional Sentence Perspective and Theme-Rheme Theory. It is concluded that texture provides the means for the realization of discourse intentions (context). (OD)

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…

Dedicated to Margaret Langdon at the University of California, San Diego, for her contributions to Yuman studies, this volume of occasional papers contains papers presented at two conferences on Hokan-Penutian languages. The papers and presenters are as follows: "Yuman Linguistics: The Work of Margaret Langdon" (Leanne Hinton), which is…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

This paper seeks to formulate a principle that explains the working of the Japanese number system with respect to Japanese nouns and that defines the kinds of nouns and contexts that condition the forms of number expressions. It is the author's theory that in applying numbers to nouns, the Japanese make a formal distinction between things they…

This article reports on a study designed to obtain data on the first words understood and produced by eight infants. It provides a descriptive account of the earliest levels of language comprehension and allows comparison of lexical development in comprehension and production. (Author/CFM)

This study investigated the use of generic noun phrases by preschool children and their mothers. Results indicate striking differences in the way generics and non-generics are distributed in the speech of both groups, suggesting generic noun phrases differ in their semantics and conceptual organization from non-generics and may reflect children's…

This paper discusses various techniques that scientists and other professionals can use to keep current in their field despite the large amount of available information, such as consulting abstracts, indexes, reviews, and catalogues. It also examines specific language patterns that are used in the sciences to produce synthesis and abridgement,…

Six papers resulting from the fieldwork projects of members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics program at the University of North Dakota include: "A Relational Grammar Approach to Kera Syntax" (Janet K. Camburn), a syntactic study of an Afroasiatic language; "Clitic Doubling and M-Chains in Piraha" (Dan Everett), examining…