Discusses the relationship between second-language teaching and research from the multiple perspectives of a North American context. (Author/VWL)

Some results are reported of an investigation into the meanings of the English modal auxiliary verbs. The corpus consisted of the one million word Brown University corpus of American English and a matching Lancaster University corpus of British English. The three factors operative in the study were: (1) contextual features, that is, co-occurring…

The experiment reported in this document extended the study by Milburn and Bell (1969) of English word frequencies. Specifically, this experiment examined the influence of instructional set on the relationship between affect and frequency estimates, with a distinction between personal and nationwide norms. The experiment design provided for two…

Reports the results of three experiments investigating comprehension and memory for slang metaphors. The experiments examine the thesis that the special pragmatic properties of slang should make these metaphorical expressions easy to understand and remember, especially since speakers frequently share information about the conventional meaning of…

Reflections on the annual conference of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English (CCTE) and the development of language study in Canadian education are given. (HTH)

This paper, a small part of a larger project which explores the effects of linguistic insecurity on language production, discusses the negative attitudes toward language of some of the present-day "language elite"--those who take pleasure in or earn their livelihood by "Correcting every body else." Linguistic insecurity is, then, the feeling that…

Intended for use with students who have just become aware of dialect variations, this book addresses dialects of American English. Chapters include an introduction to dialect study, discussions of colonial English, Eastern sttlement, Eastern words, Eastern pronunciation, Eastern grammar, the Westward movement, an analysis of sectional atlas…

A nation's language is on the order of a natural resource--subject, like the other, to depletion, the ravages of pollution, thoughtless neglect. Suggests the development of an American Academy like unto the French Academy which would diligently establish "sure rules to our language, rendering it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and…

Compares the distribution of prepositions in American and British English. Two machine-readable one million word Corpora, the Brown Corpus of American English and the Lob Corpus of British are used as a basis of comparison. (Author/OD)

Raised, nasalized variants of /ae/ in such words as hat and back in the speech of many Illinoisans are found to correlate with the size of the community in which the speaker was raised. Generally, the higher the variants, the more urban the speaker was raised. (Author/RM)

This paper reports on an investigation of the voice-onset-time (VOT) characteristics of word-initial stops produced by four four-year-old children. Instrumental analysis of the children's spontaneous speech showed that they had distinct distributions for voiced and voiceless stops at all three places of articulation and that there was very little…

The 74 studies cited in this selected, annotated bibliography represent major areas of research which may be useful to linguists. Structures Elicitation Techniques (SET) is a term used in contrast to naturalistic observational technique, and the methods referred to in the annotations as SETs are diverse but have in common the elicitation of…

Cites over 75 examples of errors in usage which were made by newswriters for the "Washington Post," suggesting that they indicate the social dimensions of language decay. (DD)

Examines colloquial contractions (spelling variants such as "kinda" and "hafta") against a background of other variations in the English writing system with respect to their morphological identity, characteristic spelling patterns, and significance in print. Divides variants into those that are independent of speech variation…

Discusses two basic areas of difference between British and American English, namely the complementation of certain participles and the complementation of certain verbs. Complementation after "concerned" and "interested" is illustrated by several examples taken from speech and from newspaper advertisements. (AMH)