Considers the culturally patterned set of analogic renamings found in Huli baby talk, nursery rhymes, and children's verbal games. An analysis of socialization activities shows a marked concern with body motifs and appellations and inter-adult behavior involving talk about the body, and showing that such language sensitizes children to cultural…

This introduction to sociolinguistics is presented in four parts. The first part gives an overview of this branch of language study, its scope and principles of inquiry, and its basic and key concepts. This portion is written for individuals with no prior knowledge or expertise in the subject. Topics covered in this section include: the nature of…

Reports on research concerning the impact of pupils' speech styles on teacher attitudes. Focuses on Australian research and the classroom implications for Australian teachers and students. (RL)

Reports the study of ritual verbal insults among Black men and among gay men. Gives examples of these insults and explains the situations in which such insulting takes place. (PMJ)

Discusses the birthday notices that appear in the advertising section of the Papua New Guinea "Post Courier." The texts of these notices are analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective, and their context is considered as a register of the variety of English that has become known as Papua New Guinea English. (Author/OD)

Two experiments were undertaken in Hong Kong to examine sociocultural factors in the speech acts of making apologies in Cantonese. The first experiment involved ten men who were given role cards describing various situations with minor to serious problems for which they must apologize. The influence of certain situational variables on the…

A national random sample of over 14,000 high school seniors was studied with respect to socio-cultural differences in responses to cognitive test items. Six different cognitive tests and ten different groups were analyzed. The tests were: vocabulary, picture-number, reading, letter-groups, mathematics, and mosaic comparisons. The groups were:…

THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD "LANGUAGE" CAN BE LIMITED TO MEAN "A VOCAL AND AUDITORY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, WHICH WORKS BY THE SYMBOLIC PROCESS, WHICH HAS A COMPLEX STRUCTURE, AND WHICH IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING SO LONG AS IT REMAINS IN USE." THERE ARE SIX IMPLICATIONS OF THIS DEFINITION--(1) ALTHOUGH LANGUAGE IS PRIMARILY AUDITORY AND VOCAL, IT CAN…

In the French verb phrase, negation is often marked twice, by a proclitic element (ne) and by a second negative (such as "pas" or "rien"). Until the seventeenth century, the first element was obligatory, while a second negative was optionally added for emphasis or precision. Subsequently, the second negatives lost their…

Over 14,000 high school seniors were studied with respect to sociocultural differences on cognitive test item responses. Six different cognitive tests and ten different groups were analyzed. The tests were: vocabulary, picture-number, reading, letter-groups, mathematics, and mosaic comparisons. The groups were: American Indians, blacks,…

The lexicon of present-day English is changing rapidly and regularly, and a description and explanation of this change is necessary for any comprehensive diachronic theory. An examination of a corpus of 500 new words collected during 1975 provides the basis for a typology of lexical change that both supports and suggests modifications for the…

This paper surveys the principles and findings from the field of linguistics that have been brought to bear on questions dealing with learning to read, the analysis of the reading process, and the sources of reading failure. It is intended to guide the reader through the significant areas in the literature and to note specific works. Section 1…

The underlying assumptions of the study described in this report are that language change in process is revealed through language variation and that variation is rarely random. With these two ideas in mind, the author studies the presence of "r" in Hawaiian English and considers its appearance in various environments. The study also…

This experiment deals with a test of auditory discrimination between standard Black English and nonstandard Black English. The test consists of two sections, one emphasizing phonological variables and the other emphasizing grammatical variables. It was administered to 83 black and 71 white children who were second, fourth, and sixth graders in…

The focus of this highly quantitative investigation is the analysis of the differences observed, both in methodological approach and in language choice in the classroom, during five years of classroom visitations. The study reflects information collected from two very different institutions with radically distinct populations: a rural setting with…