Recent years have seen a surge of interest in "increments" among students of conversational interaction. This article first outlines "incrementing" as an analytical problem (i.e., as turn constructional unit [TCU] extensions) by tracing its origins back to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974) famous turn-taking article. Then, the article…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

This study investigated contemporary Japanese college students' attitudes towards Japan English (JE) and American English (AE) through a verbal guise test (VGT) as well as a questionnaire. Forty-four Japanese college students listened to four Japanese and four North Americans reading a text in English, rated them in terms of solidarity-related…

This article examines sign languages that belong to a complex of indigenous sign languages in Mesoamerica that K'iche'an Maya people of Guatemala refer to collectively as Meemul Tziij. It explains the relationship between the Meemul Tziij variety of the Yukatek Maya village of Chican (state of Yucatan, Mexico) and the hitherto undescribed Meemul…

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and…

This article challenges the categorisation of English into national forms, arguing that this obscures differences in usage within a nation and ignores genres and registers that exist around the world. Further, I suggest that in addition to examining the spread of English around the world, scholars should study the ubiquity of various discourses…

Traces history of Jewish languages and interlinguistics through non-Jewish languages with which Jews came into contact. Proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, formulates research tasks in comparative Jewish interlinguistics and assesses contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics. (Author/BK)

This issue of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" is about convergence, a type of language change that is contact-induced and results in greater similarity between two languages that are in contact with each other. In Backus (forthcoming), I have attempted an overview of contact-induced language change, focusing on causal factors, on mechanisms…

The present paper assesses the implications of the existence of two varieties of the same language for contact-induced language change in cases of bilingualism. By analysing the contact between French and Tunisian Arabic, on the one hand, and Spanish and Northern Moroccan Arabic, on the other, the purpose is to illustrate how the coexistence of…

This study assesses and characterizes lexical relationships among the major urban Syro-Lebanese varieties of Arabic. To achieve this quantitative analysis of degrees of similarity or differentiation, an analytical procedure based on lexical compatibility was developed. Secondarily, a classification of these varieties is presented as a by-product…

Demonstrates that two Tungusic languages, Evenki and Oroqen, that have long been treated as a single language for classification purposes, are better treated as distinct linguistic varieties. Fundamental questions are raised about the current classification of Tungusic languages and a renewed examination is suggested of the role of dialect…

It is argued that viewing learners' errors as evidence for the emergence of new varieties of the English language is dangerously mistaken, particularly where it leads to the abandonment of Standard English as a model for learners. It is shown how this view is mistaken by: (1) citing recent British thinking on the relationship of varieties of…

An examination of linguists' attempts to characterize the variety of English used in various articles and novels found that, although they used different criteria for classification, the linguists almost equally (about 30 percent of the time each) either could not identify, correctly identified, or incorrectly identified the variety. (14…

The question of the origin of Catalan is considered from the historic, geographical, linguistic and textual viewpoints. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

This dictionary is a composite of four Philippine Creole Spanish dialects: Cotabato Chabacano and variants spoken in Ternate, Cavite City, and Zamboanga City. The volume contains 6,542 main lexical entries with corresponding entries with contrasting data from the three other variants. A concluding section summarizes findings of the dialect study…