This article explores English-speaking children's acquisition of raising structures with an experiencer (e.g.," John seems to Mary to be happy"). We review and address previously unnoticed issues in the methodologies of existing studies testing the acquisition of raising, thus providing a more reliable picture of children's abilities…

This dissertation takes a discursive approach to Hawai'i stand-up comedy, which is a highly dramaturgical genre, and it examines the cultural specificity of Hawaii comedy in an explicitly interactional context. This culturally-specific performative genre is a discursive site where comedians and their audiences jointly construct multivocal humor…

Teaching within institutions that prototypically privilege the social order of language is often problematic for both genders, especially because we tend to occupy masculine lines of rhetoric. The "standards" that women adhere to are not always associated in the feminine construction, and when we question "standards," the…

Although the originators of the language socialization (LS) paradigm were careful to cast socialization as a contingent, contested, "bidirectional" process, the focus in much first language LS research on "successful" socialization among children and caregivers may have obscured these themes. Despite this, I suggest the call…

This article examines how "Nisei," the second generation of Japanese immigrants, in Hilo on the island of Hawai'i have maintained their Japanese cultural and linguistic skills. In this article, the author first provides a history of these Japanese immigrant communities in Hilo. This article describes the author's research findings. The…

Learning to juggle has become popular among corporate training programs because it shows participants how to appreciate mistakes and use "Intelligent Fast Failure" (learning quickly by daring to make a lot of simple mistakes at the beginning of a process). Big business also likes the way juggling can get executives "out of the…

This article discusses language planning activities at the East-West Culture Learning Institute in Hawaii. Activities have been planned to facilitate and orient the use of the language planning approach by practitioners who have increasingly focused on the relation of development and modernization to language, and need to understand how language…

Studying the lexical borrowing of the Japanese community living in Hawaii inspires several hypotheses in the field of sociolinguistics. The use of borrowed words is a linguistic device to create a new Japanese dialect--Hawaiian Japanese. The borrowed words reflect the process and degree of social and psychological adjustment to the new cultural…