If we held words half as dear as did our linguistic forebears, our speech and writing would be sharpened and our minds opened to new and splendid vistas. (Editor)

Uses data from both sides of the U.S.-Canada border to test a model regarding the way language changes diffuse over space. Two cases are examined: the non-diffusion of phonetic features from Detroit to Windsor and the gradual infiltration into Canadian English of American foreign (a) pronunciations. (Author/VWL)

Having established the world's first undergraduate college of world Englishes, and in an "Expanding-Circle" setting, we have created the pilot environment for a new type of ELT curriculum. We must address the creation of a curriculum that is pervasively informed by the philosophy of world Englishes at both a macro and micro level.…

Using reaction time, the interaction between stimulus sentences requiring varying degrees of inferential activity and tasks requiring different levels of cognitive processing is investigated. Effects of thematic and nonthematic contexts are also examined. Results suggest that analyses of processing time may provide useful insights into the…

Discusses study which indicated that the majority of trade names represent a simplification of word spellings to a more regular form; these changes can be viewed as positive for ease of learning by the child in both reading and spelling. (JM)

This paper discusses mimesis, the direct representation and total imitation of an event. It studies the co-occurrence of quotative verbs with mimetic enactment based on two corpora of U.S. American English, both available through the University of Pennsylvania Data Consortium. The Switchboard Corpus has 542 speakers ranging in age from 20-60 years…

Presents a sample of new words and collocations gathered in the last ten years by one dictionary staff from reading a balanced sampling of material published during the period. (TO)

Considers the meaning of "American" and the eventual "dissolution of a specifically 'American' identity". This retrospect, which searches back into the seventeenth century, pauses particularly on Henry Adams and Walt Whitman, both of whom confronted the problems of unity and multiplicity suggested even in our nation's name.…

Explains differences in U.S. and U.K. accounting terminology and describes teaching strategies for secondary-level introductory and advanced courses and college beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses. (SK)

Results from a new analysis of synchronous acoustic and fleshpoint-kinematic data, recorded from 53 normal young-adult speakers of American English, are reported. The kinematic data represent speech-related actions of the tongue blade and dorsum, both lips, and the mandible, during the test words, "special" and "problem," and were drawn from an…

Reexamines the notion of non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs) in light of spoken corpus evidence, based on analysis of 692 occurrences of non-restrictive "which"-clauses in British and American spoken English data. Reviews traditional conceptions of NRRCs and recent work on the broader notion of subordination in spoken grammar.…

Describes the use of "I'm sorry" by Japanese speakers that accomplishes a function that has not been identified previously and discusses possible consequences of this use in the American English speaking community. (Author/VWL)

A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 2-1/2 and 3-1/2 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual…

The ability of speakers to exaggerate speech sounds ("hyperarticulation") has led to the theory that the targets themselves must be hyperarticulated. Johnson, Flemming, and Wright (1993) found that perceptual "best exemplar" choices for vowels were more extreme than listeners' own productions. Our first experiment, using their…

Bullock and Gerfen show that two of the last speakers of French in Frenchville, Pennsylvania, systematically replace the French front mid round vowel (in words like "deux, neuf") with the rhoticized schwa of American English, their dominant language. As the authors argue, it is unlikely that this sound change would have arisen in the…