Discusses the prevalent trend in American English to verbify, that is to convert nonverbs into verbs. Offers criteria to help decide when to use verbified words. (SR)

Examined mandibular correlates of prosodic control in nonread dialog exchange involving repeated corrections. Articulatory and acoustic data were collected from four American English speakers at an x-ray laboratory, measuring jaw opening. Results suggested a local and global use of the jaw-opening gesture to produce both linguistic or…

Aims to contribute new data on verbal "-s" by systematically examining its behavior in Devon English (DE), a variety spoken in Southwest England, and a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of verbal "-s" in nonstandard varieties of English in North America. (Author/VWL)

Explored the variation in the resistance that lingual and nonlingual consonants exhibit to coarticulation by following vowels in the schwa+CV disyllables of two native speakers of English. (Author/VWL)

Sought to determine whether two low-rising intonation contours should be accepted as distinct patterns in American English, alongside three other widely accepted contours. Dialogues varying only in their intonation contour were presented in a random order to 47 speakers of Midwestern American English. Subjects interpreted the meaning of the…

This document shares Dr. Walt Wolfram's views on African-American Dialect. He states that the most elementary principle is that all language is patterned and rule-governed, and one can apply that principle to African-American English, Appalachian English, and to every other dialect that is examined.

Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were…

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)

Discussed the crucial meanings and usage of American language. (RK)

The hypotheses that black subjects comprehend nonstandard English materials better than those in standard English and that white subjects comprehend standard English materials better than those in nonstandard English were not supported. (Author)

Suggests that the loss of any good idea which cannot be shared because a person lacks the language spoken by the majority is a detriment to maintaining democracy. Such loss is what we may expect whenever the opportunity to learn standard spoken English is limited for any reason. (TO)

This is a glossary of Russian and English terms related to building design and construction. It is intended for use by interpreters and specialists dealing with American and Soviet literature on buildings. The glossary consists of two parts: the Soviet-American section, which presents the Soviet terms written in Russian and the American equivalent…

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…

Idiomatic expressions in American English provide an important clue to the speaker's values and attitudes, many of which are represented in bipolar language (e.g., "warm hearted"-"cold blooded,""walking on air"-"feeling low"). Most bipolar idiomatic continua which predict meaning also reveal positive and negative evaluations connected with…