Advocates the recognition of a "consensus dialect of American English, which could be used for educational purposes throughout the United States. Appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue, "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education. (FWB)

The three books under review show what flux the English language has undergone and continues to undergo, and how stable grammatical theory has been until recent times. (Author)

If we can change unconscious imitation of models into conscious decision-making of preferred speech, we will have made a sizeable advance in the whole matter of speech usage. (Author/MB)

The language of sportscasting is analyzed in terms of register variation, first by locating the register by successive approximations to a characterization of occasions of use, then by identifying syntactic characteristics: simplification, inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions, and routines. Sports announcer talk is described as a…

Hundreds of words and phrases that are employed every day are not to be found in even the fullest dictionaries. This omission will be corrected by the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has collected daily speech of Americans, particularly regional colloquialisms. (MLW)

Investigates the sociolinguistic interaction between language behavior, religious affiliation, and degree of bilingualism in a group of Pennsylvania Germans. Also explores the nature of bilingualism and language contact phenomena in order to gain an understanding of ethnic subcultures and strategies to maintain their identity. (Author/MES)

Attempts to demonstrate that a complete description of elliptical coordinations can be obtained only if the uses of elliptical and nonelliptical coordinations are investigated also. Future research on elliptical coordinations should be directed towards more full-scale analyses of the genres discussed here and other genres. (31 references) (CK)

Offers evidence that contradicts the idea of a relatively homogeneous North American dialect area in which vowel systems remain fairly stable. The article examines back vowel fronting in Canadian English and its relationship to the shift affecting the front lax vowels, as well as to the general principles of vowel chain shifting. (29 references)…

Explores the phenomenon of post verbal alternation in English double object constructions and presents a statistical model for predicting the position of the indirect object in instances where alternation is unconstrained. The study includes analysis of a large set of written and oral American English data using a parametric multiple regression…

Examines linguistic and social factors reflected in the development of American Czech, spoken by Czech immigrants living in rural Nebraska communities, distinguishing between fully competent, proficient, and imperfect speakers. Despite the undisputed English influence, American Czech shared characteristics with other enclave languages developing…

Compared the use of selected epistemic modals in the English speech of Chicano barrio residents and Anglo visitors to the community. Transcribed conversations served as the database. Discusses the epistemic modal functions used the most disparately between groups. Differences are shown to relate to cross-culturally different uses of epistemic…

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except…

For the past 25 years, controversy has developed over the value and use of African-American (AA) English. This study examined the opinions of AAs from a variety of backgrounds and communities in California and Georgia to obtain their views on AA English; its place in the school, in the community, and in AA heritage; and its role in the futures of…