Discussing World Englishes, outlines a basic developmental scentrio, and suggests that speech communities typically undergo five consecutive phases in this process--foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation. Describes the sociolinguistic characteristics of each one. The framework is…

Reviews two books, "American Earlier Black English," by Edgar W. Schneider, and "The Death of Black English," by Ronald Butters, that capture the essence of the renewed controversy on the reemergence of the historical issue and a new dispute over the current development of Vernacular Black English. (36 references) (JL)

Examines several longstanding, isolated biracial sociolinguistic situations in the coastal and Appalachian regions of North Carolina: a core community of African Americans and two case studies of isolated speakers. Compares diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for speakers representing different generations of African American and…

Considers utterances that appear to violate the interdependence assumed by the interactionist view, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialogue. Self-talk, imprecations, and response cries are discussed. (EJS)

A report of an investigation of conversations involving more than two persons. Two types of illocutionary acts are accounted for: the traditional kind directed at the addressee(s) and another, called an informative, addressed to all participants. Evidence is presented that every illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative. (AMH)

Endangered languages, or languages on the verge of becoming extinct, are discussed in relation to the larger process of loss of cultural and intellectual diversity. This article summarizes essays presented at the 1991 Linguistic Society of America symposium, "Endangered Languages and Their Preservation." (11 references) (LB)

Eight general principles are postulated by which immigrants adapt dialectologically to their new surroundings, based mainly on results of a developmental study of six Canadian youngsters in two families who moved to southern England, with supporting evidence from several other studies. (52 references) (Author/LB)

An "organization of repair" operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism producing a skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair.…

Research supported by the Ford Foundation and the American Association of University Women. (DD)

Presidential address delivered to the Linguistic Society of America at its Annual Meeting, December 28, 1972, Atlanta, Georgia. (DD)

Four points in Ladefoged's discussion note in "Language" (v68 March 1992) are examined: arguments based on political considerations; the cost of giving up a native language to join a dominant language; the responsibility of a linguist in supporting the loss of a particular language; and the task of the linguist. (one reference) (LB)

Outlines three features that render creoles synchronically distinguishable from other languages, all three clear results of a break in transmission followed by a development period too brief for the traits to be undone as they have been in older languages. Shows that an expanded data set reveals flaws in the socio-historical argumentation behind…

Presents evidence for the idea that when morphemes are borrowed from a socially dominant language into a pidgin, and extended in usage as in a creole, the major factor determining the direction of such extension is the linguistic background of the speakers of languages other than the dominant one. (Author/CLK)

Parts of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, New York, N.Y., December 30, 1970, under the title Toward the Formalization of Rudeness in Conversation.'' (VM)