An analysis of noun classes in Tikar, a Benue-Congo language spoken in west central Cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system (possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, third-person pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals) with an eye to determining whether…

Colombian Inga is of particular interest to the Quechuanist because it is the northernmost member of the Quechuan language family spoken in modern times. In the present work, the relationship of Colombian Inga to other varieties of Quechua is examined. The affiliation of Inga with the Ecuadorian group of Parker's (1969a) Quechua A branch of the…

The problems of measurement and type-formation are discussed in the light of two approaches toward systems of linguistic objects. First, they are discussed as gestalt systems; second, they are discussed in the light of systems of general type viewed as sets of collections of arbitrary distinctive features. (Author/RM)

Before the white invasion, Native American peoples possessed an extremely rich and varied heritage with highly developed oral literatures, and constant development of new phrases, expressions, and patterns of pronunciation. Examples of Indian people's adeptness with language include: many learned to speak more than two languages fluently;…

The present volume, the second part of a final report on tone systems of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, contains the following papers: "Gurung, Tamang, Thakali, Sherpa, and Chepang Prosodies," by Richard S. Pittman; "Proto-Tamang-Gurung-Thakali," by Pittman and Jessie Glover; "Cognate Counts via the Swadesh List in…

The Uniform Slavic Transliteration Alphabet (USTA) was designed primarily with the following objectives: to aid librarians (catalogers and bibliographers), information scientists, transliterators, and editors of bibliographic works of the many Slavic tongues; and to serve as original research for the further development of a machine-readable…

A brief typological sketch of Wappo syntax is presented as well as a detailed presentation of one particular typological characteristic, "subjecthood." An explanation for the unusual surface coding of subjects in Wappo is given. (Author/NCR)

Investigation of data from many languages has the following results: (1) the characteristics of classifier languages are distinguished, and four types identified; (2) defining criteria are postulated for classifiers, and it is discovered that every classifier is composed of one or more out of seven categories of classification. (CHK)

A discussion of American Sign Language looks at its history in the context of deaf education and its increasing acceptance as a complete natural language both among linguists and in the college curriculum. (MSE)

Suggests some reasons why the exploration and description of language function is often an untidy exercise but, none-the-less very rewarding and rich in implication for English teaching. (Author/RK)

Research on which portions of this study are based was performed under a National Science Foundation Grant and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (VM)

Discusses residual bilingualism as a means of identifying the nature, quantity, and distribution of Dutch-origin elements in the speech of different users of French in Brussels. Observations on code switching in a community of monoglots, bilinguals, and immigrants help provide a frame of reference for similar complex bilingual contexts elsewhere.…

Covering a 500-year span, this article traces the changes in and evolution of the Spanish language from its earliest written accounts in the eleventh century to the Spanish that was brought by the Conquistadores to the New World. (DS)

Considers effect of language distance--how distant the language is from English--on attainment of English language literacy, as measured by performance on an Australian English-as-a-Second-Language end-of-school examination for non-English speaking background students, who also sat for another examination in their first language. Study concludes…

Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both…