Criticizes a previously published article by Peter Abbs for misunderstanding sociolinguistic and structuralist influences on English curriculum. Includes a response from Abbs.

Reviews distinctions between negative and positive letters and summarizes the advice commonly offered for conveying negative messages. Outlines the tenets of Grice's theory of conversational implicature, and discusses sociolinguistic explanations for the use of indirectness in negative messages. Analyzes the texts of several letters, using Grice's…

Discusses the use of Swedish and Finnish in a bilingual company with offices in both countries. In some work areas, Finnish is the dominant language, in other instances, Swedish is. At many meetings, each person speaks in his/her mother tongue. There seems to be no friction over language choice. (SED)

Presents the data from a study of the Valdotan community in northern Italy which examined, according to Smelser's model of social and cultural change, the Valdotans' level of ethnolinguistic identification. Re-interprets this data according to Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor's theory of the interaction between the ethnolinguistic vitality and the…

Eight dyads of misarticulating school children (mean age = 7:9 years) enrolled in clinical programs were videotaped while they role-played remedial articulation lessons. Hierarchical relationships among the selected levels of analysis suggested the use of a cohesive register appropriate for clinical teaching. Children's sociolinguistic…

Examines two strategies which Blacks use to bring about cooperation in the Black community: (1) "indirection," which makes use of humorous messages, avoidance, and signifying to reduce conflicts, and (2) "neutralization," which involves the use of verbal justifications and excuses to stabilize situations in which disagreements may arise over…

Describes the rationale and focus of World Language Communities, a core course in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The course emphasizes the social, political, and economic implications of language diversity and the dynamics of natural language and linguistic communities. (SED)

Presents a method of quantifying the rate of a given change in a language during a specific time period. (Author/RM)

Discusses ethnic-social variation in American Sign Language among black signers in Georgia. Some of the lexical and formational (phonological) variation observed in old and young signers is discussed. (Author/RM)

This paper discusses a facet of linguistics known as socio-dialectology, whose subject matter is variation between idiolects. The relationship between sociolinguistic stratification and dialectal variation is examined. (CHK)

This paper discusses research on the English of Mexican Americans, arguing that in focusing primarily on description of vernacular Chicano English, the literature describing English spoken by Mexican Americans presents an incomplete picture of the complexity of their linguistic situation. Researchers may lose sight of the range of linguistic…

Sociolinguistic research on varieties of language and language variation, along with the necessity for meeting "equivalence" in terms of the appropriateness of the variety to the context have been well recognized in the formulation of a translation theory. However, the treatment of variation has always been restricted to dialect and has not…

First of a series of selected bibliographies. (DD)