Describes Albert Camus's writings regarding semantic abuses in public rhetoric. (DD)

Four keynote papers, presented at an international conference on sign language research, discussed general linguistic issues of sign language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. (CB)

Tests Ervin-Tripps's hypotheses concerning the relationship between several social and ecological factors and the choice of directive variants in English, using as a sample a predominantly Black male migratory agricultural labor population. Found that most of the predictions derived from Ervin-Tripp's model for these directive variants were…

Argues that pragmatics should expand its research interest to include not only the study of how speakers perform speech acts but also the investigation of instances where they decide not to perform them, referred to as the "opting out" choice. (CB)

English is the most widely used language for commerce, industrial expansion, diplomacy, science, and other fields. As speakers of other languages adapt it to their purposes, educators must adjust their perceptions of how the language is used. This idea, and related ones, are discussed in this article. (JL)

Article provides a brief overview of sociolinguistics for educational researchers, describes the relevance of sociolinguistics for understanding classroom discourse, and suggests ways to measure the adequacy of sociolinguistic studies. (RB)

Discusses glosses, that is, formulations which, on their occurrence, are adequate but which turn out to have been incomplete, ambiguous and perhaps misleading. Examines the ways in which a coparticipant's activities may result in a speaker either maintaining or revealing the gloss. (SED)

Discusses the status of the Same (Lappish) language which is distributed into six different dialect groups. Earlier research into the problems relating to the linguistic behavior of a Same group living in Finland and the position and use of their minority language is analyzed in terms of demographic, social structural, and political-legal factors.…

Discusses the assimilation process of the Kven (descendants of Finnish-speaking immigrants from Northern Finland and the Tornio River Valley in Sweden to Northern Norway) and the historical factors and government policies which has lead to their status today as an assimilated group speaking the majority language. (SED)

Reviews two studies of the relationship between gender loading in languages and the perception of gender by speakers of those languages; the two studies reach contradictory conclusions. Examines a number of theoretical and methodological issues in linguistic relativity research and suggests avenues for further research. (SED)

Presents data that suggest that three factors--social variables, speech register, and linguistic variables--influence the choice of grammatical structure in Brazilian Portuguese where options exist to express the same idea. Examines the range of options used in responses that indicate general patterns of linguistic structures related to particular…

Discusses how current applied and sociolinguistic research and theory, which reveals the naturalness of language variation and productive aspects of error-making, seriously challenges traditional second language learning practices and postulates. (EKN)

An analysis of two opposing talks given in connection with a television program; that of a union member and that of an employer. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Investigates performance of the highly constrained Hallowe'en "trick or treat" routine in 115 children from 2 to 16 years of age. Changes in competence and role of parental input are examined in relation to cognitive and social factors. (Author/RM)

Examines these distinct registral features of matrimonial newspaper advertisements in English in India: incongruity, deletion of preposition, miscellaneous deletions, two-word sentence, new abbreviations, registral confusion, stylistic variation. (RM)