This article underlines the necessity of discourse analysis in a complete linguistic description, that is, the need to look at various phenomena such as social relationships as manifested in conversation, performatives, pronominalization constraints, or external factors such as the sex of the participants. A model of a method of analysis is…

A study polled Alsatian students to examine attitudes toward the Alsatian dialect and changes as students became older, more educated and more proficient in French. Use of Alsatian with family and friends becomes less frequent by age 15 with increased command of French. (CHK)

The goal of this article is to give a survey of the literature and theoretical trends relevant to language acquisition. Developments in the fields of psychology, psycholinguistics, sociology, sociolinguistics and in various interdisciplinary studies are discussed. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Reports on a study to determine the origin, development, and use of the comparative in children ages 2-7. The role of adult-child interaction in acquisition is discussed. Tabulated results show that the comparative is used infrequently by young children. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The frequency of liaison in French is studied in the context of the grammatical function of contiguous words involved, the phonetic characteristics of the liaison consonant and a number of paralinguistic variables such as sex, age, occupation, syllabic rate, loudness, attitude of the speaker and subject matter. Results are tabulated. Available…

Argues that courses in sociolinguistics should form part of the education of every Canadian teacher regardless of the subject he is going to teach. (Author)

This paper, part of a larger study of bilingualism, examines the assignment of gender to borrowed nouns, defined as those which can be etymologically identified as having entered Montreal French or Puerto Rican Spanish via English. The data were drawn from two distinct data bases. One consisted of over 300 hours of taped speech recorded from 16…

Eight essays in ethnolinguistics were compiled for this monograph. "Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach" represents an introduction to the application of linguistic knowledge to the historical and sociological study of peoples. "Speech and Language: On the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Speakers" expands on the theme of…

Early bilingualism of many young children is characterized by an apparent mixture of languages. Because of the variety of patterns they follow and the lack of empirical data available it is difficult to make generalizations. However, the speech of individual children can be examined for insights into early bilingualism. To this purpose, a study…

Observation of language change caused by language contact tend not to support theories put forth by Meillet, Jakobson, Weinreich, and others that there are linguistic prerequisites for such change. A theory of the social factors that determine what kinds of language change will take place as a result of contact begins with the recognition of two…

THE ONLY GROUP IN SOUTH AFRICA TO HAVE DEVELOPED A NATIONALISM BASED, AT LEAST PARTLY, ON ETHNICITY AND LANGUAGE ARE THE AFRIKANERS. DUE TO AFRIKANER FEELINGS OF NATIONALISM, ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN MADE TO SEGREGATE AFRICANS AND NON-AFRICANS OF DIFFERENT LANGUAGE GROUPS FROM THE AFRIKANERS AND FROM EACH OTHER. MOTHER-TONGUE INSTRUCTION IS STRESSED AT…

Six Samoan children ranging in age from 2 to 16 were the subjects of a study to document the spontaneous production of the deictic verbs "sau" ("to come") and "aumai" ("to bring/give"). "Aumai" appears to be used before "sau" and is generally used more frequently than "sau." Imperatives with "aumai" tend to be directed to higher status persons or…

In Black English (BE), in addition to the motion verb "come," there exists a modal-like "come" which expresses speaker indignation. This "come" is comparable to other modal-like forms, identical to motion verbs, which occur in Black and non-Black varieties of English, and which signal various degrees of disapproval.…

By giving assignments to children in a field that inquires into the nature of language use, teachers can help enhance their total language development and sensitivity to language. To be most effective, such projects should involve children working interactively in groups; should require considerable time to complete and involve the solving of…

The natural process of learning language is to concentrate on what we mean, not only on how we are saying it. What we mean is dependent upon the context in which we speak. This context in turn depends on the society or the speech-community in which our speech act takes place. To be a member of a speech community is to know what language behavior…