Examines the less obvious differences between British and American English in regard to semantics and grammar. A comparison is made, to see how American and British styles differ for public notice, in an experiment in which speakers of American English were asked to paraphrase notices from a British public utility office. (Author/OD)

Describes some of the current research on Brazilian Portuguese phonology. Various techniques are discussed that analysts utilize to investigate Brazilian Portuguese nasality. (49 references) (CB)

Examines the various strategies by which Gaelic has been employed in the newspaper press in Scotland. The prospect for a monolingual or bilingual newspaper is considered and a comparison with the uses of Gaelic on radio and television is made. (eight references) (Author/CK)

Examines a computer-based corpus that provides the data for a comprehensive investigation of clitic climbing in written and spoken modern Spanish. The results are based on nearly 15,000 tokens with 32 different main verbs from a computer corpus of 3.5 million words from ten countries. Clitic climbing is more common in spoken than in written…

Using the case of a vernacular variety spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, this article demonstrates how linguistic-systemic principles such as remorphologization, psycholinguistic principles of perceptual saliency, and sociolinguistic processes of symbolic identity converge to account for the development of leveling in this community.…

This article describes "language" use in a religious domain where the very notion of 'language' must be defined in a qualitatively special way. It is suggested that within the traditional Islamic educational system, Arabic among the Kanuri of northeast Nigeria is first acquired as a "graphic," an invisible whole that, by its…

Provides an overview of current research on grammatical, phonological, semantic, and pragmatic development in African American English child language, as opposed to adult or adolescent language, and discusses the implications of these findings for professionals involved in second-dialect instruction, speech-language assessment, or intervention…

Suggests using literary texts as a means of enhancing learner participation in English language classes in southern Spain. Literary texts may be employed to develop participation in reading, increase learner's awareness of communicative strategies, and increase the awareness of formal resources used by authors to reinforce texts. (25 references)…

Examination of the pattern of word stress in Nigerian Standard English suggests that progressive stress shift is the primary cause of the difference in stress assignment between Nigerian Standard English and British Standard English. (13 references) (Author/CB)

Argues that native speakers of English should not seek to overexploit its position as a world language; they should respect nonnative usage as expressing other peoples' identities and should be prepared to modify native usage to become more efficient international communicators. (JL)

Examines the phenomenon of semantic change with regard to color categories in closely related Mayan languages (Tzetal and Tzotzil) associated with radically different social milieux. It is argued that, although a model of individual cognition explains how color categories change at the basic level, a social model accounts for differences between…

This paper offers some partial identifications of the communicative functions of Tarahumara alternations and underscores their implications for a cognitive phonology. (Contains 17 references.) (JL)

Examines the role of the educational and socioeconomic levels of the speakers in advancing linguistic change. The study reviews three grammatical phenomena found at distinct stages of change. Individuals at the lower socioeconomic and educational strata of society embrace innovations in language more readily than their affluent and educated…

Examines the origin, development, and nature of Pakistani English as a distinct language variation with its own cultural and linguistic identity. Lexical borrowing from Urdu is discussed as is the formation of new words through the use of English affixes with Urdu and English bases and though semantical or grammatical shifts. (JL)

Historical/sociocultural circumstances of the French language in Canada are outlined and the role of Quebec French in Canadian language education is discussed, focusing on its place in French teaching outside Quebec and in development of bilingualism. Establishment of a Quebecois language is viewed as essential to French Canadian cultural…