In this paper, we draw on data from world languages teachers (English, Spanish and French, in particular) to explore and unpack binaries encountered i... [more]
Decades of research has investigated the heterogeneity of English among speakers of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds, but there still remai... [more]
Open languages are the new class of formal languages proposed by the author. A language of this class combines the grammar of an object-oriented programming language with the universality of a natural language. The open language allows the creation of a m
The ordinary discourse of parents, and to a lesser degree young children, includes a surprising amount of attention to language. The dinner table conversations of 22 middle class families, each with a child between 2 and 51/2 years of age, were recorded.
This study concerns names of nets on the Ordenanzas de los cordoneros (1482) of Seville. The author's aim is to compare this short hand-written text with the printed Recopilacion de las Ordenancas of Seville (1527), the Ordenancas (1632) and the manuscri
Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predictably structured larger words, phrases, and sentences.
Responding to a compliment poses a dilemma for speakers (Pomerantz, 1978) because they have to balance two diametrically conflicting conversational principles: to agree with one's conversational coparticipants and to avoid self-praise (Herbert, 1989). Fa
This study takes a look at politeness phenomena in American and English judicial opinions. The initial position, based on previous research of written texts, points to an extensive use of politeness phenomena even where there is disagreement. However, the
In this presentation, we describe the form and function of a formulaic construction used as a disclaimer in contemporary English. The basic structure not X or. anything, but Y appears to serve as a means of projecting a virtual offense that might lead to
This interdisciplinary paper seeks to elucidate the roles played by mutual knowledge, background knowledge and shared beliefs in establishing common ground. We begin our discussion by clarifying the terminological and conceptual confusion associated with
This paper argues that the motivation for structure in creole formation comes from the innate architecture of language competence and production. In this architecture, the lexical and the grammatical subsystems of language are related, but supported diffe
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that future tense is not a grammatical category in Sango and that none of the temporal adverbs is used in a verbal system as a grammatical marker for future time. Supporting this thesis is evidence of different kind
This paper examines a hypothesis in the Acts of Identity theory that suggests a complementary relationship between the variant attributes of an individual's linguistic presentation and the individual's social identity. Through the mathematical modeling
When one word replaces another in a speech error, the two welds predominantly share syntactic category membership; this is the syntactic category constraint. Stem exchanges like trucked the park appear to violate this constraint, implying either that morp
During the early years of white administration in Southern Rhodesia, few whites spoke the local vernaculars. The state used those few, largely traders and farmers, to translate and interpret. Members of the Native Affairs Department were expected to learn
In this paper, the authors continue developing a Linguistic Theory of the Complex Structural Models, but in terms of the Semantics. Each symbol (transformed function) is syntactically a lexeme, carrying associate a sememe or atomic semantic unit. Each sem
This paper reviews literature on dictionary-based cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and presents CLIR research done at the University of Tampere (UTA). The main problems associated with dictionary-based CLIR, as well as appropriate methods to de