Allan R. James

The Acquisition of Second Language Speech

From being a relatively neglected area in the study of second language learning, the acquisition of second language speech has emerged over the last decade as an important research field with a wide range of approaches; the traditions of articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguists investigation contribute a rare interdisdplinarity to this area of linguistic inquiry. Current scholarly interest augurs well for future theoretical advances.

Compromisers in english: A cross-disciplinary approach to their interpersonal significance

Abstract The article offers an interdisciplinary view of a group of items found in conversation which constitute a productive means for the expression of interpersonal meaning between interactants. Examined is a sub-set of “discourse particles” in English, termed ‘compromisers’, tokens of which include sort of, like and you know , which are analysed for their significance in verbal interaction. Their interpersonal significance is viewed as a product of pragmatic, interactional and social-behavioural dimensions of meaning, where the key to their meaning is seen to reside in their expression of ‘like-ness’. This is achieved rhetorically by the figurative properties of the compromiser constructions themselves. It is further shown how the expression of ‘like-ness’ can be related within the social-behavioural sphere of meaning to the interpersonal value dimension of ‘solidarity’ or ‘affiliation’ between interlocutors.

Notes on some graphetic aspects of RP vowel notation

The dominance within the EFL world of the Jones transcription system (DJ), as in the EPD (Jones, 1967), has been seriously challenged by the adoption of the new Windsor Lewis system (WL) in the Concise Pronouncing Dictionary (Lewis, 1972a) and the new edition of the ALD (Hornby, 1974). This issue (recently discussed in, e.g., Lewis, 1972b, and Walsh, 1974) is likely to remain a lively one at least until the appearance of the simplified Gimson system in the next edition of the EPD ; meanwhile there are other systems that have some claim to use in EFL teaching, e.g. those in Gimson (1970) (G), Abercrombie (1964), and the Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (Allen and Corder, 1974/1975).