Robert N. St. Clair

The Irregular Present Tense Verbs of Spanish.

There have been several generative studies of the Spanish verb system (Foley, 1965; Harris, 1967; Saciuk, 1969; Willis, 1969). All of them seem to concur in their analyses of the regular verbs of Spanish. However, the irregular verbs still demand analysis. The reason for this is obvious. Either the irregular verbs have been systematically avoided by some linguists or their analyses have lacked serious motivation. In this paper we will attempt to remedy this situation by analysing and describing some of the irregular verbs of Spanish. Before delving into the mysteries of the irregular verbs let us first review the regular verbs.

Language and the Social Construction of Reality.

Abstract The role of language in society is investigated from the theoretical framework of the sociology of knowledge. It is demonstrated that people may use the same forms of speech, but they do not share the same linguistic experiences in life. This dramaturgical model explicates how language functions socially. People create their own roles as playwrights, and they perform them as actors. By watching their own behavior, they also become critics and make up their own audience. They may have performance failure (stage fright) or be out of character, but they are always a part of the social scene they have help to create. What is significant about this symbolic interactionist approach is that it demonstrates the limitations of the positivistic formal models in dealing with social interaction.

COMMUNICATION ACROSS LINGUISTICALLY RELATED SYSTEMS

About a decade ago Morris Halle (1962) discussed the role of phonology within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar. Part of his discussion was concerned with the phenomenon of mutual intelligibility among the dialects of a language. Halle proposed that the dialects of a language were mutually intelligible because they shared the same underlying forms. He illustrated his new approach to mutual intelligibility in dialectology with the following data from Canadian English.

The sociology of code-switching

Abstract Code-switching, a phenomenon commonly found in human communication, has begun to receive greater attention it deserves in sociolinguistics, although it had been a major part of British scholarship as may be represented by scholars like J. R. Firth. Perhaps, what is needed in sociolinguistics now is a micro-theory of code-switching in which the instrumental use of language and other forms of semiotic expression are readily explicated. The model described in this essay provides such a framework. It is based on research in symbolic interactionism and borrows from the rich tradition of dramaturgical sociology. It also relates to the concept of emergence and the negotiation of social reality in the field of ethnomethodology.

Inclusive and Exclusive Pronouns in English

In this paper we will argue that the inclusive and exclusive personal pronouns of English are not to be described in terms of feature specifications as claimed by Postal (1966), Jacobs and Rosenbaum (1967), and Ingram (1971). Instead we propose that such forms are the result of the processes of sentential or phrasal conjunction (Koutsoudas, 1971) and lexical incorporation (Gruber, 1965; McCawley, 1970). Hence the derivation of the pronoun we in (3c), e.g., is related to the pronouns in (3a) by means of two rules. The first conjoins the sentences of (3a) into (3b), and the second replaces the conjoined elements of (3b) with the lexical form we in (3c).