Human beings not only created language, but also become the users; therefore, the study on linguistics should not only be made from the perspective of symbol, but more should be people-oriented. But the most significant difference between human beings is the gender difference, so people of different genders from either physiology or psychology in the use of language will have their own gender c...

This paper presents a summary of developments in Austronesian linguistics during the period 1991–2002. The aim is to introduce a general linguistic public to the synchronic study of Austronesian languages. General typological characteristics and interesting features of Austronesian phonology, lexicons, morphology and syntax are discussed, followed by a summary of how these characteristics, or i...

The study of phonetic variation and change in sociolinguistics predominantly focuses on ‘the vernacular’ or at least on speech occurring in spontaneous conversations. While such studies are obviously vital to understand the patterns of change in a speech community, it is also desirable to understand how patterns of variation and change develop in a ‘prestige’ standard language which may functio...

Judit Moschkovich University of California, Santa Cruz Abstract This article reviews two sets of research studies from outside of mathematics education to consider how they may be relevant to the study of bilingual mathematics learners using two languages. The first set of studies is psycholinguistics experiments comparing monolinguals and bilinguals using two languages during arithmetic comput...

Dialect speakers in the North of England use vowel-less forms of the definite article (the) which are unattested in English varieties elsewhere and have been termed Definite Article Reduction (DAR). Previous research on DAR has provided detailed phonological descriptions, but less insight has been gained into other aspects of DAR like its emergence and the northern pattern of occurrence. I demo...

An attractor, in complex systems theory, is any state that is more easily or more often entered or acquired than departed or lost; attractor states therefore accumulate more members than non-attractors, other things being equal. In the context of language evolution, linguistic attractors include sounds, forms, and grammatical structures that are prone to be selected when sociolinguistics and la...

The paper presents approaches to identifying realworld demographic attributes based on language use in the virtual world. We apply features developed from the classic literature on sociolinguistics and sound symbolism to data collected from virtual-world chat and avatar naming to determine participants’ age and gender. We also examine participants’ use of avatar names across virtual worlds and ...

This paper surveys and evaluates some techniques for eliciting requirements of computer-based systems, paying particular attention to how they deal with social issues. The methods surveyed include introspection, interviews, questionnaires, and protocol, conversation, interaction, and discourse analyses. Although they are relatively untried in Requirements Engineering, we believe there is much p...