LINGUIST List 5.1070

Sun 02 Oct 1994

Qs: St. Lucia, English, Registers & grammaticality, Discourse

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1. jeffrey howard allen, St. Lucia and Dominica
2. , A query re English as the language of LINGUIST
3. Liliana Sanchez, registers and grammaticality judgements
4. Megan Moser, cognitive effects of discourse

I would like to get a list together of all researchers who have done
work on the French and English Creole varieties of St. Lucia and Dominica
(West Indies). It would be good to not limit this list only to linguists
per se, but to have one that includes research from other related
fields (sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, etc) in order to create
a network among all those interested in these two islands.

If you have already done research on these islands or if you have
colleagues, grad students, undergrad students who have done so or are
interested in doing so, please contact me.

I will post results of this request/search.

Jeffrey Allen
Dept of French & Italian
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
Fax: (+1) 812-855-8877
e-mail: jhallenindiana.edu

The title says most of what I wanted to ask - I was just wondering
whether there'd been on LINGUIST any discussion of how English had
become its de facto lingua franca, or of whether that was a good thing
(I'm not sure it is, myself), or of alternatives to that practice
or policy, or whether any others on the list were struck by the contrast
between the world of languages that is our subject and the single language
in which we discuss it. Best, Larry Rosenwald
lrosenwaldwellesley.edu

I am looking for references on grammaticality judgements and registers
of speech. For instance, there are certain word orders that are
ungrammatical in a neutral register of speech but may become grammatical
in literary language. If somebody on this list has any idea of references
dealing with the methodological issue of how to determine the boundaries
of grammaticality, please post them or send them to my address:
lilianasaludra.usc.edu.

Thanks

Liliana Sanchez
Department of Linguistics
USC

A colleague of mine in psychology is interested any references that
would help to answer the questions below. Please reply directly to
me; I will post a summary to the list.

Does restricted turn taking (as in a debate) versus unrestricted
talking affect what people remember from the discourse?

More generally, what do we know about how features of discourse (e.g.,
restrictions on turn taking) affect the cognitive outcome from
engaging in that discourse? There are various measures of cognitive
outcomes, including (1) amount of content recalled and (2) complexity
of content recalled. We would be interested in a study that used
any measure to judge the effect of a discourse feature.

Megan Moser
moserisp.pitt.edu