This study examines children's acquisition of three politeness routines: hi, thanks, and goodbye. Twenty-two children, eleven boys and eleven girls, and their parents participated. At the end of a parent-child play session, an assistant entered the playroom with a gift to elicit routines from the children. Spontaneous production of the three routines was low, with thank you the most infrequent. Parents actively prompted their children to produce routines, however, and children usually complied. Further, parents themselves used the routines, with more mothers than fathers saying thank you and goodbye to the assistant. Results were discussed in relation to the role of parents in linguistic socialization and to the importance of routines in social interaction. (Routines; politeness formulas; linguistic socialization; parental teaching; mother-father differences; sex role socialization)

This paper addresses the proposition that certain multilingual situations favor certain learning strategies on the part of speakers. The paper takes this proposition as the best approach to explaining the development of pidgin grammars, and exemplifies the general approach by studying the seventeenth-century Delaware-based Traders’ Jargon in its linguistic and social context. The task of the paper, then, is to see if the evidence provided by the Jargon's grammatical structures fits the theory's predictions, and if the evidence for the multilingual situation in which it arose fits as well. The conclusion is that both types of evidence fit well if we assume that the Jargon arose before the period of European settlement, and that this assumption is indeed justified. (Pidgin and creole studies; languages in contact; early European/Indian; North American Indian languages)

Whether or not literary dialect constitutes a reliable source of linguistic evidence is a question to which linguists have generally been content to respond in a negative fashion. Literary portrayals, they hold, are too much a work of the creative imagination to merit serious linguistic consideration. An interpretive analysis of one class of Hiberno-English representations, however, shows that since their inception, the theatrical portrayals of the variety have, by and large, reflected numerous aspects of the dialect quite accurately. In addition, the evidence attests a historical transition from lexico-phonological to syntactic representation: a shift which suggests that at different stages of transitional bilingualism, an emergent variety may be characterized by different forms of mother-tongue interference. Given the general absence of longitudinal studies, literary portrayals, once accepted as linguistic data, may open the way to the at least partial reconstruction of the linguistic contours involved in the language crystallization process. (Non-standard varieties; English dialects; language crystallization; variation in literary dialect; transitional bilingualism; Hiberno-English, Irish, Ireland.)

A historical study of variation in the relative clause marker in Scottish English indicates that sociolinguistic methodology has some important contributions to make to historical linguistics. The use of the frequency with which NPs in certain syntactic positions are relativized as a measure of syntactic complexity reveals that the WH relativization strategy appears to have entered the language in the most complex styles and least frequently relativized syntactic positions, until it eventually spread or diffused throughout the system. The addition of the WH relativization strategy seems to have resulted in a ‘squish’ of two strategies which are opposed in stylistic meaning rather than in actual qualitative change in the relative system. The process of diffusion can be seen as completed as far as the more formal styles of the modern written language are concerned, but it has not really affected the spoken language, where the native TH strategy prevails. (Sociolinguistic methodology, historical linguistics, language change, relativization, history of tle English language)

The note at the bottom of page 247 (Vol. 8, no. 2 (1979)) should read: See now Hymes's foreword to K. Basso, Portraits of “the Whiteman” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).