ESL Web Directory

Welcome to Jaume Masip´s Nonverbal Behavior page of links in the Department of Social Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Salamanca (Spain).

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant.

A Glossary of language terms.

A look at culture, society, individual and code.

An extensive site, with links to abstracts of over 20,000 linguistic dissertations.

It is common practice in many current second language coursebooks to introduce words in semantic groups. These are often presented as a set of words (semantic clusters) and share a common superordinate (headword). There seems to be a pervasive belief among coursebook writers that doing so will aid vocabulary building and lexical associations in particular. This belief appears to be founded in methodology rather than on research.

The relationship between language and emotions can be viewed from two angles. First, language, in a broad sense, can be viewed as being done [performed] "emotive". 2 This can take place extralinguistically (e.g. by facial expressions, body postures, proximity, and the like), in terms of suprasegmentational and prosodic features, and in terms of linguistic (lexical and syntactic) forms.

A society is generally as lax as its language.

The definition of equitable linguistic rights cannot be dependent on the political or administrative status of languages or on irrelevant or insufficiently objective criteria such as their level of codification or number of speakers

Dialect differences are one of the most interesting features of language, but also one of the most controversial, particularly in schools. Dialects are varieties of a language that contrast in pronunciation, grammatical patterns, and vocabulary and that are associated with geographic area and social class.