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Cross-cultural investigation of the Questionnaire of Smoking Urges in American and Spanish smokers. This study evaluated the factor structure of the Questionnaire of Smoking Urges (QSU) across American and Spanish smokers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the fits of one-, two-, and four-factor models of smoking craving in American and Spanish data sets were compared. The two-factor model provided the best fit in both samples. However, negatively worded items confounded the interpretation of the two-factor structure in both the American and Spanish data. The first factor had positively and negatively worded items, whereas the second had only positively worded items. The two-factor structure was reexamined, removing either the positively or the negatively worded items. Using only positively worded items resulted in a loss of fit, whereas using only negatively worded items improved model fit substantially. Thus, the results supported the generalization of smoking craving across Spanish and American smokers and suggested that negatively worded items play a larger role in the two-factor structure of the QSU than originally thought. A
Universals of language maintenance, shift and change. Since Greenberg the recognition of linguistic universals has been the backbone of language typology. Earlier Garvin had already divided universals into absolute and potential ones, the former uncontested cornerstones of linguistic theory, the latter commonly accepted generalizations among experienced professionals. The 'universals' to be discussed here are of the latter type: tried and tested principles of language maintenance and of language change, whose applicability has been established in numerous language contact and conflict situations in different communities. Among the principles displayed and discussed are the following: Fishman's 'intergenerational dislocation' of language reproduction; Haugen's 'dialect fragmentation' of languages vs. Garvin's 'unification' and standardization; Fishman's claim of the complementary distribution of language functions as a guarantee of stable bilingualism; Wölck's disparate distribution of minority language maintenance along the social scale. Evidence for those and some other 'universals' of language maintenance and change will be provided from a 30-year longitudinal survey of Quechua-Spanish bilingualism in Peru; from Seneca-English bilingualism in New York; from studies of diglossia in Scotland and North Germany, of German-Hungarian bilingualism in Hungary from the Ladin survey in Italy and the Sorbian Project in Germany, and from the EUROMOSAIC survey. ca |
