Dialect Test
The Dialect Test was created by A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work "On Early English Pronunciation". It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main vowel sounds of an individual dialect by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
Discourse grammar
Being a relatively young framework, DG has so far found only limited applications. Work has focused mainly on comment clauses, discourse markers, final particles, and insubordination. Furthermore, DG as a descriptive tool has for the most part been restricted to the study of English. Analysis within this framework is now being extended to non-European languages. More detailed research has been carried out already on Akie, a traditional hunter-gatherer language of the Nilotic family spoken in north-central Tanzania. A grammar of this language based on DG has been published, the use of theticals in the organization of texts has been studied, and institutional frames surfacing from the analysis of Akie texts have been identified using Thetical Grammar as a basis.