This volume sheds empirical light on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) by providing five sets of analyses of two longitudinal, interactional datasets, involving two dyads exchanging emails over one academic semester. The collective study on CDST is the first of its kind, in that it delves into multiple subsystems of learner language,…

An investigation was undertaken into the possibility of automatically detecting how concepts exist in relation to each other in abstracts, a text-type commonly used in free-text retrieval. The end goal of this research is to capture these relationships in structured representations of abstracts' contents so that users can require not only that the…

A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

To examine the relationship between writers' knowledge of expository frames--conventions accepted by both writers and readers in association with a particular type of discourse--and writing skill, 60 persuasive essays were analyzed for content organization. The essays, evaluated as either above average or average on a high school writing…

This collection of symposium papers on varieties of the English language used in Ireland includes: "The Role of Irish English in the Formation of Colonial Englishes," by P. Trudgill; "Anglo-Irish Verse in Translation from Irish," by P. L. Henry; "The Methodology of Urban Language Studies," by J. Milroy;…

Conversational and narrative language samples were elicited from 16 school-age individuals with mental retardation and 16 typically developing children matched for mental age. Analysis demonstrated that both groups produced more syntactically complex language during narration, whereas they were more talkative during conversation. Results support…