This report details a literacy affordance framework for describing and connecting the ways in which teachers focus their students on the syntactic structures of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in mathematics. This framework is intended to serve as a critical access point for connecting and moving broader research in secondary mathematics…

There is an emerging trend in higher education for the adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, despite this interest in learning at scale, there has been limited work investigating the impact MOOCs can play on student learning. In this study, we adopt a novel approach, using language and discourse as a tool to explore its…

In this paper I will show the preliminary findings from my study of the discourse in synchronous written chats performed by students who study modern German literature within their first term of German studies. The focus of the study is on learning strategies and discourse strategies and how the Swedish learners make use of them when chatting with…

The concept of grammatical servitude, defined as the absence of semantic choice in linguistic constructions, minimizes dependence on intuition and subjective judgment in syntactic analysis. It also causes the researcher to neglect important communicative resources of the speaker. To remedy this problem, the use of semantics in syntactic analysis…

One of the central problems in the study of fictional prose is that of distinguishing between mere linguistic regularity, which in itself is of no interest to literary studies, and regularity which is significant for the text in which it is found. General criteria for determining whether any particular instance of linguistic prominence is likely…

"Strunctional" analysis identifies, simultaneously yet separately, both the structural and functional links that tie sentence pairs together. Coherence in prose results from an appropriate combination of structural and functional relations between each sentence pair. Structural links between sentences comprise syntactic and lexical links;…

How syntax affects sentence prosody is explored. It is demonstrated that the lengthening of phase-final words and pausing afterward reflect a distinctly prosodic representation in which phonological constituents are arranged in a hierarchical nonrecursive structure. A model of prosodic pronunciation is also presented. (SLD)

A symposium on discourse analysis and language learning is summarized. Discourse analysis can be divided into six fields of research: syntax, the amount of syntactic organization required for different types of discourse, large speech events, intra-sentential cohesion in text, speech acts, and unequal power discourse. Research on speech events and…

The option of verb-final versus verb-second (V2) order in subordinate clauses in German is subject to regularity when discourse context is taken into account. The artificial rule which places the verb at the end of any subordinate clause obliterates the feel for discourse structure that is still present in colloquial German. The option of using V2…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

This study investigates if negotiation can affect syntacticization in the learning of second language (L2) syntax. Evidence from a number of studies has suggested that linguistic modification occurs during negotiation, but no research has examined if such modifications assist the learning of syntax in a second language. This study examined to what…

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…

There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

The notions of recursiveness and deletion are discussed in the context of Chomsky's presentations of transformational grammar in "Syntactic Structures" and in the later work, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." After consideration of word-recursion, coordinate-clause recursion, and subordinate-clause recursion, extensions to…

Combining linguistics and composition studies, this paper (part 1 of a two-part article) proposes a model for the analysis of information management and cohesion in written discourse. It defines concepts of discourse analysis--specifically information management, syntax, semantic reference, lexicon, cohesion, and intonation, with examples taken…