Describes international amateur radio talk (IART) as a clear case of the significance of the channel or medium as a restrictive factor in discourse and analyzes sample texts of IART. (HTH)

Criticizes J.L. Austin's and J.R. Searle's claims that utterances have illocutionary force and offers an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances, which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfully relate to the state of affairs in the world. (FL)

Explores alternative actions which can be produced by practices of talking associated with the action of "initiating repair": questioning terms and certain forms of repeats. Shows that initiating repair can be produced by a practice which does not ordinarily produce it. Argues that situated analysis must go hand-in-hand with more formal…

Discusses how children in one society on the Papuan Plateau, Papua, New Guinea, learn about making and responding to requests based on a strategy of appeal. (FL)

Finds that when paired with older adults simulating dementia, the young adults' instructions were longer, more informative, and more repetitious; however, the young adults did not alter their prosody or grammatical complexity. Suggests that young adults adjust their speech to the perceived communicative needs of older listeners by varying…

Illustrates the existence of meanings in conversation that are not based on the listener's interpretations by analyzing the conversations from a family therapy session. Transcripts of the conversations are appended. (HTH)

Describes a study of the use of the terms "will" and "gonna" in the speech of two three-year-old girls. The results suggest that one of the functions of "will" and "gonna" is to impart different causal relations to the two practices of "undertaking" and "planning." (HTH)

Presents results of a study indicating that constructive and dramatic play contexts affected language to the extent that children use more exophora in the constructive context and more linguistic verbs, third-person pronouns, and displaced reference tenses in the dramatic context. (HTH)

Discusses the process of understanding of intent by which participants, through the comparative interpretation of a series of cues and symbols as they are revealed in speech, develop categories for a contextual model of communication. Argues that discourse is essentially dialogic and phenomenologically realizable. (FL)

Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Reports results of four experiments in which undergraduate students rated the degree of condemnation in critical remarks. Shows that ironic criticism in many cases is used to enhance rather than to dilute condemnation. Notes significant implications for both pragmatic and processing theories of verbal irony. (SR)

Describes a study to examine the changes that take place in the form and types of discussions about the past as two young, Spanish-speaking girls moved from elicited routines to spontaneous and novel conversations about their past experiences. (HTH)

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Assesses three papers in this volume, those by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy, for their treatment of the following: (1) definition of semantic space, (2) defining children's processes of understanding that space, and (3) describing the contexts in which cognitive language is used. (AEW)

Examines the nature of American Sign Language, indicates its intricate morphological structure, and demonstrates one experimental way of uncovering and validating this structure. (FL)