Based on Vygotsky's theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of development evidenced through the dialectical tension of tool and sign. Data were drawn from a series of reflective memos I authored during a seminar for new…

The impersonalizing role passive voice plays in scientific discourse is well known. Analysis of the Methods sections of nine medical research articles shows that metonymy is another frequent strategy used to create anonymous authors/agents. Discourse agents were categorized into four semantic domains: familial lay, nonfamilial lay, authorial…

Historians generally agree that causality is central to historical writing. The fact that many school history students have difficulty handling and expressing causal relations is therefore of concern. That is, whereas historians tend to favor impersonal, abstract structures as providing suitable explanations for historical events and states of…

Reviews discourse analytic and text comprehension studies for their contributions to a cognitive process view of writing, then reports on a study that combines discourse analysis with online pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. (FL)

Treats, in a systematic and principled manner, representations studied in situated literacy and an associated methodological approach based on semantic analysis that characterizes the representations. Illustrates application of the method for four situated-literacy examples: mother/child word-naming games; children's story writing; journalistic…

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational…