Parent-child conversations are a potential source of children's developing understanding of the biological domain. We investigated patterns in parent-child conversations that may inform children about biological domain boundaries. At a marine science center exhibit, we compared parent-child talk about typical sea animals with faces (fish) with…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

The paper investigates Polish punk and hip hop (rap) song lyrics broken down into frequency lists. In an analysis inspired by MacLaury's view of categorization, the construals of punk and hip hop worldviews are shown to vary in the distance of the observer from the world, the width of the viewing frame, as well as the granularity and density of…

Information necessary to understand many English sentences appears to be supplied by a source outside the sentence which is composed of a fund of knowledge accumulated throughout life. This fund of knowledge may be visualized and a conceptual network into which the incomplete information supplied by a sentence can be mapped, thus making it…

The assumption that "ideal" text grammars are valid descriptions of the schemata used by children to organize their recall of text was challenged in a study involving 150 elementary school children. The children, all with above-average reading ability, were classified as having one of three types of schemata: theme-initial (identifying…

Describes the results of two studies indicating that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idiomatic expressions, and that people are automatically biased toward interpreting such language as idioms before deriving their intended literal meanings. (HTH)

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

SAM (Script Applier Mechanism), a computer program designed to understand stories that rely heavily on scripts (typical sequences of events in particular contexts), is described in this report. Chapter one, which discusses SAM's background, shows how causal chaining was developed to connect events in stories, presents a typical script, and…

Examines the in-class essay as written by university freshmen to assess the extent to which students use formulaic expressions to minimize the cognitive burden of generating a coherent and adequate answer. Results show that students made extensive use of formulaic expressions and shaped their answers to reflect the way the information had been…

The immediate recall is compared of 15 speech concepts presented in mixed order in 3 modalities: auditory, symbolically visual (written), and iconic. Results of experiments with 121 subjects suggest that the first step of information processing is a differentiation of sensory stimuli. (10 references) (LB)

Examines how one approach to the study of language, ethno-methodological conversation analysis, accomplishes the integration of linguistic phenomena into the practical continuum of human activity. It is concluded that an integrational rhetoric should and can produce close, detailed, empirical analyses of situated discursive action. (51 references)…

Attempts to clarify the role of grammar in second-language instruction. It is suggested that changes in language teaching have encouraged the view that grammar is one of several dimensions along which learners need to progress to achieve greater proficiency but that it should not be dominant. (22 references) (CK)

Preterite/Imperfect (PI) usage is one of the hardest grammatical features of Spanish to learn. Some of the blame lies with misleading textbook explanations. A discussion of problematic P/I textbook explanations shows why the presentation of a more reliable set of principles is a preferable alternative to questionable rules of thumb. (18…

Argues that the formal properties of language reflect the underlying mental processes that individuals deploy in problem-solving situations. This analysis of the linguistic features of "private writing" reveals that writers utilize their linguistic systems to organize and direct strategic mental processes. (69 references) (CK)

Every sentence conveys a temporal point of view through its aspectual meaning. This viewpoint arises through presenting a situation from a certain temporal perspective and indirectly classifying the situation as an exemplar of an idealized situation type. The information is conveyed by the aspectual categories of a language. This paper presents a…