This study analyzes the discourse structures of one text type in Central Bontoc, one of eight minority Philippine languages. The text explains the Innana rituals, a complex of six rituals held annually in Bontoc villages shortly after the planting of the rice crop. The rituals are considered extremely important because they are believed to help…

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…

Variability in the grammatical profile of finite verbs in English is examined in 20 Master of Science theses in biology, chemistry, and physics. The use of verbs with respect to voice, tense, aspect, and modality is examined in five rhetorical sections of the theses--introduction, review, methods, results, discussion. (SED)

This paper deals with the computer's production and recognition of sentences in a connected discourse and its application to computer assisted instruction. Studies of textual properties in real discourses have been carried out at the paragraph level. The theoretical concepts of representing paragraph content in terms of (1) the factual data…

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

Two articles on sentence construction and eight on the paragraph comprise this publication. Francis Christensen contributes four articles on (1) the use of loose, cumulative sentences, (2) sentence openers, with illustrations from Hemingway, (3) a generative rhetoric for the paragraph, and (4) the formation of principles of paragraph composition…

A study investigated three issues: (1) differences between two types of rhetorical organization of expository text (problem-solution pattern and collection-of-descriptions pattern) in the reading recall of second-language readers; (2) differences between the two types on reading recall of readers at two levels; and (3) relationship between the…

A study compared the topical structure (TS) of Arabic and English in order to determine whether Arab learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) transfer potential differences between Arabic and English in their English writing, or whether they use an altogether different TS indicative of developmental factors. Four sets of data were compared…

A study to find patterns of cohesion and rhetorical structure that distinguish good from weak English essay writing is described. The corpus consisted of ten Swedish college essays written as part of the final exam in a first-year English course. Methodological problems encountered included the delimitation of units for the analysis of cohesive…