This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, "interactive alignment" and "interpersonal synergy", and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy…

This study seeks to examine variations in patterns of interactivity as they are displayed in the ongoing discourse construction of high and low self-efficacy learners of Spanish in the context of computer-mediated-communication. The paper specifically focuses on the analysis of synchronous text chats of six university students of Spanish at…

Introduces the transitivity model of textual analysis, assesses its application to news reports, and discusses the critical linguistic background in which it has proved popular. (JK)

The purpose of the model is to select either Spanish or English as the language to be used; its goals at this stage of development include modeling code-switching for lexical need, apparently random code-switching, dependency of code-switching upon sociolinguistic context, and code-switching within syntactic constraints. (EJS)

Study of the pragmatics of politeness conventionally draws on conversational data, but can be extended to some genres of written text. A framework is described that analyzes politeness strategies in terms of impositions (claims and denials of claims) and reveals some stylistic features in scientific papers and in popularizations. (Author/CB)

Indicates a periodic structure in the distribution of between-turn silences in two-party conversation, a finding that is inconsistent with current stochastic or signaling models, which view social interaction as an exchange of stimuli and responses. Finds that social interaction is fundamentally a collaborative activity. (JD)

Analyzes argumentation and the ways in which idealized models of argumentation relate to the linguistic behavior of participants in argument as talk. Sequencing patterns of arguments are interactionally accomplished. Speakers produce turns which are related to their purpose in talking and that include speech act complexes appropriate for the…

Examines the two rules of intonation most commonly found in English language teaching textbooks: those concerning intonation in lists and intonation in questions. The article suggests that teachers and materials writers must provide learners with descriptions of intonation allowing them to understand the communicative significance of intonation…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

Discussion of the linguistic character of electronic mail (e-mail) looks at technology's role in shaping spoken and written usage, the growth of e-mail as a new communication genre, and formal linguistic properties of e-mail. Proposes a model of e-mail as a creolizing linguistic modality, analogous to pidginization and creolization processes well…

Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

Taking the lexicogrammatical resources (i.e. the vocabulary and syntax) of English as a starting point, this report explores the demands those resources put on the design of the part of a text generation system that supports the process of lexicogrammatical expression. The first section of the report notes that a reason for using the lexicogrammar…