This paper is an analysis of behavioral texts (speech directed obligatorily to a second person in a communication situation) and a discussion of the persuasive devices employed by the speakers in an effort to effect a change in the listener's behavior. This study deals with two Eastern Bontoc behavioral texts. Several nonlinguistic persuasive…

The study reported here focused on the uses of the word Esperanto in selected English, French, and German newspapers over an 18-month period. Most uses were metaphorical: generally positive in articles on arts or technology, generally negative in political contexts. (Author/VWL)

This paper, based on the analysis of forty oral and forty written personal experience narratives elicited from the same subjects for two different audiences, explores the shaping of participant reference with respect to considerations of audience and the effect of modality. The discussion first focuses on the impact of cognitive constraints on the…

Addresses the discourse domains of academic writing in English and Polish using the example of school writing. The English argumentative-expository essay is related to its potential counterpart in Polish.(Author/VWL)

A multidimensional approach analyzes the linguistic characteristics of 26 Somali spoken and written registers. Somali represents a different language type, and no single dimension adequately describes the relations among registers. Findings are related to previous analyses of English, Tuvaluan, and Korean. (27 references) (Author/LB)

Examines writing in Lithuanian, a language that has received little scholarly attention in the West and particularly the variety of Lithuanian used by the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States. Examines articles from both Lithuanian and American Lithuanian newspapers to see how the written American variety differs from native norms…

Examines the cross-linguistic influence of native language topic-prominence in shaping and accenting the written English discourse produced by Chinese learners. The article endeavors to demonstrate that this interlingual discourse does not meet the criteria for adequate coherence in written English discourse. (22 references) (Author/CK)

An analysis is presented of an electronic mail conversation that took place in a Finnish scholarly electronic mailing list. The data is analyzed within the framework of systemic-functional oriented discourse and the theory of register, which attempts to explain the ways language use varies according to the type of situation. The electronic media…

Discusses differences in academic discourse presentation, including preference for the use of first person singular "I" in some languages vs. the "we" perspective in others. Data are presented concerning employment of the two perspectives in English, German, French, Russian, and Bulgarian research articles in linguistics.…

Examined children's development between first and fifth grade in the use of referential expressions in oral and written narratives; analyzed a new context of use, written narrative, and compared it to the oral one; and compared the development of referential expressions in children speaking Italian and Catalan. (Author/VWL)

Humor--and communication itself--when translating from one language to another, depends on an accumulation of shared understandings about how people say things in a given culture. Examples are given in translations of Portuguese to English and English to Portuguese. (CB)

Examines how language attitudes are expressed in Legon, Ghana, a multilingual society. Focuses on the graffiti in male lavatories, which offers an interesting glimpse of some of the intergroup tensions existing within Ghanian society. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the similarities and differences between the rhetorical structure of some Slavonic and English scientific texts. The study tests the assumption that scientific discourse has universal features that are language-independent. Results point to differences between the two types of rhetorical patterns resulting from cultural and academic…

The development of effective skills and basic competencies in written English for Ute students in a reservation public school system and adult Ute learners seeking high school equivalency certificates is discussed. The focus of analysis is on assessing the Ute students' assumptions about written language and their use of those assumptions when…

Although spoken language was the subject of attention among Soviet linguists for a short period in the 1920s, it has not attracted much attention since then. The main concern of Soviet linguists has been the forms of written language. Only at the end of the 1960s did linguists begin to record spontaneous speech on tape and study its forms. The…