This paper first briefly reviews what Halliday and Hasan (1976) said about "(the) same." The paper then examines the understanding of this form by qualitatively analyzing 259 naturally occurring spoken tokens of "(the) same" in their discourse contexts. It focuses on the following questions with reference to the data: (1) What…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

A study designed to examine the variation that occurs in the request production of children between the ages of 6 and 7 observed the kind of requests children make, what they request, whom they ask, and how they formulate their ideas. Twenty native French-speaking children divided into two age groups (6- and 7-year-olds) were asked to complete two…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

Impromptu speech can be defined in different ways: in terms of situational context, linguistic characteristics, and real-time processing. These approaches are not contradictory. There are certain situations that call for rapid processing of spoken discourse, and the needs of that processing are reflected in the structure of the text. The degree of…

It is proposed that the target for teaching pronunciation in English as a Second Language must be the authentic, connected speech that is used by most native speakers, not an artificial and over-correct model too closely tied to the writing system, a different modality entirely. In English, this means learning the language's rhythmic patterns to…

The unique position of WH words in Slavic languages is discussed, with specific reference to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The multiple fronting characteristics of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian differ in terms of the following positions and behaviors: extraction from embedded questions; clitic placement and other indications of constituent status;…

Communities of one sort or another are found in the literature of many disciplines and are used to explain any number of things: linguists examine language in terms of speech communities, while composition researchers write of discourse communities. Linguists have advanced various definitions of communities, but Stanley Fish's "Is There a…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

The development of the Conversational Unit (CU) was investigated in a semilongitudinal study of three mother/son dyads in nonstructured spontaneous communication. The children were 19 to 23 months old at the start of the investigation. Sound films were recorded monthly during bathing and feeding times. After four months, verbal and nonverbal…

The term "scaffolding" refers to adult behaviors that support and guide children's participation in activities, including speech events, enabling the children to extend the range of what they are able to do without assistance. A study examined how scaffolding behavior in support of expository discourse differed among preschool teachers in…

The idea that "natural speech" as well as written discourse can be organized is now commonly accepted. There is also evidence that natural speech contains more coherence indicators than written texts do. This article proposes that one type of organizer, pragmatic connectives such as "therefore, then, thus, while, however, but"…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…

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…