This study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). "Patterns of lexis…

This paper analyzes the use of a special type of unspecific noun, called "shell nouns" [Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (1999). "Pattern grammar". Amsterdam: Benjamins; Schmid, H. (2000). "English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition". Berlin: Walter de Gruyter], which are frequently used as cohesive devices, in the written…

Experiments were carried out to determine (1) the degree of agreement with which subjects identify paragraph boundaries in unindented prose passages, (2) if a significant proportion of cues to paragraph structure are formal in nature, (3) if the identification of paragraphs in different kinds of prose differentially depends on semantic (as…

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…

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

An examination of various linguists' definitions of parataxis, asyndeton, and juxtaposition shows that the concepts are often varying and lack precision. The author offers new definitions which distinguish three specific cases. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Twenty-five Philippine languages and dialects were studied to determine the manner in which words, clauses, sounds, and sentences group together to make up units larger than the sentence. Data obtained were analyzed according to tagmemic theory. The introduction to this volume (see also AL 002 032 and AL 002 033) gives a brief orientation to the…

A discussion of how one perceive YsI form versus formlessness in discourse." (Author/RD)

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

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 examines what devices a speaker of English uses to produce continuous language, and how such devices are used in English. (CLK)

Research supported by the Information Processing Techniques Branch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. (DD)

Discusses a study of the grammar and syntax development in the speech of three children; adapted from the forthcoming book, Developmental Psychology Today" (CRM Books, Communications Research Machines, Inc., 1971). (Editor/SW)

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…