Discourse coherence is a common phenomenon in linguistic studies, and plays an important role in discourse analysis. As a common and extremely important type of language phenomena, discourse coherence has drawn more and more scholars' attention, but they emphasis on partial discourse coherence, paying a little attention to holistic coherence. The…

Special issue devoted to language and history. (VM)

The structure of natural conversations in first-grade classrooms is the focus of this inquiry. Analyses of a particular type of discourse, namely, connected conversations initiated and sustained by questioning, suggest that the probability that a conversation will be continued may be expressed as a simple exponential function. (Author/RM)

It is contended that there are such things as discourse blocs, and that they are composed of discourse units glued together into a contextuated whole by bloc signals. There are three kinds of structures with which it is necessary to deal in order to discuss coherent discourse: the discourse bloc, the discourse unit, and the bloc signal.…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

A study investigated the exophoric function of the pronouns "it, they, he, she" and related forms in four English conversations. It analyzed the frequency and characteristics of the occurrence of those exophoric pronouns and found that they were much less frequent than endophoric pronouns. It also found that the exophoric pronoun groups…

The encoding specificity principle predicts that a change in context between input and test will adversely affect recognition memory. Experiment I tested this with sentences from a prose passage and no context effects were obtained. Experiments II, III, and IV compared context effects for words in random sentences versus connected discourse. In…

Discourse analysis, a field that reflects an interest in language as text and social interaction, is discussed. Discourse analysis deals with the way language varies from one communicative situation to another; textological analysis deals with the internal organization of such discourse in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Assumptions in…

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…

A study explored context effects on two selected indexes of communicative competence in the narrative language of a sample of first grade children. The 30 subjects each completed 2 tasks--the retelling of a story that had been read to them and the dictation of an original story. These narratives were recorded and analyzed for linguistic competence…

Impromptu speech is heard only once, at a rate of perception that depends on the speaker's delivery, and is specifically adapted to the listeners. These features trigger cognitive activities that facilitate translation. Impromptu speech is characterized by a constant interconnection between cognitive competence and language competence and between…

A fundamental problem in the study of spontaneous speech is how to segment it for analysis. The segments should be relevant for the study of linguistic structures, speech planning, speech production, or communication strategies. Operational rules for segmentation should consider a wide variety of criteria and be hierarchically ordered. This is…

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…

The problem of meaning in cross-cultural situations, resulting from differing patterns of thought, requires comprehension of the basic rules or patterns of these thought systems. This comprehension can be sought through Vygotsky's unit of analysis, a unit being a product of analysis which, unlike elements, retains all the basic properties of the…

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…