Describes international amateur radio talk (IART) as a clear case of the significance of the channel or medium as a restrictive factor in discourse and analyzes sample texts of IART. (HTH)

Criticizes J.L. Austin's and J.R. Searle's claims that utterances have illocutionary force and offers an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances, which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfully relate to the state of affairs in the world. (FL)

Explores the ways in which the simplifying processes of the varieties of English used in note-taking resemble and differ from those found in baby talk and in foreigner talk. Explores 10 simplified-register features identified in the university lecture notes of seven students. (HTH)

Investigates the comprehension of combined concepts (such as "peeled apple") in discourse through four experiments by having people verify features that were true of the phrase. Discusses experiments and results. Argues against a compositional model of conceptual combination in which both the modifier and head noun are accessed…

Explores alternative actions which can be produced by practices of talking associated with the action of "initiating repair": questioning terms and certain forms of repeats. Shows that initiating repair can be produced by a practice which does not ordinarily produce it. Argues that situated analysis must go hand-in-hand with more formal…

Discusses how children in one society on the Papuan Plateau, Papua, New Guinea, learn about making and responding to requests based on a strategy of appeal. (FL)

Finds that when paired with older adults simulating dementia, the young adults' instructions were longer, more informative, and more repetitious; however, the young adults did not alter their prosody or grammatical complexity. Suggests that young adults adjust their speech to the perceived communicative needs of older listeners by varying…

Illustrates the existence of meanings in conversation that are not based on the listener's interpretations by analyzing the conversations from a family therapy session. Transcripts of the conversations are appended. (HTH)

Describes a study of the use of the terms "will" and "gonna" in the speech of two three-year-old girls. The results suggest that one of the functions of "will" and "gonna" is to impart different causal relations to the two practices of "undertaking" and "planning." (HTH)

Presents results of a study indicating that constructive and dramatic play contexts affected language to the extent that children use more exophora in the constructive context and more linguistic verbs, third-person pronouns, and displaced reference tenses in the dramatic context. (HTH)

Discusses the process of understanding of intent by which participants, through the comparative interpretation of a series of cues and symbols as they are revealed in speech, develop categories for a contextual model of communication. Argues that discourse is essentially dialogic and phenomenologically realizable. (FL)

Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Reports results of four experiments in which undergraduate students rated the degree of condemnation in critical remarks. Shows that ironic criticism in many cases is used to enhance rather than to dilute condemnation. Notes significant implications for both pragmatic and processing theories of verbal irony. (SR)

Explores whether speakers choose spatial perspectives to minimize effort. Discusses an experiment in which speakers describe locations on a display for addressees who shared their vantage point or had different views. Finds that same-viewpoint speakers spoke differently from speakers with offset views, who did not differ from each other reliably,…

Examined the conversations of preschool children as they completed two different tasks--a picture making task and a doll playing task. Concludes that the children's speech was primarily task-focused and that the rate of speech varied with task. (FL)