The paper represents a fragment of a multi-year project focused on everyday speech interaction and, particularly, on verbal mechanisms of granting speech efficiency and effectiveness. The introductory statement of the research is more precise the speaker organizes his/her message verbally, the easier it is understood by the listener. Special…

One of the most memorable eulogies delivered in the United States Senate is the one by Senator Michael Mansfield for President John F. Kennedy. An analysis of his word choice reveals that he (1) forced the audience to participate in the creation of the message; (2) employed active, forceful descriptions; (3) focused on praiseworthy qualities of…

The issue addressed in this paper is the relationship between form in fictional prose and form in other uses of language, particularly those uses important in composition theory. Form in composition theory has traditionally had two ways of identifying units of analysis: (1) the sentence and semantic units, and (2) pragmatic and rhetorical units.…

The Georgetown Round Table on discourse analysis dealt with the following aspects of the topic: Emerson's essay on language; oral remembering and narrative structures; persuasive discourse; social construction of topical cohesion; discourse as an interactional achievement; the place of intonation; topic as the unit of analysis in a criminal law…

If young readers (adolescents) are introduced to a range of story structures and less structured texts (or "deviant narratives"), it may encourage the development of more diverse and accommodating schemata and the capacity to make inferences about the link between discourse units. It is, after all, a basic principle of recent narrative…