Offers rules and comments for using discourse analysis to teach student writers how to convert incoherent compositions into coherent, cohesive prose. (RL)

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)

Proposes that dialogue provides children with opportunities to participate with adults in creating linguistic relationships of which they would be incapable alone. Reports the findings of a study of dialogues between mothers and their young children. (FL)

Reports the findings of a study that was designed to explore children's use of language in the adversative episode. (FL)

Describes the functions, specific uses, syntactic structure, and typographical characteristics of titles, discussing examples from newspapers, books, films, and scientific journals. Analysis of the semantic relationship between title and text is followed by the description of various instructional techniques for the production of titles and the…

Addresses ways in which discourse can be categorized, focusing on the relationship between writer and audience. Describes results of a case study of the proposal writing of executives in a large consulting firm to illustrate concepts related to intentionality in writing. (FL)

Using excerpts from "Three Approaches to Psychotherapy," the language of the counselors and client was compared. Counselors differed significantly in their use of verb phrases. The client's language was consistent. Structural analyses of language may help counselors relate treatment policies to the needs of clients. (Author)

Analyzes the process of reading philosophical works. Considers reflective reading a performative act in which the genuine reader enters into a dialogue, questions, recollects, and rereads. (PD)

Examines structuralist, phenomenological, and constructivist views of discourse and applies them to rhetorical criticism. Structuralist criticism analyzes elements of the text and their interrelationships; phenomenological criticism stresses the influence of the situation on discourse; and constructivist criticism incorporates both methods,…

Reaction time to reading sentences which were not clearly interrelated was longer when a paragraph was titled to give it to more discourse (paragraph) level meaning. The presence of titles had no effect on reaction times for meaningful paragraphs, however. (CP)

Compares sentence grammar with text linguistics, giving a survey of the treatment of indirect discourse in school grammars, and finding them inadequate. Recommends rules derived from text linguistics in spite of their greater complexity, because they do not hold the student to mechanical recasting of sentences. (IFS/WGA)

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)

Describes four procedures commonly used to describe the content and structure of text: T-unit analysis, propositional representation, story grammars, and primary trait scoring. Discusses results of research regarding the procedures and their implications for instruction. (TJ)

Subjects asked to be brief tended to use messages concerned with the exchange of information more than messages dealing with rate of communication, judgments, and feedback. These subjects also used higher percentages of nouns and adjectives and lower percentages of pronouns, verbs, prepositions, and articles than unrestricted subjects. (Author/RL)

The way in which knowledge of a given topic influences the acquisition of topic-related information was studied with the knowledge domain of baseball. A knowledge structure was postulated that included the goal structure as well as the states and actions of the game. (SW)