An experiment was carried out to examine individual story schemata and a story theory. The theory proposed relating structural characteristics of narratives to the reader's affective response and the reader's intuitions about what constitutes a story. Two levels of narrative structure are distinguished by the theory: the chronological sequence of…

Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

An artistic verbal performance is something more than words, yet most critical commentary on this genre focuses on the word, on the linguistic level. A methodology for making performance-centered texts is described based on the performance of "Stagolee," a story that originated from Julius Lester's book, "Black Folktales." A…

A review of the research of E.G. Mishler, H. Mehan, and others suggests that a unified theory of the mechanics of how continuous discourse is accounted for in classroom behavior is necessary for further study. Discourse analysis meets the criteria for selection of a theoretical framework because it deals with all the language within the classroom…

An examination of the stylistic differences among writing from literary specialists, from science, and from social science shows that a more precise diagnosis of the writing problems of clarity and coherence is possible. Ten randomly selected paragraphs from each of four publications, the "Canadian Medical Association Journal," the "Canadian…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

To test whether verbal choices in a persuasive setting would show less diversity and more qualification than those in a nonpersuasive setting, a study involving 24 college students was undertaken. The subjects were divided into five groups and each group was asked to role play two situations: one calling for the subjects merely to be…

This report describes a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically rich, naturalistic domains, primarily in the domain of the stock market. The methods and results of six separate experiments on…

A complete analysis of a story's structure must rely on more than a simple grammar of story components; it requires a consideration of the characters' plans as they are stated or implied in the story. Furthermore, these plans are recognized as the characters' beliefs, and beliefs about interactions among plans are crucial determinants of a story's…

This paper discusses the notion that comprehension of language involves an active interpretative process entailing both a generating of expectations and a matching of expectations to the "incoming message." There are, however, two forms of discourse in which the relation of text to message differs from that holding in ordinary language.…

In Guyana Creolese, the word "doz" appears frequently in the speech of people on a wide range of social levels. The term signals that the action occurs habitually. The use of "doz" is not widely noted among creolists, however, possibly because it often occurs in phonologically reduced forms such as "Iz" or…

Argument can be defined as a process whereby people reason their way from one set of problematic ideas to the choice of another. This definition implies three primary dimensions; argument is problematic, it is based on the perceptions and choices of people, and its rationality is grounded in a variable logic of more or less rather than a…

Compositions based on a picture as stimulus and written by fourth and sixth graders were studied for syntactic and lexical deviations. From the corpus of data, eight interpretations were made: (1) comma fault, sentence sense, and coordinating conjunctions were the most frequent syntactic problems encountered--all could be eliminated by oral…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

This study examines the basic question about the position of dicursivity with respect to language, arising from the axiomatic statements concerning linguistic sign, form and meaning as definition components of the structural conception of language. The book is divided into two sections: I. Axiomatics of Structural Linguistics, and II. Linguistics…