Examined children's comprehension and production of idioms through the roles of familiarity and of different kinds of contextual information on comprehension. A sample of 264 children showed that familiarity (i.e., frequency of exposure) plays a minor role and only for children who are not yet able to use contextual information. (18 references)…

The future of curriculum studies is uncertain. Curricular language at the beginning of the 1990s demonstrates several features that inhibit our understanding of curricular phenomena. Persistence of the generic fallacy, confused conceptualizations, uncertain metaphoric transfer from other disciplines, and ideological commitment make optimism…

The initial phase of Porta's mature poetry, composed between 1801 and 1805, is discussed in the context of dialect translation and parody of famous literary texts. (Author/LB)

Educators at Bowling Green State University found that trying to apply a corporate model of strategic planning in a college environment was very difficult. This article recommends choosing metaphors carefully, anticipating undesirable side effects, and creating a need to know. Using noncorporate metaphorical models may prove effective. (six…

Discusses four poems by William Carlos Williams used to teach creative writing to college students. Uses "Portrait of a Woman in Red" and "The Last Words of My English Grandmother" because they contain speakers who are clearly not the poet, which gives undergraduate students opportunities to discuss details Williams uses to…

Revives the beneficial or functional sense of redundancy and shows that functional redundancy in writing need not be a contradiction in terms. Defines not only redundancy but also its opposite, ellipsis, and emphasizes the usefulness of each, using examples both in reading and writing. (TB)

The pervasiveness of metaphor in environmental discourse suggests important questions about the role of metaphor in environmental learning. A conception of environmental thinking and action is proposed, which identifies five analytically distinct "moments" of "environmental sensemaking": conceptualising, knowing about, knowing how to respond,…

In this article, I elucidate the idea of a poetics of teaching and outline its value to scholars and teachers who seek a deeper understanding of the practice. A poetics of teaching draws together aesthetic, intellectual, and moral dimensions of the work that are often treated separately, if treated at all, in both research and in the classroom. In…

Group phenomena and interactions are described through the use of the chaos theory constructs and characteristics of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, phase space, turbulence, emergence, self-organization, dissipation, iteration, bifurcation, and attractors and fractals. These constructs and theoretical tenets are presented as applicable…

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not…

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace…

This article presents a reading-time study of scope resolution in the interpretation of ambiguous cardinality interrogatives in English-French and in English and French native sentence processing. Participants were presented with a context, a self-paced segment-by-segment presentation of a cardinality interrogative, and a numerical answer that…

A central question in metaphor research is how metaphors establish mappings between concepts from different domains. The authors propose an evolutionary path based on structure-mapping theory. This hypothesis--the career of metaphor--postulates a shift in mode of mapping from comparison to categorization as metaphors are conventionalized.…

Grounded blends may be literal or metaphorical, the latter allowing for an even richer variety of blend characteristics. This contribution of metaphor is achieved largely through the utilization of body partitioning. Body partitioning may result in: (1) the appearance of a single, coherent source-domain scene iconically represented; (2) a single…

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor (1980, 1999) provides a basis for describing everyday cognitive structures using linguistic models and thus, making it possible to uncover both individual and collective patterns of thought and action. Lakoff and Johnson have not, however, developed a workable system for carrying out qualitative…