Offers an examination of the distributional range of causative verbs. Contrary to research claiming these verbs have highly circumscribed distributions, demonstrates that they readily appear in a wide variety of argument structure frames. The appearance of accusative verbs with omitted patient arguments is analyzed in detail and an account is…

Presents a comment on Laurie Grobman's article in an earlier issue of this journal, discussing her oversimplification of instrumental discovery theory and outlining briefly some of the limits of social construction, the approach that Grobman prefers. (SG)

Focuses on whether women and men have different perceptions about when simultaneous talk becomes interruptive. Asks participants to judge whether 20 overlaps are interruptive when presented with a conflictive interview between a high-power female and a low-power male. Suggests that verbal aggressiveness is a better predictor of recognition of…

Tests D. Schiffrin's hypothesis that the choice between "CAUSE so RESULT" sequences and "RESULT because CAUSE" sequences is determined by topic continuity against British conversational data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. Produces results similar to Schiffrin's. Concludes that these studies reveal a cohesive…

Claims that everyday discourse is in fact richly metaphorical and that, through the operation of metaphor, people fictionalize as they talk. Argues that because literary writing has been dominated by culture and curriculum, English teachers have not been encouraged to explore aspects of language that are the core of how people think and behave.…

The discourse of a recent position paper by H.G. Widdowson is analyzed by using three methods criticized in Widdowson's paper. The paper was converted into a miniature data corpus and analyzed with the concepts of systemic functional linguistics, corpus linguistics, and critical discourse analysis. (Author/VWL)

Attempts to provide an introduction to postmodernism for health care workers that spans postmodernist and modernist discourses. Discusses metanarratives, authority, discourse, deconstruction, textuality, and difference. (Contains 42 references.) (SK)

Traces how the individualizing of literacy problems is constructed through dominant discourses of blame and victimization, and how these detract attention from both the nature of literacy as a cultural and variable construct and from broader socioeconomic explanations for literacy difficulties. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on ESL Literacy…

Outlines the characteristics of traditional academic discourse. Analyzes some examples of the new hybrid discourses in order to show what the author means by hybrid and to provide suggestions for hybrid rhetorical strategies that may be helpful to share with students. Offers some tentative suggestions on teaching intended mainly to stimulate…

Analyzes the linguistic notion of procedural vocabulary, proposing that several different vocabulary concepts are part of this type of vocabulary. The paper discusses the role of procedural vocabulary in discourse, suggesting that the concepts of schema and procedure are relevant for describing this type of vocabulary and categorizing it into two…

The purpose of this study is to examine how 4 teachers with learning disabilities (LD) negotiate multiple, complex, and sometimes contradictory discourses of disabilities in constructing their own understandings of LD. We chose to study teachers with LD because of their unique access to at least 3 different sources of knowledge about LD: (a)…

Students' conceptions are characterized by some authors as having a high degree of coherence while, in the minds of others, they show little coherence and great heterogeneity. The objective of this study was to throw light on this problem by reference to "the particulate nature of matter," a topic where great discrepancies have been observed in…

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people's preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun…

Following the scientific revolution, the modern perception of discourse assumed that text can and should reflect, in a literal way, objective reality as observed in the real world. This perception is radically different from a traditional religious perception of discourse in general and from the Jewish perception in particular. The Jewish…

This paper reports an analysis of research article (RA) abstracts from linguistics journals from two related angles: rhetorical organisation and thematic structure. Based on a small scale study it reveals two major types of rhetorical organisation, here called the IMRD type and the CARS type. When thematic analysis, in terms of thematic…