Two studies were conducted to analyze script and event structures of preschool children's dialogues during play. To identify scripts in discourse data, the following procedural guidelines were developed and followed: (1) identify exchanges of continuous discourse, (2) delineate all conversational episodes, (3) select all episodes with pretend play…

Argues that rhetorical history and rhetorical criticism require different evaluative standards and sources of evidence. Suggests that teachers should focus on specific functions of rhetorical analysis rather than on methods and approaches. (MH)

Triggered by inconsistencies and omissions in the reporting of casualty statistics and earthquake magnitude of the 1976 Tangshen (China) earthquake, this paper examines coverage of the natural disaster by "Peking Review," China's only foreign language news weekly. The paper's main section analyzes in detail "Peking Review's"…

While most previous research has implied or assumed that the conversational structure giving each speaker a turn to speak is universally normative, findings of one study suggest that in interactions with at least four participants, alternatives to this rule are possible. A phenomenon called "conversational fission" occurs when a four-…

Religious symbol systems have the capacity to bring into place superordinate constructions of reality. One interesting construction of reality has been developed by the Unity School of Christianity, organized in the second half of the nineteenth century and perhaps the most successful of organized groups within the American New…

The "great national discussion" of 1787 involved deliberations, writings, debates, and speeches concerning the newly created U.S. Constitution. Both the framers and the critics of the Constitution utilized philosophies of: (1) republicanism; (2) Lockean liberalism; (3) work-ethic Protestantism; and (4) state-centered theories of power…

A symposium on discourse analysis and language learning is summarized. Discourse analysis can be divided into six fields of research: syntax, the amount of syntactic organization required for different types of discourse, large speech events, intra-sentential cohesion in text, speech acts, and unequal power discourse. Research on speech events and…

In his rhetorical theory, James Kinneavy distinguishes between "aim" and "mode," but his modes do not represent kinds of reality; instead they represent more specific aims on a lower level of abstraction. Although Kinneavy's classification has been useful in the classroom, seeing the modes as specific aims yields even more…

To integrate many of the theoretical linguistic studies examining pronoun reference, this paper focuses on tracing the shift from purely transformational syntactic studies of intrasentential phenomena to the wider orientations of discourse and pragmatic studies. The first section describes the classic studies of pronominalization within the…

A discussion of ellipsis, the omission of information from a communication, argues that the fairly precise logical notion of ellipsis as used in philosophical analysis can be applied in the sociological study of ideology. It is proposed that ellipsis is a simple explanation of the workings of the language in which much potent ideology is embodied,…

Inference is discussed as a factor in the derivation of non-explicit antecedents and referents for three types of discourse anaphora: definite pronouns, "one"-anaphora, and verb phrase ellipsis. This derivation process is seen as being part of the normal process of text-understanding. It is claimed that the use of non-explicit…

Although current theories concerning the composing process overlap in useful and interesting ways, a paradigm is emerging. This article discusses two of the major assumptions of this emerging paradigm: that there are distinct purposes for each kind of discourse (for example, expressive, literary, persuasive, and referential) and that the relation…

This paper uses discussion of Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" to present a theoretical framework for explaining the semantics of narrative discourse. The algebraic theory of finite automata is used. (CK)

A network model of logical and semantic structures from which speakers or writers generate linguistic messages at the discourse level is presented. (Author)