Discusses language embodied by practice, or the interrelations among traditional areas of linguistics, such as grammar and semantics and conversational organization, on the one hand, and gesture and prosody on the other. Specific focus is on the role of prosody and gesture in turn-taking. (Author/VWL)

For analytic purposes, contends that, in principle, culture is an unapparent and functionally unimportant element of routine everyday interactions. It is when persons, relationships, and episodes are evaluated by the participants or others in the community, and what the participants opt to say, or not say, that we come face-to-face with culture.…

Suggests that future research in language and social interaction should (1) focus on studies of media or mediated discourse as forms of social interaction as one broad group; and (2) engage in the flow of postmodernist discourse. (Author/VWL)

Illustrates a three-level analysis of classroom discourse as a means of examining in detail the implications of characterizing language teachers' questions as "display" questions. Attempts to demonstrate that the characterization of teachers' questions as display questions because they are non-referential is only relevant on one level of…

Argues that rhetorical scholars should recognize resistive reading, strategic ambiguity, and hermeneutic depth as three types of polysemy that support different scholarly purposes. Complicates assumptions about the critical judgment of polysemous texts and suggests that some types of polysemy are best identified through the adoption of a new…

Describes research creating a feminist, rhetorical analysis of legal language by examining in detail both the "Plain English" and the "Law and Literature" movements. Examines legal texts that construct the "reasonable woman," asking how that hypothetical legal subject is construed by judicial discourse and what its…

Discusses the author's ongoing research analyzing several sites of discourse related to a military training accident that resulted in the death of the first female military pilot assigned to a combat position. Contributes to scholarship discussing interactions of technology, gender, and military culture. Explores how language influences…

Contributes to scholarship on the relationship between workplace documents and workplace practices by examining the history and practice associated with one volunteer ambulance squad's preprinted report forms. Argues that preprinted forms that enable workers to reflect on their actions play a crucial role in their development as professionals and…

Reviews corpus-based research that draws on theoretical insights from systemics, genre, and discourse analysis for exploration of small-scale specialized corpora of academic writing. (Author/VWL)

Reports results of four experiments in which undergraduate students rated the degree of condemnation in critical remarks. Shows that ironic criticism in many cases is used to enhance rather than to dilute condemnation. Notes significant implications for both pragmatic and processing theories of verbal irony. (SR)

Defines quantitative-discourse psychology. Illustrates its practice in five research projects, all of which examined naturalistic discourse, investigating: reading time; inference generation; construction of multiple agents (narrators, characters) in literary short stories; tutorial dialog; and dialog patterns in two-party conversations. Notes a…

Uses W. Kintsch's Construction Integration model as a framework to explore the effects of preexisting attitudes on memory for texts. Shows that preexisting attitudes interacted with attitude texts over delay although not in a direct or expected fashion. Emphasizes the need to manipulate representational levels of attitude texts and to consider…

Examines how type of referent (name versus pronoun) influences comprehension of short passages. Provides strong support for central predictions of centering theory: (1) using a repeated name to refer to the central entity of a discourse disrupts comprehension; and (2) this disruption interacts with whether there is a continuing or shifting…

Proposes the subsuming theory criterion for experiments on common ground in mutual knowledge (i.e., the design must keep common information constant and only vary whether or not it is common). Demonstrates how doing so makes stronger claims. Illustrates how experiments can be designed to satisfy the criterion by evaluating some earlier studies…

Proposes a taxonomy of functions for direct reports of speech (and of writing and thought) in focus-group discussions. Reported speech both depicts the experience of the original utterance and detaches the reported utterance from the reporting speaker. (Author/VWL)