Much of the current controversy in the area of story theory derives from a failure to make clear the distinctions among theories of (1) plan comprehension, (2) narrative comprehension, and (3) story schema. A theory of plan comprehension attempts to account for the ability of humans to interpret the observed actions of another person in terms of…

This article underlines the necessity of discourse analysis in a complete linguistic description, that is, the need to look at various phenomena such as social relationships as manifested in conversation, performatives, pronominalization constraints, or external factors such as the sex of the participants. A model of a method of analysis is…

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

A study of the 1980 debate between Republican presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and George Bush demonstrates what influence, if any, a debate has on the voting public. The unit of analysis used in the study was each single message presented by each candidate without interruption by the other candidate or the moderator. Two investigators made…

Questions asked in five play sessions by each of eight children aged 1.6 to 3.0 were analyzed for usage of the wh-interrogatives. About 93% of utterances using "what" and "where" were formulaic constructions (e.g., "Where's NP?" and "What's that thing?"). In order to determine whether children were…

While editors have no way of encoding most of the features of the human voice, they are often able to use punctuation and other devices to give the impression of speech. While retaining many distinctive features of a personal voice is possible in writing, considerations of voice are inseparable from considerations of textual features and audience…

An explanatory linguistic theory attempts to capture and explain the universal nature of human language, to choose among possible grammars of each human language, and to account for the linguistic constraints involved in language acquisition. Discourse theory, like linguistic theory, must be mentalistic in that it seeks to account for mental…

This examination of an evaluation of writing based on process rather than on product argues that one of the primary functions of evaluation as a part of teaching should be to diagnose the writing strategies that underlie a writer's current performance, not just textual problems. The first half of the paper discusses the various ways teachers use…

Noting that little effort has been devoted to the precise use of the term "theory" in rhetorical theory studies, this paper argues that, for the sake of scholarly precision in research, it is important to establish parameters of the term and to distinguish it from related terms and concepts. The paper reviews the advantages of the use of theory,…

This paper proposes a general principle of topic resources as a key principle of conversation. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the notion of cohesion as a condition in which interactants perceive that their utterances are related to one another and presents the "given-new" strategy (in which the interactants…

This paper advocates the view of readability as an interaction between text structure and the cognitive processes and structures possessed by a reader. A simulation model of prose comprehension that yields predictions of both propositional recall and text readability based on the frequencies of different processing events is discussed. The paper…

Several theories of story structure are reviewed in this paper, including those of D. Rumelhart, R. Schank, and T. van Dijk. Examples are given of Rumelhart's story grammar consisting of elements such as setting, episodes, events, and reactions that must be present to form a coherent structure. Schank's contribution to story structure theory is…

An investigation into the types of propositions used in criminal trials reveals that the question being adjudicated in criminal trials is a proposition of fact that may or may not be influenced by policy and value considerations. The argument is offered that the proposition of fact identifies the ultimate issue in a legal debate. While value…

A model has been developed for studying the relation between text structure and reading comprehension, emphasizing the reader's use of world knowledge and text-structural knowledge to evaluate and interpret meaning from text. When the highlights of the model are considered from the perspective of various expository texts used in research on…