The speech of two two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children was taped during free play in their homes. The following characteristics of their speech were discovered: (1) excellent, near full control of tones; (2) somewhat stricter word order than is found in adult speech (Mandarin is undergoing a word order shift from SVO to SOV); and (3) few…

The spontaneous speech of 14 children aged 2;6 to 5;6 was recorded. One additional child provided longitudinal information from age 2;4 to 5;6. In a second study, 75 children were tested for mastery of hypothetical reference in a story-telling situation. The speech samples from Study 1 and the children's answers from Study 2 were analyzed for…

The first phase of an ongoing study of communication in a naturalistic situation in which children talked to familiar children is described in this paper. The situation was one that encouraged pretend (or dramatic) play. Research was focused on (1) the amount of pretend play; (2) the amount of speech used for planning or managing the play; and (3)…

To conceptualize a reader's comprehension of text as a semantic and interpretive processing of information, it is necessary to take note of interactions among persons and texts and conditions under which the texts are to be comprehended. A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was constructed which focuses on the text as any…

Narratives about personal experiences were elicited from 33 kindergarten children in a suburb of Zurich. The narratives were analyzed for the development of the use of the particle "ebe" from a conversational context (where the use of the particle was already mastered) to an appropriate narrative context (in which the particle, as…

Text analysis is the study and description of units of verbal behavior larger than the sentence and is concerned with elements of sentences and with the internal relations of larger passages as well as with how a text relates to the communicative situation in which it occurs. It is of current interest because literary critics have moved toward…

To determine whether argument is logical, this paper reviews the empirical literature on perception, memory, and reasoning. It finds cognitive processes to be inferential, thus supporting the assumption that argument is logical. It notes, however, that a cognitive view of argument must be taken to appreciate this logicality, because people…

One model of discourse production attempts to explicate deeper-level decisions that writers make, to explain why some writing activities may be more successful than others, and to indicate likely profitable modes of instruction. The model views discourse production as a series of three interactive decision levels in which (1)…

A notation system for the representation of interacting plans of action is presented in this paper and applied in the analysis of a portion of "Hansel and Gretel." The notation system explicates interactions among plans: how cooperation takes place, how conflicts arise and are resolved, how beliefs about plans determine actions, and how…

The purposes of this study were to determine what specific types of criticism students perceive as being most helpful, whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary according to individual levels of speech anxiety or exhibitionism, and whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary…

The notions of recursiveness and deletion are discussed in the context of Chomsky's presentations of transformational grammar in "Syntactic Structures" and in the later work, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." After consideration of word-recursion, coordinate-clause recursion, and subordinate-clause recursion, extensions to…

Discusses a study of five hundred and eleven intimate relationships and notes particular consistencies in these relationships which appear to represent intimacy as a type of rhetorical situation. (MH)

Lenny Bruce's contribution was to broaden the range of material publicly accepted as humorous. (JH)

This article proposes a new analysis of illocutionary force, in terms of discourse practices, and specifically analyzes the act of reproaching. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Examines the way in which Darwin employed conventional language and conventional religious categories of popular thought to explain and lend credibility to the ideas he advanced in "The Orgin of Species." (MH)