Claims that Malthus'"Essay on Population" is preeminently a rhetorical achievement because it (1) originated from controversy; (2) traced and dramatized the effects of a principle that, in Malthus's opinion, was long known but little understood by the public; and (3) drew its power from the evocation and conscious imitation of Newton's…

Indicates that subjects signalled play through such messages as overt invitations, nonverbal cues, abrupt topic changes, and outrageous or put-on utterances. Determines that the nature of these messages led to different types of episodes: play with, for, or at a partner. Finds that the signalling of play is often incomplete or taken for granted by…

Discusses how the development of critical thinking skills is inhibited in many students because they under-conceptualize the context in which controversy occurs. Suggests ways to raise students' awareness of being involved in a continuing debate, such as using written dialogue as a basis for extending a writing assignment that combines exposition,…

Examines public commentary about psychiatrists and their profession generated by the Hinkley proceedings. Claims that the impression of psychiatry communicated during and following the trial could have long-lasting results. Focuses on the language of print media describing and commenting on events involving the psychiatrists who took part in the…

Assessed older (N=33) and middle-aged (N=18) women on linguistic discourse tasks. Subjects were interviewed, administered cognitive tests, and given narrative and procedural discourse tasks. Older subjects generally performed more poorly than did middle-aged subjects. Within the older group, measures of quality of disclosure were generally…

Asserts that the main goal of writing instruction is to help students attain the competence necessary for academic discourse and the most effective way to do this is to teach the basic strategies for uncovering the rules that govern discourse in any particular context.(SRT)

Describes efforts of the University of Michigan's English Composition Board to examine and make more uniform the process of evaluating entering student essays for purposes of placement. Examines some of the factors evaluators bring to bear when assessing student papers. (HTH)

Analyzes argumentative talk as a sociable function among some ethnic groups. Even though speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods, they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The cultural relativity of norms of evaluation…

Reports the findings of a study showing that the importance or salience of a text at the time of reading has little effect on recognition of specific features from the prose. (HTH)

Investigates extent to which certain co-referential and structural constraints are reflected in the anaphoric noun phrases of written narratives of elementary school writers. Results indicate that poor writers are relatively insensitive to the constraints of the more difficult co-referential context, but that they (poor writers) are as sensitive…

Describes a study to examine the changes that take place in the form and types of discussions about the past as two young, Spanish-speaking girls moved from elicited routines to spontaneous and novel conversations about their past experiences. (HTH)

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Presents a framework for expressing how choices are made in systemic grammars. Framework represents grammar as combination of systemic syntactic description and explicit choice processes called "choice experts." (DF)

Textual grammar provides a means of examining the relationship between the sentence and the text as a whole, and it is in that context that the problems of learning a second language become clear and that it becomes important for the teacher to understand how the text functions so as to impart it to students. (MSE)

The nature of meaning as it is developed through interaction between individuals is explored in a discussion of how writers lead readers to understand a text. (DF)