Translators must understand what they translate, but oral language is generally more redundant than written language and the translator need not repeat everything he hears. One method of teaching this skill is to have students sight translate a text in its entirety and then abridge it to its minimum informative content. Abstracting and compressing…

To analyze a case of discourse and social transformation, a study examined the 1950s coffeehouse movement and the "Beat Generation" which spawned the movement. While the coffeehouse/Beatism phenomenon was short-lived, the philosophical foundation of the movement was far more pervasive than is generally recognized. In addition to the…

Lincoln-Douglas style debate will not reach its objectives as value-oriented argumentation until debaters are trained in values analysis. Lacking adequate theoretical and practical literature and unsure of this relatively new debate format, coaches and debaters fail to develop an adequate understanding of what a value is and how it relates to…

Provoking violent controversy, Susan Sontag's speech, "The Lesson of Poland," is an example of subversive rhetoric. Delivered at a February 6, 1982, show of support for the recently oppressed Polish people, Sontag's speech, like other modernist writing, did not seek a consensus with the audience, but challenged its whole scheme of…

The structure of natural conversations in first-grade classrooms is the focus of this inquiry. Analyses of a particular type of discourse, namely, connected conversations initiated and sustained by questioning, suggest that the probability that a conversation will be continued may be expressed as a simple exponential function. (Author/RM)

Two speech events, narration and joking conversation, are analyzed from speech samples of Hawaiian 5- to 7-year-olds. An underlying iterative routine was found which allows for both stories and joking to be produced jointly in a contrapuntal style. (Author/RM)

An initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar is made, based on a technique developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practical speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments. (Author/RM)

Attempts to define the limitations of linguistic theory, and the possibilities of access at the discursive level, based on the hypothesis that there are two types of relatives. Examples are given in German; reference is made to the principles of machine discourse analysis. (Text is in French.) (Author/MSE)

This paper considers two classes of conversational errors: production errors and interactional errors. It is proposed that error correction can be used to invoke alternatives to concepts of persons, situation and relationships. (CK)

This analysis of repeated utterances in Japanese conversational discourse focuses on repetition as an expression of iconicity. In the analysis of a 30-minute conversation among 4 Japanese speakers, the iconic meanings expressed by both reduplication and conversational repetition are highlighted. The iconicity characteristic of conversational data…

A study was conducted to find out how the topics of the Nineteenth Amendment and women's suffrage were handled at the time by news publications in rural areas. Several components were used to carry out the objective: one was to investigate newspaper coverage of the amendment and in addition broaden that search to include women's suffrage; another…

Personal ads, used to transcend social estrangement, are nothing other than written attempts at courtship. The idea of courtship is to maintain interaction through the continual negotiation of ambiguities. Historically, women have employed question-asking and attention-getting devices to combat male dominance and inattention in cross-sex…

Among the features characterizing human language is creativity, the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences with a finite number of rules. What is expected of creativity is non-conformity, violation of rules, and challenges to accepted convention. Words may be used to activate possible contexts. Most textbook sentence examples do not…

A study investigated the role of certain discourse and language processing factors in the production of narratives under controlled conditions. Subjects watched a short segment from a movie and then narrated the events to a researcher. The narrations were taped, transcribed, and analyzed in terms of such factors as: (1) the number and types of…

Legal writing is a unique form of composition. The legal style is characterized by a reliance upon nominalizations, archaisms, jargon, and foreign (especially French and Latin) terms and a scarcity of verbs and adverbs. Twelve judicial opinions, all on the subject of whether an advance degree should be considered marital property upon divorce,…