This essay identifies and reviews the major and easily recognizable characteristics of a library discourse and proposes models describing the actual, possible, and necessary modes of library communication. The transmittal of orderly thoughts or information in a library situation differs from a conventional communication pattern. Three unique…

An exploratory study investigated the communicative behaviors that differentiate talkative from reticent children. Four three-year-old girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in naturalistic interactions with six to eight previously unfamiliar adults. All four children had demonstrated age-appropriate knowledge of linguistic…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

The factors which influence a speaker's decision to use one categorization for an object as opposed to others that are available are analyzed. The categories that are most used in speech are basic level categories established at the most abstract level at which the category members: (1) share a number of physical and functional attributes, (2)…

New information about reading comprehension (specifically schema theory) was applied to the teaching of literature in a study involving 33 high school students enrolled in two American literature classes. In particular, the study examined the ways in which knowledge of background information about a work could influence students' comprehension of…

The characteristics of demagogic discourse and a methodology appropriate for its analysis can be illustrated by examining Huey Long's "Every Man a King" radio address on February 20, 1934. The demagogue is similar to the revered public figure in that both are mass leaders, charismatic, and heroic. But the demagogue elicits powerful…

The following essays on children's spoken language are included in this volume: "Play with Language and Speech" by Catherin Garvey, "'You Fruithead': A Sociolinguistic Approach to Children's Dispute Settlement" by Donald Brenneis and Laura Lein, "From Verbal Play to Talk Story: The Role of Routines in Speech Events among…

A study was designed to discover whether readers use simple story grammar categories (setting, beginning, development, and conclusion) to organize the propositions of a story. Nineteen proficient readers were given a list of randomly ordered propositions that made up a simple story structure. Each reader was instructed to group the propositions…

An experiment was carried out to examine individual story schemata and a story theory. The theory proposed relating structural characteristics of narratives to the reader's affective response and the reader's intuitions about what constitutes a story. Two levels of narrative structure are distinguished by the theory: the chronological sequence of…

Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

An artistic verbal performance is something more than words, yet most critical commentary on this genre focuses on the word, on the linguistic level. A methodology for making performance-centered texts is described based on the performance of "Stagolee," a story that originated from Julius Lester's book, "Black Folktales." A…

A review of the research of E.G. Mishler, H. Mehan, and others suggests that a unified theory of the mechanics of how continuous discourse is accounted for in classroom behavior is necessary for further study. Discourse analysis meets the criteria for selection of a theoretical framework because it deals with all the language within the classroom…

An examination of the stylistic differences among writing from literary specialists, from science, and from social science shows that a more precise diagnosis of the writing problems of clarity and coherence is possible. Ten randomly selected paragraphs from each of four publications, the "Canadian Medical Association Journal," the "Canadian…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

To test whether verbal choices in a persuasive setting would show less diversity and more qualification than those in a nonpersuasive setting, a study involving 24 college students was undertaken. The subjects were divided into five groups and each group was asked to role play two situations: one calling for the subjects merely to be…