This report describes a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically rich, naturalistic domains, primarily in the domain of the stock market. The methods and results of six separate experiments on…

A complete analysis of a story's structure must rely on more than a simple grammar of story components; it requires a consideration of the characters' plans as they are stated or implied in the story. Furthermore, these plans are recognized as the characters' beliefs, and beliefs about interactions among plans are crucial determinants of a story's…

This paper discusses the notion that comprehension of language involves an active interpretative process entailing both a generating of expectations and a matching of expectations to the "incoming message." There are, however, two forms of discourse in which the relation of text to message differs from that holding in ordinary language.…

In Guyana Creolese, the word "doz" appears frequently in the speech of people on a wide range of social levels. The term signals that the action occurs habitually. The use of "doz" is not widely noted among creolists, however, possibly because it often occurs in phonologically reduced forms such as "Iz" or…

Argument can be defined as a process whereby people reason their way from one set of problematic ideas to the choice of another. This definition implies three primary dimensions; argument is problematic, it is based on the perceptions and choices of people, and its rationality is grounded in a variable logic of more or less rather than a…

Compositions based on a picture as stimulus and written by fourth and sixth graders were studied for syntactic and lexical deviations. From the corpus of data, eight interpretations were made: (1) comma fault, sentence sense, and coordinating conjunctions were the most frequent syntactic problems encountered--all could be eliminated by oral…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

This study examines the basic question about the position of dicursivity with respect to language, arising from the axiomatic statements concerning linguistic sign, form and meaning as definition components of the structural conception of language. The book is divided into two sections: I. Axiomatics of Structural Linguistics, and II. Linguistics…

Information necessary to understand many English sentences appears to be supplied by a source outside the sentence which is composed of a fund of knowledge accumulated throughout life. This fund of knowledge may be visualized and a conceptual network into which the incomplete information supplied by a sentence can be mapped, thus making it…

Investigates the manner in which hostile nations communicate intentions of friendliness by analyzing specific international messages occurring in U.S.-China relations during the Nixon administration. (MH)

Defines personae as the imaginary and fictive being implied by and embedded in a literary or dramatic work and contends that personae are discoverable in every scientific discourse. (MH)

Narratives from part-Hawaiian children 5 to 12 years old in a variety of circumstances were collected for several years. Typical verbal routines, ways of analyzing the data, tendency of routines to structure speech events, functions of nonnarrative routines in narrative performance, and establishing a context for narration are considered. (EJS)

Describes a public address curriculum based upon a different way of conceptualizing public address. (Author)

A passage from Aristotle is discussed and interpreted. Rhetoric represents truth and justice in any situation for the auditor through the use of language. The usefulness of rhetoric lies in its ability to assure an adequate and competent articulation of truth and justice. (JF)

Supports Frederiksen's (1975) model of the structure of text and of memory through a study of the effects of manipulation of four aspects of text structure with community college and Ivy League subjects. (AA)