The successful oral reading of poetry requires that oral interpreters conduct phenomenological investigations of the first lines of the poems, not merely to make these lines happen properly but to suggest what has preceded the first line. Individual word meanings in the opening lines of a poem establish "structures of intentionality"--the…

Speakers of Turkish and Greek make far more extensive use of formulaic expressions than do speakers of English. Many of these formulas are situation-oriented, and accompany anxiety-provoking events, happy events, and the act of establishing rapport. Illness, death, leave-taking, and good fortune are among events typically accompanied by formulas.…

General Systems Theoy is a contemporary discipline that profitably lends itself as a new approach to literature. Pioneered by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in Germany in the 1930s, the theory has had successful applications in the United States in philosophy, business, and urban planning. Applications of certain principles of systems theory to A.…

Research has identified three reading strategies that are affected in various ways by signaling--the emphasis of superordinate relationships in text. Using a structure strategy, readers follow the text's superordinate relations to focus on the text's message and how it relates to supportive details. Readers who use the detail/list strategy focus…

Although the nature of topicalization is complex and cannot be easily separated from considerations of syntactic structure and sentence focus, analysis of language usage has indicated that topicalization is more a stylistic than a syntactic process. Topicalization refers to moving a noun phrase (NP) into the initial position of a sentence.…

Presuppositions, those propositions which the sentence is not primarily about but which have to be established prior to the utterance of a sentence in order for communication to go smoothly, are discussed. The notions of the Kiparskys (1970), Lakoff (1970, 1971), Fillmore (1971), Karttunen (1971), and Horn (1969) are summarized with examples in an…

Defining peak as the climax of discourse, this paper argues that it is important to identify peak in order to get at the overall grammar of a given discourse. The paper presents case studies in which four instances of peak in narrative discourses occur in languages from four different parts of the world. It also illustrates the occurrence of a…

Two views of coherence in written discourse can be analyzed and then blended into a theory of coherence that selects the best of both views. One view is H. Miller's observation that all coherences are tentative and that the composing process is richer than its products. Another view is A. D. Van Nostrand's suggestion that the two elementary…

The seven articles in this journal issue survey and assess the art of rhetorical criticism based on evidence derived from critical practice. The first five articles analyze the literature subsumed with certain approaches to rhetorical criticism and are arranged in the chronological order of the emergence of the approach: neo-classical criticism,…

A research project investigated the process of reading comprehension through which the reader generates a semantic representation of the message conveyed by a text. The first focus of the project was an examination of the functioning of abstract knowledge in text comprehension. Studies were conducted to explore the activation of proposition…

The spontaneous speech of seven children was monitored for "wh" questions. The children were observed longitudinally from about age 24 to 36 months. The pattern of development with regard to the deletion of non-obligatory verbs revealed that "what,""where," and "who" questions presented increasing verb…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…

Fundamentally, negotiation is a process for making decisions and is rhetorical since it is open to view and to rhetorical constructs. The rhetorical construct related to negotiation is invention, the finding of the materials, the arguments, for the discourse. For cross-cultural negotiation, one must display empathy for the varying cultures,…

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to text analysis as a research tool and vehicle for improving instruction. In terms of perspective, two major theses are maintained throughout the paper: text analysis should be used within the context of understanding that a multiplicity of variables can influence reader/text interactions, and…

A framework for the study of discourse, based on the analysis of three superordinate features of discourse (asymmetry, hierarchy, and continuum), is proposed in this paper. The paper begins by noting the confusion in terminology that exists in the world of composition pedagogy and theory; pointing to the need for a framework for testing,…