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,…

The questioning of hegemonic discourses has become an essential element in many feminist, afro-centric, and literary theories of discourse. Scholars in these areas have explicated various indictments of the phallocentric, eurocentric, and essentialist linguistic strategies defined and perpetuated by dominant population groups, and some have begun…

The view that child maltreatment is the result of a breakdown in normal family communication processes suggests that difficulties in verbal interaction may be found in nearly all interactions between maltreating parents and their children. To explore this possibility, a comparative study was made of the conversations of maltreating mothers and…

Focusing on how people select topics to mention when reporting on a personal event, a study investigated the hypotheses that people would be more likely to mention topics (1) of high prior concern than topics of low concern and (2) with an unusually good or bad outcome than topics with an ordinary outcome. Subjects, 12 couples expecting babies,…

Epistemic rhetoric, as a monolithic view of language use, will not be much help in forging a useful and consistent definition of the composing process and an accompanying effective pedagogy. By rejecting the mimetic functions of language--and thereby the validity of any empiricism and its derivative, positivism--epistemic rhetoric banishes items…

An academic discipline is created and embodied in discourse, which functions on two dimensions: the global, disciplinary level suggested by T. Kuhn and others, and the local, institutional level, such as the workshop or laboratory where practitioners carry on the discipline's day-to-day business of research, teaching, and writing. The discipline…

Dramatic texts are an ideal pedagogical tool for clarifying certain aspects of communication such as authorial stance, point of view, role, persona, impersonation, ethos, shared communal values, cultural assumptions, genre expectations, audience, performance, dialogue, and enactment. Using dramatic texts in a composition class can broaden student…

It is proposed that the role of teacher language in instructional effectiveness be included in teacher training as part of language across the curriculum. Of the three aspects of "teacher-talk" identified (physiological, interpersonal, and pedagogical), the pedagogical aspect is highlighted as the basis for a model of teacher-talk…

Beauty, commercials, and hatred can be linked in an analysis of the dominant structures of advertising. Television commercials such as the one quoted in the title use a common rhetorical method: present an ideal state; imply that the viewer has not attained this state; offer a magical object which will connect the viewer with the desired state;…

Scholars have long been interested in the relation between rhetoric and dialectic. Recent theorists suggest that one way of viewing argument is through the perspective of argument-as-procedure, in which rules such as those attendant to the conduct of dialectic, debate, or discussion come under the purview of argumentation. This paper is a critical…

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

A discussion of the preference structure of repair sequences in conversation argues that the structure varies predictably from one context to the next, based on the interpersonal relationship of the interlocutors. In particular, it is said to depend on the asymmetrical distribution of knowledge among the interlocutors, including knowledge of the…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…