A study examined how Japanese language use reflects the hierarchical and compartmentalized society and the psychological attitudes of the speaker through analysis of the verb forms used. Data were drawn from a survey of 500 individuals concerning the choice of verb form in different social situations, and from transcriptions of a housewife's…

Discourse and conversational analysis methods were used in a qualitative reconstruction of one aspect of the regularities in the way 61 children "do" personal reference. Of particular interest was the development of two reference forms: minimization--preference for simple (one word) forms, or recipient design--reference forms indicating…

In comparing 50 English as a second language (ESL) compositions written in class to 50 ESL compositions written at home, accuracy on the syntactic level and fluency on the discourse or rhetorical level for the home and class conditions were examined. The subjects, twenty-five undergraduate foreign students enrolled in special sections of freshman…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children are sensitive to functors in language and only omit them due to factors specific to speech production and after having analyzed them as separate morphemes. This hypothesis was tested as an alternative to two existing hypotheses concerning children's selective listening for content words and for…

Three questions in the application of native-language sociolinguistic theories to second language contexts are addressed: (1) Is transfer always a psycholinguistic process of interlingual overgeneralization? (2) Does attention to speech underlie all style shifting? (3) Is H. Giles' Speech Accommodation Theory adequate to explain all purposeful…

Recognizing the lack of research delineating what personality traits might predispose a person to poor listening, this paper contrasts two lines of research assessing how the cognitive and affective characteristics of speakers impact on their recall of conversation. The first section of the paper considers the theoretical perspective arguing that…

Noting that the new literary and rhetorical theories are concerned with revealing the constructive nature of productive and interpretive processes, this paper examines the cognitive processes in reading and writing which make them constructive and intentional acts, and how reader and writer "negotiate" meaning in light of context, reader…

Foreigner talk (FT) has been characterized as speech "used by speakers of a language to outsiders who are felt to have limited command of a language or no knowledge of it," or "the variety of language that is regarded by a speech community as primarily appropriate for addressing foreigners." A study was carried out in Germany…

Findings from an interdisciplinary research project, Methods of Analyzing Samples of Elicited Discourse in English and Spanish for Determining Student Language Proficiency, are presented. The research project was designed to develop a unified framework for the analysis of audiotaped discourse samples elicited from Spanish/English bilingual…

Two case studies involving possible violations of the rights of Spanish speaking criminal suspects are presented. In cases where suspects do not understand English, the Miranda warnings regarding the right to remain silent must be delivered in their native language and in a way that is understandable to the suspects. In the two cases involving…

Tautologies in student essays, arguments that most commonly assume the truth or self-evidence of themselves without relationship to something other than themselves, can be identified whenever an essay contains a series of nonsuccessive, noncumulative discourse units. Three kinds of tautologies in student papers are tautologies of redundancy,…

The current style-specific theories of human communication include the public speaking style, the relationship style, and the message communication style. It now appears that intercultural communication may emerge as the fourth style-specific theory as a result of scholars' concern over the ethnocentric bias found in the study of communication.…

This paper draws upon a theory of stories that relates particular text structures to particular affective states and then relates the affective states to story intuitions and overall judgments of liking. The first section of the paper outlines the theory as it deals with some important properties of the genre of popular stories in Western…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

As the United States entered the nineteenth century, it did so under the influence of the Second Great Awakening. This was the second wave of revivalism to sweep the nation, and it originated in the frontier as the Great Western Revival. One pertinent characteristic of the revival was its rhetoric, a rhetoric that was a prime expression of a…