This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with the following topics: (1) cinema, culture, and the social formation; (2) going beyond historical-critical dualism in the analysis of theoretical discourse; (3) empathy in instrumental communication; (4) a…

Two experiments were undertaken in Hong Kong to examine sociocultural factors in the speech acts of making apologies in Cantonese. The first experiment involved ten men who were given role cards describing various situations with minor to serious problems for which they must apologize. The influence of certain situational variables on the…

Noting that there are students with limited writing ability who belong neither in regular English composition classes nor in classes for speakers of other languages (ESOL), this paper reports on a study conducted at the University of Texas, EL Paso to produce a profile of 30 limited English writers. Following an introduction to the family…

Two Finnish courses in business English were designed to teach students language that will enable them to negotiate effectively in English. The instructional approach is based on an analysis of recorded negotiations carried out in British subsidiaries of Finnish companies. The analysis identified a group of linguistic variables through which, it…

This paper is based on a general analysis of 40 episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and 170 (of 179) episodes of I Love Lucy, both of which were aired on television during the 1950s. Character portrayals of the stars and supporting actors/actresses are described in detail and analyzed from the perspectives of gender and sex…

As standardized tests receive more critical scrutiny and fall into more disfavor, members of the educational community search for alternative measures of assessing schooling and learning. If one of the goals of education in a democracy is to encourage students to express, develop and share ideas, the discussion setting is a logical arena in which…

To understand and describe a developmental learning progression of choices students make in forming chains of relationships in their narrative texts, a study used the Cohesive Harmony Index to measure cohesion in children's written narratives. Data were obtained from 36 grade school children at intervals of four months over the students' first…

To assess the compatibility of miscue analysis and recall analysis as independent elements in a theory of reading comprehension, a study was performed that operationalized each theory and separated its components into measurable units to allow empirical testing. A cueing strategy model was estimated, but the discourse processing model was broken…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…

Max Headroom, the computer-generated media personality, presents a good opportunity for an investigation of the degree of intertextuality in television. Max combines narrative genres (science fiction and film noir), television program types (prime-time episodic narrative, made-for-TV movie, talkshows), advertising and programming, and electronic…

A text concordancer is a computer program that operates on a body of text to locate and sort all occurrences of a target morpheme, word, or pattern. Developments in word processing and hard disks in small computers have made new applications of the technique possible with direct relevance to the classroom. A discussion of the technique looks at…

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has been instrumental in efforts to curtail pornography by defining it as a violation of women's civil rights and allowing individual women to sue the distributors for damages. Dworkin's position derives from the tension between "what should be" and "what is." Her conception of the difference…

A study examined the effect of a job-related approach to language learning on a fossilized learner of English as a second language. The subject was a bilingual female nurse with 20 years' residence in the United States. Her oral and written output was thoroughly analyzed and her social and linguistic needs for interacting with patients and…

Consisting of two separate papers, "Representational Issues in Systemic Functional Grammar," by Christian Matthiessen and "Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar," by Robert Kasper, this document deals with systemic aspects of natural language processing and linguistic theory and with computational applications of…

Differences in spoken and written English appear at every level of the language; there are differences in phonology, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax, as well as differences in acceptability levels. This study contains four sections and an inventory of contrasting forms. Section One deals with domains and modalities including those discourse…