Using Kenneth Burke's conceptualization of the "representative anecdote," this paper explicates Burke's own theoretical frame. By examining Burke's system through the two anecdotes of "drama" and "nuclear war," the paper demonstrates that Burke weaves together two distinct theoretical threads, one a theory of Being,…

To show how Hugh Blair's treatise on rhetoric helped shape the patriarchal context in which women write and to suggest some considerations for modern teachers of writing, it will be useful to look at the ways 18th-century belletristic rhetoric responded to the disruption occasioned by women's entry into public discourse. Blair's work, the most…

Using experimental narratives in which discourse order and event order were not confounded, a study investigated the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of narrative texts. Subjects, 100 college students, listened to tape recorded passages representing five types of discourse organization: canonical, backward, flashback,…

Excerpts from a transcript of computer "conversations" provide the basis for a study of how people manage ongoing interaction, given the constraints of computer-mediated discourse, and whether any unusual conventions are used in doing so. The discourse was analyzed using address, topical references, and adjacency pairs to link the…

The fall of Gary Hart, brought about because of his indiscretions during the 1988 presidential campaign, should not be treated exclusively as a consequence of Hart's moral failings. Rather, the fall of Hart can be traced to a complex of factors including bad judgment, the near total control that the press exercises over the political agenda, and…

A collection of seven papers developed for the 1982 Summer Institute of Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines address aspects of the institute's research topic, the interface of the morphosyntax and discourse structure in languages of the Philippines and Sabah. They include three papers on general concerns of discourse types in…

Yupik language has two devices to indicate switch reference. The rules generally given for them are not entirely correct, and counterexamples to the ideal have been found previously. A subset of those counterexamples in Central Yupik Eskimo support the claim that there are two systems, partially overlapping and partially unique, that organize…

An investigation was undertaken into the possibility of automatically detecting how concepts exist in relation to each other in abstracts, a text-type commonly used in free-text retrieval. The end goal of this research is to capture these relationships in structured representations of abstracts' contents so that users can require not only that the…

The 1988 Vice-Presidential debate between candidates Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen served as a rhetorical forum for airing the policies and behaviors of each candidate. Elements of compliance-gaining and apologia were interrelated and overlapped throughout the debate. Both candidates effectively maneuvered these strategies and avoided direct…

A study developed an analytical tool for the critiquing of FCC legal arguments in the dimensions of purpose and quality. The supposition of the study was that law is an inherently rhetorical activity. The model elaborated was a situational matrix created out of the classical typologies of rhetorical occasions and oratory: the forensic,…

Much of the current controversy in the area of story theory derives from a failure to make clear the distinctions among theories of (1) plan comprehension, (2) narrative comprehension, and (3) story schema. A theory of plan comprehension attempts to account for the ability of humans to interpret the observed actions of another person in terms of…

This article underlines the necessity of discourse analysis in a complete linguistic description, that is, the need to look at various phenomena such as social relationships as manifested in conversation, performatives, pronominalization constraints, or external factors such as the sex of the participants. A model of a method of analysis is…

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

A study of the 1980 debate between Republican presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and George Bush demonstrates what influence, if any, a debate has on the voting public. The unit of analysis used in the study was each single message presented by each candidate without interruption by the other candidate or the moderator. Two investigators made…