Text analysis is the study and description of units of verbal behavior larger than the sentence and is concerned with elements of sentences and with the internal relations of larger passages as well as with how a text relates to the communicative situation in which it occurs. It is of current interest because literary critics have moved toward…

To determine whether argument is logical, this paper reviews the empirical literature on perception, memory, and reasoning. It finds cognitive processes to be inferential, thus supporting the assumption that argument is logical. It notes, however, that a cognitive view of argument must be taken to appreciate this logicality, because people…

One model of discourse production attempts to explicate deeper-level decisions that writers make, to explain why some writing activities may be more successful than others, and to indicate likely profitable modes of instruction. The model views discourse production as a series of three interactive decision levels in which (1)…

A notation system for the representation of interacting plans of action is presented in this paper and applied in the analysis of a portion of "Hansel and Gretel." The notation system explicates interactions among plans: how cooperation takes place, how conflicts arise and are resolved, how beliefs about plans determine actions, and how…

The purposes of this study were to determine what specific types of criticism students perceive as being most helpful, whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary according to individual levels of speech anxiety or exhibitionism, and whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary…

The notions of recursiveness and deletion are discussed in the context of Chomsky's presentations of transformational grammar in "Syntactic Structures" and in the later work, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." After consideration of word-recursion, coordinate-clause recursion, and subordinate-clause recursion, extensions to…

Discusses a study of five hundred and eleven intimate relationships and notes particular consistencies in these relationships which appear to represent intimacy as a type of rhetorical situation. (MH)

Lenny Bruce's contribution was to broaden the range of material publicly accepted as humorous. (JH)

This article proposes a new analysis of illocutionary force, in terms of discourse practices, and specifically analyzes the act of reproaching. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Examines the way in which Darwin employed conventional language and conventional religious categories of popular thought to explain and lend credibility to the ideas he advanced in "The Orgin of Species." (MH)

Traces the development of discourse analysis in modern linguistics, and presents a semantic analysis, based on a comparative word frequency count, of two political speeches made by the socialist Jean Jaures. (AM)

Discusses the relationship between subject and predicate, using examples from various languages; demonstrates the inadequacy of a universal view of the notion of "subject"; and presents a diachronic hypothesis concerning the subject-theme dialectic. (AM)

Debate is compared to modern poetry in its tension between content and form. From the perspective of this comparison, debate is defended against charges that it is unnecessarily structured, a distortion of normative language use, uncommunicative, and pertinent only to an esoteric group of listeners. (JF)

Examines former President Ford's consistent use of the war metaphor in an attempt to explain the domestic problem of inflation and posits various reasons for the war metaphor's failure to be accepted by the American public. (MH)

Contends that investigation of the past may contribute to a generic understanding of labor rhetoric and examines the rhetorical dimensions of the 1972 election contest for the leadership of the United Mine Workers. (MH)