A study examined whether male and female writers would respond in identifiably different ways to the same writing task, and whether a content analysis of the discourse produced for these writing tasks would reveal distinctly "male" and "female" concerns. It was hypothesized that themes relating to autonomy would appear more often in men's essays,…

Recognizing the proliferation of persuasive language in advertising and in politics, this guide explains how to analyze political language for its persuasive techniques and why it is important to do so. The first chapter of the book provides a rationale for analyzing persuasion, and an overview of the book. The remaining chapters explore various…

An examination of three articles written in the year 1900-1901 by the young rhetoric instructor Gertrude Buck reveals her influence on the development of modern rhetorical theory. Her view that discourse is a social act, her attempts to free discourse from formal rhetoric and the expectations of teachers, and her insistence that rhetoric should…

A discussion of pragmatic choice in the use of the possessive pronoun or indefinite article (e.g., "I broke my finger" versus "I broke a finger," and "My leg hurts" versus "A leg hurts") looks at the constructions in the light of a theory of division of pragmatic labor that suggests a binary system of…

Historians of rhetoric have generally accepted the view that Adam Smith rejected the principles of classical rhetoric. However, while there can be no doubt that Smith greatly truncated the five classical arts of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) by reducing his concerns largely to style and arrangement, he did not…

A study of collaboration and the ongoing negotiation of authority in police helicopter work focused on inflight communication in one helicopter during two weeks of operation. Data were drawn from audio and video recordings of internal and external communications obtained inflight and from observation and physiological indicators of stress and…

Distinguishing between interpretive and formal models of discourse processing and between qualitative and quantitative research, this paper argues that formal models are the analogues of interpretive models, and that the two are complementary. It observes that interpretive models of reading are being increasingly derived from qualitative research…

The differences between story grammar and story schema are outlined and discussed based on research on story understanding by children and adults. The contention of all story grammars is that stories have a relatively invariant structure despite great differences in story content. The importance of structure within folk tales, and the ways in…

The emergence of a subfield of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, whose goal is to discover the principles by which a hearer or reader understands a text or can construct a model based on the text, given the sentence-level competence to parse the text's sentences and assign logical forms to them, is discussed in the context of a court case in…

Combining linguistics and composition studies, this paper (part 1 of a two-part article) proposes a model for the analysis of information management and cohesion in written discourse. It defines concepts of discourse analysis--specifically information management, syntax, semantic reference, lexicon, cohesion, and intonation, with examples taken…

A new theory of speech acts is proposed that draws a fundamental distinction between speech acts proper--declaratives, interrogatives, and directives--and the myriad social actions that are performed using language such as making promises, making offers, issuing invitations, and asking questions. The theory states that sentences are usally meant…

A study analyzed responses to indirect imperatives in a large doctor's office, looking specifically at superior-subordinate relationships in an organizational setting in order to see if there are different responses to indirect and direct imperatives, and what those differences involve. Twenty hours of interaction were audiotaped and observed…

Sentences produced by children and adults in telling stories are analyzed, with particular emphasis on developmental trends in sentence length, the degree of cohesion between clauses, and the internal coherence of sentence content. Subjects for the study were 10 adults and 60 Japanese children in six different age groups. Each subject was…

The discourse classification systems used most frequently by reseachers in composition credit A. Bain, J. Moffett, J. Emig, J. Kinneavy, J. Britton, and R. Lloyd-Jones. A majority of the studies that have included discourse types as a major focus of their work were designed to investigate students' syntactic structures. Other studies focused on…

The proceedings of the 1981 International Congress of Applied Linguistics include the full text of papers read by invited speakers. The keynote address, four plenary lectures, seven special lectures, and one symposium symmary are presented. The papers cover such topics as the status of applied linguistics, bilingual education for majority and…