Presuppositions, those propositions which the sentence is not primarily about but which have to be established prior to the utterance of a sentence in order for communication to go smoothly, are discussed. The notions of the Kiparskys (1970), Lakoff (1970, 1971), Fillmore (1971), Karttunen (1971), and Horn (1969) are summarized with examples in an…

Defining peak as the climax of discourse, this paper argues that it is important to identify peak in order to get at the overall grammar of a given discourse. The paper presents case studies in which four instances of peak in narrative discourses occur in languages from four different parts of the world. It also illustrates the occurrence of a…

Two views of coherence in written discourse can be analyzed and then blended into a theory of coherence that selects the best of both views. One view is H. Miller's observation that all coherences are tentative and that the composing process is richer than its products. Another view is A. D. Van Nostrand's suggestion that the two elementary…

The seven articles in this journal issue survey and assess the art of rhetorical criticism based on evidence derived from critical practice. The first five articles analyze the literature subsumed with certain approaches to rhetorical criticism and are arranged in the chronological order of the emergence of the approach: neo-classical criticism,…

A research project investigated the process of reading comprehension through which the reader generates a semantic representation of the message conveyed by a text. The first focus of the project was an examination of the functioning of abstract knowledge in text comprehension. Studies were conducted to explore the activation of proposition…

The spontaneous speech of seven children was monitored for "wh" questions. The children were observed longitudinally from about age 24 to 36 months. The pattern of development with regard to the deletion of non-obligatory verbs revealed that "what,""where," and "who" questions presented increasing verb…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…

Fundamentally, negotiation is a process for making decisions and is rhetorical since it is open to view and to rhetorical constructs. The rhetorical construct related to negotiation is invention, the finding of the materials, the arguments, for the discourse. For cross-cultural negotiation, one must display empathy for the varying cultures,…

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to text analysis as a research tool and vehicle for improving instruction. In terms of perspective, two major theses are maintained throughout the paper: text analysis should be used within the context of understanding that a multiplicity of variables can influence reader/text interactions, and…

A framework for the study of discourse, based on the analysis of three superordinate features of discourse (asymmetry, hierarchy, and continuum), is proposed in this paper. The paper begins by noting the confusion in terminology that exists in the world of composition pedagogy and theory; pointing to the need for a framework for testing,…

The implications of a social movement theory advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason" is examined in this paper. The paper notes that unlike sociologists and rhetoricians who have stressed the psychology of movement adherents, the reasons for movement formation, or the movement's interaction with power agents,…

Models of reading have been proposed to guide researchers and educators in their theoretical research and instructional planning. The models specify important properties of the material to be read and processes the learner uses while reading. Two separate models of reading by K.S. Goodman and D. Rumelhart are similar in that they describe reading…

This study investigated the written and oral discourse of a subject with an established reputation as an author, editor, lecturer, and television host, to determine whether his written discourse was more complex syntactically than his spoken discourse. The oral language sample was taken from a taped television program in which the speaker…

This study related selected principles of rhetorical analysis to teaching as it actually occurs in the classroom. The Aristotelian definition of rhetoric as the means of discovering all the available means of persuasion is central to teaching, in that the entire endeavor of education rests upon the premise that children, as they grow, need and…

In analyzing utterances whose singular property is to become true simply by being uttered, this article discusses the theory of explicit performatives and proposes an alternative explanation which focuses on meaning rather than on the fact of these utterances are speech acts. (Text is in French.) (CLK)