Beauty, commercials, and hatred can be linked in an analysis of the dominant structures of advertising. Television commercials such as the one quoted in the title use a common rhetorical method: present an ideal state; imply that the viewer has not attained this state; offer a magical object which will connect the viewer with the desired state;…

Scholars have long been interested in the relation between rhetoric and dialectic. Recent theorists suggest that one way of viewing argument is through the perspective of argument-as-procedure, in which rules such as those attendant to the conduct of dialectic, debate, or discussion come under the purview of argumentation. This paper is a critical…

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

A discussion of the preference structure of repair sequences in conversation argues that the structure varies predictably from one context to the next, based on the interpersonal relationship of the interlocutors. In particular, it is said to depend on the asymmetrical distribution of knowledge among the interlocutors, including knowledge of the…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

One alternative approach for assessing the moral quality of public argument in liberal democracy is narrative ethics, based not in procedural rationality but in narrative, with a concern for character and community. To be intelligible and practicable, such criticism shifts the focus of ethics from discrete decisions and actions to questions of…

This paper examines the referential strategies used by Japanese children and adults in two story telling tasks focusing upon the following discourse contexts: (1) first mentions of story characters, (2) references in subject position to the same character, and (3) references to another character. The subjects, 60 children and 10 adults, were…

This report comprises two documents which describe the state of the art of computer generation of natural language text. Both were prepared by a panel of individuals who are active in research on text generation. The first document assesses the techniques now available for use in systems design, covering all of the technical methods by which…

The discourse cloze, an alternative cloze procedure, is described. It is argued that in the regular cloze procedure many of the words can be supplied from the "micro" context, and thus the regular cloze is not necessarily a test of reading comprehension on the "macro" level. In the discourse cloze approach, all words deleted from a passage of…

A rhetorical analysis was conducted of the four broadcast political debates that led to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson's victory in the 1982 California senatorial race. Specifically, the analysis covered one primary debate held in San Diego among five of the seven Republican contenders and the three bipartisan debates held in Fresno, San Francisco,…

Traditional assumptions about oral and written discourse persist among various philosophers and critics. Careful examination of the context for traditional assumptions, however, suggests that current scholarship should pursue altered lines of inquiry. Peculiar influences on Renaissance standards of purpose, style, and theme illustrate the nature…

This study looked at preschool and first-grade children's ability to draw script-based and text inferences in comprehension of stories they heard. In two experiments, children were asked to recall brief stories and answer two inference questions: one script inference question requiring them to fill in information about the event that was not…

Scientific discourse is difficult to read because of its lexical, syntactic, semantic, and logical features. This paper discusses each of those features, giving special attention to syntax, and suggests ways in which discourse analysis can be used to teach content reading in sciences and to rewrite scientific text for instructional purposes. Some…

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

This paper is concerned with the semantic, rather than the syntactic, nature of non-restrictive relativization, and its implications. (CK)