Personal letter writing, a major literacy event in Tuvalu, an independent island nation near Fiji, is strongly influenced by culture-specific discourse conventions such as religion. The influence is evident in the vernacular, but also in English letters of Tuvaluan biliterates, whose native patterns of discourse are transferred across literacies.…

Discusses the use of document outlines to reduce navigation problems in hypertext. Measures of syntactic and lexical balance in an outline are proposed, and the degree to which these balances occur in a sample of documents is shown. Based on balance in an outline, a method for semiautomatically generating an outline is applied to a textbook. (45…

In conversations between bilinguals, each of whom is a learner of the other's language, two different local patterns of codeswitching may emerge: compliance and mutual convergence. It is argued that a pattern of compliance is ultimately more accommodating that convergence, contrary to the claims of Speech Accommodation Theory. (20 references)…

Examines transcribed excerpts from a casual discussion according to sentence-level, textual/situational, and cultural structure. A brief comparison is made with a more formal written text to provide an additional background against which to illuminate the casual spoken discourse structure. (20 references)

Examines corporate videos as cultural texts, claiming that they function as rites and ceremonials in modern organizations that facilitate organizational socialization. Notes that video-enacted rites can be a valuable tool in communication ethnographies. Defines and analyzes four types of rites: integration, passage, renewal, and enhancement. (SR)

Examines the current tradition of cross-cultural speech act research and concludes that each of the approaches so far proposed for analyzing cross-cultural speech acts is inadequate in one respect or another. (45 references) (GLR)

Literary "discourse theories," increasingly applied to history and society in recent years, are losing favor among conservative and liberal scholars as focusing too narrowly on the role of language. These poststructuralist theories hold that language and knowledge are slippery, that words and cultural texts rarely mean what they appear…

Examination of a range of cross-linguistic generalizations leads to the view that grammar is primarily shaped by the entire range of cognitive, social, and interactional factors involved in language use. Specific grammatical phenomena are discussed that support the view that grammatical regularities arise because of certain strategies people use…

Proposes the Vocabulary-Management Profile, a tool for discourse analysis. The number of new words introduced in a moving interval of text 35 words long is counted and a curve created by plotting the number of new words in a successive interval at the midpoint of the interval. Analyses of text by George Orwell and James Joyce are presented. (JL)

Claims that Adlai Stevenson adapted the tenets of contemporary civic republicanism as a pragmatic to the response to the obstacles that confronted him in his 1952 presidential campaign. Analyzes his campaign rhetoric to reveal the strengths and limitations of republicanism as a political argument. Explores the complex relationship between…

Analyzes the corporate apologetic discourses of three paradigmatic cases (at Chrysler, Toshiba, and Volvo) and examines the use of persuasive descriptions and strategic dissociations preferred by these corporate apologists. Shows how organizations label their wrongdoing in a way that displays sorrow but limits culpability and use dissociations to…

Examines the effects of an intergenerational literacy program on the measured English proficiency of nine bilingual families. Finds significant increases in the families' measured second-language facility. Proposes that teacher scaffolding strategies, as well as parents' and children's efforts to linguistically mediate each other's learning, were…

Randomly assigned to 1 of 156 conditions, 256 adults evaluated either a patronizing or a neutral conversation between a nurse and an elderly nursing home resident. Nurses using patronizing styles were viewed as less respectful or nurturant and residents as less satisfied. Results held true for personal situation topics but not for resident…

Presents discussion of various studies of the effect of television on aggressive behavior. Argues for a positive and significant correlation between television violence and aggressive behavior. Performs additional tests to solidify conclusions. Provides substantive interpretation. (HB)

This paper illustrates the use of corpus-based analytical techniques to address a range of issues in applied linguistics. This approach provides large databases of naturally occurring discourse, enabling empirical analyses of the actual patterns of use in a language and, when coupled with automatic computational tools, enables analyses of a scope…