Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism has applications to rhetoric and composition instruction. Dialogism, sometimes translated as intertextuality, is the term Bakhtin used to designate the relation of one utterance to other utterances. Dialogism is not dialogue in the usual sense of the word; it is the context which informs utterance, and…

The first paper focuses on the study of British working class speech, and highlights research on the topic. It is suggested that a culture is identified through its organizing concept, and that it is necessary to determine how far culture is linguistic. The conclusion is drawn that it is not possible to make fundamental correlations between…

Developing and integrating two lines of research, one focusing on discourse and the other on intention recognition in discourse, this paper presents the basic elements of a computational theory of discourse. The paper argues that by specifying the basic units a discourse comprises and the ways in which they can relate, an account of discourse…

Developing a theme drawn from speculative writing of the nineteenth century--that technology, like biological species, undergoes a process of evolution--this paper explores the thesis that if technology divides from its human creators and perfects itself until it gains the capacity for self replication, it cannot return to its creator. Using…

Sentence-by-sentence analysis of factual or propositional cohesion in the first 29 lines of a Swedish children's story finds several sources of coherence that contribute to its cohesion. First, the text receives much coherence from its description of a single event, a situation where happenings are normal and expected. Second, a rather primitive…

Traditionally, the study of public address has meant the study of great speakers, focusing on individual speech texts, or the speaking careers of individual orators. So dominant was this traditional study of public address that, in its halcyon decades of the l930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it all but eliminated other approaches to rhetorical criticism.…

An investigation of Puerto Rican Spanish conversational strategies involved analysis of recorded conversations for the amount of simultaneous speech, its context, and the turn-taking used. Overlapping and interruption were distinguished from cooperative (supportive) simultaneity of speech, and a "turn" was defined as a recognized utterance. The…

Three colloquium papers are presented on two fields of linguistics, dialogism (the study of dialogue content) and polyphony (the representation of different sounds by the same letter or symbol). The first paper, by J. Moeschler, examines dialogism, dialogue, and polyphony from the perspective of the pragmatics of the utterance and the pragmatics…

To gain a sense of good rhetorical structure, what students of writing in English as a second language need to do is not to practice writing paragraphs and essays conforming to particular patterns, but rather to recognize and understand the resources available for indicating relationships between the propositions that make up their own, unique…

A mythic interpretive framework can explain how the use of an uncontested term--a word which "seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context"--is legitimated and perpetuated. By examining John C. Calhoun's nullification rhetoric as a case study of political myth (specifically his "Disquisition…

The Know-Nothing party of the 1850s was the first nativist party in American politics to gain importance and serves as an exemplar of how cultural nativism may be captured and turned toward political goals. The resurgence of nativist sentiment in the Know-Nothing era provides an excellent example of a rhetorical situation which seriously…

Court trials are formalized disputes in which the parties are denied confrontation and have restrictions placed on their rights to tell the story. The rights of telling are part of discourse rights, and in the courtroom they are circumscribed by attorneys' objections to either the other attorneys' questions or the witnesses' answers. This can be…

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

Two speech styles, origin-myth telling and ritual wailing, found among the Shokleng Indians of south Brazil are analyzed from the perspective of two specific functions of speech style: (1) for indexing or highlighting the subject matter in certain contexts, and (2) for relating the contexts and subject matters to other contexts and subject matters…

Dominant sensory metaphors play a major role in speech, and this dominance further manifests itself in other behaviors involving particular sensory modes. Communicators use one of the five senses as dominant metaphor in their speech: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, oflactory, or gustatory. Interpersonal attending, which teaches the importance not…