A qualitative interdisciplinary study examined mediated women's discourse in the form of the women's page of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" from the years 1915, 1920, and 1925. The material was subjected to qualitative content analysis. Findings indicated that women's advice columns mirrored the function of the mother for the culture by…

To discover what variables are involved in the production of text coherence, and how cohesion and coherence are different, a study collected 30 papers randomly selected from over 200 papers written by incoming freshmen college students at a local community college. The papers were rated by 21 state conference participants. Raters were in-service…

To identify specific dimensions of communicative disturbances among adults and children in abusive/neglecting families, 10 mother/child pairs from problem families were matched with 10 control pairs. Each mother was videotaped with her 4- to 15-year-old child for 15 minutes while playing a game under nonstressful conditions. Subjects'…

An acoustic study of German focused on voice frequency at sentence-, turn-, and discourse-end in conversations. The data were drawn from short dialogues in which the same word occurs at the ends of utterances, in the middle of a turn, at the end of a turn, and at the end of a discourse. The dialogues were read 10 times by a male and a female…

Noting that the concept of convention as a rule procedure in a formal analysis of interpersonal communication applies to the mass communication practice known as the "convention" or annual professional meeting of an academic discipline, this paper illustrates the ideological consequence of this eidetic connection. The paper characterizes…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Rhetorical force can be used to analyze interaction in organizational communication. In such an analysis, force is conceived of as being perceptual, arising out of interaction, aiding in understanding communication patterns, and increasing one's abilities both to anticipate actions and to plan or constrain one's actions. Rhetoric is a product of…

"Fantasy-theme analysis" suggests that the individual and collective dramatizations of a group's goals, scope, and activities--the group's conceptualized reality, or fantasy theme--can be used to study social movements. Based on the notion of fantasizing in small groups, this analytic approach provides a method of discovering how…

The language behavior of field-dependent and field-independent female college students was examined in three different communication conditions with respect to length and type of verbal output. The conditions were dialogue, warm monologue, and cold monologue. (Author/AM)

The concepts of distance, modalization, comprehensibility, and tension, as used for discourse analysis, can be applied to the analysis of speech events in literary texts. Such a linguistic approach may lead to new insights for the psychological description of authors and/or literary characters. Available from Dept. of English, University of…

Fantasy Theme Analysis was used to examine the rhetorical clash of incongruent world views during the 1978 controversy over a gay rights ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fantasy Theme Analysis considers the individual and collective dramatizations of a group's goals, scope, and activities--the group's conceptualized reality, or fantasy theme--in…

This report presents the results of a review and evaluation of the Langley Research Center's scientific and technical information program, which examined technical reports from various institutions and organizations to determine the organization of reports, the language used to convey information, and the methods used to present information.…

This number of a journal devoted to ideas for teachers of English as a second language (ESL) contains the following articles: (1) "Using Authentic Discourse in Teaching the Conditional" by Helen Hoyt Schmidt, (2) "Better Communication through Summarizations" by John Battaglia, (3) "A Look at Discourse Analysis" by…

Drawing upon reading and text comprehension theories and the sociolinguistic studies of M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, this paper builds theoretical links between the reading and writing processes. The major portion of the paper discusses the five language concepts that undergird both processes: (1) text processing in both reading and writing…