Using a rhetorical approach to communication and communicative competence that defines communication as an interactive process in which people participate to achieve their goals, a study was undertaken to determine whether the communication skills postulated from the rhetorical definition could be judged independently from the linguistic skills of…

Four experiments involving 54 adults were performed to examine the relationship between the effects of story grammar categories and content centrality on subjects' importance ratings, summaries, immediate recall, and delayed recall. Results of the studies indicated that central content units were judged as more important and were better recalled…

Recent studies have documented the importance of a variety of contextualization cues such as intonation, voice quality, volume, and pitch in conversation. The appropriate use of and response to them presupposes that one has certain kinds of linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. There remains, however, the question of how children acquire this…

Conventional wisdom holds that many children experience difficulty when they first read expository material after spending most of their reading time with simple narratives. Unfortunately, there is little available data bearing on this belief, nor is it clear how one would go about testing the claim. The labels "narrative" and…

In 1965, transcripts were collected of 72 sermons on the issue of racial integration preached between 1955 and 1965. The sermons, all given by Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Episcopal ministers in the southern United States, were examined to determine the position advocated by the minister. The sermons deemed segregationist were then…

The purpose of this study was to learn something about information-transmission procedures in offices. It was hypothesized that certain kinds of information and communication activities have particular properties, and that some of these activities are best pursued in face-to-face communication situations. Natural conversations involving an…

Puppetry has potential for illuminating many aspects of human life. One of these aspects, the system of language and speech, is explored here. An examination of the widespread use of a voice-modifying instrument to provide the puppets' voices demonstrates that traditional puppeteers act both as folk linguists and as folk sociolinguists. The study…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Noting that identifying and inferring cause and effect relationships is critical to the receptive language use of both listeners and readers, this paper describes the various constructions used to express cause and effect and discusses the problems in comprehending them. Various sections of the paper discuss (1) the form of cause and effect…

Narrative observations were made of remedial interchanges occurring among school children (K-4) in open classrooms. Transcripts of interchanges were typed move by move and coded according to a hierarchical coding scheme (remedy, defiance, no response, relief, ending, and ambiguous). The interchanges of the kindergarteners and first graders were…

This volume contains six articles. In "Integrational Linguistics as a Basis for Contrastive Studies," Hans-Heinrich Lieb discusses the problems associated with complex contrastive analysis. Hanne Martinet's "A Functional and Contrastive Analysis of Attributive Adjectives Endings in '-ant' and in '-ende' in French and Danish,…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

Using some of the tools of fantasy theme analysis, this paper analyzes the rhetoric of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the United States Civil War, as an expression of the rhetorical visions of the American South. Specifically, the paper deals with two speeches--Davis's farewell to the United States Senate, from which he…

Containing a methodological and conceptual critique of rules theory, this paper argues that rules theory cannot adequately explain enigmatic episodes because of its reliance on the practical syllogism and the concept of coordination. It proposes structural analysis as an alternative approach to analyzing and conceiving of enigmatic episodes. The…