People in interaction with others organize their perceptions of a social situation in terms of plans even when the others' plans are poorly formulated. They use their models of others' plans in formulating their own. Much of what occurs in discourse centers on a continual communication about and reformulation of one's own plans and one's own…

A study investigated how children report epistemic modality and focused on two main questions: (1) How do children reproduce modal devices that are present in the original (to-be-reported) discourse? and (2) How do children use different linguistic means of quotation--direct, indirect, or other--in this situation? Sixty monolingual French-speaking…

In order to make information about technical writing more available, the South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA) has collected the papers not subject to copyright restrictions that were presented at the technical writing section of its 1987 meeting. The essays cover a wide range of topics in technical writing pedagogy and research. The…

If the various academic disciplines are considered as cultures, with their own language, literature, behavior, and mode of discourse, then more and more the need of educated readers is to read across disciplines or multiculturally, and the goal of college writing teachers should be to encourage students' interdisciplinary reading. Respect for the…

Linguistics can make major contributions to the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum, as exemplified in the relationship between linguistics and the English curriculum. The major points of contact between English and linguistics are the areas of stylistics and poetics. In the study of English, linguistics can enrich descriptions of texture…

The rhetorical functions of history depend on the domain in which history is used, with no connotations of interpretive priority attaching to the social or the academic realm. The appropriation of history in support of social causes as radically opposed as socialism and fascism fuels the temptation to subsume history under ideology, with the…

A study investigated some of the ways in which phenomena are perceived and translated into speech, especially in the assignment of agents in a given situation. Subjects were 16 adults with infant children. The adults were shown the Visual Cliff series of pictures of an infant crawling to its mother across a glass sheet covering an open space with…

Noting that expert computer systems respond to various contexts in terms of knowledge representation, this paper explains that heuristic rules of production, procedural representation, and frame representation have been adapted to such areas as medical diagnosis, signal interpretation, design and planning of electrical circuits and computer system…

A computer natural language system called HWIM (Hear What I Mean) is described in this report. Noting that the system accepts either typed or spoken inputs and produces both typed and spoken responses, the report proposes HWIM as an example of a relatively complete language system illustrating how the many components of language processing…

The writing-reading process is a total interacting system comprising four subsystems: the writer, the text, the reader, and the context. A model of the complex interactions among these four subsystems is useful to the extent that it provides a framework for established facts, and in so far as it explains phenomena and suggests hypotheses. While…

In the writing of Matthew Arnold, integration, one great impression rather than many great individual lines, is the most important goal. In his essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," the "blocs" of his thought are in sets of two, three, or even four sentences: in effect, he writes much like a poet, in couplets,…

Developmental changes in the expression of contrast in child discourse were investigated. Contrast is defined as a psychological phenomenon and applied to the domain of discourse topics. The development of the ability to produce utterances that are topically related to the previous conversational turn is considered. Four types and three levels of…

A study of the syntactic development of discourse in and after adolescence among fluent English speakers in a bilingual community of East Los Angeles focused on subordinate devices not observed until adolescence, such as the relative clause using "which" and clauses using "even though/although." Discourse analysis of these…

If sociolinguistics involves the specification and analysis of sociological, interpersonal, and pragmatic variables at issue in given language-use situations, and discourse anaysis is the observation and analysis of both linguistic and paralinguistic features of speech events within these situations, there are at least three areas in these…

The concept of "structured programming" was developed to facilitate software production, but it has not carried over to documentation design. Two concepts of structure are relevant to user documentation for computer programs. The first is based on programming techniques that emphasize decomposition of tasks into discrete modules, while the second…