This article tries to understand, by using some poststructural tools, practices with children that were performed by a Left action group in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s. Modernist resistance discourses of enlightenment and liberation from obedience, silence and innocence can be seen as being produced, together with postmodern acts of unfolding…

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…

A syntax of fiction would be concerned with the semantics, stylistics, and syntactics of extended fictive utterances. (JH)

The suspicion that some second language learners' problems in reading can be attributed to a lack of literacy in general rather than to a lack of fluency in English per se motivated the present study. The hypothesis suggests that readers learn literacy only once and that a lack of literacy in one's first language can be more of a barrier to…

A study of President Ronald Reagan's speeches reveals not only a President intent on "identifying directly with the people," but a spokesman adept at the use of symbolic communication as well. Probably the most obvious symbol of the campaign for economic renewal is the term "Reaganomics" itself. Referentially, it has come to…

This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

Molefi K. Asante's Afrocentric methodology was used in analysing the rhetoric of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, writer Toni Morrison, and sociologist Robert Staples on the women's movement. Three conclusions were drawn from this analysis: (1) that the three rhetors noted more differences than similarities between black and white females; (2) that…

The ways in which preschoolers use the word "but" were studied. It was found that the eight preschoolers, who ranged in age from 3;9 to 5;5, were able to use "but" to express a number of different types of adversative relationships. "But" introduced clauses containing information that: (1) contrasted with shared knowledge about the usual state of…

Noting that rhetorical critics have ignored the study of nonwestern movements and have failed to construct theories that help to explain and interpret the rhetorical form of such movements, this paper synthesizes concepts from rhetorical theory and anthropology to explain the linguistic process that made up the 1978 Israeli peace movement. The…

The practical value of the systems approach to rhetoric may be enhanced by attending to distinctions between the various types of symbolic activities. One such distinction exists between popular discourse, understood as intentional communication, and theoretical or descriptive statements about such discourse. A second distinction is between…

One hundred twelve college students participated in a study designed to determine whether students differ in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes in discourse processing and whether individuals tend to be more "text-bound" and less able to use preexisting knowledge schemata when they are more "stimulus-bound"…

Paragraphs, as well as sentences, can be spoken of as having a deep and a surface structure. The amount of deep structure of the paragraph that is mapped onto the surface paragraph is related to the mode of discourse in which the paragraph is found: the deep structure in scientific paragraphs is relatively uncomplicated with few assumptions made;…

The study reported in this paper addresses the problem, "What makes an answer appropriate?" The claim is made that an appropriate answer must address the goals of the question either directly or indirectly. The conditions of the experiment were dialogues between an expert and an apprentice who were repairing an appliance. In the…

Data for a study of the composition process consisted of student compositions written in response to four stimulus tasks (compositions written within unstructured, topical/Aristotelian, dramatic situation, and behavioral models), and students' introspective comments made in response to questionnaires, during taped discussions, and in individual…

The temporal patterning of speech, primarily within the context of interpersonal exchanges, is traced in this cross-section of research exploring the major directions such studies have taken. Eighteen authors contributed selections to support the thesis that time as a dimension of speech reflects many of the important processes that occur during…