The theme of the doctoral honors seminar reported here was the reappraisal of rhetorical research. After a preface and the seminar's keynote address about the ten negative commandments for the rhetorical historian, abstracts of seminar presentations are grouped under the headings rhetoric and culture, rhetoric and philosophy, and discourse…

This paper presents a passage written by a student and analyzes the way in which each sentence is or is not connected to those before it and after it, revealing the problems that cause the passage to lack coherence. The paper notes that, although this writer would have benefited from an opportunity to talk out her ideas (rather than a lesson in…

This paper is an abstract of the original manuscript, by Nancy Boulton, which examines the area of intersection between purely linguistic and social behavior to see if the latter is amenable to formal description. The paper examines psychoanalytic discourse and presents evidence for the following hypotheses: (1) since participants can recognize…

Language has the power to structure and change thought and behavior, where there exists a belief in this positive power of language. Magic is curative because the language of magic has a powerful suggestive effect on the human mind familiar with the context in which this language is used. In psychotherapy, the special terminology is a vital part…

The role of the particle "o.k." in service encounter dialogue is discussed. A service encounter is defined as a situation of interaction between a "posted" server and a second party (a customer) who invokes the server's participation as an operator of a "serving post." It is suggested that approval or acceptance is often only part of what is being…

A historical review of theories of persuasion and its relationship to such areas as argument and propaganda indicates a number of inherent weaknesses in the definitions and taxonomies which have been proposed. Definitions and classifications have been sometimes circular in nature, have reflected the special interests of their authors, have been…

The first part of this dissertation is a metatheoretical discussion of the needs and means of semantic analysis. This discussion includes sections on metalanguage, deep and surface structure and structural semantics, and procedures for relating the English of abstracts to a classification concordance in the same language. The second part describes…

The papers reprinted in this volume carry out the "distributional method," i.e., the analysis of occurrence restrictions, beyond phonemics. This methodological approach, of defining more freely combining new elements on the basis of occurrence restrictions of old elements, has proved applicable in many situations in structural…

This book discusses various approaches to the teaching of composition from classical and contemporary sources. It is intended to give a comprehensive coverage of the various kinds of oral and written themes students are expected to create in college and high school. The book can be used as a basic text in college composition and rhetoric, for…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

This article outlines a model of the two basic components of a text, namely, the system of formal linguistic rules, and the realization of these rules into concrete discourse, by means of particular transformations. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Sensitivity to syntactic structure can be increased by direct instruction. (JH)

Students have been taught to recall specific details, but often are unable to read critically or to grasp the main ideas. (JH)

Contends that a student gains knowledge through the act of writing as she joins bits of information into a whole. Presents a model for scanning students' written material to determine the way ideas are related. Notes that the value of a piece of information depends on how the writer joins it with other information. (KC)