The use of discourse analysis in examining the classroom language interactions between English teachers and their students builds on the basic concepts of language function and language sequence. The four language functions are eliciting, informing, directing, and boundary marking (marking the divisions of discourse units). The three language…

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

This report considers some of the expectations, conventions, and strategies relied upon by Anglo children when they are participating in the speech event of storytelling, with particular focus on the children's interweaving of narrational and metanarrational speech. The data were obtained from white middle-class schoolchildren, aged six through…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of sentence length, sentence structure, and word frequency on the readability of textbook prose. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which the factors, taken alone or in combination, affected the readability of two 1,000-word college textbook passages when the content remained the same. Two…

The spontaneous speech of a Mohawk-speaking boy was recorded from age 2;10 to 4;1. Analysis of this speech indicated that certain verbal prefixes are acquired earlier than suffixes. The pronominal prefix of nouns, on the other hand, enters late. Yet, before the appearance of any nominal affix, the child already uses a pronominal possessive as a…

Boaventura De Sousa Santos, a Portuguese law professor, appears to be the first legal scholar and theorist who works with rhetorical theories and who is accepted by the legal profession. Santos's major works have centered on the legal system of Pasargada, a Brazilian favela (squatter village) whose residents try to settle disputes outside the…

Formulae in composition can be derived and applied through a three-part process: first, analyzing passages and deriving formulae; second, writing sentences from formulae; and third, writing a composition using only sentences derivable from the formulae. Student participation in all three parts provides better motivation and demonstrates to…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

A review of the literature and an examination of the state of the technology is presented in this discussion of text analysis with computers. The computer capabilities of several available text analysis programs are reviewed, including those that examine vocabulary, word strings, sentence and syntactic complexity, and readability. (AEA)

Since clauses are the largest functional components of a sentence, their analysis can increase attention to sentence structure and stylistic variation. Students can learn to distinguish main clause types by naming the verb forms used (transitive, intransitive, equational, and passive). Once students have mastered the recognition of main clauses,…

The focus of the contributions to this journal issue is communication theory and research. Following an introductory article that deals with the need for quality control in the criticism of communication research, eight articles offer discussions of the following topics: the nature of criticism in rhetorical and communicative studies, some issues…

Ways in which the study of discourse analysis can aid the teacher of basic writing in helping their students to express themselves fluently are explored in this paper. It is noted that remedial writers need to learn to relate abstract ideas to concrete examples and that they seem unable to supply the connections between ideas, especially those of…

One niche in which scholars have not looked for keys to the composing process is the sometimes illusory but vital area of nonlogical discourse, which includes fantasy, hallucination, dream, reverie, vision, trance, and meditation. Abundant evidence exists about the genesis, importance, and use of nonlogical discourse, but this evidence comes…

The actual process of reading diagnosis and the effects of examiner/student interaction upon the diagnostic outcome were explored in this study. A testing session of approximately 50 minutes, conducted by a university professor to determine the reading problems of a nine-year-old boy, was videotaped. Applying an ethnomethodological model for…