Presents a text-linguistic definition of the difference between semantic and pragmatic relations. Shows that the type of context (descriptive, argumentative) appeared not to influence language users' interpretation of clear cases, whereas their judgments of ambiguous relations were influenced by the type of context. Finds informative texts are…

Criticizes J.L. Austin's and J.R. Searle's claims that utterances have illocutionary force and offers an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances, which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfully relate to the state of affairs in the world. (FL)

Some regularities are noted in the beginnings of texts: anaphora, proper names, and deictics in particular. (FL)

Investigates the role of paragraph markings in text: how informative paragraph cues are and how they affect interpretation. Reports one study asking subjects to reinstate deleted paragraph markings. Reports a second study examining the effect of paragraph boundaries on reading time, ratings, and judgment of important ideas in the text. (JAD)

Investigates what young children remember and how consistent is their recall. Finds that young children recall more information when conversing with a stranger than with their mother. Shows that, although more consistent in conversations with the same adult across two interviews, children's recall is highly inconsistent. (SR)

Investigates creation and interpretation of nonlexicalized categories within discourse, as indicated by the use of general extenders. Shows that such categories are locally contingent, depend on contextually salient features for identifying similarity among members, can be created through contrast or contiguity, and clearly depend on assumptions…

Concentrates on one area of discourse relations, the concession family, identifying its underlying semantics and pragmatics. Proposes (on the basis of extensive corpus studies) a new classification of concession markers in English and German. Suggests a generation model for producing bilingual text that can incorporate marker choice into its…

Concludes that, whereas inference processing may be impeded by the relative lack of familiarity of the content of expository text, it is not strictly precluded. Indicates rather that inference processing in the comprehension of expository text is regulated by the information-processing constraints of the reading task and by the discourse and…

Demonstrates that reactivation of unsatisfied goal information depended on the type of original goal context and whether it was fully reinstated and that reinstatement of goal information from the distant target episode was successful only when the context was fully reinstated. Supports models of comprehension that assume reactivation of relevant…

Tests two views of how relevant global information becomes readily available to readers. Demonstrates that backgrounded information became readily available if it shared features in common with the current contents of working memory. Shows that this occurred independently of whether the information was relevant or thematically related;…

Presents principles of dialog cooperativity derived from a corpus of task-oriented spoken human-machine dialog. Analyzes the "corpus" to produce a set of dialog design principles intended to prevent users from having to initiate clarification and repair metacommunication that the system would not understand. Proposes a "more…

Presents a taxonomy of jokes and wit as a useful, descriptive tool. Argues that humor processing may occur in a parallel rather than serial fashion by contrasting a serial-processing, incongruity-resolution model with an alternative dual-processing model. Also presents a taxonomy of the social functions of wit. (JK)

Presents results of a study indicating that, over many propositions appearing in passages that vary widely in content and vocabulary difficulty, early and later propositions are better recalled, and that the rated importance of a proposition predicts probability of recall independent of serial position. (HTH)

Outlines an attempt to use artificial intelligence formalisms as a formal language of description for the complex conversational behavior that occurs in ethnographic interviews. Discusses three kinds of coherence and uses them to analyze the text of an interview. (FL)

Transcripts of 11 young children's speech to adults were found to include hints and question directives. (FL)