Examines how interlocutors' beliefs about each other's goals affect conversational references, comparing pairs who were either informed or noninformed about the goal difference, or misinformed that goals were the same. Finds that misinformed and noninformed pairs overlooked clues that may have signaled the goal discrepancy, made conversational…

Compares the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Finds that overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Suggests greater number of discourse markers…

Describes procedures for constructing story-based causal diagrams. Discusses the cognitive and pragmatic constraints that govern the tendency to attribute events to incomplete causes. Uses causal diagrams to analyze major disagreements about the 1987 stock market crash. Explores how causal diagrams may mitigate the constraints on causal…

Discusses research on how race of actors in a text, race of participant, and race of experimenter relate to discourse processing. Uses the O. J. Simpson murder case to demonstrate the fruitful use of extended discourse and how belief-based disposition contributes to a rich mental representation of and inferential use of discourse. (PA)

Describes conversational joint remembering in terms of three hierarchically related functions--framing and orientation, correspondence functions, and validation function. Highlights the importance of studying remembering as a social activity governed by the setting in which it occurs. (JD)

Indicates that the main determinant of implicitness, when defined in terms of "inferrable" vs. "evoked" information, was the variable of content, not that of modality: Abstract texts contained more inferrable information than did narrative texts, regardless of modality. (NKA)

Reports findings of three experiments indicating that story plot unit structure is a good predictor of subjects' thematic judgments about the story, and that subjects are sensitive to a more abstract level of conceptualization than the thematic patterns tested, based on evaluations of the protagonist's plans in the story. (HTH)

Discusses how children in one society on the Papuan Plateau, Papua, New Guinea, learn about making and responding to requests based on a strategy of appeal. (FL)

Provides a definition of comparison questions and shows how they relate to the semantic categories of two taxonomies for classifying questions, both of which omit comparison questions. Examines the comparison questions that auditors generate when they diagnose problems in a company. (SR)

Investigates recursion in the paragraph, discussing it in the context of grammatical hierarchy and illustrating it by use of natural texts. Analyzes two short narrative texts at the paragraph and discourse levels, and presents both in tree diagram and function-set representations. (KEH)

Identifies and describes the features of spoken discourse that native speakers of English consider to be indicative of level of intellectual functioning. Discourse criteria include detail, coherence, story construction, storytelling performance, and metacomments. (SR)

Finds that both severity of violation and recipient of explanation affect the linguistic content of elementary school-aged girls' excuses. Concludes that older girls used fewer single apologies, incorporated more repair components, and tailored their explanations to the nature of each violation. (JAD)

Investigates the social payoffs of speaking ironically. Suggests that speakers choose irony over literal language in order to be funny, to soften the edge of an insult, to show themselves to be in control of their emotions, and to avoid damaging their relationship with the addressee. (SR)

Describes a news story as a text prototype dominated either by telegraphic or by narratological tendencies in content selection and organization. Shows how the former strategy leads to feature accumulation typical of American English news writing, and how the latter, characteristic of German and Polish news styles, shows affinities with everyday…

Studies the Yagua speakers' use of a second position morpheme for indicating that information should be integrated as part of the main event line. Concludes that the information attached to this morpheme is mildly or strongly discontinuous with preceding information or expectations. (HB)