Successful reference relies on being appropriately informative for listeners. What factors influence informativeness? For example, what factors influence the decision to refer to a ball with the less informative phrase "it," as opposed to the more informative phrase "the red ball"? The present dissertation proposes and…

U.S. schools teach predominately to the analytical, left-brain, which has foundations in behaviorism, and uses a mechanistic paradigm that influences epistemic beliefs of how learning takes place. This result is that learning is impeded. Using discourse analysis of a set of Piagetian children, this study re-analyzed Piaget's work. This study found…

Advice literature is ubiquitous. Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) argue that our modern lives motivate if not require us to consult the experts. In many fields, experts have negotiated a discourse accessible to the public in handbooks, guidebooks, self-help manuals, etc. As I discover in this study, these public discourses can reinscribe both…