Applies a theoretical framework that encompasses cultural and social regulation of mother-child speech to observations of discourse between three mothers and their two-year-olds. Maternal speech was semantically contingent in the sense that both partners in the conversation were jointly focused on a shared topic of concern. (Author/CB)

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

Explores the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite descriptions. It is argued that indefinite descriptions are not semantically ambiguous and that their various interpretations may be explained on the basis of general communicative principles. He shows that his proposed analysis can account for generic and predicative interpretations. (45…

Analyzes the use of language in two British and Australian secondary school textbooks and a corpus of written British English of one million words. Significant differences were found in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the ideological stances expressed in the books.…

Argues that translation can be an effective learning tool for English speakers learning Chinese if semantic and discourse analysis are incorporated. Examples are given to illustrate various problems in such translation, including the division between state and action verbs, and the nonuse of -LE with verbs in past meaning. (15 references) (JL)

Evidence from a sample of informal written language (personal correspondence) shows that the most important constraints on pronoun usage in subject position are discourse-based. The quantitative analysis supports the hypothesis that pronoun usage is "functional" since semantically relevant information is preserved in surface structure.…

Treats, in a systematic and principled manner, representations studied in situated literacy and an associated methodological approach based on semantic analysis that characterizes the representations. Illustrates application of the method for four situated-literacy examples: mother/child word-naming games; children's story writing; journalistic…

Combines analyses of communication strategies (CS) to deal with an interactional perspective and a psycholinguistic approach. The article uses this combination to provide a clearer picture of CS in relation to foreign-language discourse and proficiency. (22 references) (Author/CK)

Background: A critical issue in academic assessment is the effect of children's language and culture on their measured performance. Research on this topic has rarely focused on science education, because science is commonly (though erroneously) assumed to be "culture free." Students' scientific understandings are influenced by the cultural values,…

This collection of papers on semantics and cohesion is organized into two sections: Meaning and Semantics, and Textual Cohesion. Titles and authors are as follows: "Functional Text Semantics, Idioms, and Variability" (Jan-Ola Ostman); "On the Degree of Motivation in Signs Used in Metaphors Involving Plant Symbolism" (Ralf…

The uses of the present progressive tense in informal English spoken discourse are examined, focusing on the increasing frequency of the so-called stative or non-action verbs found in the progressive aspect. Generalizations are proposed to account for: (1) the discrepancy between grammar book explanations and actual usage, and (2) the meaning of…

Linguistics gives the student of literature an analytical tool whose sole purpose is to describe faithfully the workings of language. It provides a theoretical framework, an analytical method, and a vocabulary for communicating its insights--all designed to serve concerns other than literary interpretation and evaluation, but all useful for…

The essays in this book focus on the role of the reader in textual interpretation. Specifically, they examine "open" and "closed" texts. The three essays in Part I deal with both verbal and nonverbal texts. The first considers musical compositions that leave considerable autonomy to the individual performer and also discusses…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

Sixty undergraduate students read and summarized eight short passages in a study of how semantic components were involved in text comprehension. After the first summary was completed (the naive or untutored summary), the students were assigned to one of three groups. The experimental group was introduced to the semantic components, including…