The purpose of this study was to locate those measurable criteria of responsiveness to language which have not been utilized to any significant extent in standardized tests. The project involved creating a testing instrument, reviewing of the instrument by a panel of experts, and applying the resultant test to a small population of college…

This general bibliography on discourse and related topics lists over 350 books, articles, and papers, written between 1912 and 1971, covering a great variety of linguistic problems and issues. The subjects range from general topics such as "Nouns and Noun Phrases" and "Language as Symbolization" to such specialized articles as "Samoan…

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…

A 6-minute, videotaped segment of discourse in a medical school classroom problem-based learning session is analyzed for evidence of the kinds of meanings being constructed, their functions, and the linguistic, kinesic, and other means by which they are being made. Three interdependent discourse agendas are distinguished: construction,…

A study investigated the extent to which native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Portuguese understand implicatures in Brazilian television commercials in Portuguese. Subjects were nine Brazilian graduate students and 11 American students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Correct inference of the…

A study of the functions and structure of referential third- person pronominal chains in spontaneous English conversation as compared to those in written English is discussed. The study found the frequencies of these pronouns and of their chains to be generally much higher in the spoken corpus than in the written corpus. In the spoken corpus,…

Noting that there are students with limited writing ability who belong neither in regular English composition classes nor in classes for speakers of other languages (ESOL), this paper reports on a study conducted at the University of Texas, EL Paso to produce a profile of 30 limited English writers. Following an introduction to the family…

Consisting of two separate papers, "Representational Issues in Systemic Functional Grammar," by Christian Matthiessen and "Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar," by Robert Kasper, this document deals with systemic aspects of natural language processing and linguistic theory and with computational applications of…

The Halliday and Hasan (1976) method of categorizing semantic units was used to analyze the cohesive strategies used by secondary students learning English as a second language. The method involves classifying and charting the network of semantic relationships, the types of cohesive devices, and the number of breaks in the flow of a text or…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE THEORY THAT CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MESSAGES IS A CONTRAL TOPIC IN ALL SCIENCES DEALING WITH MAN. CONTENT ANALYSIS IS THE DETERMINATION OF CHARACTERISTICS OF A SOURCE FROM THE NATURAL LANGUAGE UTTERANCES IT EMITS. ASSIGNING PROPERTIES TO WORDS AND THEN COUNTING THE APPEARANCES OF THE PROPERTIES IS INSUFFICIENT--THE CONTENT OF…

This study explored varying uses of the concept "involvement" in ordinary speech, examined the concept as found in the literature on adult education program planning, and analyzed its use and validity in empirical behavioral science research. It was expected that the concept would be further clarified, thus increasing the likelihood of forming…

The procedures used to develop a list of concepts taught in fourth-grade language arts are described. Thirty concepts from the list were randomly sampled and then analyzed. Analysis consisted of listing examples and non-examples, relevant and irrelevant attributes, subordinates and supraordinates, and a definition and principle for each concept.…