Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions is extended to include Lewis' basic categories. The distinction as applied to sentences is brought out by investigating the consequences of the failure of presupposed sentences. Stalnaker uses Donnellan's distinction to support his theory of creating an…

The study of schema theory as part of the inquiry into the nature of language comprehension has drawn attention to the reader's central role in the construction of text-guided meaning. Contemporary schema theory represnts a major step in the effort to move away from a reductionist view of reading comprehension. Specifically, it focuses on wbat…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

These two studies, which were part of a cross-national project exploring the development of Italian and British children's understanding of sociolinguistic rules, investigated politeness in children's requests addressed to adults and children, and children's views on how requests addressed to persons differing in status and familiarity would be…

An understanding of the structure and function of discourse in social communication and in its internal representation to the individuals is sought in this multidisciplinary collection of papers. The approaches are divided into theoretical orientations and empirical orientations. The theoretical papers deal with: (1) comprehension in conversation,…

This paper empirically examines one aspect of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of educational failure, a code thesis wherein a restricted code is defined as giving access only to "particularistic" meanings and an elaborated code is defined as giving access also to "universalistic" meanings. According to Bernstein,…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…

This study reports on an analysis of questions which were used in the pursuit of understanding in three focussed discussions, two by native speakers (NSs) and one by non-native speakers (NNs). Twelve adult subjects, four NNs and eight NSs, were used. In 66 minutes, only 30 questions were used for the purpose of pursuing understanding. These…