The use of religious tracts in teaching a course in persuasive communication is described in this paper. Excerpts from a number of tracts are presented to show how religious tracts can be used in teaching about (1) persuasive messages that appeal to fear, (2) the question of ethics in persuasion, (3) appeals to concerns about physiological…

Fifty-four first grade students comprising eight reading groups in three separate classrooms participated in a study that examined effective and appropriate communication in peer-directed groups. Specifically, the study investigated selected aspects of requests for information and action and their relationship to language ability, social…

The dialect versus Standard English controversy continues in college composition courses. On the one hand, texts, handbooks, and workbooks usually emphasize Standard English while influential linguists point out the merits of dialectalism. One option for educators is to discuss alternatives in class. Students soon reject the extremes of…

To provide an authority on usage, this book presents an analysis of the treatment of American English as it appears in a number of dictionaries and usage guides. The first chapter presents brief sketches of the usage guides and studies that provided the basis for this compilation and discusses the organization of the book. After a resume of the…

This centrally focused collection of articles and lectures examines literary interpretation and the relation of literature to language. The first of the book's three parts introduces the distinction between natural discourse and fictive discourse (verbal structures that function as representatives of natural utterances). It also deals with the…

This journal issue concerns women's perspectives in several areas of communication. Cynthia J. Huyink, in "A Dramatistic Analysis of 'Sexual Politics' by Kate Millett," examines Millett's motivations and analyzes the rhetorical strategies she used to accomplish her attempt to explicate the system of patriarchy, to reveal its injustices to its…

THIS DOCUMENT COMPRISES THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION TO A SELECTION OF WRITINGS COMPILED AND EDITED BY M.M. GUXMAN--"VOPROSY FORMIROVANIJA I RAZVITIJA NACIONAL'NYX JAZYKOV (PROBLEMS OF THE FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES)," MOSCOW, 1960. GUXMAN'S VOLUME IS A COLLECTION OF DETAILED STUDIES OF LANGUAGES…

A study was conducted to delineate the qualitative differences in the language abilities of two disadvantaged groups and one advantaged group of kindergarten and first grade children who were tested on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. (As part of a larger study, the present report deals only with a part of the pretest phase.)…

To measure the effectiveness of an intervention program of language development, it is necessary to understand childrens' knowledge and use of grammatical structures. In both standard and dialectal English, grammar rules are learned without formal instruction for forming the negative, interrogative, and other parts of speech. A mental…

Among the Mexican American Dialects activity's concerns is the linguistic phenomena characterizing what has been termed Local Hispanicized English (LHE) and whether or not LHE has become an institutionalized dialect of American English. In order to answer whether LHE has characteristics distinguishing it from other Hispanicized forms of English…

The program described in this paper proposes individual, programed instruction of operations for sentence manipulation and word group frames, addressing the most frequent usage problems faced by college students. Serving as an aid to the student who needs particular reinforcement in one or more areas in composition, the program utilizes a…

With increasing enrollments in journalism, many journalism instructors contend that problems of spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation are particularly acute. Some of the questions raised at recent gatherings include: Are formal rules of English grammar dying? Is proper punctuation mere pedantry? What can journalism schools do about grammar and…

Evidence is offered to support the view that linguistic competence cannot in principle be divorced from linguistic performance in order to abstract universal properties of grammars, that rules of grammar inevitably incorporate perceptual strategies and constraints, and that grammaticality and acceptability are related to predictability. A theory…

The present paper reports on an experiment designed to test the semantic analysis of Spanish mood vs. the traditional analysis in terms of government, by testing preferences for the Present Indicative or the Present Subjunctive following expressions of varying certainty. Two separate tests were conducted, in which subjects were given the option of…

Paralleling and reflecting the many recent changes in national life have been corresponding developments in the American language. As new concerns and problems have arisen, new vocabularies have come into being. Countless new words and novel expressions as well as new meanings and uses for established words have been created. This collection…