Showing papers on "Discourse analysis published in 1976"

On questions following questions in service encounters

Abstract: This paper is a treatment of some patterns of talk that occur in service encounters (and presumably in other conversations as well). It is an attempt to examine the contribution of discourse structures such as the question–answer adjacency pair to the coherence of everyday discourse. The customer-request–server-response sequence is examined as to its adherence to a pattern of question–answer. Though some sequences do adhere to the question–answer pattern, there are many that do not, but rather are manifested as question–question. The question–question patterns are shown to be of several kinds in terms of the relationship of the second question to the first. The analysis demonstrates the relationship of these patterns to the pragmatic interpretation of the customer-request as either a request for information or as a request for service, and leads to a tentative set of generalizations concerning the interpretation of responses to questions in general. (Questions, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics, indirect speech acts, coherence, ritual, service encounters, American English.)

Discourse Theory: Implications for Research in Composing.

Abstract: Although current theories concerning the composing process overlap in useful and interesting ways, a paradigm is emerging. This article discusses two of the major assumptions of this emerging paradigm,: that there are distinct purposes for each kind of discourse (for example, expressive, literary, persuasive, and referential) and that the relation of speaker, audience, and subject is basic to all types of discourse. The article then explores four kinds of questions which Should help researchers test and refine these assumptions. The questions involve the process of composing, published writing, writing done at different age levels, and 'eliciting writing and assessing writing performance. Current theorists referred to throughout the article are J.I. Kinneavy, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Walker Gibson, and James Moffett. (JM)

Salt Passage Research: The State of the Art

Abstract: The question of whether the movement of salt is causally dependent on the utterance of the phrase, “Please pass the salt,” has occupied the attention of numerous philosophers (3, 9, 20). Empirical resolution of the validity of this belief, however, was not undertaken until the classic work of Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield (8) on the American soldier. Since then, numerous social scientists have explored the antecedent conditions that give rise to this apparent regularity. In this article, we will summarize those efforts that shed some light on the complex phenomenon known as salt passage.

A generic exploration: Staged withdrawal, the rhetoric of resignation

Abstract: The author argues that staged withdrawal promises to be a recurrent event, because of the recurrence of the described relationships among occasion, audience, and speaker role, and because the ultimately converging interests of the resigner and survivor dictate a recurrent manipulation of the discourse to exploit ambivalent audience expectations of the resigner‐speaker role.

A taxonomy of japanese discourse types

Abstract: The major failing of Longacre's schema is that he relegates Drama, or Dialogue, to a subcategory of Narrative. In fact, the basic discourse type is Dialogue, and Longacre's Narrative, Procedural, Expository, and Hortatory are special subtypes of this. This position is supported by the observation that all forms of discourse comprise an interaction between a speaker and an addressee, although in special cases, such as writing, the addressee may not be physically present. By recognizing the -primacy of Dialogue, two additional parameters, mentioned first in Hinds (1975), may be formed. The first parameter indicates the degree to which the addressee needs to give an uninvited acknowledgment, either verbal or nonverbal, that he understands or is following what is being said.

The validity of clausal processing strategies at the discourse level

Abstract: In the last few years, considerable research in psycholinguistics has sought to test the hypothesis that the clause is a relevant segmentation unit in the processing of speech. The current interest in linguistic contexts and discourse analysis has raised the question of the validity of the clausal processing strategy suggested by Bever, Garrett, and Hurtig (1973). They demonstrated that the alternative readings of deep structure ambiguous sentences are available during the processing of a clause but that at the clause boundary only one reading remains available. They argued that such evidence supports a view of speech processing as operating clause by clause. It has, however, been suggested that the use of ambiguous sentences in linguistic argumentation or in the psycholinguistic investigation of speech processing is unjustified since phenomenally such sentences are never ambiguously perceived in context. Two sentence fragment completion experiments are presented to demonstrate that the clausal processing strategy is operative in the processing of an auditory speech signal and that the strategy is also operative in the larger discourse context. The analysis of the latency to completion data support the hypothesis that the clausal processing strategy demonstrated in research on sentences in isolation is also operative in connected discourse. This finding is consistent with the functional interactionist model of language proposed by Bever (1970) and Fodor, Bever, and Garrett (1974). Thus the notion of interactionism can be extended to account for discourse phenomena by characterizing the relationship of sentence grammar, discourse grammar, and the psychological processes operative in the encoding of sentences and discourses in the following way: The sentence (clause) is the on-line perceptual unit while the discourse (proposition/idea set/logical event space) is the unit of cognitive (semantic) memory. That is, the discourse is the object of analysis at the cognitive organizational level while the sentence (syntactic structure) is the object of analysis at the production/comprehension level. Such an hypothesis thereby treats the research on sentences and discourse in linguistics as well as psychology as interactive models of the various subcomponents of a total linguistic-cognitive system.