Showing papers on "Discourse analysis published in 1984"
TL;DR: In this paper, a conception of genre based on conventionalized social motives which are found in recurrent situation-types is proposed, and the thesis is that genre must be conceived in terms of rhetorical action rather than substance or form.
Abstract: This essay proposes a conception of genre based on conventionalized social motives which are found in recurrent situation‐types. The thesis is that genre must be conceived in terms of rhetorical action rather than substance or form.
2,796 citations
TL;DR: The basic principle of language style is that an individual speaker does not always talk in the same way on all occasions as discussed by the authors, which is one of the most challenging aspects of sociolinguistic variation.
Abstract: Language style is one of the most challenging aspects of sociolinguistic variation. The basic principle of language style is that an individual speaker does not always talk in the same way on all occasions. Style means that speakers have alternatives or choices — a ‘that way’ which could have been chosen instead of a ‘this way’. Speakers talk in different ways in different situations, and these different ways of speaking can carry different social meanings.
2,116 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1984
TL;DR: In this paper, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members, and it is shown that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation.
Abstract: In this book, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice, a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations, such as topical structures, storytelling, argumentation, local semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover, it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.
427 citations
TL;DR: This article found that the more organized discourse types of comparison, problem/solution, and causation were predicted to yield superior recall of information than when this same information was cast as a collection of descriptions about a topic.
Abstract: Discourse can be organized in different ways; four of these ways are comparison, problem/solution, causation, and a collection of descriptions. These four discourse types correspond to schemata that vary in their organizational components; these differences were expected to result in differences in processing text. The more organized discourse types of comparison, problem/solution, and causation were predicted to yield superior recall of information than when this same information was cast as a collection of descriptions about a topic. The data from two studies support the hypothesized facilitation of the more organized types of discourse and have implications for understanding memory and writing instructional materials.
416 citations
TL;DR: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painfut adiustments as discussed by the authors, and very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress.
Abstract: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painfut adiustments. Ancient philosophies have ta be scrapped; old social institutions have fo disintegrate; bonds of casre, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with pro,qress have to have rheir expectations of a conlfortable life fiustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress. -United Nations, Department of Economic Affairs, Memures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries, May 19S1
397 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This paper examined the extent to which seven forms of language were perceived as powerful and effective when used by an interviewee in a hypothetical job interview and found that respondents made rather fine discriminations among powerful and powerless language forms, that these discriminations were quite stable, and that some ostensibly powerless forms were judged to be relatively powerful in fact.
Abstract: Two studies are reported. The first study examined the extent to which seven forms of language were perceived as powerful and effective when used by an interviewee in a hypothetical job interview. Results suggested a five‐level model of linguistic power and effectiveness, which is independent of communicator sex. The second study examined the same seven linguistic features but in this case two dissimilar intentions were attributed to the interviewee: desire to appear sociable versus desire to appear authoritative. Results indicated that power of style interacted with communicator intention, qualifying to an extent the five‐level model suggested by Study 7. Again, effects were independent of communicator sex. Results of both studies showed that respondents made rather fine discriminations among powerful and powerless language forms, that these discriminations were quite stable, and that some ostensibly powerless forms were judged to be relatively powerful in fact.
146 citations
136 citations
TL;DR: The birth of molecular biology: An essay in the rhetorical criticism of scientific discourse is given in this paper, where it is described as "the birth of a new class of discourse".
Abstract: (1984). The birth of molecular biology: An essay in the rhetorical criticism of scientific discourse. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 70-83.
81 citations
01 Aug 1984
78 citations
TL;DR: This paper studied how several levels of discourse work together to create a story, focusing on informational, sentential, textual, and conversational structure, each of which plays a role in more than one functional domain.
Abstract: Analysts of oral narrative are forced to face the problem ofhow what is said both conveys a meaning and accomplishes an action. This paper demomtrates by the micro-analysis of a single convenational narrative how several levels of discourse work together to create a story. Four questions are addressed: How is the story opened? How is the point ofthe story made? How does the story perform an action within a social interaction? How is the story closed? Their answers require attention to informational, sentential, textual, and conversational structure, each of which plays a role in more than one functional domain. Implications of the analysis for the study of other discourse genres is considered.
TL;DR: Pellegini et al. as mentioned in this paper tested Halliday's model of context/text relations and how these relations varied across the elementary school years, and found that text varied as a function of discourse context.
Abstract: PELLEGRINI, A. D.; GALDA, LEE; and RUBIN, DONALD L. Context in Text: The Development of Oral and Written Language in Two Genres. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1549-1555. The intent of the study was to test Halliday's model of context/text relations and how these relations varied across the elementary school years. Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to produce messages in narrative and persuasive genres, in both the oral and written channels. Their texts were analyzed in terms of elements of linguistic cohesion and length of clausal themes. Significant multivariate effects on these measures were obtained for grade, channel, genre, channel x genre, and grade x channel. These results generally support the predicted effects for this model of discourse production: Text varied as a function of discourse context. Predicted age effects were partially supported. These results are significant in that they document age-related features of text production: organization of text with causal conjunctions improves across the elementary school years; the production of grammatically cohesive text improves through third grade. Furthermore, the data support previous research suggesting that oral text is less explicit than written text.
TL;DR: The authors found that most of this work is predicated on a single (perhaps even curious) assumption: that all discourse, of which L2 discourse is taken as a subcategory, is intended by its speakers to be informative to some interlocutor (i.e., transmits a message via an acoustic or graphic conduit).
Abstract: While the recent explosion of work on L2 discourse has provided researchers with a mass of data on the development of communicative abilities, we find that most of this work is predicated on a single (perhaps even curious) assumption: that all discourse, of which L2 discourse is taken as a subcategory, is intended by its speakers to be informative to some interlocutor (i.e., transmits a message via an acoustic or graphic conduit) and that the production of discourse entails the formulation of strategies on the part of speakers in order to maximize this transmission of data. That discourse is not communicative (i.e., sending and receiving information) by nature has, in fact, been long known, but overlooked, especially in L2 research. Malinowski pointed out as early as 1935 that:Language is an activity the function of which is not an expression of thought or communication of ideas … the neglect of the obvious has often been fatal to the development of scientific thought. The false conception of language as a means of transferring ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener has, in my opinion, largely vitiated the philological approach to language (Malinowski, 1935, 9).
TL;DR: The authors investigated the interaction between the application of communicative strategies and narrative discourse features in a learner of Moroccan Arabic as a second language over a four-week period during daily conversation sessions in the target language.
Abstract: Research in second language learners’communicative strategies has provided an elaborate framework for analyzing how learners manage to convey meanings and messages in spite of their limited "knowledge" of the target language. Many studies (e.g., Faerch and Kasper 1983) have dealt with the identification and classification of communicative strategies (CSs). This paper investigates a new aspect of the use of CSs: the interaction between the application of CSs and narrative discourse features.
Twelve narratives were collected from a learner of Moroccan Arabic as a second language over a four-week period during daily conversation sessions in the target language. The analysis of the data draws upon research in narrative discourse (e.g., Labov 1972) and language learners’CSs (e.g., Tarone 1980; Faerch and Kasper 1983). The study suggests that the subject resorted to a number of strategies to compensate for her linguistic deficiencies and that the application of these strategies was not random but constrained by narrative discourse features. The limitations of this study are discussed and suggestions for further research made.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This paper reviewed the present status of the categories developed by the Writing Research Unit at the University of London for classifying discourse function, focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of spectator role and the implications of the spectator/participant distinction for research and practice.
Abstract: This article reviews the present status of the categories developed by the Writing Research Unit at the University of London for classifying discourse function. Special attention is given to the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of spectator role, and to the implications of the spectator/participant distinction for research and practice. In a public lecture at the University of London Institute of Education in 1962 I suggested that, whereas most uses of language represent ways of participating in the world's affairs, there exists a particular use in which we stand aside and speak as spectators of events as for example when we go home in the evening and recount the experiences of our day. In such a case, both speaker and listener are in the role of spectator, contemplating a reconstruction of events. By extension, we may contemplate imagined events when we tell or hear, write or read, a fictional story, or when in our day-dreaming we construct an imaginary future for ourselves. My intention in putting forward this notion of a spectator role was to find an everyday, informal counterpart for the specialized formal discourse we know as literature and so to create a link between what poets and novelists do and what ordinary mortals and school children can achieve. Four years later, in 1966, the Writing Research Unit was established under my direction at the London Institute of Education, and this distinction between participant and spectator uses of language became the basis of a set of categories classifying discourse by function. To examine these categories, we might begin with a simple exercise in compare and contrast. Let us take on the one hand a verbal transaction and on the other a verbal object. There is nothing figurative in the term "verbal transaction"; it takes the words in their simple literal sense: in the Oxford School Dictionary a transaction is defined as "a piece of business." On the one hand, then, a verbal transaction, and on the other a verbal object: an artifact, something we make with words. In terms of our tacit understanding, I believe the distinction between do and make in this context is deeply ingrained. I go back to the example of a young child's verbal behavior: Clare, at the age of almost three, could do a number of things with language particularly she could ask questions, make demands, and issue requests. But from time to time she indulged in a different form of speechResearch in the Teaching of English, Vol. 18, No. 3, October 1984
01 Mar 1984
TL;DR: The suggestion that teaching ESL writers about the top-level rhetorical organization of expository text, teaching them how to choose the appropriate plan to accomplish specific communication goals, and teaching themHow to signal a text's organization through appropriate linguistic devices should all function to make ES1 writing more effective.
Abstract: This paper discusses some recent theoretical advances intext analysis' and'i reading comprehension research---research from the perspective of. wrtten text as communicative interaction---and suggests some implications of these research findings for a related domain of textual interaction, namely ESL composition. Specifically, the paper reviews Meyer's (1975, 1977, 1982, Meyer, Brandt, and Bluth 1980, Meyer and Rice 1982, Meyer and Freedle 1984) empirical findings of reading research which appear to have direct implications for ESL composition and instruction in ESL composition. These implications include the suggestion that teaching ESL writers about the top-level rhetorical organization of expository text, teaching them how to choose the appropriate plan to accomplish specific communication goals, and teaching them how to signal a text's organization through appropriate linguistic devices should all function to make ES1 writing more effective. 0 TEXT AS INTERACTION: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF TEXT ANALYSIS AND READ r :ARCH
TL;DR: The authors compared the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of ESL and found that learners exhibit one universal discourse strategy in retreating to a more pragmatic mode of communication under the severe communicative stress of on-line description, as revealed through the systematic loss of the coding relations between foreground-background information and clause independence/tense-aspect.
Abstract: This paper compares the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of ESL. Fifteen native speakers and thirty-five advanced learners produced on-line (play-by-play) descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. A methodology for the quantitative analysis of discourse production is described which permits the explicit identification of foreground-background information and its interaction with both native speaker and interlanguage syntaxes. Results show that: (1) Native speakers and learners exhibit one universal discourse strategy in retreating to a more pragmatic mode of communication under the severe communicative stress of on-line description, as revealed through the systematic loss of the coding relations ordinarily holding between foreground-background information and clause independence/tense-aspect; (2) Learners also exhibit a learner-specific general communication strategy in which significant events are described but nonsignificant events avoided.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: A critical review of recent psychological research on the role of imagery processes in prose comprehemion and memorization in adults and children can be found in this paper, where the effects of imagery have been studied by means of experiments which involve varying the imagery value of sentences in prose, instructing readers to form visual images while reading, adding illustrations to prose in order to aid readers' imagery, and comparing individuals who have different levels of imagery ability.
Abstract: This paper is a critical review of recent psychological research on the role of imagery processes in prose comprehemion and memorization in adults and children. The effects of imagery have been studied by means of experiments which involve varying the imagery value of sentences in prose, instructing readers to form visual images while reading, adding illustrations to prose in order to aid readers' imagery, and comparing individuals who have different levels of imagery ability. The results ofthese experiments are summarized and evaluated äs to their relevance to the general question of the role o f imagery in the cognitive processing of text.
Book•
01 Jan 1984
TL;DR: This dialogue game approach to the discourse analysis of the English interjection well aims at the formulation of rules which would be informative, systematic, systematic and adequate.
Abstract: This dialogue game approach to the discourse analysis of the English interjection well aims at the formulation of rules which would be informative (marking some contexts of use as more natural than others), systematic (applicable in a mechanical or at least in a non- ad hoc way), and adequate (showing putative competitors to be either false to fact, too narrow or too wide, or demonstrably equivalent).
TL;DR: In this article, the authors suggest that historians should attend more explicitly to the way in which their craft is exercised in compiling histories from the interpretative work of participants, and that this suggestion will be found to be most convincing by those readers who are led to scrutinize their own current and not yet fully interpreted historical or sociological material in the light of our discussion and who are thereby made more sensitive to the highly variable interpretative works performed by their subjects.
Abstract: is unsystematic and infrequently subjected to close examination, and it usually remains almost entirely hidden from the analyst and his audience. When we talked informally to historians about this, they often replied by referring to their own craft skills. One implication of this paper is that it may be necessary for historians to attend more explicitly to the way in which their craft is exercised in compiling histories from the interpretative work of participants. We believe that this suggestion will be found to be most convincing by those readers who are led to scrutinize their own current and not yet fully interpreted historical or sociological material in the light of our discussion and who are thereby made more sensitive to the highly variable interpretative work performed by their subjects. The pages above, then, are offered not as proving a case, but as identifying a series of issues worthy of consideration by historians as well as by sociologists of science. In summarizing the implications for sociology of material similar to that presented here, we have argued that sociologists should pay much more attention to the nature of scientists' discourse instead of trying, with but little success, to use that discourse as the empirical basis for their own supposedly definitive versions of what is going on in science. The conclusions of this paper suggest that a historian's account will remain merely one among many plausible accounts. We are not suggesting, of course, that historians should cease constructing their own historical accounts; but rather, that they should take up the supplementary goal of describing and documenting the various repertoires and interpretative devices used by participants and, perhaps, of trying to explain how different repertoires and devices come to be adopted in different social settings and in different historical periods.
TL;DR: This paper used discourse analytic studies and text comprehension studies to explore cognitive processes that occur during writing, and found that decisions regarding predicate relationships are central to sentence production, and some implications for a process model of writing are suggested.
Abstract: This article demonstrates the potential of discourse analysis for exploring cognitive processes that occur during writing. Discourse analytic studies and text comprehension studies are reviewed for their contribution to a cognitive process view of writing. Research is reported which combines discourse analysis with on-line pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. Results indicate that decisions regarding predicate relationships are central to sentence production. Some implications for a process model of writing are suggested.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply the theme dynamics model to British legal texts, each of which represents one particular genre: a will, a deed, a contract, a court order, and a Statute.
Abstract: Although to a lay person legal texts are notoriously difficult to read, some semblance ofordermay befound, especially in the thematic structure ofsuch texts. Thematic structure here coincides with what has been called in the literature 'thematic progression' or 'theme dynamics\\ and refers to the cohesive link sei up by the themes — the initial element or elements — of the component sentences of a text. The predominant type of thematic progression in legal texts involves the hypertheme of the particular text, which is derived from two sources: the sei of expectations produced by the specific genre of text, and the title ofthe text, if there is one. This model is applied to flve British legal texts, each of which represents one particular genre: a will, a deed, a contract, a court order, and a Statute. Since the texts do have a cohesive structure, äs shown by the analysis, it is suggested that other factors lead to difficulties in reading, such äs technical vocabulary and the length of clause andphrase elements.
Book•
01 Jan 1984
TL;DR: In this article, three studies of children's conversations during peer learning were presented, focusing on the structure and process in children's Conversational Development, including the structure of conversation, the structure in the conversation of young children, and the development of narrative skills.
Abstract: 1 Implications of Ethology for the Study of Pragmatic Development.- Ethology.- Etiological Methods and Pragmatics.- The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Pragmatic Behaviors.- The Functional Significance of Pragmatic Behaviors.- Conclusions.- References.- 2 Answering Appropriately: A Developmental Perspective on Conversational Knowledge.- The Nature of Early Contingent Responding.- Toward an Understanding of Responses to Speech Acts by Both Children and Adults.- Further Considerations.- Summary.- References.- 3 Structure and Process in Children's Conversational Development.- The Structure of Conversation.- Structure in the Conversation of Young Children.- Applied Discourse Analysis.- Appendix A.- Appendix B.- References.- 4 Skill in Peer Learning Discourse: What Develops?.- What Is a Peer?.- What Is Peer Learning?.- Issues for the Study of Peer Learning Discourse.- Constraints on Children's Effectiveness.- Research Evidence: Three Studies of Children's Discourse During Peer Learning.- Summary and Conclusions.- References.- 5 The Development of Narrative Skills: Explanations and Entertainments.- The Content of Children's Stories.- The Plots of Children's Stories.- Causes and Consequences in Children's Stories.- Conclusions.- References.- 6 Of Hawks and Moozes: The Fantasy Narratives Produced by a Young Child.- Method.- Results and Discussion.- Summary and Conclusions.- References.- 7 Children's Deictic Reference: The Role of Space and Animacy.- Simple Comprehension and Production Studies.- Results-Comprehension Study.- Production Study.- Discussion.- A More Complex Descriptive Task: The Doll's House.- The Language Used While Conducting the Tour.- General Discussion.- Conclusion.- References.- 8 Discourse Development in Atypical Language Learners.- Description of the Language-Impaired Population.- Current Level of Knowledge Concerning Discourse Development in Atypical Language Learners.- Analyzing Discourse Skills in Atypical Populations: Segmentation of the Verbal/Nonverbal Stream.- Future Research Directions.- References.- Author Index.