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Three papers, based on a study done with 160 Wisconsin fourth- and sixth-graders, are presented in an attempt to contribute to the psycholinguistic information needed in developing elementary English language learning programs. The first paper, "A Linguistic Ability Test for Elementary Grades," discusses a written test made up of 15 linguistic tasks which measure linguistic ability objectively and relate these to written discourse. The second paper compares and analyzes differences in discourse when children are asked to respond to pictorial stimuli ranked from concrete to abstract and are given preliminary instructions which vary. The third paper, based on the writing samples obtained from the pictorial-stimuli situation, describes the lexical and syntactic linguistic deviations made by the subjects. The data and linguistic variables are tabulated in the appendix. (JM)

This paper argues that the most appropriate books for elementary education are those that are the best that children can learn to read. The author suggests that many schools have problems teaching students to enjoy reading because the teachers too often attempt to teach from inferior school texts rather than from books that are worthy of study that is, books which are worth re-reading and which inspire reflective thought, within a course of study that should be enjoyable in itself. The author states that too often school textbooks cheapen and sully the students' learning, that only an education based on the great books provides the substance of a real education. Schoolbook culture, it is contended, offers no valid entry into the real world because it too often excludes the study of serious works of literary art. A genuine education would not only expose children at an early age to the great books but it would also treat writing as an art rather than as a set of mechanical skills to be mastered. (Author/DI)

The purpose of this study was to determine statistically significant linguistic features of oral and written discourse rated quite high or low by teachers, and to make recommendations based on these findings to supplement existing guidelines for teaching composition. Fifty-five paired oral (tape-recorded) and written compositions were elicited under uniform stimulus conditions from a homogeneous group of 11th-grade students. The compositions were rated on a 1-7 scale by three teachers according to organization, use of conventions, critical thinking, effectiveness, and appropriateness. A frequency count of 35 linguistic items was made for each composition sample rated among the 10 highest or 10 lowest by each teachers. An analysis of the differences among these compositions revealed that (1) teachers rated oral and written discourse equally, (2) male students were rated as better speakers and female students as better writers, (3) students who spoke first did not receive higher ratings than those who wrote first, and (4) significant differences existed in oral and written usage of 8 of the 29 linguistic items frequently encountered among the high and low papers. The results of the research led to 14 recommendations for improving composition instruction. (JM)

Based on a paper presented June 23, 1969 at the Padagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg. (RS)

This study examines the basic question about the position of dicursivity with respect to language, arising from the axiomatic statements concerning linguistic sign, form and meaning as definition components of the structural conception of language. The book is divided into two sections: I. Axiomatics of Structural Linguistics, and II. Linguistics and Translinguistics. Topics discussed under Section I are: Language and Sign; Language and Form; and Language and Meaning. Section II deals with Language and Discourse. A 120 item bibliography is included. (Author/LS)

This paper offers an example of how connected discourse can be formally analyzed in such a way as to reveal something of its structure. The method used here was described in a previous paper, ‘Discourse Analysis’, Lg. 28 (1952), 1–30. It consists essentially of the following steps: given a particular text, we collect those linguistic elements (morphemes or sequences of morphemes) which have identical environments within a sentence, and we call these equivalent to each other; thus, if we find the sentences A F and B Fin our text, we write A=B and say that A is equivalent to B or that both are in the same equivalence class. We further collect those linguistic elements which have equivalent (rather than identical) environments, and we call these also equivalent to each other; if we find the sentences A F and B E, and if A=B (because B F occurs too), then F is secondarily equivalent to E, and we write F=E. (Note that in the sentence A F, A is the environment of F, and Fis the environment of A.) This operation enables us to collect many or all of the linguistic elements or sections of any particular text into a few equivalence classes. For example, if our text consists of the sentences1 A F: B E: C G: B F: M E: A G: N E: N G: M H, we set up two classes: one class to include A, B (because of A F and B F), C (because of A G and C G), M, and N (because of B E and M E and N E); the other class to include F, E (because of B F and B E), G (because of A F and A G), and H (because of M E and M H).2

This paper reports a comparative analysis of the news coverage of the 2011 Libyan civil war in two national media (China Daily and The New York Times). The 2011 Libyan civil war attracted wide attention and was extensively covered by various media around the world. However, news discourse regarding the war was constructed differently across various news agencies as a result of their clashing ideologies. Based on corpus linguistics methods, two small corpora with a total of 22,412 tokens were compiled and the comparative analyses of the two corpora revealed the following results. First, although the two corpora shared a lot of commonalities in word frequency, differences still exist in several high ranking lemmas. On the one hand, words such as “Qaddafi” and “war” ranked similarly in the two corpora’s lexical frequency lists; on the other hand, the frequencies of the lemma “rebel/rebels” were much higher in The New York Times corpus than in the China Daily corpus, which indicated that the image of the rebel received more attention in the reports by The New York Times than in those by China Daily. Second, although the word “Qaddafi” achieved similar frequencies in the two corpora, a follow-up collocation analysis showed that the images of “Qaddafi” contrasted with each other in the two corpora. In The New York Times corpus, the words and phrases collocating with “Qaddafi” were mainly negative descriptions and highlighted the pressure on Qaddafi whereas many neutral and even positive descriptions of Qaddafi appeared in the China Daily corpus. Based on these findings, the paper further discusses how discursive devices are applied in news coverage of warfare, as well as some methodological implications of the case study (Reprinted by Permission of Canadian Association for the Studies of Discourse and Writing).

Formal discourse analysis, hailed at one time by Martin Joos as ‘the most exciting thing that has happened in linguistics for quite a few years’ (1950:708), was the culmination of structural linguistics. The present paper shows that strict formalism, divorced from meaning, is not only impossible in discourse analysis but is unsuitable as a general linguistic methodology. The purpose of the paper is therefore primarily negative and a constructive proposal must await another occasion. The paper consists of two parts: (1) a survey of previous theories on formal discourse analysis and (2) a theoretical exposition of the untenability of formalism as linguistic methodology and the need for semantics.

This paper considers some small errors which occur in natural talk, treating them as matters of competence, both in the production of coherent speech and the conduct of meaningful interaction.Focusing on a rule-governed occurrence of the interjection ‘uh’, a format is described by which one can display that one is correcting an error one almost, but did not, produce. It is argued that there are systematic ways in which someone who hears such talk can find that an error was almost made and what that error would have been.Two broad classes of error are considered, both of which can be announced by and extracted from the occurrence of an error correction format. These are ‘production’ errors; i.e. a range of troubles one encounters in the attempt to produce coherent, grammatically correct speech, and ‘interactional’ errors; i.e. mistakes one might make in the attempt to speak appropriately to some co-participant(s) and/or within some situation.Focusing on interactional errors, it is proposed that the error correction format (and other formats for events other than error) can be used to invoke alternatives to some current formulation of self and other(s), situation and relationship, and thereby serve as a resource for negotiating and perhaps reformulating a current set of identities. (Conversational analysis, discourse devices (metalinguistic, attitudinal markers), U.S. English.)

The paper deals first with the epistemological status of content analysis going on later to outline a concept of discourse which would allow one to dispel the ambiguity surrounding this status. Finally, the author sketches the mechanism of automatic discourse analysis in accordance with these premises. Inheriting from its linguistic and literary origins, content analysis feels the need to tackle the problem of transmitting sense effects which linguistics has been unable to deal with since its constitution as an independent science. Reactions to this state of affairs range, on the one hand, from systematic ignorance displayed by linguistics in its use of classes of equivalence worked out from statistical counts and based upon arbitrary a priori classifications and, on the other, to the reintroduction of linguistic concepts with a literary bias. The author demonstrates that the two approaches have a common epistemological basis : An explicit or implicit assumption of homogoneity, based in this instance upon the unity of the human mind and upon the existence of a form of unity implying the homogeneity of the referent, i.e. society. However, as it is difficult to uphold an assumption of this kind in view of the heterogeneous character of reality, the author suggests that one introduces into content analysis a concept of discourse which can be defined as a sequence of variable dimension referred to the conditions which determined its production. Essentially, these conditions concern the properties of discourse relative to the place and position of both speaker and receiver. By place is meant those situations which are attributable to speakers using the prevailing mode of production in which they are capable of taking positions conjecturally. A theory of discourse of this kind eventually raises the problem of the syntactical relationship between what is as yet unasserted (but capable of being asserted) and the mechanisms of assertation. It also elaborates various laws enabling one to locate utterances or minimal parts. A technique for automatic analysis based on these principles would entail three phases : One would need to establish firstly a corpus of reference discourses of a similar type on the basis of a scientific examination of the circumstances of production : secondly one would need to make allowance for the influence of linguistics by constructing a «reconnaissance grammar-system» enabling one ultimately, by using transformational rules, to plot a graph of minimal utterances interrelated in such a way as to allow one to reconstruct the original discourse ; and lastly, one would need to evolve a method of systematic comparison which would apportion the sub-sequences in accordance with classes of equivalence, the definitions of which will emerge in the course of analysis., Pêcheux Michel. L'application des concepts de la linguistique à l'amélioration des techniques d'analyse de contenu [The application of the concepts of linguistics for the improvement of the techniques of content analysis]. In: Ethnies, volume 3, 1973. Linguistique et relations interethniques. pp. 101-118.

Among a multitude of study areas, discourse analysis has emerged as a fast-growing discipline because of growing interest of linguists in studying language in natural setting, as opposed to making analyses of artificially created sentences. A concentrated amount of work on discourse analysis in the past few decades has demonstrated that discourse in classrooms is highly organized and amenable to analysis. This paper is an attempt to make an analysis of such a naturally occurring classroom discourse based on Sinclair-Coulthard analysis model developed in 1975.This model has come as a significant contribution for those who are interested in the field of discourse analysis. The study suggests that there is use of a simple discourse pattern in Nepali higher secondary classes of English. Key words: Discourse analysis; Spoken discourse; Discourse structure; Exchange;Move Journal of NELTA Vol. 15 No. 1-2 December 2010 Page: 22-27 Uploaded date : 4 May, 2011 DOI: 10.3126/nelta.v15i1-2.4606