For successful written communication, the writer not only must engage the readers’ attention but also must sustain their interest till the end whatever the length of the communication. The subject of the communication, the information or the propositional content alone, cannot hold the reader’s attention for long. A writer’s success depends not only on what is being conveyed but also on how wel...

According to situated cognition theory, cognitive accomplishments rely in part on structures and processes outside the individual. This article argues that interactional structures particularly those created through language use can make essential contributions to situated cognition in rational academic discourse. Most cognitive accomplishments rely in part on language, and language in use alwa...

One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The t...

AIM To document the prevalence of perturbations of handover meetings and understand how nurses manage temporal, physical and social meeting boundaries in response to perturbations. BACKGROUND Handovers are joint activities performed collaboratively by participating nurses. Perturbations of handover are frequent and may potentially threaten continuity of care. DESIGN We observed and videotap...

We present in this paper a set of concepts that extend a design method issued from the Software Engineering domain, in order to take into account Human-Computer Interaction design, in particular for Augmented Reality systems. Previous works focused on the initial phases of development (i.e., Specification phases). Our efforts concentrate on the Analysis phase, into which we have introduced a ne...

This paper looks at the discursive and interactional structures to be found in male toilet graffiti at a British university. Traditionally, toilet graffiti has been discussed in terms of thematic content and the possible psychological and socioanthropological impacts on it. By contrast, this study draws on work in conversation analysis and discourse studies to investigate patterns of interactio...

Speech is multifunctional, both communicating denotational content and establishing interactional positions for interlocu-tors. In some cases, the denotational and interactional func-tions of speech interrelate and even depend on each other. This paper describes a type of speech event in which the interrela-tions between denotation and interaction are particularly sali-ent—autobiographical narr...

with regard to the relationship between the use of modality and readability levels oftexts, 2 opposing views have been raised. the first view endorses direct positiverelationship between modality and readability in the sense that the use of modalityincreases textual understandability. the second view is that the use of modality leadsto an increase in the number of words, resulting in readabilit...