Speech Communication

This study focuses on four major speeches of the final five months of the Gorbachev era. Three are concerned with the putsch of August 1991, and one is concerned with the December 1991 resignation. First the three major speeches given by Gorbachev immediately following the putsch are analyzed using the components of crisis rhetoric. Next the resignation speech is examined using the concepts found in apologia rhetoric. Finally, based on these four speeches, interrelationships between the two rhetorical forms are attempted using clues found within the actual rhetoric.

Structural hierarchies are deeply embedded in institutions such as our educational system. It can be argued that this type of model reinforces an aggressive worldview and fosters an atmosphere of violence. Teaching students to communicate compassionately should promote empathy, discourage verbal aggression and reinforce a more peaceful worldview. To accomplish this, educators need a means of replacing hegemony that assumes hierarchy and aggressive conflict are inevitable. Marshall Rosenberg's (2001) Nonviolent Communication (NVC) may provide educators with an appropriate tool. Rosenberg's model counters the prevailing hegemony making it an ideal candidate to explore in relation to these issues. This paper examines the impact of adding an NVC workshop to two types of communication courses and whether Rosenberg's model would be a useful addition to a college curriculum.

Nine journal articles were analyzed in order to understand gendered composition and what makes writing an article feminine and what makes it masculine. The journals reviewed were Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Human Communication Research, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Women Studies in Communication. Categories were compiled to include the characteristics of a feminine style in feminist research, and a masculine style in traditional research. This analysis takes a rhetorical approach in order to address a more gender diverse perspective in research. As a result of many published articles reflecting a theme of a "dominant masculinist paradigm" in the publication process, this study examines some of the reasons why feminist scholarship in communication struggles for acceptance.

Social representations consist of beliefs, values and norms that influence thought and behavior. Moscovici's Social Representation Theory provides an explanation for how social representations are formed, mutate, and survive, while Dynamic Social Impact Theory provides a framework by which to examine the emergence of macro-social phenomena from everyday communication (i.e., clustering, consolidation and continued diversity). Previous research has not examined, but has assumed, the processes by which social representations of aggression develop. The purpose of the present study was to examine social representations (SRs) of direct and indirect aggression and the process by which SRs emerge from interpersonal communication. Specifically, participants were randomly assigned to fixed addresses in an electronic social space and communicated with four of their nearest neighbors, for four weeks about direct and indirect verbal aggression. In the present study, most people agreed about the aggressiveness of direct responses whereas judgments about indirect responses were relatively varied.

This project comprises a series of experiments investigating the role of prosody--the timing and intonation of an utterance--in syntactic disambiguation. Acoustic analyses isolated two parameters--main-clause verb segment and pause durations, and the pitch contour over the verb and the following phrase--that reliably predicted syntactic structure in two sets of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The manipulation of one of these parameters--verb and pause duration--resulted in increased processing load over the disambiguating region of sentences temporarily ambiguous between a direct object and an embedded clause syntactic structure (e.g., "John knew the answer by heart" vs. "John knew the answer was correct"). Also, differences in the prosodic contours associated with temporarily ambiguous "filler-gap" sentences determined whether or not a gap was posited during on-line sentence processing. These findings suggest that prosodic information is used early, perhaps immediately, to make informed on-line parsing decisions and support a model of sentence processing in which both lexical and prosodic information interact on-line to generate the syntactic representation of an utterance.