Considering the immense difficulty of the English language to Japanese students, the ability of some of my boys to express their thoughts in it is astonishing. Their compositions have also another interest for me as revelations, not of individual character, but of national sentiment, or of aggregate sentiment of some sort or other. What seems to me most surprising in the compositions of the average Japanese student is that they have no personal cachet at all (Hearn n.d.:31).

This essay discusses some of the contrasts which can be drawn between written discourse in English and the forms of written language discourse associated with members of American Indian speech communities. I word my reference to the second member of this pairing very cautiously. If contrasts of this sort are to be made with standard English discourse as used outside those communities, then several “Indian-related” discourse forms need to be considered.

The past decade has witnessed intensive activity in Textlinguistik (discourse analysis) among German linguists (cf., Kallmeyer and Meyer–Herrmann 1980). This, of course, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Such basic works on German syntax as Drach (1940) and Boost (1964) paid attention to relationships between sentences within discourse and/or their impact on word order.

This study provides a fragment of a contrastive analysis of written texts from Hindi and English. Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language used in South Asia in several varieties by approximately three hundred million people. It is one of the four major world language in terms of number of speakers. In this study, I present a number of sample texts from Hindi, both of the narrative and the expository kind, and discuss them in the theoretical frameworks of contemporary discourse analysis.

The contrastive study of Japanese and English discourse structures may be divided into two major areas of inquiry. The first of these areas concerns grammatical studies which examine cohesive ties, word order constraints, and sociolinguistic variations (Hinds 1982b, Kuno 1978, Makino 1978a). The second of these areas concerns specific or implied contrasts between organizational parameters which shape the overall form of discourse. Following Longacre (1976), it is possible to differentiate, minimally, among four discourse types: expository, narrative, procedural, and hortatory.

Linguistics, applied or non–, is a flourishing academic enterprise in Korea, when viewed from the quantitative perspective, especially in terms of the number of its practitioners and the scale of its actitvities in recent years. After a cursory sketch of some typological features of Korean discourse (Section 2), I will first present an overview of contrastive studies in Korean and English in recent years (1980–1982) (Section 3), and then I will discuss some aspects of written discourse in contrastive terms, making some suggestion for further research in related areas (Section 4).

For centuries linguists in theoretical linguistics and contrastive analysis have confined themselves to the sentence boundary. This selfimposed restriction is, no doubt, the result of the view, sustained since classical times, that language is a self-contained system, a mechanism for producing and comprehending sentences. The study of discourse was, untill recently, left to scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism who were interested in language.

The goal of this paper is to compare and contrast some discourse features of English and Marathi. The paper is divided into four parts. The introductory sections review the main theoretical approaches for discourse analysis in general and discourse in South Asian languages in particular. Some of these insights are later used in this study. The first sections of part 2 point out the role of sociocultural differences in the discourse patterns of English and Marathi. The second section of part 2 focuses on the differences in the morphological and syntactic patterns which are used as discourse strategies in Marathi and English.

About seventeen years ago when my eldest daughter was a student in the third grade of elementary school, she came home one day with a grade of “D” on an English assignment. Because I have been, in part at least, a language teacher most of my adult life, and because my daughter was a particularly verbal child, I was a bit distressed at the grade. I looked over her paper and was unable, in my ignorance, to detect what in it had induced her teacher to give her a grad of “D”.