I employ spoken and written discourse and extended excerpts from teleconferences between local, state, and federal officials in the midst of Hurricane Katrina to examine the term coordination as one powerful way of accounting for and pragmatically (re)constructing weather in crisis discourse. By means of discourse analysis, I find that the indexical term coordination is part of a metadiscursive vocabulary of disaster, and that, though it performs important social functions in the communication of accountability, authority, and redress, it has very little to do with communicating about weather itself. My conclusion presses for a discursive approach as a means of recovering and understanding social ontologies like weather and the way we materially organize around themes what Latour refers to “matters of concern.” Relevance: It analyzes how notions of weather and disaster are constructed in language.

The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according to their behavior in strings of the type “John is easy to please,"“John is eager to please,"“John is likely to please,” etc. It is suggested that the members of a least some of these classes show common semantic features that could be used to obtain intensional definitions which would theoretically confirm the empirically derived extensional definitions supplied by correlational grammar.

Key words: Adjectives, Discourse Analysis, English, Grammar, Kernel Sentences, Phrase Structure, Semantics, Sentence Structure, Structural Analysis, Structural Grammar, Syntax

This paper explores how discourse analysis can benefit from the main tenets of complexity theory: including its holistic (or systemic) perspective in the research of any object, always in relation to its emergency conditions; and transdisciplinarity as methodology. If applied to the study of discourse, it revitalizes ethnography as an empirical methodology, constructivism as a theoretical starting position, and the integration of discourse analysis with rhetoric, argumentation theory and semiotics, among other disciplines.

Despite their diversity, constructivist and social constructionist methods share a common concern with revealing the personal or ‘local’ meanings that characterize an individual or group, and strive for pragmatic utility rather than objective veracity in the usual sense. To exemplify this approach, this article reviews representative constructivist methods, including repertory grid technique, the coding of narrative processes, discourse analysis of public rhetoric, and focus group methodology. Each is shown to have broad applicability and special relevance for research and practice in psychotherapy.

Key words: constructivism, deconstruction, discourse, ethnodrama, epistemology, focus group, innovative moments, narrative, personal construct theory, psychotherapy, repertory grid, social constructionism.

This article reports a study that examined the discourse of a staff development process designed to help teachers examine their beliefs and practical reasoning, and introduce them to new premises and practices based on current research. The discourse analysis was designed to shed light on the agenda-setting dilemma faced by educators who attempt to develop constructivist environments while introducing new content. The study suggests that the dilemma, in this case, existed at the beginning of the process but not at the end; and was affected by school context.