William Frawley University of Delaware Numerous years earlier, I performed a sort of perverse experiment. I showed, to several linguistic coworkers, the following comment made by Walker Percy (in The Message in the Bottle): language is too essential a problem to be left just to linguists. The linguists’ reactions were peculiarly foreseeable: “What does Percy know? He’s a mercenary outsider, a novelist, a psychiatrist! How can he say something like that?” Now, it must be known that the linguists who said such things in reaction were ardent followers of the linguistic style: to cross disciplines at impulse for the sake of explanation– any description. It was odd, to state the least: Percy was damned by the very people who concurred with him! The papers in this book, though radically interdisciplinary, do not fall prey to the kind of hypocrisy explained above. The papers (from the Third Delaware Seminar on Language Research studies) attend to the concern of literacy– a linguistic issue too important to be left just to linguists– however much of the authors are not linguists at all, and those who are linguists have actually taken the care to see beyond the parochialism of a single discipline. The subsequent papers have been composed by psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, computer researchers, and language instructors to explain the problem of how people establish, comprehend, and produce extended pieces of informa tion (discourses and texts).
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