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The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the economic impacts and benefits of Florida public libraries. The study objectives were to: describe the role of public libraries in economic development; identify and describe the range of specific activities and programs engaged in to support economic development; identify factors that contribute to the success of involvement in economic development; propose a study, based on findings reported here, to measure specific return on investment from public libraries; and offer recommendations and strategies for how public libraries in Florida might be more effective in supporting economic development. Data collection efforts involved a multi-method approach consisting of a literature review, focus groups, a financial analysis of Florida public libraries, a statewide sample survey of public library patrons, a survey of library directors and ranch managers, librarian service logs, and group interviews. Results indicate that patrons believe that public libraries contribute to their financial well being, provide economic benefits to local businesses, and support the prosperity of the community. Participants described numerous instances where economic benefits and impacts resulted from a range of public library services and programs. This study provides an important first step in documenting those impacts, describing programs and services that support economic development, and offering strategies that policymakers and the library community might use to enhance this service role. Appendices contain service logs; patron survey; directors/managers survey; group interview questions guide; group interview survey; economic benefit survey with estimated tax statement; and economic benefit survey without estimated tax statement. (Includes 72 tables and figures. Contains 39 references.) (AEF)

A study demonstrated that court interpreter failure to preserve pragmatic features in the interpreted version of courtroom testimony can potentially distort both the lawyer's question and the witness' response. Pragmatic features are defined as those aspects of an utterance that signal how the speaker intends the message to be taken. While some of the alterations made in translation are relatively trivial, others are serious and may critically influence the jury's assessment of whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. Data were drawn from court colloquies involving English-speaking attorneys and Spanish-speaking witnesses, using audio and videotapes from four trials. Focus of the analysis is on alterations to pragmatic markers, words or phrases that modify the basic message or signal a separate one. Results indicate that addition of pragmatic markers and features to witness answers can make the witness appear less confident of the testimony. When the witness is the defendant, the situation is potentially more critical. In contrast, deleting these same features from a witness response removes disfluencies, making the witness or defendant appear more confident, and he/she may be potentially perceived more favorably by the jury. (MSE)

This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of markers does not affect sentence grammaticality, it does remove a powerful clue about the speaker's perception of the relationship between prior and subsequent discourse. Each discourse marker may appear in a sentence-initial position; some may occur in sentence-medial or sentence-final position; however, in the latter cases, a change in marker scope occurs. Each discourse marker has an associated core meaning, part of which signals type of sequential relationship (e.g., change of topic, parallelism, etc.) and part of which provides the starting point for interpretation of the commentary message in a given case. Three types of discourse markers are examined: those signalling reference to the discourse topic; those signalling that current discourse activity relates to the foregoing discourse; and those signalling relationship of the basic current message to some prior message. Based on this conceptual framework, analysis of discourse markers in other languages in encouraged. (MSE)