In men with coronary artery disease who were at high risk for cardiovascular events, intensive lipid-lowering therapy reduced the frequency of progression of coronary lesions, increased the frequency of regression, and reduced the incidence of cardiovascular events.

TEACHING THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE This paper falls into two sections. In the first section I shall make some remarks about spoken language which I shall then make use of in the second section. The second section addresses the problems of what it might mean to teach and to assess the communicative competence of adolescent native speakers of a language. YULE, G. and SMITH, H.

Objective-We examined the effects of simvastatin-niacin and antioxidant vitamins on changes in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) subpopulations and alterations in coronary artery stenosis, as assessed by angiography. Methods and Results-Lipids, lipoproteins, and HDL particles were measured on and off treatment in 123 subjects of the HDL-Atherosclerosis Treatment Study. Patients were assigned to 4 treatment groups, simvastatin-niacin, simvastatinniacin-antioxidant vitamins, antioxidant vitamins, and placebo. Subjects were followed for 3 years on treatment and then for 2 months off treatment. Simvastatin-niacin significantly increased the 2 large apoA-I-containing HDL subpopulations, ␣ 1 and pre␣ 1 , and significantly decreased the 2 smallest particles, pre␤ 1 and ␣ 3 , compared with values obtained from the same patients off treatment. Adding antioxidant vitamins to the lipid-modifying agents blunted these effects (not significant). A significant negative correlation (rϭϪ0.235; PϽ0.01) between the changes in ␣ 1 HDL particle concentration and coronary artery stenosis was noted. Subjects in the third tertile (157% increase in ␣ 1 ) had no progression of stenosis in the 3-year follow-up period, whereas subjects in the first tertile (15% decrease in ␣ 1 ) had an average of 2.1% increase in stenosis. Conclusions-Simvastatin-niacin therapy significantly increased the large apoA-I-containing ␣ 1 HDL particles. This increase was significantly associated with less progression of coronary stenosis even after adjusting for traditional risk factors.

6.1 The Given/New Distinction Over the last 15 years, since Holiday drew the attention of scholars in the West to the Prague School division of information within an information unit into given or new information, a considerable literature has developed. This literature has now largely obscured the phenomenon to which Halliday [1967 a] sought to draw attention. The aim of this contribution is to reassert Halliday's basic distinction, to outline briefly how it relates to ihe plethora of other diMmi'tinns which have »ince been made in the literature, and to demonstrate from a limited corpus of data lha distinctions must be invoked to account for tion in that data, Halliday's preoccupation through a se 1970] was to account for (he way in which in to information structure. His account relate Halliday's simple dichotomous he range of international realisa-les of articles [1963, 1967a, b, inalion in British English relates exclusively to information structure in spoken language, and the fundamental categories which signal information structure are phonological (with an auxiliary, but never overriding, syntactic contribution). He identifies the unit of information as the lone group, i.e. a unit which is inlonalionally defined [Haliiday. 1967a. p. 200). According to his classification the speaker must include in every tone group a chunk of new information, which will be phonologically marked by the tonic pitch movement. The speaker may optionally include one or more chunks of given information, which will not be phonologically marked by pitch prominence. It is important to note that in Halliday's account, the assignment of given/new status to information is determined by the speaker, not by the text. Furthermore, whereas Halliday does find some correlation between clause and tone group in the data on which he bases his analytic framework [1967 a, p. 201], in that there is a tendency for the lone group to be co-extensive with the clause, this is merely a tendency, not a requirement on the speaker. It certainly does not follow that long, often complex, written sentences will contain the type of simple information structure associated with tone groups in spoken language (cf. the problems encountered by Prince [1981] in trying to analyse complex expository prose in terms of an analysis developed for the typically short tone-group structures found in spoken language). In Halli-day's terms then, tite unit of information, the tone group, is phonologically