Techniques of Description - Spoken and Written Discourse

Written as a tribute to Malcolm Coulthard, a leading figure in studies of discourse, Techniques of Description is a collection of specially commissioned, state-of-the-art essays by leading international linguists.
All the papers share certain assumptions about language study: that descriptions should be data-based, data-tested, and replicable. The collection contains original and important research on descriptions, with intriguing applications to forensic, gender and literary studies. It will be invaluable for scholars of English language and discourse studies.

Corpus and Context - Investigating Pragmatic Functions in Spoken Discourse

"Corpus and Context" explores the relationship between corpus linguistics and pragmatics by discussing possible frameworks for analysing utterance function on the basis of spoken corpora. The book articulates the challenges and opportunities associated with a change of focus in corpus research, from lexical to functional units, from concordance lines to extended stretches of discourse, and from the purely textual to multi-modal analysis of spoken corpus data.

Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

This book develops David Brazil's pioneering work on the grammar of spoken discourse, testing theory against a corpus. David Brazil's work on the grammar of spoken discourse ended at A Grammar Of Speech (1995) due to his untimely death. Gerard O'Grady picks up the baton in this book and tests the description of used language against a conversational corpus.

Discourse Markers in Native And Non-native English Discourse

While discourse markers have been examined in some detail, little is known about their usage by non-native speakers. This book provides valuable insights into the functions of four discourse markers (so, well, you know and like) in native and non-native English discourse, adding to both discourse marker literature and to studies in the pragmatics of learner language. It presents a thorough analysis on the basis of a substantial parallel corpus of spoken language. In this corpus, American students who are native speakers of English and German non-native speakers of English retell and discuss a silent movie.

Reported Discourse - A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains

The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions.