Overview

This collection reviews 20 years of research into Spoken Discourse by the Birmingham group, allowing, for the first time, a developmental perspective. It combines previously published but unavailable work with new research.

Theoretical Framework

Bringing together recent theories of discourse structure, with a new and detailed analytic framework, the book emphasises both historical context and new developments.

Content and Applications

The articles are comprehensive, ranging from the theoretical to the highly applied. Practical applications include language teaching, literary stylistics and forensic linguistics with examples taken from literature and language classrooms, telephone conversations, disputed witness statements and corpuses of spoken English.