The Grammar of Discourse

The Second Edition of The Grammar of Discourse critically evaluates and updates Robert E. Longacre’s ambitious work dedicated to the thesis that language is language only in context, and that context’s natural role in the resolution of sentence ambiguities has been overlooked for too long by linguists. This new edition advances even further the `discourse revolution’ which Longacre predicted in the First Edition would come in response to the demand for greater explanatory power through context. The most cogent application of this, one which makes the book unique among linguistics texts, is the author’s exhaustive investigation into the interface of the morphosyntax of a language with its textual structures. This expanded volume builds upon its predecessor’s major points, with new chapters increasing the coverage of paragraph and clause structure-the latter being handled in a new chapter which solves a problem posed in the original edition: how holistic concerns of structure, especially the recognition of different strands of information, relate to the constituent structure of discourse. The insights contained in this chapter create an opportunity to tie in current discussions of transitivity, ergativity, the antipassive, agency hierarchy, order-preserving transformations, and word-order concerns into the structure of discourse.Other noteworthy features of the Second Edition include: The integration of information salience, local dominance, and paragraph type to answer the question `What makes a discourse followable ?’ -A study of dialogue relations-The formalization of the interrelations of tagmeme and syntagmeme, and of the varieties of exponence on the various levels of hierarchy-The use of an expanded and enriched statement calculus to better pinpoint logical relations between predications-The use of a similarly enriched predicate calculus to present case frames-A stepped diagram presentation of paragraph level analyses.> With material tested in classes at the University of Texas, Arlington, this influential work merits serious consideration as a text for first-year graduate courses in linguistics.