This study, first published in 1982, attempts to show that the foundations of a contextual grammar of English must be firmly based on an adequate definition of the sentence. This book will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

Written by respected researchers in their field, this book is about the skills beyond basic word recognition that are necessary for the processing and comprehension of spoken and written language. The major topics presented are as follows: language and text analysis; cognitive processing and comprehension; development of literacy; literacy and schooling; and, factors influencing listening and reading.

Studies in Language and Linguistics General Editors- Geoffrey Leech, Department of Modern English Language, Lancaster University and Jenny Thomas, School of English and Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor Broad-ranging and authoritative, Studies in Language and Linguistics is an occasional series incorporating major new work in all areas of linguistics. Variation in English- Multi-Dimensional Studies provides both a comprehensive view into a relatively new technique for studying language, and a diverse, exciting collection of studies of variation in English. The first part of the book provides an explanation of multi-dimensional (MD) analysis, a research technique for studying language variation. MD is a corpus-based approach developed by Doug Biber that facilitates large-scale studies of language variation and the investigation of research questions that were previously intractable. The second part of the book contains studies that apply Biber's original MD analysis of English to new domains. These studies cover the historical evolution of English; specialized domains such as medical writing and oral proficiency testing; and dialect variation, including gender and British/American. The third part of the book contains studies that conduct new MD analyses, covering adult/child language differences, 18th century speech and writing, and discourse complexity. Readers of this book will become familiar with the analytical techniques of multi-dimensional analysis, with its applicability to a wide variety of language issues, and with the findings of important studies previously published in diverse journals as well as new studies appearing for the first time.

This second volume in honour of Michael Halliday contains three sections: The Design of Language, Text and Discourse and Exploring Language as Social Semiotic, and concludes with a recent interview conducted by Paul Thibault in which Halliday provides further insights in his theory of language. The essential design features of language are semantic, lexico-grammatical and phonological. Text for Halliday is a semantic unit expressed by the lexico-grammatical and phonological patterns in language. The papers in the first section study aspects of these three strata of language and the relation between them. The second section deals with units higher than the clause complex and the papers there attempt to integrate the analysis of the lexico-grammatical and phonological systems into higher level discourse units. The papers in the third section develop the notion of language as social semiotic which is central to Haliday’s model of language.

This work arose from the desire to teach foreign students in North America a particular variety of language used in their disciplines (speech situations), whereupon the inadequacy or non-existence of previous study became apparent. Given this raison d'être, the work first illustrates one approach to the analysis of language in order to test whether something of significance can be said about the typology of texts and discourse. The approach chosen is Systemic Functional Grammar, with its roots in the Prague School of Linguistics and the London School of J.R. Firth, a theory that is particularly able to show how situational factors affect codal choices. Secondly, the author proceeds to use this theory and one language variety (academic speech) to illustrate the influence of speech situational components on the codal selections in the language variety. Since the impetus for the work is pedagogical, the book concludes with a brief reappraisal of the analysis model and a discussion of some of the pedagogical implications stemming from the analysis. Since the work is also theoretical, the implications of the study for the model of grammar are thoroughly explored.

Textual Interaction provides a clear and cogent account of written discourse analysis. Each chapter introduces key concepts and analytical techniques, describes important parallel work and major issues, and suggests how to apply the ideas to the teaching and learning of reading and writing. In this activity-based book, Hoey analyzes a wide variety of narrative texts and argues that, in the interaction between writer and reader, the reader has as much power as the writer.

This work provides an overview of approaches to written text analysis, including both classic and commissioned papers which share a common linguistic framework. The examples used range from pure science, social science and periodicals to literary narratives.