Bücher von Gillian Brown

Dr Brown examines the functions of different types of rules in the phonological component of a generative grammar with examples especially from Lumasaaba, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda.

Gillian Brown examines the ways in which speakers and listeners use language collaboratively to talk about what they can see in front of them and about a series of events. The focus of attention is upon the listener's role, as the listener tries to make sense of what the speaker says in a highly constrained context.

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.