David Brazil's pioneering 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 teststhedescription of usedlanguageagainst a spoken corpus. He incorporates findings from the last decade of corpus linguistics study, notably concerning phrases and lexical items larger than single orthographic words and ellipsis. He demonstrates theadded communicative significance that the incorporation of two systems of intonation ('Key' and 'Termination') bring to the grammar. O'Grady reviews the literature...

The notion of Choice provides a constant underlying theme to work in Systemic Functional Linguistics, whether this is concerned with in-depth description of the system of lexicogrammatical options available within specific languages or with the analysis of the semiotic and/or social implications of the choices taken within specific texts. Yet to date little has been published exploring the applicability of choice across various contexts. This book addresses this gap in the literature by presenting a selection of writings from internationally renowned authors that develop the analytical...