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-Theuse 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.

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.

Additional Editor Viola Waterhouse. Contributors Include Mildred L. Larsen, Eugene E. Minor, Eugene E. Loos, Lorrie Anderson, Mary Ruth Wise, Betty A. Snell, Robert Eastman, Elizabeth Eastman, Furne Rich, And Kenneth M. Kensinger.

The central idea of this volume is the insistence that the structure of a part of a text must be explained in light of the structure of the whole. This needs to be repeated anew to every generation of linguistics students as a warning against analytic nearsightedness-the fixation on parts of a text without regard to the whole. Holistic Discourse Analysis is not a plea to abandon the analysis of lower levels of grammar, but to enrich the study of them by putting them in broader perspective. The book addresses discourse analysis and its purpose, text typology, and constituent-based charting with an analysis of a story in terms of peak and profile. It discusses functions of different verb types and their tense/aspect/modality, of noun phrases, and of clause combining in discourse. It includes a chapter with a layman's introduction to discourse analysis, and another with ways to represent combinations of sentences in a paragraph. The last three chapters deal with nonnarrative discourses: procedural, hortatory, and expository. This Second Edition has significantly improved the usability of the volume by employing color-coding in illustrative texts so the reader can more easily visualize multiple levels of prominence in these texts. This book offers itself both as a classroom text and a field manual for discourse analysis. It can also serve as an introduction to the more theoretically oriented volume, Longacre's The Grammar of Discourse (1996). Robert Longacre has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife Gwen translated the New Testament into Trique, an Oto-Manguean language. From 1972 to 1991 he taught linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and served as a linguistic consultant for SIL. At present, he is researching the discourse structure of biblical Hebrew and also the theory and practice of discourse analysis in general. Shin Ja Hwang, was a student of Robert Longacre in her M.A. and Ph.D. studies and has worked with him as a colleague. She has taught graduate courses on discourse analysis, functional grammar, language universals and typology, and sociolinguistics at Texas SIL, the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and the University of Texas at Arlington.

In this fully revised, second edition of Joseph, A Story of Divine Providence, Robert Longacre approaches the Joseph story as a paradigm for an approach incorporating the interests of the Old Testament scholar and critic with the interests of the contemporary textlinguist. His study seeks to explore several questions: How does one approach an ancient text? What does one hope to gain from its study? How do we orient ourselves in regard to this story? Does our orientation provide a key to our understanding of the story or does it simply hinder our approaching the story in an unbiased and objective matter? The book is comprised of four parts, the first three exploring the connection Longacre seeks to establish between textlinguistics and biblical studies. The fourth part is a constituent display of the entire Joseph pericope. This new edition of Longacre's landmark work incorporates a more user-friendly format, particularly noticeable in "Part 4: Constituent Display of Joseph." The book also includes new textlinguistic insights and updated references.