This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.

Integrating various aspects of human communication traditionally treated in a number of separate disciplines, Olga T. Yokoyama develops a universal model of the smallest unit of informational discourse, and uncovers the regularities that govern the intentional verbal transfer of knowledge from one interlocutor to another. The author then places these processes within a new framework of Communicational Competence, which legitimizes certain nebulous but important linguistic phenomena hitherto caught in a noman's land between the formal and functional approaches to language. Russian word order, a classical problem of Slavic linguistics, is subjected to a rigorous examination within this theoretical framework; Yokoyama demonstrates how this “free word order language” can only be described by taking into account such generally neglected factors as the speakers' subjectivity and attitude. Of particular interest to Slavists is a new generative theory of Russian intonation, which is consistently incorporated into the description of Russian word order.

In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.

In "Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament," Steve Runge introduces a function-based approach to language, exploring New Testament Greek grammatical conventions based upon the discourse functions they accomplish. Runge's approach has less to do with the specifics of language and more to do with how humans are wired to process it. The approach is cross-linguistic. Runge looks at how all languages operate before he focuses on Greek. He examines linguistics in general to simplify the analytical process and explain how and why we communicate as we do, leading to a more accurate description of the Greek text. The approach is also function-based--meaning that Runge gives primary attention to describing the tasks accomplished by each discourse feature. This volume does not reinvent previous grammars or supplant previous work on the New Testament. Instead, Runge reviews, clarifies, and provides a unified description of each of the discourse features. That makes it useful for beginning Greek students, pastors, and teachers, as well as for advanced New Testament scholars looking for a volume which synthesizes the varied sub-disciplines of New Testament discourse analysis. With examples taken straight from the "Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament," this volume helps readers discover a great deal about what the text of the New Testament communicates, filling a large gap in New Testament scholarship. Each of the 18 chapters contains: - An introduction and overview for each discourse function - A conventional explanation of that function in easy-to-understand language - A complete discourse explanation - Numerous examples of how that particular discourse function is used in the Greek New Testament - A section of application - Dozens of examples, taken straight from the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament - Careful research, with citation to both Greek grammars and linguistic literature - Suggested reading list for continued learning and additional research

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.