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Acknowledgements; The author and series editors; Foreword; Transcription notations; Introduction; An exploratory grammar; Starting assumptions; Why do we want a linear grammar?; Discourse analysis; What is a sentence grammar?; Product and process; Why speech?; Who is it for?; 1. The argument and organization of the book; Communicating in time; Immediate constituent grammars; Finite state grammars; Summary of the argument; Development of the description; 2. Used language; Sample of data; Used speech is purposeful; - Going through the motions; - Interaction; - What can be told or asked?; - Communicative need; Participants co-operate; - Dealing with mismatches; - Projecting a need; Existential values; - Meaning and value; - Existential antonyms; Scholarly background; Process and product; - The purposeful increment; 3. Telling and asking exchanges; The telling increment; Minimum requirements for telling: syntactic; Minimum requirements for telling: intonational; 4. The simple chain; Initial, Intermediate, and Target States; - Three-element chains; Four- and five-element chains; A set of sequencing rules; Some implications of the sequencing rules; The simple chain; Sample of data; 5. Non-finite verbal elements; Non-finite forms; Extensions; - Chains representing more than one telling increment; Suspension; Suspension in simple chains; - Characteristics of suspensions; - Suspensive non-finite verbal elements; - Suspensive elements before chain-initial N; Extensions and suspensions compared; Sample of data; 6. The relationship between elements; The relationship among constituents; Post-verbal and post-nominal functions; Indeterminacy and ambiguity; Non-significant differences; Indeterminacy in chains with non-finite verbal elements; Unrestricted reference; A finite-state account; Non-finite verbal elements as suspensions; 7. The timing of events; The two time continua; Event time and moment of utterance; Differentiated and undifferentiated time refe. All products are subject to availability. Prices from publishers and exchange rates are subject to change.

This book provides an innovative analysis of English grammar in the spoken form. Hitherto, most grammars of English have relied heavily on the written language, and this excludes much normal spoken discourse. This work offers an alternative view of the structure of spoken English based on naturally-occurring language data. A Grammar of Speech has relevance for many areas related to linguistics, such as Artificial Intelligence, computational linguistics, and machine translation. First Prize English Speaking Union's Duke of Edinburgh Book Competition