Preface
The aim of this book is to present current Birmingham work in the analysis
of Spoken Discourse. The first three ‘historical’ papers outline the foundation
on which the other nine build: Chapter 1 is, with very minor alterations, the
central chapter of Towards an Analysis of Discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard
1975); Chapter 2 introduces the Brazil description of intonation assumed in
all the later chapters; Chapter 3 is a slightly modified version of sections 1
and 3 of Exchange Structure (Coulthard and Brazil 1979). In republishing
these papers we resisted the very strong temptation to rewrite and update,
feeling it was more useful to give readers access to these texts very much
in their original form, warts and all, particularly as several of the later
articles are developments of or reactions to them.
Many of the other papers are revised, sometimes substantially revised,
versions of papers which first appeared in a restricted-circulation University
of Birmingham publication, Discussing Discourse, Papers Presented to David
Brazil on his Retirement. Three papers were specially written for this collection:
John Sinclair’s ‘Priorities in discourse analysis’ (Chapter 4), David Brazil’s
‘Listening to people reading’ (Chapter 11), and my own ‘Forensic discourse
analysis’ (Chapter 12).
In order to give the reader easier access to the work of the Birmingham
school I have collected all references from the individual articles together
at the end of the book and supplemented them with other relevant publications,
in order to form a reference bibliography.
Malcolm Coulthard
Birmingham
July 1991