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.