An Introduction to Discourse Analysis

The central concern of this book is the analysis of verbal interaction or discourse. This first six chapters report and evaluate major theoretical advances in the description of discourse. The final chapters demonstrate how the findings of discourse analysis can be used to investigate second-language teaching and first-language acquisition and to analyse literary texts.

Grammatical competence is concerned with 'the knowledge and skill required to
understand and express the literal meaning ... Discourse competence he sees as
concerned with cohesion and coher— ence in the structure of texts; it therefore ...