Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

A report of an investigation of conversations involving more than two persons. Two types of illocutionary acts are accounted for: the traditional kind directed at the addressee(s) and another, called an informative, addressed to all participants. Evidence is presented that every illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative. (AMH)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

The organization of repair in a corpus of conversations in the Lue, Yuan (or Myang), and Siamese dialects of Tai is examined with regard to the preference for self-correction described previously for an English corpus. In both, repair is an identically organized sequential phenomenon involving repair segments during conversation. (CHK)

An "organization of repair" operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism producing a skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair.…

This article discusses the discourse functions of relativization. Relativization is seen as an instance of the application of "bracketing" devices used in the organization of information. Syntactic structure is thus seen as a component of, and derivative from, discourse structure. (CLK)

This article examines the variable absence of the verb in "as far as" constructions, which serve as qualifiers or topic restrictors in English. (46 references) (Author/CK)