Books by Gillian Brown

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. The theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America.

Dr Brown examines the functions of different types of rules in the phonological component of a generative grammar with examples especially from Lumasaaba, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda.

The main topic of this revised and updated edition is the comprehension of the spoken language. Subjects covered include the function of intonation and paralinguistic features, while revisions made include a new section on `pause' and how this interacts with rhythm,

After a description of the features of spoken English, this text considers how they differ from the features of written language. The text describes practical techniques for teaching listening comprehension and speaking, which apply to ESL and foreign languages as well as English.

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.