Deciding between two grammars

Abstract

AbstractThe main interest of Chapter 7 is with exploring what the presence of two competing grammars means to interlocutors with reference to the way they communicate with one another and build their discourses. Altogether ten grammatical features are presented to distinguish the two grammars. A concern central to the chapter is to determine how each of the two grammars contributes to discourse processing. Three general types of text organization are characterized in Section 7.2, namely text pieces (a) where interactive grammar is predominant, (b) where both grammars are equally important, and (c) where sentence grammar is predominantly employed. An important factor determining discourse processing can be seen in the presence of adjacency pairs in conversational turn taking.