Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

Discusses the sources of information in oral language. Uses converging evidence from prosody, pausing, structural and semantic parallelism, and stylistic analysis to argue for a series of hypotheses about the units that organize the construction of narrative discourse. Provides examples and appendixes. (JD)