Speakers Listeners and Communication

In this study Gillian Brown draws on a wide range of examples of discourse analysis to explore the ways in which speakers and listeners use language collaboratively to talk about what they can see in front of them and about a series of events. She examines the conditions under which communication is successful and the conditions under which it sometimes fails. The focus of her attention is upon the listener's role as the listener tries to make sense of what the speaker says in a highly constrained context; and her cognitive/pragmatic approach to discourse analysis both complements and challenges the sociological/anthropological perspectives on the subject which currently predominate.