This is a guide to the various frameworks, concepts, and methods available for the analysis of discourse within linguistics. It compares six dominant approaches to discourse analysis: speech act theory, pragmatics, ethnomethodology, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, and variation theory.

The author not only considers each approach from several standpoints but she also illustrates them through extensive applications to a variety of concrete social and linguistic problems facing discourse analysts.

Deborah Schiffrin is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is author of Discourse Markers (1987).