Currently there is a movement in linguistics towards careful use of corpora in linguistic and text analysis, which has involved both written and spoken corpora and those which combine spoken and written text. Most text analyses address written texts - often literary works - but detailed discussion of the language of a single oral text from multiple perspectives has rarely been published.

This book is among the first to integrate the analysis of the language of spoken and written texts. It describes language as a network of functional relations involving a context which is also a network of functional relations. The essays in Part One present several perspectives on the theory of language as functional relations; those in Part Two discuss a single oral text using a variety of functional perspectives. All of the essays are by linguists interested in oral and written texts, who have achieved international recognition in their fields. Illustrated in this book are cognitive, social construction, social praxis and anthropological approaches to the description of text.