David Brazil's pioneering work on the grammar of spoken discourse ended at "A Grammar Of Speech" (1995) due to his untimely death. Gerard O'Grady picks up the baton in this book and tests the description of used language against a spoken corpus. He incorporates findings from the last decade of corpus linguistics study, notably concerning phrases and lexical items larger than single orthographic words and ellipsis. He demonstrates the added communicative significance that the incorporation of two systems of intonation ('Key' and 'Termination') bring to the grammar.

O'Grady reviews the literature and covers the theory before moving on to a practical, analytic section. His final chapter reviews the arguments, maps the road ahead and lays out the practical applications of the grammar. The book will be of great interest to researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis and also EFL/ESL.

"Taking David Brazil’s ground-breaking work on the grammar of speech as a starting point, O’Grady makes an important contribution to the analysis of unfolding real-time language. He assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Brazil’s grammar and goes on to offer a developed version, using evidence from a corpus of read aloud speech. Perhaps his main contribution is in placing intonation more centrally in the description. His work will be of relevance to all whose interests are in understanding speech as process rather than product and the role of intonation in discourse."

Martin Hewings, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, UK