"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 "It provides a comprehensive and authoritative introduction for advanced learners in discourse analysis and would be highly informative to scholars in related fields such as sociology, and anthropology." -- Discourse & Communication.