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Although developed with classroom material, their goal was a model that could capture interaction structures in different institutional settings (Coulthard and Montgomery, 1981). Despite limitations in their analysis, the aim of capturing the way institutional practices are organized is characteristic of much more recent discourse work. In analytic terms, this work performed broadly linguistic analyses of simplified transcripts of actual interaction. This was a departure from much of linguistics that had focused on invented or idealized materials.

A separate tradition in linguistics focused on the way sentences are linked together into coherent discourse. Part of this involved considering the use of terms such as ‘however’and ‘but’(Brown and Yule, 1983). Linguistic work of this kind spawned a psychological tradition of discourse processes that attempted to relate textual and cognitive concerns. This asked, for example, about the …