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Discourse Analysis: the 80/20 cut

Posted: February 27th, 2018, 9:40 am
by Jonathan Robie
Barry Hofstetter wrote: February 26th, 2018, 11:58 pm So Steve, assuming that your reading of the text is valid in all its particulars, what difference does it make? Should we draw different conclusions from the more traditional grammatical and syntactical reading of the text? If so, what?
I'd like to jump off from this question in a different direction. Which aspects of Runge / Levinsohn discourse grammar are most useful, and how are they used?

For instance, I assume topic / focus is a fundamental concept used to show the structure of a passage, and a lot of other things revolve around identifying the topic or focus. What is the 20% of discourse grammar that brings 80% of the benefit? If you wanted to add some concepts from discourse grammar to a traditional grammar, what would you add?