Halliday's view of all learning as a form of language development is supported as a first step, but an argument is made for a view of learning as induction into discourses as ways of being, not just ways of using words. (Contains 19 references.) (LB)

Discusses the sources of information in oral language. Uses converging evidence from prosody, pausing, structural and semantic parallelism, and stylistic analysis to argue for a series of hypotheses about the units that organize the construction of narrative discourse. Provides examples and appendixes. (JD)