This book proposes that subjective expression shapes grammatical and
lexical patterning in American English conversation. Analyses of
structural and functional properties of English conversational
utterances indicate that the most frequent combinations of subject,
tense, and verb type are those that are used by speakers to
personalize their contributions, not to present unmediated
descriptions of the world. These findings are informed by current
research and practices in linguistics which argue that the emergence,
or conventionalization, of linguistic structure is related to the
frequency with which speakers use expressions in discourse. The use of
conversational data in grammatical analysis illustrates the local and
contingent nature of grammar in use and also raises theoretical
questions concerning the coherence of linguistic categories, the
viability of maintaining a distinction between semantic and pragmatic
meaning in analytical practice, and the structural and social
interplay of speaker point of view and participant interaction in
discourse.

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