ABSTRACT
As noted in many places in this book, there has been remarkably little work either in linguistics or in applied linguistics into speaking as a unified language faculty. Therefore, to a certain extent this book has needed to draw together work from different fields and at different levels within the skill of speaking to present a picture of research into speech. Any unified theory of speaking would need to both bring together and demarcate itself clearly from a number of interrelated academic disciplines, from pragmatics to corpus linguistics, from psycholinguistics to phonetics. All of these are well known and flourishing areas in linguistics, and each, along with a number of others, has something to say about speaking, even if they cannot provide a unified theory of spoken discourse in all contexts and domains.
