ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to grammar and discourse that reveals meaning from a conceptual perspective, focuses on the ways in which users of language express viewpoints, stances, and information and depicts imageries using the conceptual categories that underlie all of grammar within discourse. Grammar involves the choice of certain forms over other possible competing forms. Each evoking a difference in the speaker's or writer's perspective or perception of an event, a difference in the degree of responsibility assigned to an entity active in the discourse, or a difference in stance vis-a-vis the topic or issue at hand. The traditional rules of grammar can be confusing. They seem and sometimes truly are superficially arbitrary. And they often occur as long lists of proper usages associated with one type of grammatical construction or another, followed, by other lists that are full of exceptions. The chapter also presents an overview of key concepts discussesd in this book.
