In the linguistics literature, “discourse” is often defined in two, not mutually exclusive, ways, namely, structurally, for instance, “language above the sentence or above the clause” (Stubbs 1983: 1) and functionally, for example, “language that is doing some job in some context” (Halliday 1985: 10). We shall privilege the functional viewpoint here, though analyzing the structures of discourses is important for shedding light on the jobs being done. It has to be stressed that discourse is not a special form of language, but a perspective upon it, language described not only as a set of interacting units and systems, but also precisely that implied by Halliday, as an instrument put to work. The work which it does is the attempt by one participant or set of participants to influence the ideas, opinions, and behavior of other participants. Such work can be studied in a single text or in a number of tokens of similar texts to try to infer generalities of behaviors and responses (which may well then in turn serve as background to studying particular language events for particular, special meanings). Most forms of traditional non-corpus-assisted discourse analysis have practiced the close-reading (that is, “qualitative analysis”) of single texts or a small number of texts in the attempt to highlight both textual structures and also how meanings are conveyed. Some types, such as much work in critical discourse analysis (CDA), use few concepts from linguistics proper, tending to rely on the analyst's knowledge and experience (and prejudices) of similar texts, in a manner reminiscent of literary analysis (though with a politically driven purpose). Other traditional discourse analysis is more linguistically grounded. Thompson (1996a: 108-112), for instance, demonstrates the power of functional grammar, in particular transitivity analysis, in displaying how meanings, including what we might call non-obvious meanings, are communicated.