This work would not have been possible without many kinds of support that I have received from individuals and institutions. I am grateful to them all. The New York Community Trust has supported much of my research on discourse. It also funded three small conferences on discourse at the University of Texas which advanced the work. I received a Faculty Research Award from the University of Texas Research Institute in 1994, which enabled me to pursue this project. During that period I spent some time as a Visiting Scholar at the Maison Suger of the CNRS in Paris. I was the beneficiary of a Dean's Fellow award from the College of Liberal Arts in 1998.

Parts of this work have been presented at conferences and colloquia. I benefited greatly from the discussions that followed, as well as the presentations themselves. They include three conferences on discourse structure at the University of Texas; an International Round Table on The Syntax of Tense and Aspect at Université de Paris, 2000; a symposium on Information Structure in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective at the University of Oslo, 2000; a conference on Linguistics in the Next Decade at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 2000; a Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Siena in 1998; an invited lecture series at the City University of Hong Kong in 1998.