week 7- doing things with spoken/ written data Flashcards
How do we know when it’s our turn to speak in a conversation?
- Semantic clues: So anyway…,
- Speech modification: lowering of the pitch, volume, speed
- Changes in body language and eye contact
- Politeness and pragmatics: avoid speaking at the same time and avoid silence between turns
- intonation
- pauses
what is a transactional function?
obtaining goods and services
what is an Interpersonalfunction
socialising
what are adjacency pairs?
Two-part exchanges: the FPP [first pair part] and SPP [second pair part] come from the same pair type. For example: Greeting/greeting (A: Hello! B: Hi!)
Three-part exchanges: FPP+SPP+F [Feedback] A What time is it? B: Gin O’clock A: My favourite time of day!
what are discourse markers in casual speech?
- e.g. um, like, uh, you know, well, by the way
- They can signal the flow of the conversation.
- They have an interactional function, often to do with politeness.
- allows speakers to collect their thoughts before officially speaking (the cognitive function)
- use of markers becomes more sophisticated with age.
how is ‘like’ used as a discourse marker?
- Introducing something said previously, although not usually with the direct words
- Conveying approximation
- Helping create flow in speech
- Signalling what the addressee should focus on
- Suggesting openness in options, that what someone is proposing is just an option: We could, like, go out for an indian.
how is ‘you know’ used as a discourse marker?
- ‘Mitigating a face-threatening act
- Suggesting a common ground or shared knowledge between speaker and addressee
- Shifting to a new topic
- Marking the speaker’s search for expressions or content of what they’re going to say next
- Introducing an explanation or exemplification
- introducing a rhetorical question
what do general extenders (eg: vague language) do in conversation?
- They take the form of a conjunction (and, or) plus a noun phrase (stuff, something)
- They tend to occupy clause final position and generally signal a turn change
- They tend to occur in declarative positive clauses
- They often make reference to different preceding items
- They are used to classify a given category within a larger group and to express interpersonal relations
- They are used mainly in informal contexts among younger speakers who know each other quite well
- Middle class speakers tend to use ‘and stuff’ and ‘and things’ while working class speakers favour ‘and that’ (Cheshire 2007)
what is text coherence?
‘ the grammatical and semantic interconnectedness between sentences that form a text’ (Bussman1996: 80)
‘the extent to which discourse is perceived to ‘hang together’ rather than being a set of unrelated sentences or utterances’ (Nunan 2013: 219)
Coherence exist in the head, not on the page. It is the ability to recognise that a spoken or written text ‘hangs together’
what is text cohesion?
‘the various linguistic means (grammatical, lexical, phonological) by which sentences ‘stick together’ and are linked into larger units of paragraphs…’ (Bussman 1996: 81)
‘the ties that bind a text together’
(Crystal 2006: 261)
what is a reference?
• language users refer using words
• on particular occasions
• when picking out something in the world real or imaginary
- ‘Features that cannot be semantically interpreted without referring to some other feature of the text’ (Crystal 2006)
Deictic reference
In shared visual contexts, we might use deictic expressions Look at this!
Anaphoric reference
The referring expression refers to something in the preceding text/discourse (looks backwards). I’d love a cup of coffee. It should wake me up.
Cataphoric reference
the referring expression refers to some thing in the subsequent text/discourse (looks forwards) You’ll never believe this. May’s finally resigned!
Exophoric reference
The referring expression refers to something outside the text/discourse They’re late again! Can you believe it?
