An Empirical Search for Genres of Spoken Discourse

Abstract

This chapter is meant to provide empirical support for our claim that empractical and conversational speech are two different genres of spoken dialogue. Our hypotheses are based on the historical and more recent assumptions regarding the characteristics of speech which occasionally accompanies primary nonlinguistic activities; these have been presented in Chap. 3antecedently to our systematic empirical engagement of the topic. The rationale for our very detailed account of the corpora used, the analyses performed, and the result obtained is the pilot character of our study. Corpora of 18 excerpts of empractical and 15 excerpts of conversational speech taken from 14 different English-language feature films were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively with regard to three types of characteristics: temporal, sequential, and syntactic organization. The analyses included the following results for empractical speech: 1. Temporal organization. A significantly higher mean percentage of off time, a more frequent overall occurrence of pauses, and a more frequent occurrence of long pauses (≥3 s in duration) invariably filled with ongoing nonlinguistic activity, all point to the greater importance of silence in empractical than in conversation speech. 2. Sequential organization. The fact that 10 out of the 18 excerpts of empractical speech did indeed involve dialogical interaction but without speaker change confirms the assumption that regular turn-taking is not a necessary prerequisite of dialogue. 3. Syntactic organization. High frequency of both formal and functional imperatives (typically requesting gross motor activity); of object, place, and action deixis; of verbatim repetitions with conative function; and low frequency of both anaphora and cataphora all characterized empractical speech. These results reflect both the pervasive impact of a shared situation dominated by salient nonlinguistic activity and the occasional, elliptical nature of empractical speech. By contrast, speech in conversational settings manifested far less silence, long pauses filled with nonverbal rather than nonlinguistic behavior, regular speaker change, requests for mental rather than gross motor activity, and hesitational rather than conative repetitions. These results indicate the necessity for a shift in psychological theorizing about verbal communication: Both the differences found with regard to the role of the listener and the importance of silence in prototypical empractical speech make it necessary to distinguish the two dialogical genres. But it should also be noted that a number of significant differences between empractical speech with only 1 speaker and empractical speech with ≥2 speakers suggest the additional possibility of smooth transitions between empractical and conversational speech. Such transitions between genres are also confirmed by the occurrence of both brief sequences of conversational speech embedded in an empractical setting and brief sequences of empractical speech embedded in a conversational setting.