Spoken Discourse Research Articles

Conveying information about adjective meanings in spoken discourse

This study examined information about adjective meanings available in adults' spoken discourse in the original 27 CHILDES corpora of typically developing English-speaking children. In order to increase the probability that adjectives would be novel to children to whom they were addressed, only RARE adjectives were examined (those that occurred < or =5 times in the corpus, N=878). Contexts surrounding adjectives (+/-3 utterances on either side of the target) were scored for linguistic clues to meaning, including related language, compare/ contrast and evaluative information. Linguistic contexts contained more information in adult-child conversations than in adult-adult conversations. There were differences among information categories. For example, explicit definitions were relatively rare compared to other types of information and were far less frequent than reported in structured laboratory situations. Findings highlight the importance of looking at adult input in situations where teaching word meaning is not an explicit goal.

A Usage-Based Account on the Korean Suffix -TA in Spoken Discourse

Abstract. This paper investigates the usage of the Korean plain speech level suffix -ta in spoken discourse and discusses the relationship among its interactional functions, the local contexts of its use, and its basic meaning. This paper employs a usage-based approach, whereby naturally occurring spoken discourse is analyzed in detail by examining how the functions of -ta are distributed and to what extent the suffix is adapted to its context through the development of local patterns. The suffix -ta functions differently in terms of sentence types: on the one hand, it serves as a reactive token, an attention-getter, a self-repair, or a stance marker by indexing the speaker's cognitive process in spon-taneous sentences. On the other hand, it can function as a way to claim speakership by indexing the on-going interactional process in non-spontaneous sentences. On the whole, compared with the intimate speech level suffix -e/a, the various functions of -ta are grounded in the representation of cognitive and interactional processing among conversation participants as the primitive form of their internalized knowledge. -Ta's frequent collocations with -keyss-, mac-, and ani- explain the highly adaptive feature of -ta to its local contexts. This paper reveals that the grammatical, lexical, and interactional contexts in using -ta contribute to the emergence of its interactional functions and its basic meaning.

Andrew Tolson, Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. £16.99. 193 pp

Andrew Tolson, Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. £16.99. 193 pp

Textual and contextual contrast connection: A study of Chinese contrastive markers across different text types

This study reports on the Chinese contrastive markers zhishi, danshi, buguo, and keshi, which correspond to English ‘but/yet/however’, across different discourse modes: narratives of personal experiences, casual conversations, formal lectures, and formal interviews. They are classified lexically as conjunctions, a classification that reflects their function within grammar and discourse of linking together two or more clauses or utterances. In this function, they express a topic-internal contradiction. In addition, danshi, buguo, and keshi have other functions in spoken discourse, viz. to introduce a new topic unit and to mark a dispreferred response. Among them, keshi is the most common and general contrastive marker since it more frequently occurs in informal speech situations. Danshi occurs more often in formal speech situations, especially in formal monologues. Buguo occurs more often in formal dialogues but less often in formal monologues. Zhishi, which is the least frequent of these contrastive markers in the four speech modes, tends to appear in informal dialogues. In addition to their frequency and text types, these contrastive markers display a range of attitudinal, cognitive, and interactional properties. Zhishi shares the function of supplementation or revision with buguo; however, the former usually expresses an afterthought and is used to clarify the preceding utterance, while the latter is often used to change the topic. As for danshi, it is often used as a point-making device or for emphasis. Keshi, by contrast, is used to denote an implicit contrast.

The Communicative Role of Self-repetition in a Specialised Corpus of Business Discourse

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of fluent speech. The present corpus study examines naturally-occurring business discourse between native speakers and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong. By examining the form and communicative functions of instances of self-repetition, this study aims to suggest a framework for future studies of self-repetition, as well as to raise language learners' awareness of language use in intercultural communication business contexts.

The Interface between Intonation and Function of Discourse Markers in English

The article examines how the function and the distribution of pragmatic markers in spoken discourse are reflected by prosodic means. The results of this preliminary analysis show that the intonation largely depends on the discourse function of a marker; on the one hand; and the speaker’s perception of its importance for the ongoing discourse. A vague division can be made between the prosodic patterns of those discourse markers which are strongly involved in the organisation and monitoring of the discourse; and those whose function is more pragmatic.

Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships

It has been noted that Japanese differs markedly from languages like English and Mandarin in the use of head nods and aizuchis (short utterances roughly equivalent to English “uh huh” and “yeah”). In Japanese conversation, such behaviors are extremely frequent, and their placement is often unexpected from the viewpoint of speakers of languages like English and Mandarin. For example, these behaviors often occur in non-transition relevant places. Sometimes aizuchis can even be uttered by the turn-holder. In such cases, the conventional technical terms such as “back-channel”, “continuer”, and “reactive token” are hardly applicable. Furthermore, the turn-holder often actively elicits aizuchis from the listener. Final particles, which are very frequent in spoken discourse, play an important role in the elicitation. Finally, there is a discussion of how the Japanese ideology of communication and social relationships may provide motivations for the above phenomena.

AUCH AND NOCH IN CHILD AND ADULT GERMAN. Ulrike Nederstigt. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiii + 406. $106.00 cloth.

AUCH AND NOCH IN CHILD AND ADULT GERMAN. Ulrike Nederstigt . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xiii + 406. $106.00 cloth. Nederstigt's volume offers a detailed and comprehensive treatment of the usage and acquisition of two German focus particles, auch (roughly “also”) and noch (roughly “still”). In view of the ubiquity of auch and noch in adult language and their early emergence in first language (L1) development, Nederstigt's work is a substantial addition to the as-yet small body of existing research. This study is an impressively thorough and rigorous analysis of auch and noch in both adult and child speech that emphasizes the importance of investigating natural spoken discourse to gain maximally informative insights into patterns of usage and sequences of acquisition.

Beyond negation—the roles of meiyou and bushi in Mandarin conversation

This paper focuses on the negative markers meiyou and bushi (meaning ‘not/no’) in Mandarin conversation and, in particular, on their idiosyncratic use in spoken discourse. In this study, through close observation of actual conversation, I found that meiyou and bushi serve more functions than simply that of a response token ‘no’ to a question, and I identified their extra linguistic functions beyond negation. I explored their function in the light of Halliday’s [Halliday, M.A.K., 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, London] theory of three metafunctions of language, viz. the propositional, textual, and interpersonal functions. Cognitive and social principles, that is, Sperber and Wilson’s [Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford] theory of relevance and Brown and Levinson’s [Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge University Press] politeness principle were applied as well, particularly to the textual and interpersonal functions. In particular, I observed from my data that, in Taiwan, Mandarin meiyou tends to be used to preface non-agreement and bushi, disagreement. Both of them are markers of a dispreferred second part in the adjacency relationship. This study suggests that bushi is basically a monosemous marker of denial; it retains the meaning of negation, conveys explicit negation in interaction, and encodes the speaker’s attitudes toward the communicative world of the speech event; i.e., it is less referential (that is, focusing on the referential content of the message) and more expressive/subjective (that is, focusing on the speaker’s beliefs or attitudes toward the event). Meiyou, on the other hand, is polysemous and is undergoing grammaticalization through the semantic–pragmatic recruitment of both subjectivity (to express and regulate beliefs, attitudes, etc.) and intersubjectivity (to make explicit the speaker’s attitude to what is being said).

Shallow Processing and Attention Capturein Written and Spoken Discourse

Processing of discourse seems to be far from uniform with much evidence indicating that it can be quite shallow. The question is then what modulates depth of processing? A range of discourse devices exist that we believe may lead to more detailed processing of language input (Attention Capturers), thus serving as modulators of processing enabling some parts of discourse to be processed more than others. We list some of these and describe two in detail. We introduce the text-change procedure in which texts are presented twice in succession with a possible change to a word on the second presentation. By analogy with visual change-blindness, text change provides a method of tracking attention capture and depth of processing in text. In Experiment 1, the effect of italicization in writing was investigated. Italicization led to an increase in change detection. In Experiment 2, we investigated focus-driven word stress in speaking. Once again, focus-driven stress led to increases in change detection. These examples show how word stress increases depth of processing. We discuss the findings in terms of the Granularity account of focus, in which deeper processing is characterized as a more detailed semantic specification.

Malay ESL college students' spoken discourse: The use of formulaic expressions

Abstract For communication purposes, formulaic expressions can be an easy and efficient way to impart information. Very often campaign slogans are built on using such expressions. Because the context and implications are transparent to the listening public, further explanations are usually not required. But once people get used to such a paratactic mode of expression, orally oriented language users may be lulled into thinking that, when they use such a mode of expression, there is no need for further elaboration of an issue at hand. This study examines whether literate Malays (undergraduates) use formulaic expressions in the spoken texts they produce. And in the event that they do, the study also hopes to determine the nature of topics that draws the use of such expressions. The results of the study show categorically that urban students do not use formulaic expressions. However, there is a tendency among rural students to use such expressions especially when discussing topics which are context reduced, i. e. when topics are more abstract.

Communicative intention in George W. Bush's presidential speeches and statements from 11 September 2001 to 11 September 2003

The purpose of this article is a pragmatic interpretation of utterances. In particular, the analysis aims at apprehending illocutionary intention, as understood by Bach and Harnish (1979), in George W. Bush's speeches and statements. I also investigate how the speaker carries his discourse during the time period analysed. Here, I point to Scollon and Scollon's (2000) discussion of the theory of anticipatory discourse (the four variables – rapport with the audience, hostility towards the enemy, positive self-presentation of the government and the speaker and rapport with the people of Iraq – measured in the course of the analysis and illustrated in the figures make the problem in question clear). Additional comments are also made concerning some distinctive features of the speaker's discourse strategies which belong to the area of rhetoric as broadly understood. The time period chosen, covering Bush's principal speeches and statements, enabled me to investigate the communicative action of the speaker during the recent conflict between Iraq and the US. I analysed altogether some 44 speeches and statements delivered during the given time period. That makes up for the 2,229 communicative acts identified for the total of 2,203 sentences analysed. The framework used for the analysis is the one proposed by Bach and Harnish (1979), i.e. the intention and inference approach, according to which communicative acts are classified in terms of the kind of attitude each act expresses. Thus, each utterance was classified as a particular subtype of the four broad types of communicative illocutionary acts. Finally, I conclude by trying to gather and comment on the crucial entities found in Bush's speeches and statements.

Book Review: How Different Are We? Spoken Discourse in Intercultural Communication

Book Review: How Different Are We? Spoken Discourse in Intercultural Communication

English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Futures in Worlds of Work, Study, and Everyday Life

This overview of the current state of English for specific purposes (ESP) begins by surveying ongoing debates on key topics: needs assessment and its goals, specificity in instructional methods, and the role of subject knowledge in instructor expertise. Two strands of current theory and research are next surveyed, namely, genre theory and corpus-enhanced genre studies, and critical pedagogy and ethnographies, followed by examples of research and theory-informed pedagogical strategies for literacy and spoken discourse. Topics in need of further inquiry are suggested.

Analysing Bilingual Classroom Discourse

The present paper analyses and evaluates spoken discourse in the bilingual classroom at Damascus University. It looks at the mechanism of classroom interaction: the use of questions, initiations, repetitions and expansions. Although this paper deals with classroom interaction at Damascus University, it is believed that the results arrived at may be of a more general interest. Video- and audiorecordings of interaction in six EFL classrooms at the ESP Centre, Damascus University are examined in detail. The findings of this research show that classroom language is artificial; this can be exemplified by the teacher's simplified input, his use of display questions that restrict students' responses and his greater number of initiations. This type of discourse is usually described as ‘artificial’, ‘contrived’ and deliberately ‘planned’ for practising the language. It contrasts with other types of language produced in real communicative discourse described as ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’. Given this, EFL learners find themselves unable to assign any communicative value to the forms of the language they learn through controlled interaction. Consequently, this paper suggests ways of improving spoken discourse in the EFL classroom to make it less artificial and more genuine.

Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for human cognition. Byrne's "suppression" data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning.

Extending the lexicogrammar: Towards a more comprehensive account of extraclausal, partially clausal and non-clausal expressions in spoken discourse

A number of systematic phenomena attested in spoken discourse sit uncomfortably alongside the clause as the principal unit of lexicogrammatical organisation. From a grammatical perspective, therefore, certain elements may be considered to lie outside of the purview of the clause, in the sense that they are either ‘clause-external’, in the case of prefaces and tags, or ‘non-clausal’, in the case of independent, free-standing syntactic or formulaic expressions. In this article, I explore the possibility of revising the lexicogrammatical framework in order to incorporate such phenomena, thus providing a more inclusive and integrated account of them. The framework adopted here, Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), gives considerable importance to the contribution of the clause to discourse, particularly through the textual and informational organisation of ideational content within the wider discourse context. The proposed modifications to the lexicogrammar are therefore considered to reflect the textual and informational demands of the speaker in the creation of spoken discourse. Drawing largely on Biber et al.’s [Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., Finegan, E., 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman, London, pp. 1037ff] corpus-based description of the ‘grammar of conversation’, I propose a clause-based approach to (a) clause prefaces and tags, (b) independent, non-clausal expressions, and (c) formulaic speech act realisations, and discuss the implications of such an approach for a systemic functional model of language that prioritises the lexicogrammar in terms of meaning potential.

Language and the medial temporal lobe: Evidence from H.M.’s spontaneous discourse

Previous researchers have found it challenging to disentangle the memory and language capabilities of the famous amnesic patient H.M. Here, we present an original linguistic analysis of H.M. based on empirical data drawing upon novel spoken discourse with him. The results did not uncover the language deficits noted previously. Instead, H.M.’s level of oral usage was remarkably competent: he performed well within the normal range for his age and educational cohort. Thus, we found no support for the view that medial temporal lobe structures are critical for the maintenance of language comprehension and production.

The journey of non-standard discourse markers in Quebec French

In this study, I look at the history of several non-standard discourse markers in Quebec French. I attempt to explain how certain markers have become specialized so as to take on a conventional role in spoken discourse. Furthermore, my current interest focuses on discourse markers and their relationship with discursive structures. I will illustrate the organization of discursive “networks” through the presentation of two case studies, the exemplification/opposition network — from the study of par exemple —, and the exemplification/approximation network, from the study of mettons, disons, comme, genre and style. Data are taken from sociolinguistic corpora of French spoken in Montreal, which total approximately 300 hours of sociolinguistic interviews carried out in 1971, 1984 and 1995 with speakers who are representative of the Montreal francophone sociolinguistic community.

The nature and patterning of native and non-native intonation in the expression of certainty and uncertainty: Pragmatic effects

The present article investigates whether the interlanguage intonation produced by non-native speakers of English might lead to pragmatic differences that could affect their spoken discourse in the expression of certainty and uncertainty. The study analyzes the prosodic forms produced by Spanish learners of English and compares it to the prosody of English native speakers in order to interpret the pragmatic meaning expressed in the conversation of both language user groups. To study Spanish learners’ and English native speakers’ intonation, a cross-linguistic computerized corpus has been compiled. The speech of both groups of speakers was digitally recorded while they performed two tasks: reading aloud and interpreting short English conversations. The data collected in the corpus, over 3 millions words, was analyzed acoustically in order to obtain comparable detailed and quantitative information on the prosodic characteristics produced by the two language user groups. The results reveal that the Spanish speakers’ choice of the English tone system may lead to pragmatic incompatibility in the expression of modality in their interactions.