Riassunto completo Discourse Analysis - Lingua Inglese III

Characteristics of the LSWE Corpus

Most of the texts in the corpus were produced after 1980 so the sample is mostly of contemporary British and American English usage. The corpus was made up of 37,244 texts and approximately 40,026,000 words. The texts in the corpus varied, however, in length. The newspaper texts tended to be the shortest while fiction and academic prose were the longest.

The LSWE corpus aimed to provide a representative sampling of texts across the discourse types it contained. The conversational data in the corpus was collected in real-life settings and is many times larger than most other collections of conversational data. Both the British and the American conversational data were collected from representative samples of the British and US populations. The conversational data in the corpus aimed to represent a range of English speakers in terms of age, sex, social and regional groupings.

7.8.1 Discourse characteristics of conversational English

The major aim of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English,

The Longman grammar project, which was derived from the LSWE corpus, was to provide a grammar of English based on an analysis of actual language use. The project has also made important observations about discourse characteristics of conversational English.

A key observation made in the Longman grammar is that conversational discourse makes wide use of non-clausal units, that is, utterances which do not contain an explicit subject or verb. These units are independent or self-standing in that they have no grammatical connection with what immediately precedes or follows them. The use of these units in conversational discourse is very different from written discourse where they rarely occur. Conversation is highly interactive and often avoids elaboration, or specification of meaning. The use of non-clausal units is, in part, a result of this.

Conversational discourse also makes wide use of personal pronouns and ellipsis. This

islargely because of the shared context in which conversation occurs. The meaning of these items and what has been left out of the conversation can usually be derived from the context in which the conversation is taking place.

7.8.4 Situational ellipsis in conversation

Some of what speakers say in conversational discourse, thus, is predictable and does not need to be fully spelled out. Speakers often use situational ellipsis in conversation, leaving out words of low information value where the meaning of the missing item or items can be derived from the immediate context, rather than from elsewhere in the text.

7.8.5 Non-clausal units as elliptic replies in conversation

Non-clausal units as elliptic replies often occur in conversational discourse. In the shared social situation in which the conversation is taking place, both speakers know what they are asking about.

7.8.6 Repetition in conversation

Conversation also uses repetition much more than written discourse. This might be done, for example,

To give added emphasis to a point being made in a conversation. One way that speakers may do this is by echoing each other.

7.8.7 Lexical bundles in conversational discourse

Conversational discourse also makes frequent use of lexical bundles, that is, formulaic multi-word sequences such as It's going to be, If you want to and or something like that. Research has shown that lexical bundles occur much more frequently in spoken discourse than they do in written discourse. Speakers may, for example, use them to give themselves time to think what they will say next. They do this as conversation occurs in real time, and speakers often take and hold on to the floor at the same time as they are planning what to say next.

7.8.8 Performance phenomena of conversational discourse

The Longman grammar discusses performance phenomena that are characteristic of conversational discourse. Speakers need to both plan what they are going to say and speak at the same time as they are doing this, meaning that

Their speech contains pauses, hesitations and repetitions while this happens.

Silent and filled pauses in conversation

Performance phenomena that are characteristic of conversational discourse include silent and filled pauses, in the middle of a turn or a grammatical unit.

Utterance launchers and filled pauses

Filled pauses at transition points in conversational discourse typically use utterance launchers such as 'well', 'and' and 'right' as the speaker prepares what they will say.

Attention signals in conversation

Speakers often use another person's name as an attention signal to make it clear who they are speaking.

Response elicitors in conversation

There are a number of typical ways of eliciting a response in conversational discourse.

Non-clausal items as response forms

Non-clausal items such as uh huh, mm, yeah and OK often operate as response forms in conversation.

Extended co-ordination of clauses

Conversational

Discourse often includes long-extended turns. These turns may be extended by coordination where one clausal unit is added to another and then another with items such as "and" and "but", or by the direct juxtaposition of clauses.

The Longman grammar discusses three key principles which underlie the production of conversational discourse. The principle of "keep talking" refers to the need to keep a conversation going while planning for the conversation that is going on. The principle of "limited planning ahead" refers to human memory limitations on planning ahead, that is, restrictions on the amount of syntactic information that can be stored in memory while the planning is taking place. The principle of "qualification of what has been said" refers to the need to qualify what has been said 'after the event' and to add things which otherwise would have already been said in the conversation. This may be done by the use of digressions.

Inserted in the middle of something else, or by the use of ‘add-ons’ to what has been said.

Prefaces in conversation

In conversation, the main part of a speaker’s message is often preceded by a preface which connects what they have to say to the previous utterance as well as giving the speaker time to plan what they will say next. Prefaces may include fronting of clausal units, noun phrase discourse markers and other expressions such as interjections, response forms, stance adverbs, linking adverbs, overtures, utterance launchers and the non-initial use of discourse markers.

Tags in conversation

Speakers add tags in many ways as an afterthought to a grammatical unit in conversational discourse. They can do this by use of a question tag at the end of a sentence. The effect of this is to turn a statement into a question.

A tag can also be added to the end of a statement to reinforce what has just been said. This can be done by repeating a noun phrase, by paraphrasing

What has been said or by adding a clausal or non-clausal unit retrospectively to what has just been said. Conversational discourse, then, has many features which are not typical of more formal kinds of spoken discourse, or of written discourse. Because conversation takes place in a shared context, and in real time there is often less specification of meaning than there is in other spoken and written genres. Also, because conversation takes place between people who usually know each other, it is less influenced by traditional views of accuracy and correctness that is associated with more publicly available texts. The need to keep talking while planning what to say next also has an influence on the nature of conversational discourse.

7.9 Collocation and corpus studies

Corpus studies have also been used to examine collocations in spoken and written discourse. The collocation 'special thanks' was the most common way in which dissertation writers expressed gratitude in the acknowledgements.

findings a strong contextual dimension. As he argues, understanding language use includes understanding social and contextual knowledge, not just knowledge of the language system. This kind of analysis is especially suited to smaller, specialized corpora which have a genre focus (e.g. academic essays) rather than a register focus (e.g. academic discourse). Tribble suggests three stages for this kind of analysis: (1) choose a text which is considered an expert example of the particular genre, (2) compile contextual information about how the text was created and (3) carry out a corpus-assisted analysis of linguistic features of the texts that can then be integrated with the contextual analysis. The analysis can also be combined with other contextual information available on the data such as information on the speech event and speaker attributes and other information that is available on the data, such as the information that accompanies the MICASE and BAWE corpora. Each of these strategies can

help offset the argument that corpus studies are, necessarily, decontextualized and only of interest at the item rather than the discourse level.

Chapter 8: Multimodal discourse analysis

8.1 Background to multimodal discourse analysis Halliday

Much of the work in multimodal discourse analysis draws from Halliday's social-semiotic approach to language, a view that considers language as one among a number of semiotic resources (such as gesture, images and music) that people use to communicate, or make meaning, with each other.

Multimodal discourse analysis aims to describe the socially situated semiotic resources that we draw on for communication. Halliday describes three types of social meanings, or ideational functions, that are drawn on at the same time in the use of language. These are interpersonal textual (what the text is about), (relations between participants) and meanings (how the message is organized). In multimodal texts, these meanings are realized visually in how the image conveys aspects.

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