Malcolm Coulthard - Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

Edited by

Malcolm Coulthard

First published in 1992 by
Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

The collection as a whole 1992 Malcolm Coulthard
Individual chapters 1992 individual contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Advances in spoken discourse analysis.

I. Coulthard, Malcolm.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Advances in spoken discourse analysis/edited by Malcolm Coulthard.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Discourse analysis. I. Coulthard, Malcolm.

P302.A33 1992 9140402

401'.41dc 20

ISBN 0-415-06686-7 (hbk)

0-415-06687-5 (pbk)

ISBN 0-203-20006-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-20009-8 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

1 Towards an analysis of discourse
John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard

2 The significance of intonation in discourse
Malcolm Coulthard

3 Exchange structure
Malcolm Coulthard and David Brazil

4 Priorities in discourse analysis
John Sinclair

5 A functional description of questions
Amy Tsui

6 Caught in the act: using the rank scale to address problems of delicacy
Dave Willis

7 Analysing everyday conversation
Gill Francis and Susan Hunston

8 Inner and outer: spoken discourse in the language classroom
Jane Willis

9 Intonation and feedback in the EFL classroom
Martin Hewings

10 Interactive lexis: prominence and paradigms
Mike McCarthy

11 Listening to people reading
David Brazil

12 Forensic discourse analysis
Malcolm Coulthard

Preface

The aim of this book is to present current Birmingham work in the analysis of Spoken Discourse. The first three historical papers outline the foundation on which the other nine build: is a slightly modified version of sections 1 and 3 of Exchange Structure (Coulthard and Brazil 1979). In republishing these papers we resisted the very strong temptation to rewrite and update, feeling it was more useful to give readers access to these texts very much in their original form, warts and all, particularly as several of the later articles are developments of or reactions to them.

Many of the other papers are revised, sometimes substantially revised, versions of papers which first appeared in a restricted-circulation University of Birmingham publication, Discussing Discourse, Papers Presented to David Brazil on his Retirement. Three papers were specially written for this collection: John Sinclairs Priorities in discourse analysis ().

In order to give the reader easier access to the work of the Birmingham school I have collected all references from the individual articles together at the end of the book and supplemented them with other relevant publications, in order to form a reference bibliography.

Malcolm Coulthard
Birmingham
July 1991

About the authors

David Brazil is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities at the University of Birmingham. The second edition of his The Communicative Value of Intonation appeared in 1992.

Malcolm Coulthard is Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include the two edited volumes presented to David Brazil on his retirement, Talking about Text, 1986, and Discussing Discourse, 1987, and, in Portuguese, Linguagem e Sexo and Traduo: Teoria e Prtica, both published in 1991.

Gill Francis is a Senior Researcher working on corpus-based grammar and attached to the Cobuild project at the University of Birmingham. Among her recent publications are Noun group heads and clause structure, Word, Aug. 1991, 2738, Aspects of nominal group lexical cohesion, Interface 4, 1, 1989, 2753, and, with A.Kramer-Dahl, Grammaticalising the medical case history, in Essays in Contextual Stylistics, Routledge, forthcoming.

Martin Hewings is a Lecturer in English to Overseas Students at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Pronunciation Tasks, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Sue Hunston is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Surrey. Her Text in world and world in text was published in the Nottingham Linguistic Circular in 1985 and Evaluation and ideology in scientific English will appear in Varieties of Written English, Vol. 2, Pinter, 1992.

Mike McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Director of the Centre for English Language Education at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Vocabulary, Oxford University Press, 1990, Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge University Press, 1991, and, with Ron Carter, Vocabulary and Language Teaching, Longman, 1988.

John Sinclair is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham and Editor-in-Chief of Cobuild Publications. His recent publications are The Structure of Teacher Talk, ELR, 1990, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford University Press, 1991, and the edited collection Looking Up, Collins Cobuild, 1987.

Amy Tsui is a Lecturer in the Department of Curriculum Studies at Hong Kong University. Her studies on conversational analysis, pragmatics and speech act theory have appeared in Semiotica, Language in Society, the Journal of Pragmatics and various conference proceedings.

Dave Willis is a Lecturer in the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham. His most recent publications are The Lexical Syllabus, Collins Cobuild, 1990 and, with Jane Willis, The Collins Cobuild English Course, Levels 1, 2 and 3, 19889.

Jane Willis is a Lecturer at the University of Aston in Birmingham. Her latest publication is First Lessons, Collins Cobuild, 1990, a task-based ELT course for beginners which is linked to the Collins Cobuild English Course.

1 Towards an analysis of discourse

John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM OF ANALYSIS

When we began to investigate the structure of classroom interaction we had no preconceptions about the organization or extent of linguistic patterning in long texts. Obviously lessons are highly structured but our problem was to discover how much of this structure was pedagogical and how much linguistic. It seemed possible that the presence of a linguistic introduction was a clue to the boundary of a linguistic unit, but we quickly realized that this is not a useful criterion. On the first morning of the academic year a headmaster may welcome the new pupils with

Good morning, children, Welcome to Waseley School. This is an important day for you

thereby introducing them to several years of schooling. When the children then meet their new class teacher she will also welcome them and explain their timetable. They go to their first subject lesson. Here the teacher may introduce the subject and go on to delimit part of it;