HUE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

TRUONG BACH LE - TRUONG THI NHU THUY

AN INTRODUCTION TO
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

HUE UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING HOUSE

Hue, 2013
1
 Biên mục trên xuất bản phẩm của Thư viện Quốc gia Việt Nam

Truong Bach Le
An introduction to discourse analysis / Truong Bach Le, Truong
Thi Nhu Thuy. - Huế : Đại học Huế, 2014. - 150tr. ; 24cm
ĐTTS ghi: Hue university. College of foreign languages.
Department of English. - Thư mục.: tr. 144-145

1. Tiếng Anh 2. Diễn ngôn 3. Lý thuyết

428 - dc23
DUK0041p-CIP

Mã số sách: GT/189-2013

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 Introduction

An Introduction to Discourse Analysis is a course book intended for

BA English majors at Hue University College of Foreign Languages. It
aims to introduce students to the major concepts in discourse analysis -
a way of describing and understanding how language is used in context.
The book is organized into four sections focusing on the following themes:
- definitions of discourse analysis, text and discourse, and distinctions
between spoken and written language.
- ways in which language elements and information can be
organized to achieve meaningful and unified English texts, i.e., lexical
and grammatical cohesion, coherence, information structure, and genres.
- ways in which conversation participants can produce and interpret
each other‘s utterances, i.e., types of spoken interactions and their structures;
how talk follows regular patterns in different situations, meaning negotiation
by means of turn-taking, topic management, feedback and repair.
- ways in which discourse processing happens where listeners and
readers interpret different levels of text.
- several ways in which discourse analysis can be applied, e.g., in
language teaching.
This material attempts to enable learners to:
- be aware of ways in which language elements can be used to
create meaningful and unified English texts.
- identify the differences between spoken and written texts and the
discourse features of each type to communicate successfully.
- develop skills in analyzing both spoken and written texts from the
discourse perspectives.
- produce both spoken and written texts with the awareness of the
discourse features according to the norms and the cultures.

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 We would like to express our gratitude to Assoc Prof Dr. Tran Van Phuoc
and Dr. Ton Nu Nhu Huong for always encouraging us to compile
linguistic course materials of this kind for the students.
Shortcomings are inevitable in this book. Therefore, we appreciate
and welcome suggestions for a revised edition.

Hue, December 24th, 2013

Truong Bach Le

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 CONTENTS

Chapter I: WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS? 7 1

(Compiled by Truong Bach Le)
I. Introduction 7 1
II. A brief historical overview 8 2
III. Discourse versus text 11
IV. Spoken versus written language 15 6

Chapter II: LINGUISTIC ELEMENTS IN DISCOURSE 23 1

(Compiled by Truong Bach Le)
I. Cohesion 23
II. Cohesive devices 24 1
1. Reference 24 1
2. Substitution 31 1
3. Ellipsis 35 2
4. Conjunction 37 2
5. Lexical cohesion 39 2
III. Cohesion versus coherence 43 2
IV. Information structure 50 3
1. Given and new information 53 3
2. Theme and rheme 56 3
V. Genres 65
1. Introduction 65
2. Text structures 71
Chapter III: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 76
(Compiled by Truong Bach Le & Truong Thi Nhu Thuy)
I. Spoken interactions 76 4

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 1. Transactional interactions 77 4
2. Classroom discourse 79 5
3. Interpersonal interactions 83 5
4. Adjacency pairs 85 5
II. Negotiation of meaning 94 6
1. Turn taking 94
2. Topic management 102 6
3. Lexis in talk 103 6
4. Feedback 108
5. Repair 108
III. How to analyse spoken language 110 7

Chapter IV: DISCOURSE PROCESSING & DISCOURSE IN 122

LANGUAGE TEACHING
(Compiled by Truong Bach Le & Truong Thi Nhu Thuy)
I. Discourse processing 122
II. Applications in language teaching 130
References 144
Glossary 146

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Chapter I

What is discourse analysis?

I. Introduction
For a long time, as Cook (1989) observes, language teaching has been
focused considerably on sentences. However, even if we submit to this
approach as a temporary measure, that there is more to using language,
and communicating successfully with other people, than being able to
produce correct sentences. Not all sentences are interesting, relevant, or
suitable; one cannot just put any sentence after another and hope that it
will mean something. People do not always speak—or write—in
complete sentences, yet they still succeed in communicating. Knowing
what is supposed to make a sentence correct, and where that sentence
ends, though it may be important and worth teaching and learning, is
clearly not enough. Nor is this only a question of a difference between
writing and speech, as might at first appear.

Activity 1. Read the following pieces of language and answer the

questions below them.

A. This box contains, on average, 100 Large Plain Paper Clips. 'Applied
Linguistics' is therefore not the same as 'Linguistics'. The tea's as hot as it
could be. This is Willie Worm. Just send 12 Guinness 'cool token' bottle tops.

B. Playback. Raymond Chandler. Penguin Books in association with

Hamish Hamilton. To Jean and Helga, without whom this book could
never have been written. One. The voice on the telephone seemed to be
sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said-partly
because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the
receiver upside down.

(Cook, 1989)

7
1 Which of these two stretches of language is part of a unified whole?

2 What sort of text is it?

3 What is the other one?

4 How did you distinguish between them?

Being meaningful and unified is known as quality of text, that is

coherence. This is an essential quality for effective communication and
therefore for foreign language learning, but which cannot be explained by
concentrating on the internal grammar of sentences. Then, as Cook
(ibid.) argues, there are two issues that language teachers have to tackle.
Firstly, paying too much attention to producing correct sentences but it is
not enough to communicate well. Secondly, while it is not the rules of the
sentence grammar that helps us to be meaningful and to perceive
meaning, then it is text grammar needs to be focused on.

II. A brief historical overview of discourse analysis

Activity 2 Read the extract and identify the approaches and disciplines
related to discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship

between language and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of
work in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including
linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology.
Discourse analysts study language in use: written texts of all kinds,
and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalised forms
of talk.

At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of

single sentences, Zeilig Harris published a paper with the title
'Discourse analysis" (Harris 1952). Harris was interested in the
distribution of linguistic elements in extended texts, and the links
between the text and its social situation, though his paper is a far cry

8
from the discourse analysis we are used to nowadays. Also important
in the early years was the emergence of semiotics and the French
structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, Dell
Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in
its social setting (e.g. Hymes 1964). The linguistic philosophers such
as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential
in the study of language as social action, reflected in speech-act
theory and the formulation of conversational maxims, alongside the
emergence of pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context
(see Levinson 1983; Leech 1983).

British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K.

Halliday's functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973),
which in turn has connections with the Prague School of linguists.
Halliday's framework emphasises the social functions of language and
the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also
important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University
of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher-
pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work
has dealt with doctor-patient interaction, service encounters, interviews,
debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in
the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The
British work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the
basis of the isolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed
sequences of discourse.

American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the

ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasises the research method
of close observation or groups of people communicating in natural
settings. It examines types or speech event such as storytelling,
greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social
settings (e.g. Gumperz and Hymes 1972). What is often called
conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be-
included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational

9
analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on
the close observation of the behaviour of participants in talk and on
patterns which recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of
Goffman (l976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is
important in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking, and other
aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts,
working within me sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of
oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in
narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large number
of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social
constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk,
overlapping with British work in pragmatics.

Also relevant to the development or discourse analysis as a whole is

the work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language.
Text grammarians see texts as language elements strung together in
relationships with one another that can be defined. Linguists such as
Van Dijk (1972), De Beaugrande (1980), Halliday and Hasan (l976)
have made a significant impact in this area. The Prague School of
linguists, with their interest in the structuring of information in
discourse, has also been influential. Its most important contribution
has been to show the links between grammar and discourse.

Discourse analysis has grown up into a wide-ranging discipline which

finds its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an
interest in the contexts and cultural influences which affect language
in use. It is also now forming a backdrop to research in Applied
Linguistics, and second language learning and teaching.

(McCarthy, 1991)

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Summary

Text analysis is concerned with the study of written and spoken texts
as language elements strung together in relationships with one another
that can be defined. It is the study of the formal linguistic devices that
distinguish a text from random sentences.

Discourse analysis also studies language in use: written texts of all

kinds, and spoken data from conversation to highly institutionalised
forms of talk. It studies the relationship between language and the
contexts in which it is used. It also studies the text-forming devices.
However, it does so with reference to the purposes and functions for
which the discourse was produced, as well as the context within which
the discourse was created. Its ultimate aim is to show how the
linguistic elements enable language users to communicate in context.

Conversation analysis is much interested in analysing conversations

where the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the
close observation of the behaviour of participants in talk and on
patterns which recur over a wide range of natural data.

( Nunan, 1993)

III. Discourse versus text

Activity 3
Read the following extract and answer the questions.

1. What features distinguish text and discourse?

2. How can a word make a complete text/ piece of discourse?

So far, I have used the terms 'discourse' and 'text' as though they are
synonyms. It is time to look at these terms a little more closely.
Consider the following statements, which have been extracted from a
number of different sources.
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1. ―discourse A continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language
larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a
sermon, argument, joke or narrative.‖ (Crystal 1992: 25)

2. "text A piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed

discourse identified for purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit
with a definable communicative function, such as a conversation. a
poster." (Crystal 1992: 72)

3. 'We shall use text "as a technical term, to refer to the verbal record
of a communicative act.' (Brown and Yule 1983a: 6)

4. "discourse: stretches of language perceived to be meaningful,

unified, and purposive." (Cook 1989: 156)

5. "text: a stretch of language interpreted formally, without context."

(Cook 1989: 158)

From these extracts it can be seen that there is disagreement about the
meaning of these two terms. For some writers, the terms seem to be
used almost interchangeably; for others, discourse refers to language
in context. All, however, seem to agree that both text and discourse
need to be defined in terms of meaning, and that coherent texts/ pieces
of discourse are those that form a meaningful whole.

Let us examine some of the claims and assumptions in the quotes.

ASSERTION: the terms 'text' and 'discourse' are interchangeable. While
some commentators appear to use the terms interchangeably, others
draw a clear distinction between them. Some people argue that
discourse is language in action, while a text is the written record of
that interaction. According to this view, discourse brines together
language, the individuals producing the language, and the context
within which the language is used. Yet other linguists tend to avoid
using the term 'discourse' altogether, preferring the term 'text' for all
recorded instances of language in use.

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I shall use the term text to refer to any written record of a
communicative event. The event itself may involve oral language (for
example, a sermon, a casual conversation, a shopping transaction) or
written language (for example, a poem, a newspaper advertisement, a
wall poster, a shopping list, a novel). I shall reserve the term discourse
to refer to the interpretation of the communicative event in context. In
this book, I shall discuss aspects of both text analysis and discourse
analysis - that is, I shall deal with both the linguistic analysis of texts
and an interpretation of those texts. ASSERTION: discourse analysis
involves the study of language in use. The assertion here is that the
analysis of discourse involves, the analysis of language in use -
compared with an analysis of the structural properties of language
divorced from their communicative functions which Cook (1989),
among others, refers to as text analysis. All linguists - from the
phonetician, through the grammarian, to the discourse analyst - are
concerned with identifying regularities and patterns in language.
However, in the case of the discourse analyst, the ultimate aim of this
analytical work is both to show and to interpret the relationship
between these regularities and the meanings and purposes expressed
through discourse.

ASSERTION: a text or piece of discourse consists of more than one

sentence and the sentences combine to form a meaningful whole. The
notion that a text should form a 'meaningful whole' - that is, convey a
complete message - is commonsensical, although it is not always easy
to determine where one text ends and another begins. The notion that
a text should consist of more than one sentence or utterance is
arguable. Consider the following: STOP!, GO!. WAIT., OUCH' Each
of these utterances consists of a single word. However, they are,
nonetheless, complete texts in their own right. Each conveys a
coherent message, and can therefore be said to form a meaningful
whole. I believe that, given an appropriate context, many words can
function as complete texts.

(Nunan, 1993)

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Exercises
1. The following are a number of other definitions of discourse analysis.
Read each of these definitions and summarise the main features they list
as being characteristic of discourse analysis.

 The analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in

use,... While some linguists may concentrate on determining the
formal properties of a language, the discourse analyst is committed to
an investigation of what that language is used for (Brown and Yule
1983:1).

 Discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered

in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become
meaning and unified for their users. Traditionally, language teaching
has concentrated on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and
while these remain the basis of foreign language knowledge, discourse
analysis can draw attention to the skills needed to put this knowledge
into action and to achieve successful communication (Cook 1989:viii).

 Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship

between language and the contexts in which it is used (McCarthy
1991:12). Discourse analysis is not only concerned with the
description and analysis of spoken interaction... discourse analysts are
equally interested in the organisation of written interaction (McCarthy
1991:12).

 Discourse analysis is the study of the language of communication-

spoken or written... communication is an interlocking social, cognitive
and linguistic enterprise (Hatch 1992:1).

(Paltridge, 2000)

2. Read the following pieces of language. Do you think they are texts in
the sense of being unified stretches of language?

14
 a. Once upon a time there was a little white mouse called "Tiptoe".
The boys lived in a large brick house with a thatched roof at the end
of the longest street in town. That morning Mrs Smooks left home in a
great hurry. But, too late, William realised that the car had no brakes.
So they ran and they ran and they ran until eventually the giant got
tired out so that he couldn't follow them anymore. "What an exciting
day," she sighed. And so he never goes alone to the shops anymore.
(Eggins 1994 : 89).

b. I had always wanted to see Paris. However, you can imagine how
excited was once we got there. We had wanted to do some sightseeing.
And unfortunately it was cold and wet. Meanwhile we went to the
Louvre instead. Prior to that it had fined up. In addition we were
exhausted by 6 o'clock. (Eggins 1994 : 91).

c. Well here we are in the tropics. I’ve spent many hours just lying
around doing nothing. We might go skin diving this afternoon which
will be exciting. Well now I'm supposed to say having a wonderful
time, wish you were here, but l won't. See you too soon. Love Heather.

(Feez and Joyce, 1998)

IV. Spoken versus written language

Activity 4
1) List what you think are the main differences between spoken and
written language.

2) Read the two texts which follow. They both refer to the same topic;
the first is the transcript of a spontaneous spoken report, and the second
is a written report of the same incident.

3) What major differences do you find between the two texts? Refer to
your categories established in 1) above and add any new ones that either
of the two texts exhibits.

15
 A. walked down there about an hour ago to have a look /and/ it is/it
looks as if a bomb's.

hit it/there are caravans upside down/erhm/some on their sides/some

of them have been completely ripped away from the/area
anyway/er/and I understand from the people that erm/that the actual
people that live in them/is that the/er/chassis//which are actually
chained down to concrete/er/the top part of the caravan has been
ripped away from the chassis in a lot of instances/and it's just bowled
over and over across the field.

B. I walked down there about an hour ago to have a look, and it looks
as if a bomb's hit it. There are caravans upside down and on their
sides. I understand from the people who live in them that the top part
of the caravan has, in a lot of instances, been ripped away from the
chassis, which is actually chained down to the concrete, and been
bowled over and over across the field.

Note: / signifies a pause in the transcript of the spoken text.

(Wright, 1994)

Activity 5

Refer to the table which compares written and spoken language adapted by
Van Lier (1995, p. 88). Then read the two extracts below it about spoken
and written language and add to the table other differences that are not listed
between these two types of discourses.

Spoken Written
auditory visual
temporary; immediate permanent; delayed reception
reception punctuation
prosody (intonation, delayed or no feedback
stress,rhythm)
16
 immediate feedback attention,boundaries,pointers,et.,,
a variety of attention and limited to verbal devices
boundary signals (including unlimited planning, editing,
kinesic ones) revision
planning and editing limited by
channel lexically dense
lexically sparse grammatically simple
grammatically dense

Extract 1

Speech and Writing

1. Speech is transient, rather than permanent. Because of physical

constraints, interlocutors may not speak at the same time, or else they
cannot hear what the others say. They are bound by the non-reversible
distribution of turns at talk. Written language, by contrast, can be
stored, retrieved, and recollected, and responses can be delayed.
Because it cannot be immediately challenged as in oral
communication, written language carries more weight and hence snore
prestige. Moreover, the permanence of writing as a medium can easily
lead people to suppose that what it expresses is permanent too, hence
the important link between written documents and the law.

2. Speech is additive or `rhapsodic'. Because of the dialogic nature of

oral interaction, speakers `rhapsodize', i.e. stitch together elements
from previous turns-at-talk, they add language as they go along (and...
and, then... and then..), thus showing conversational co-operation in
the building of their own turn. By contrast, the information conveyed
in writing is hierarchically ordered within the clause structure, and is
linearly arranged on the page, from left to right, right to left, or top to

17
bottom, according to the cultural convention. Since it is likely to be read
by distant, unknown, or yet-to-he-born 'audiences, it has developed an
information structure characterized by a high level of cohesion.

3. Speech is aggregative, i.e. it makes use of verbal aggregates or

formulaic expressions, ready-made chunks of speech that maintain the
contact between interlocutors, also called phatic communion. By
contrast, in the absence of such direct contact and for the sake of
economy of information over long distances or long periods of time,
and because it can be read and re-read at will, writing has come to be
viewed as the medium that fosters analysis, logical reasoning and
abstract categorization.

4. Speech is redundant or `copious'. Because speakers are never quite

sure whether their listener is listening, paying attention, comprehending
and remembering what they are saying or not, they tend to make
frequent use of repetition, paraphrase, and restatement. By contrast,
since written language doesn't have to make such demands on short-
term memory, it tends to avoid redundancy.

5. Speech is loosely structured grammatically and is lexically sparse;

writing, by contrast, is grammatically compact and lexically dense.
What does this mean concretely? Speakers have to attend to n- many
aspects of the situation while they concentrate on what they are saying,
and while they monitor the way they are saying it. Thus, their speech is
characterized by false starts, filled and unfilled pauses, hesitations,
parenthetic remarks, unfinished sentences. They create their utterances
as they are speaking them. One way of keeping control of this balancing
act is to use grammatical resources as best serves one's immediate
needs, and to leave the vocabulary as sparse as possible. Writers, by
contrast, have time to pack as much information in the clause as they
can, using all the complex syntactic resources the language can give
them; they can condense large quantities of information in a tighter
space by using, for example, dense nominalized phrases. The contrast is
shown in the examples below.
18
 WRITTEN SPOKEN
Every previous visit had left ―Whenever I‘d visited there before
me with a sense of the futility I‘d ended up feeling that it
of further action on my part. would be futile if I tried to do
anything more.‖
Improvements in technology ―Because the technology has
have reduced the risks and high improved, it‘s less risky than
costs associated with simultane it used to be when you install
ous installation. them at the same time, and it
doesn‘t cost so much either.

(Halliday, M.A.K. Spoken and Written Language.

Oxford University Press 1985, page 81)

6. Speech tends to be people-centered, writing tends to be topic-'

centered. Because of the presence of an audience and the need to keep
the conversation going, speakers not only, focus on their topic, but try
to engage their listeners as well, and appeal to their senses and
emotions. In expository writing, by contrast, the topic or message and
its transferability from one context to the other is the main concern.
Writers of expository prose try to make their message as clear,
unambiguous, coherent, and trustworthy as possible since they will
not always be there to explain and defend it. Of course, other written
texts, in particular of the literary or promotional kind, appeal to the
readers' emotions, and display many features characteristic of speech.

7. Speech, being close to the situation at hand, is context dependent;

writing, being received far from its original context of production, is
context-reduced. Because of the dialogic character of oral exchanges,
truth in the oral mode is jointly constructed and based, on
commonsense experience. Truth in the- literate mode is based on the
logic and the coherence of the argument being made.

19
Extract 2

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN

LANGUAGE/DISCOURSE

(a) the syntax of spoken language is typically much less structured

than that of written language.

i. spoken language contains many incomplete sentences, often simply

sequences of phrases.

ii. spoken language typically contains rather little subordination.

iii. in conversational speech, where sentential syntax can be observed,

active declarative forms are normally found. In over 50 hours of
recorded conversational speech, Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1980)
found very few examples of passives, it-clefts or wh-clefts. Crystal
(1980) also presents some of the problems encountered in attempting
to analyse spontaneous speech in terms of categories like sentence
and clause.

As a brief example, notice how this speaker pauses and begins each
new `sentence' before formally completing the previous one:

it's quite nice the Grassmarket since + it's always had the antique shops
but they're looking + they're sort of + em + become a bit nicer +

(b) in written language an extensive set of metalingual markers exists

to mark relationships between clauses (that complementisers, when /
while temporal markers, so-called `logical connectors' like besides,
moreover, however, in spite of, etc.), in spoken language the largely
paratactically organised chunks are related by and, but, then and, more
rarely, if. The speaker is typically less explicit than the writer: I'm so
tired (because) I had to walk all the way home. In written language
rhetorical organisers of larger stretches of discourse appear, like
firstly, more important than and in conclusion. These are rare in
spoken language.

20
(c) In written language, rather heavily premodified noun phrases (like
that one) are quite common - it is rare in spoken language to find more
than two premodifying adjectives and there is a strong tendency to
structure the short chunks of speech so that only one predicate is
attached to a given referent at a time (simple case-frame or one-place
predicate) as in: its a biggish cat + tabby + with torn ears, or in: old
man McArthur + he was a wee chap + oh very small + and eh a
beard + and he was pretty stooped.

The packaging of information related to a particular referent can, in the

written language, be very concentrated, as in the following news item.

A man who turned into a human: torch ten days ago after snoozing in
his locked car while smoking his pipe has died in hospital.

(Evening News (Edinburgh), 22 April 1982)

(d) Whereas written language sentences are generally structured in

subject-predicate form, in spoken language it is quite common to find
what Givon (1979b) calls topic-comment structure, as in: the cats +
did you let them out.

(e) in informal speech, the occurrence of passive constructions is

relatively infrequent. That use of the passive in written language
which allows non-attribution of agency is typically absent from
conversational speech. Instead, active constructions with indeterminate
group agents are noticeable, as in:

Oh everything they do in Edinburgh + they do it far too slowly

(f) in chat about the immediate environment, the speaker may rely on
(e.g.) gaze direction to supply a referent: (looking at the rain) frightful
isn't it.

(g) the speaker may replace or refine expressions as he goes along:

this man + this chap she was going out with.

21
(h) the speaker typically uses a good deal of rather generalised
vocabulary: a lot of, got, do, thing, nice, stuff, place and things like that.

(i) the speaker frequently repeats the same syntactic form several
times over, as this fairground inspector does: I look at fire
extinguishers + I look at fire exits + I look at what gangways are
available + I look at electric cables what + are they properly earthed
+ are they properly covered

(j) the speaker may produce a large number of prefabricated 'fillers': well,
erm, I think, you know, if you see what I mean, of course, and so on.

(Brown & Yule 1983, pp.15-17)

22
Chapter II

Linguistic elements in discourse

I. Cohesion
So far language has been treated from the point of view of several
different levels of analysis - from isolated sounds to whole sentences.
Traditionally, language analysis at the sentence level predominated.
More recently, the situation has changed and the focus has expanded to
take in whole texts in order to see, among other things, if there is such a
thing as ― grammar of texts‖, that is, rules that give both structure and
meaning to units of discourse beyond the sentence level.

Activity 6

Do texts have a 'grammar'? Are there rules that determine their structure?
Try putting the following jumbled text in the correct order. What clues
did you use to help you unjumble the text?

Note: there is an extra sentence that does not belong.

a) Inside its round fruits, called balls, are masses of white fibres.
b) But, in the cotton fields, the balls are picked before this can happen.
c) Pure copper is very soft.
d) Cotton grows best in warm, wet lands, including Asia, the southern
United States, India, China, Egypt and Brazil.
e) Cotton is a very useful plant.
f) When the fruits ripen, they split and the fibres are blown away.
(Thornbury, 1997)

23
II. Cohesive devices
According to Jackson (1982), besides being about the way in which
information within sentences is organized according to the demands of a
text, text syntax is also about the ways in which sentences are linked
together into a cohesive whole. Five kinds of cohesion have been
identified. They are: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical
cohesion. Each of these cohesive devices will be examined below from
Jackson‘s (ibid.) views.

1. Reference

Reference is defined by Halliday and Hasan as 'a semantic relation that

ensures the continuity of meaning in a text'. It involves items that cannot
be interpreted in their own right, but which make reference to something
else for their interpretation. For example, in the nursery rhyme Doctor
Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain.

He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again,
the items he and his in the second sentence are interpretable only by
reference to Doctor Foster in the first, and the item there by reference
back to Gloucester.

Reference in general may be of two kinds. Exophoric reference is

reference outside the text to the situation; e.g. if someone says It needs a
coat of paint and points to some object, then It has exophoric reference.
Endophoric reference is reference to items within the text. It may be
either cataphoric, i.e. forward pointing (e.g. this in This is how he said
it...), or anaphoric, i.e. backward pointing, as in the nursery rhyme
example in the previous paragraph. Only endophoric reference is
cohesive, and in the majority of cases it is anaphoric.

Exercises

What does it refer to in these short extracts: a noun phrase in the text or a
situation?

24
a) A pioneering 'school-based management' program in Miami-Dade
Country's 260 schools has also put some budget salary and personnel
decisions in the hands of local councils, composed largely of teachers.
It's a recognition that our voices and input are important,' says junior
highschool teacher Ann Colman.

b) Like the idea or deterring burglars with a big ferocious hound - but can‘t
stand dogs ? For around £45 you can buy an automatic dog barking unn -
Guard God, or the Boston Bulldog, both available by mail order from
catalogues like the ones you're sent with credit card statements. You plug it
in near the front door and its built-in microphone detects sharp noises.

(From Mc Carthy, 1991)

c) Find exophoric references in the following extract and consider

whether they are likely to create difficulties for a learner of English?

King trial jury adjourns with transcript

THE JURY in the trail of three people accused of conspiring to

murder the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Tom King, adjourned last
night after more than seven hour's deliberation.

They spent their night within Winchester crown court buildings,

where the trial is taking place. Five hours after they retired to consider
their verdict, the judge recalled them to answer a question they had
put to him in a note.

That question was "Can we convict if we think the information

collecting was for several purposes, or does the one whole aim have to
be murder?"

The judge said the Crown had to prove an agreement to murder so that
the jury was sure. It was not sufficient to prove it as a possibility or
probability, but it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

(McCarthy, 1991)

25
Cohesive reference may be of three different kinds: personal, demonstrative
and comparative (Jackson, 1982).

1.1. Personal reference

Personal reference is by means of the personal pronouns, possessive

pronouns (mine, yours, etc.) and possessive identifiers (my, your, etc.).
The third person pronouns are nearly always cohesive, but the first and
second person pronouns may often have exophoric reference. Sometimes
a pronoun, especially it, will refer back not to a noun or a noun phrase,
but to a longer stretch; e.g. Curtsey while you're thinking what to say. It
saves time. Alice wondered a little at this, but she was too much in awe of
the Queen to disbelieve if. Here the first it refers to the whole of the first
sentence and the second it to the whole of the first two sentences, i.e. that
curtseying while you're thinking what to say saves time.

According to Salkie (1995, pp. 65-66), the most common reference

words are the personal pronouns I, you, he. she, is, we and they, along
with their object forms (me, him, etc.) and their possessive forms(my,
your, etc., and mine, yours, etc.). Since the first and second person
pronouns l, you and we involve the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader,
they are normally used for situation reference (exophoric reference).The
third person pronouns can be used for both types of reference. In speech
these pronouns normally involve situation reference while text reference
(endophoric reference) is more common in writing. Here are two
examples of he:

a. [Watching a person on a film] 'Wasn't he also the chief baddie in the

film Hudson Hawk?'
b. Maurice Oberstein, the gravel-voiced boss of Polygram and, at 63, a
veteran of the record industry, is particularly dismissive. 'Ovenight sensations
are crap,' he declares.

Here (a) involves situation reference, (b) text reference.

Here is another example from Salkie (1995, pp. 65-66), which also
contains two instances of my:

26
Just after midnight on 16 January 1991 my son woke me up to tell me the
war had started.... But what if this war goes wrong for the allies and
conscription is once more introduced? My son fighting, perhaps dying,
for his country? That is not why I brought him up. To win this war, I am
asking other people's sons to risk their lives, yet here am I saying, please
God, not mine....

It is clear that my involves reference, but what about mine? The simplest
thing is to say that mine here involves reference AND ellipsis (of son).
Expressions such as do it combine two forms of cohesion, hyponymy and
reference. Here we see that the word mine combines two forms of cohesion.
We shall see some more examples of 'double' cohesive devices below.

1.2. Demonstrative reference

Demonstrative reference involves the demonstratives (this, that), the

definite article (the) and the adverbs here, there, now and then. All these
are a form of verbal pointing and indicate proximity in text to the
sentence in which they occur. In the case of the demonstratives, there is a
tendency to use this to refer to something the speaker has said and that to
what the other person has said. This and that may also be used like it to
refer to extended text; in the example in the previous paragraph, the item
this in the third sentence has this function.

In their cohesive (text reference/endophoric reference) function they can

be used with nouns, as in examples (a-b), or without nouns, as in
examples (c-d) (Salkie, 1995).

a. During the First World War, he told me, after he returned to South
Africa, he set up a corrugated tin roof in an alley off Smith Street. He
ordered a small quantity of drugs from England and then sold them to the
local retail chemists... His orders got bigger and bigger and eventually he
ordered a large shipment of supplies from England. When this shipment
was underway, the Second World War broke out and the drug companies
could not send further supplies to South Africa.

27
b. Basically I play what we call tuned percussion, which really entails
xylophone, marimba - which is like a xylophone except lower in pitch -
vibraphone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, and then you've got the timpani
or kettle drums and a vast amount of other drums - and so basically the
job of a percussionist is to try and attempt all those instruments.
c. Employees at the Guardian are hoping a meeting Wednesday between
management and national officers of the National Union of Journalists,
Sogat and the National Graphical Association will be successful. If not,
the dispute will go to conciliation. If that fails, the chapel will ballot on
industrial action, probably in early March.
d. In the final year, a number of special option courses allow specialization
in areas of particular interest to the student. These normally include
Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics; Second Language Acquisition;
Experimental Phonetics....
In (d) we have reference plus ellipsis: the text could have said these
options. In (c), we can understand that in two different ways: either as
short for that conciliation in which case we have reference and ellipsis;
or as ―the fact that the dispute will go to conciliation...‖. In this
interpretation, that refers back to an extended section of preceding text,
rather than one word.
1.3. Comparative reference
Comparative reference may be either general, expressing the identity,
similarity or difference between things, or particular, expressing a
qualitative or quantitative comparison; e.g. 'I see nobody on the road,'
said Alice. 'I only wish I had such eyes,' the king remarked....
We can distinguish two types of comparison. In general comparison, two
things are said to be the same or different, without going into detail.
Examples (a-b) from Salkie (1995) illustrate sameness, and (c) illustrates
the difference:

a. In our homes we associate the small screen with entertainment. We

expect to enjoy the experience of viewing. Learners bring the same
expectations to the experience of viewing video in the classroom...
28
b. House prices in the South are now 5 to 10 per cent be their peak of fate
last year, which reflects the fact that sellers are accepting more realistic
prices for their properties. Such realism will be necessary to stimulate
house sales over the next few months, Halifax comments.

c. After a pointless discussion, in which I continued to give the fullest

details I could, but no road name, since there isn't one, the woman hung
up on me. I cannot believe that an employee of a Rescue Service can treat
its customers in this way. I telephoned again ten minutes later and got a
different person who was most helpful and arranged for someone to come
out and see to my car.

In specific comparison, two things are compared with respect to a

specific property. One of the two things will be said to have more (a) or
less (b) of this property:

a. In language teaching we are accustomed to using dialogues which

present very restricted examples of language. This is acceptable in the
textbook, and can even be made to work on audio, but it is more difficult
when we can see real people in a real setting on video.

b. The making and breaking of chemical bonds is associated with an

energy barrier. At normal temperatures most molecules jostle with
enough thermal energy to overcome this barrier. Near absolute zero,
however, molecules have much less thermal energy. Therefore, even if
two reactive fragments were side by side in a solid argon matrix, there
would not necessarily be enough thermal energy to overcome the barrier
and reform the precursor.

Exercises

1. Pick out all the instances of text reference (endophoric reference) in

these examples from Salkie (1995, pp. 69-70).

a. At one point the Brundtland report states that 'The loss of plant and
animal species can greatly limit the options of future generations; so
sustainable development requires the conservation of plant and animal

29
species'. What, all of them? At what price?... At another point the
Brundtland report says that economic growth and development obviously
involve changes in the physical ecosystem. 'Every ecosystem everywhere
cannot be preserved intact: Well, that's a relief. But how can it be made
consistent with the earlier objective? Does it mean that it is all right to
deprive some people in some parts of the world of a piece of their ecosystem
but not others? What justification is there for this discrimination?

b. We asked Ruby to describe for us what life was like in the African Rilt
Valley some 1500 generations ago. She replied that she had lived with a
small group of about ten people: she indicated the number by holding up
both hands with the fingers spread. They wandered the savanna during
the day, looking for food, and sometimes met and socialised by the lake
with other groups of hominids. It was during one such encounter that she
met her mate, Klono. He wooed her by sharing with her a delicious
baobab fruit.

c. On the 29th December Daniel Deronda knew that the Grandcourts had
arrived at the Abbey, but he had had no glimpse of them before he went
to dress for dinner.... ―I fancy there are some natures one could see
growing or degenerating every day, if one watched them,‖ was his
thought. ―I suppose some of us go on faster than others; I am sure
Gwendolen is a creature who keeps strong traces of anything that has
once impressed her. That little affair of the necklace, and the idea that
somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evidently bitten into her. But
such impressionability tells both ways: it may drive one to desperation as
soon as to anything better.'

d. The friction involved in rolling is less than the friction involved in

sliding. Hence it is much easier to roll a log along the ground than to drag
it. This explains why the wheel forms a useful part of practically all land
vehicles. For the same reason ball-bearings and roller-bearings serve to
make movement easier and to reduce wear in machinery.

2. Explain how the demonstratives are used in the following examples

from Salkie (1995, pp. 70-71).
30
a. Ayleen pushed the woman into the room, trying unsuccessfully to hide
behind her. There was a long silence. Finally the child stuck her head
round and said: ―This is my mother.‖

b. I found out about people like Marx and Lenin. Lenin was a great
humanist, both a thinker and an activist. I found his writing quite easy to
understand. He explained society – how the motivation in our society is
profit and how this means most people will live in poverty. He showed
how to change this for the benefit of the majority. He explained that real
power is concentrated with those who control finance. It was fascinating.
We didn't hear about him at school.

c. ―You see the man over there - the one with the wavy hair? Next to the
woman with the laptop computer. That's the professor of chemistry.‖

d. Journalists on the Daily Telegraph received a 5 per cent rise, while

those on The Times and the Independent have been given 8 per cent and
10 per cent respectively.

e. Everyone always said I could have been a famous painter like

Rembrandt - I think he's the one that painted all those dark pictures, and
they called those cigarettes after him because he was so famous. I liked
painting flowers and pretty things, but Daddy wouldn't let me study it. He
couldn't stand bohemians and people like that. I always felt I'd missed a
big chance in life.

f. Although neglected in England,Walras obtained influential followers in

Europe, the most important being Pareto and Wicksell. It was Pareto who
removed the theory's dependence on utility, arguing that the essence of
the problem of economic equilibrium was ―the opposition between men's
tastes and the obstacles to satisfying them‖.

2. Substitution

Substitution is defined as 'a grammatical relation, where one linguistic

item substitutes for a longer one'. The substitute item is therefore
interpretable only by reference to the original longer item. There are
three kinds of substitution: nominal, verbal, and clausal.
31
2.1. Nominal substitution

Nominal substitution involves the substitution of a noun as head of a

noun phrase by one or ones, or the substitution of a whole noun phrase by
the same; e.g. My knife is too blunt. I must get a sharper one; Give me six
currant buns. I'll have the same. With one and ones there is always an
element of contrast, and there is no referential identity. What is involved
is different instances of an item, e.g. These biscuits are stale. Get some
fresh ones.

2.2. Verbal substitution

Verbal substitution is by means of do (to be distinguished from the

auxiliary do), and it substitutes for the lexical verb; e.g. 'Did you see Jim
last week?'—'I did on Thursday'/'I might have done'.

2.3. Clausal substitution

Clausal substitution is by means of so, for a positive clause and not, for a
negative one. Here an entire clause is presupposed; e.g. 'Is there going to
be a snow-fall?'—'They say so/not'; Are you going to the conference? If
so, we could travel together.

Exercises

1. Say what one or ones is replacing in these examples:

a. A group of people marching on the road should keep to the left. There
should be look-outs in front and at the back wearing reflective clothing at
night and fluorescent clothing by day. At night the look-out in front
should carry a white light and the one at the back should carry a bright
red light visible from the rear.

b. That Malaysian planning is politically motivated does not mean it is

necessarily inefficient. Although a number of criticisms have been
made about the performance of the civil service, its record in
development administration is by no means a bad one when viewed in
comparative terms.

32
c. Excess cholesterol enters the body through our foods, especially animal
fats, and many people are still unaware of the ones they should avoid.

d. Attempts to introduce forms of workers' participation have often been

problematic. The Indian case is a particularly interesting one because the
history of these ideas in that country is a comparatively long one, going
back to the 1920s.

e. There isn't always an obvious link between the materials you have and
the syllabus in use. The link through language is the most obvious and
most straightforward one to make if your syllabus is based on linguistic
items such as language structures or functions.

(Salkie, 1995, p. 38)

2. Say what do is replacing in these examples:

a. They stood up. Victor walked towards her and put his hand on her
back. ―Honestly, Lorie, I wasn't meaning to be a pain in the ass.

―I thought you weren't going to call me that.

―I like it. Can't you be a little flexible too?‖

―About my name?‖ Men seem to think that they can name women as they
please, just because Adam did. That way they give women the shape and
function they want them to have

b. Robert Orr-Ewing, responsible for Knight Frank & Rutley's lettings in

Chelsea, admits that fewer Americans are coming over, but those who
move here are renting, not buying as they did in the boom years of 1987
and 1988.

c. ―I want it all,‖ I said. ―You always do,‖ Hawk said.

d. The competition resulting from an increase in stock (capital) raises

wages and decreases profits. Thus the progress of the British economy
since Henry VIII‘s time, involving as it did a secular rise in the stock of
capital, had led to a fall in the rate of profit.
33
e. Outside the stable doors the circling voices were raised ad peremptory,
and Lestyn, wild with weariness and anger, roared back at them incoherent
defiance. Then, blessedly, Susanna‘s voice soared above the clamour:
―Fools, do you think there‘s any power that can separate us now? I hold as
Lestyn holds, I despise your promises and your threats as he does.‖
(Salkie, 1995, pp. 45-46)
3. In these examples, distinguish the instances of clause substitute so
from other uses of so.
a. ―Marty, you are the third person this morning who has offered to
disassemble my body. You are also third in order of probable success. I
can‘t throw a baseball like you can, but the odds are very good that I
could put you in the hospital before you got a hand on me.‖. ―You think
so.‖. "I was proud of myself. I didn't say, "I know so."
b. ―In the twentieth century the focus of exploitation has change but
exploitation itself remains. Capitalist society now tries to preserve itself
with a precariously interlocking and frantically stimulated system of
greeds and so it encourages people to think of themselves primarily as
consumers living in a consumer society.
c. Plan your travelling to include plenty of opportunities to get up and
stretch stiff joints. Don't expect to make a quick eight-hour car trip with
only one stop for lunch. Plan in other stretching rests. On a train or plane
make sure to walk in the aisle with your child every hour or so.
d. The sparrow perched on the edge of the pram and stared down into the
baby's open mouth. Then he turned to Teddy Robinson. ―That baby's
hungry,‖ chirped the sparrow. ―Look, his beak is wide open.‖. ―Do you
really think so?' said Teddy Robinson.
e. If your network is loaded in the upper-memory region between 640K
and 1 megabyte, you might have problems running Windows. If so, try
loading the network in conventional memory.

(Salkie, 1995, pp.53-54)

34
3. Ellipsis
Ellipsis is similar to substitution, except that in the case of ellipsis the
substitution is by nothing. An obvious structural gap occurs, which can
only be filled by reference to a previous sentence. As with substitution,
ellipsis may be nominal, verbal, or clausal.
3.1. Nominal ellipsis
Nominal ellipsis involves the omission of the head of a noun phrase,
sometimes together with some modifiers; e.g. Four other oysters
followed them. And yet another four.; 'Which hat will you wear?'-'This is
the nicest.'
3.2. Verbal ellipsis
Verbal ellipsis involves the omission of the lexical verb from a verb
phrase, and possibly an auxiliary or two, recoverable from a previous verb
phrase. For example, if one were to hear the snippet of conversation. It
may or it may not, one would know that it was elliptical, since there is no
lexical verb. That would be recoverable from a previous utterance such as,
Is it going to rain today? Another kind of verbal ellipsis omits everything
except the lexical verb; e.g. 'Has she been crying?'—'No, laughing'.
3.3. Clausal ellipsis
Unlike clausal substitution, clausal ellipsis is not concerned with the
ellipsis of whole clauses but with the ellipsis of large parts of clauses,
whole phrases and upwards; e.g. 'Who was playing the piano?'—'Peter
was'. The whole verb phrase is not often left out in ellipsis across
sentence boundaries, but it may be within sentences e.g. Joan bought
some roses, and Bill some carnations. And it may be in conversation e.g.
'Where has Jim planted the roses?'—'In the front border.
Exercises
The following examples contain various kinds of ellipsis. Say for each
instance whether it is a verb, noun or clause ellipsis. For each kind of
ellipsis make a list of the words or types of word that can precede the gap
(Salkie, 1995, pp.60-61).

35
a. Many OAPs still have a hard time making ends meet- but some are
sitting on a small fortune. During the last property boom they saw the
value of their homes soar.
b. There are four newspapers specifically for Britain's 330,000- strong
Jewish community. The Gulf war has put them in reluctant pole position
for a huge international story. Yet all four share the same potential
problem: they are weeklies, with deadlines that vary from early morning
to late afternoon on Thursday. On the past two Fridays they have risked
seeing their front pages made redundant by attacks on Israel.
c. I say that the critic new to the trade ―lowers his standards‖ when faced
with a weekly fare of rubbish, and so he does; that is, he excuses the
badness of the plays and marks them higher than he knows he should.
Which is only reasonable while he does it consciously; disaster comes
when he crosses the line into truly believing that the bad plays are really
not bad at all.
d. The judge said that an employer's duty, under section 99 of the
Employment Protection Act 1975, to consult a union when he was
proposing to dismiss employees as redundant, arose when matters had
reached a stage where a specific proposal had been formulated. Of two
possible subjects of negotiation: whether there were to be redundancies
and, if so, how and on what terms were they to take effect, only the
second was open for discussion, and the redundancies took effect on 31
December 1987.
e. The PM has been wise enough to call for a 'bipartisan' approach, and
the leader of the opposition wise enough to concur.
f. One female marine, Jacqueline Bowling, said: ―I do not think I have
any more fears than the guys have. I think we have the same feelings.
―Her husband, who serves at a post not far from hers, disagreed, and was
unhappy to find that his wife had been assigned so close to the front. ―I
guess that is where the male ego kicks in,‖ his wife explained.
g. This form tells me that you want to vote by post, or get someone else
to vote on your behalf, at elections for an indefinite period. It is for
people who have a right to vote but who cannot reasonably be expected
36
to vote in person because of the nature of their job (or their spouse's). Fill
the form in carefully using block letters except for your signature.
4. Conjunction
Conjunction refers to specific devices (conjunctions) for linking one
sentence to another e.g. He was very uncomfortable. Nevertheless he fell
fast asleep. There are a number of words—conjunctions and adverbs—
which fulfil this function. They may be divided into four groups:
additive, adversative, causal and temporal.
4.1. Additive conjunctions
Additive conjunctions simply add on a sentence as if it were additional
information or an afterthought e.g. and, furthermore, besides,
incidentally, for instance, by contrast etc.
4.2. Adversative conjunctions
Adversative conjunctions draw a contrast between the sentence they
introduce or are contained in and the preceding sentence with which they
form a cohesive relationship e.g. yet, however, nevertheless, on the other
hand, on the contrary, in any case etc.
4.3. Causal conjunctions
Causal conjunctions make a causal link between two sentences e.g. hence,
therefore, consequently, as a result, that being so, otherwise, in this
respect etc. And temporal conjunctions make a time link, usually of a
sequential nature, between one sentence and another e.g. then, after that,
previously, thereupon, meanwhile, finally, from now on, up to now etc.
Exercises

1. This exercise will help you focus on marking the relationships between
sentences in a text. Use the guidelines which follow the text and write out
the passage, connecting the sentences where possible (McCarter, 2003,
pp.38-39).

What are the arguments for and against private vehicles? What is your
opinion in this matter?

37
 (1) Private vehicles play a key role in our lives. (2) They provide
independent transport, freedom and many jobs. (3) They cause pollution,
traffic jams, noise and death. (4) Private transport, especially the car,
gives us freedom to move. (5) We no longer need to organise our lives
around bus or train timetables. (6) Many people think that their cars are
indispensable machines. (7) They cannot live without them. (8) People
who live in rural areas need private vehicles to go to towns for shopping,
socialising, taking children to schools, etc. (9) Without a car their lives
would be very difficult.(10) They would be forced to rely on infrequent
public transport, if it existed at all. (11) Many families who live in the
country have one or more cats. (12) They would be cut off from the rest
of the world. (13) For many people a car is a necessity.

Guidelines for sentence relationships

Sentences 1 and 2. You can join these sentences together; the second
sentence states the reasons why such vehicles play an important role.

Sentence 3 shows the opposite side of the picture, so insert an adverb that
brings out the contrast. Be careful with the punctuation! You will find in
the Key that the author has added another phrase, because he finds that
the contrast is not strong enough, and because there is a problem with the
rhythm of the sentence. Can you add something yourself to the sentence?

Sentence 4 is the first argument of your essay. Add a word or phrase to

indicate this.

Sentence 5 is a consequence of Sentence 4. Use a conjunction to join

them together.
Sentence 6 is an extension of the previous one. It states another true fact
about private vehicles. Can you add a phrase to help show this?
Sentence 7 is a result of Sentence 6.
Sentence 8is an example of the previous sentence.
You can join Sentences 9 and 10 with a simple conjunction that indicates
the two are of the same value.

38
Sentence 11 is a consequence.
Can you think of an adverb to join Sentence 12 to the previous one?
Use a word that means or else. Be careful with the punctuation.
Sentence 13 is a conclusion.
2. Look at the text and find conjunctions linking sentences to one another.

Wind power. Wave power. Solar power. Tidal power.

Whilst their use will increase they are unlikely to be able to provide
large amounts of economic electricity. Generally, the cost of har-
nessing their power is huge.
However, there is a more practical, reliable and economical way of
ensuring electricity for the future
And that is through nuclear energy.
It's not a new idea, of course. We've been using nuclear electricity for
the last 30 years.
In fact, it now accounts for around 20% of Britain's electricity
production. And it's one of the cheapest and safes; ways to produce
electricity we know for the future.
What's more, world supplies of uranium are estimated 10 last for
hundreds of years, which will give us more than enough time to
develop alternatives if we need to.
So, while some people might not care about their children‘s future.
We do.
(McCarthy, 1991)

5. Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion refers to the use of the same, similar, or related words
in successive sentences, so that later occurrences of such words refer

39
back to and link up with previous occurrences. There are two broad types
of lexical cohesion: reiteration and collocation.

5.1. Reiteration

Reiteration may be of four kinds. Firstly, the same word may be repeated
in successive, though not necessarily contiguous sentences; e.g. There
was a large mushroom growing near her... She stretched herself up on
tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom. Secondly, a synonym
or near-synonym of a word may appear in a following sentence; e.g. I
turned to the ascent of the peak. The climb is perfectly easy, where ascent
and climb are synonyms. Thirdly, a word may be replaced in a following
sentence by another which is semantically superordinate to it; e.g.
Henry's bought himself a new Jaguar. He practically lives in the car.
Here Jaguar is a term that is included in the term car, that is to say, car is
a superordinate term to Jaguar. Fourthly, a word may be replaced in a
following sentence by a 'general word' which describes a general class of
objects; e.g. 'What shall I do with all this crockery?'—'Leave the stuff
there'. There are a number of these general words which have a cohesive
function in texts. Referring to humans are: people, person, man, woman,
child, boy, girl. Referring to non-human animates is: creature. Referring
to inanimate concrete nouns are: thing, object. Referring to an inanimate
concrete mass is; stuff. Referring to inanimate abstract nouns are:
business, matter, affair. Referring to actions is: move. Referring to places
is: place. And referring to facts are: question, idea.

5.2. Collocation

This refers to the habitual company which words keep. For example, the
word book implies other words like page, title, read, turn over, shelf,
library etc. A cohesion results, then, from the occurrence of a word's
collocates, as well as from occurrences of itself, its synonyms or its
superordinate terms.

This concludes our discussion of the devices that English uses in order to
achieve unity and cohesiveness in texts. Without them texts would not

40
strictly speaking be texts, but collections of more or less isolated
sentences.

(From Jackson, 1982)

Exercises

1. Read the text and decide how the underlined words are related.

For example: wrinkles, creases= synonyms

WRINKLE FREE

Wrinkle Free is an amazing new formula arerosol that will actually

remove wrinkles and creases from all sorts of fabrics, leaving them
looking neat and super smart. Fast and convenient to use, Wrinkle Free is
ideal for busy and travellers, and can be used with complete safety on all
fabrics and garments, and won‘t leave a build-up on clothes. It costs only
pennies a spray! 3 oz can.

(Thornbury, 2005, p. 165)

2. Read the text and find examples of the following.

- direct repetition of content words.

- synonyms, and near synonyms.

- hyponyms.

- antonyms.

- collocations.

EASY SHOE SHINE

The Shoe Valet will deal with the family‘s footwear in record time,, with
no mess and no grubby hands. Four interchangeable wheels will give
your leather shoes the full valest treatment. One removes mud and dirt,
another applies neutral shoe cream to the leather, and the two soft

41
brushes will polish your light or dark shoes to a deep shine. Shoe Valet
operates quickly efficiently at the touch of a button.

(Thornbury, 2005, p. 165)

3. Trace all subsequent lexical reiterations of the underlined words in the

text below. Are the reiterations in the form of synonyms, antonyms or
hyponyms/superordinates?

Cruise guards 'were asleep'

DOZING guards allowed a group of peace campaigners to breach a
missile security cordon yesterday. The women protesters claimed to
have walked right up to cruise launchers.
As sentries slept, they tip-toed past sentries at 3am and inspected a
cruise convoy in a woody copse on Salisbury Plain.
Greenham Common campaigner Sarah Graham said "For the sake of
making things more realistic, the copse was protected by soldiers dug
into fox-holes.
"And there were dogs rather than the usual reels of barbed wire."
But, she claimed, the American airmen were dozing by the launchers.
"One was kipping beneath one of the vehicles.' she added.
Eventually, one of the airmen "woke up" and spotted the women, who
had been trailing the convoy from the Greenham Common base in
Berkshire since Tuesday.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed there had been an incident
Ten women had been arrested, charged with trespassing and released
on bail.
(Mc Carthy, 1991)

4. Read the text and identify the ways that it is joined together (or made
cohesive). Find examples of lexical and grammatical cohesion.

42
 BAD BREATH: Why you’re always the last to know.
A simple question: when someone you know or work with has bad
breath, do you tell them?
If you‘re like most people, the answer is probably ―No‖. Which means
that nobody is going to tell you when you have bad breath.
So to be sure you don‘t, use RetarDEX products.
They‘re guaranteed to ban bad breath, because they actually get rid of
something dentists call Volatile Sulphur Compounds, or VSCs.
These are the end products of bacteria feeding off dead cell tissue and
III. Cohesion versus coherence
debris in the mouth that, hardly surprising, smell terrible.
Activity 7
Ordinary mouthwashes, toothpastes and sprays only mask the odour
Dowith
the afollowing
nicer smell taskswhich
from soon wears (1997)
Thornbury off. Butto the clinically
explore proven
the difference
between
RetarDEX cohesion
rangeand of coherence.
24-hour oral care products has a patented active
The following text is invented.
ingredient called CloSYS which In fact, it is made
eliminates up ofVCs
these sentences from
and rapidly
different texts.....
restores fresh Yet it has some superficial features of cohesion. Can
breath.
you identify these? Do the texts cohere?
So don‘t wait for someone to tell you. Because they won‘t.
Hale knew, before
(Thornbury, 2005, p.he167) had been in Brighton three hours, that they
meant to murder him. They made a dreadful row in the morning when
it was feeding time. With a team of officials he went about inspecting
the place this morning. No wonder reviewers have singled it out for
special acclaim.
The text is cohesive, but this does not mean that it necessarily makes sense:
it is not coherent. Coherence is a less tangible quality and less easily defined
or accounted for: it is perhaps a 'feeling' the reader (or listener) has, and what
may be coherent for one may be incoherent for another. Nevertheless, the
task of making sense of a text is made easier if the content of the text is
organised in such a way as to make its meaning easily recoverable. The
order in which information is presented in a text is an important factor in
determining how coherent it is likely to be to the reader.

Cohesion alone is not enough to make a text coherent. Texts have an

internal logic, which the reader recognises even without the aid of
explicit cohesive devices.
43
Activity 8

The two columns below contain a number of short (two-sentence) texts.

There are no connectors to link the two sentences. Nevertheless, there is
a connection. Can you match each sentence in the first column with the
appropriate sentence in the second column to make a complete text?

1. Police discovered two l2 ft tall a) He is married to Antonia

cannabis plants in a greenhouse Fraser.

When they raided a house at b) There are mulberries being

Wokingham, Berkshire. trod over the floors.

2. Memory allocation error, c) Chew thoroughly before

swallowing.

3. Harold Pinter was born in d) Cannot load COMMAND,

London in 1930. system halted.

4. Please write firmly, e) Two people were taken into

custody.
5. There's nothing worse than
coming home to find plants in the f) This sturdy British-made
greenhouse dead from the cold. paraffin

6. Take one to four tablets daily. heater will safely keep the chill
off
7. Please wipe your shoes clean
on the mat. your garage or greenhouse for up
to 14 days.

g) You are making six copies.

Using the following categories, drawn from Cohesion in English by
Halliday and Hasan, determine the relationship between the first and
second sentence in each case. Is it:
- Additive, i.e. an and relation?
- Adversative, i.e. a but or however relation?

44
 - Causal, i.e. a because or so relation?
- Temporal, i.e. a before or later relation?
Activity 9
Read the following extracts on coherence. From the exercises above and
the two readings, what factors do you think make a text coherent?

Extract 1

Cohesive devices help a text hang together, or be cohesive. That

means they contribute to what Hasan terms a text's 'unity of texture'.
The schematic structure of the text, in turn, provides a text with 'unity
of structure' (Hasan 1989). Both of these are properties, Hasan argues,
that distinguish text from 'non-text'. That is, they give it textual and
structural unity. They do not, necessarily, however give it coherence.
Cohesion refers to the internal properties of a text, whereas coherence
refers to its contextual properties: that is, the way in which it relates to
and makes sense in the situation in which it occurs. In the following
text there are no grammatical or lexical links between each of the
utterances, yet in a particular situation, it is a coherent text.

45
A: That'll be the phone

B: I'm in the bath

A: OK

Thus, a text needs situational coherence, that is, a situation in which it

could occur; and generic coherence, that is, it needs to occur within
the context of a particular communicative context, event, or genre....
many contextual devices can work to facilitate coherence. The most
important of these, however, are the situational and communicative
contexts in which the text occurs.

(Paltridge, 2000, p.139)

Extract 2

Coherence: The degree to which a piece of discourse ‗makes sense‘.

When you attempt to understand a connected piece of speech or
writing, your degree of success will depend upon several factors.
Some of these, such as your general knowledge of the subject matter,
are obvious and of no linguistic interest. But a factor of considerable
interest and importance is the coherence of the discourse, its
underlying structure, organization and connectedness. A coherent
discourse has a high degree of such connectedness; an incoherent
discourse does not, and is accordingly hard to follow.

The notion of coherence is important within the various approaches to

language called functionalism, and particularly within Systemic
Linguistics.

Some types of connectedness are provided very explicitly by overt

linguistic devices like anaphors; these are singled out for special
attention as cohesion.

46
But there are also more general devices for providing structure which
are not explicitly grammatical in nature, and these other devices are
examined under the rubric of coherence.

Here is a simple example, taken from a newspaper article: After ten

years of standardization, there should be a healthy UK market for
used models. Curiously, there seems to be only one big second-hand
PC dealer in London.

The point of interest here is the word curiously, whose function is to

relate the following sentence to the preceding one in a manner that is
immediately obvious to the reader: given the content of the first
sentence, the assertion made by the second one should seem
surprising.

The skilful use of such connections has, of course, been recognized for
a long time as an essential part of good speaking and writing. But now
linguists are increasingly turning their attention to the explicit analysis
of these connective devices. The term itself was introduced by the
British linguist Michael Halliday, who has been particularly prominent
in investigating coherence within Halliday‘s Systemic Linguistics.

Cohesion The presence in a discourse of explicit linguistic links

which provide structure. Quite apart from the more general kinds of
devices for providing structure to a discourse or text, which belong to
the domain of coherence, there are some very explicit linguistic
devices, often of a grammatical nature, which serve to provide
connectedness and structure. Among these devices are anaphors like
she, they, this and one another, temporal connectives like after and
while, and logical connectives like but and therefore. Every one of
these items serves to provide some kind of specific link between two
other smaller or larger pieces of discourse. Consider a pair of
examples. In the first, the cohesion has gone wrong: The Egyptians
and the Assyrians were carrying standards some 5,000 years ago.
They were poles topped with metal figures of animals or gods.

47
 Here the reader naturally takes they as referring to the Egyptians and
the Assyrians, and is flummoxed by the continuation. The second
version is different: Some 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and the
Assyrians were carrying standards. These were poles topped with
metal figures of animals or gods. This time the item these
immediately makes it clear that it is the standards which are being
referred to, and the continuation is smooth and effortless.

Naturally, the proper use of cohesive devices has long been

recognized as a fundamental aspect of good writing, but in recent
years linguists have been turning their attention to the analysis of
these devices. The term cohesion was coined by the British linguist
Michael Halliday, and the study of cohesion is especially prominent
within Halliday‘s Systemic Linguistics, but it is also now a familiar
part of most linguistic analyses of texts and discourses.

(Trask, 1999, pp. 26-27)

Exercises
A 1. Describe situations in which the following exchanges would make
sense (Bolitho & Tomlinson, 1995, pp. 50-53).

(a) A: It's nearly seven

B: Yes, I know. I'm just going to ring him now.

(b) A: The grass needs cutting.

B: It's nearly ten o'clock.

A: He'll wait.

B: Like last week and the week before.

A: The Robinsons are coming tomorrow.

48
B: It's starting to rain now anyway.

(c) A: Shall we stop for a while?

B: If you want.

A: The Cow's quite good, isn't it?

B: If you say so.

A: We met your friend Jane last time, didn't we?

B: My mother will be worried.

(d) A: Hello.

B: Bob?

A: I'm not coming tonight. .

B: He's already gone.

A: Already?

B: Try Ted's.

B. Cohesion and coherence are obviously both concerned with ways of

connecting utterances together. It is not easy to actually define the
difference between the two as there is considerable overlap between
them. Try to complete the following definitions.

Cohesion involves indicating the conn——— between consecutive or

rel___ utterances. If a text is cohesive you can see by loo——— at the
text how one utterance is rel—— to a prev—— or subseq—— utterance.

Coherence is the lin——— together of conse———— or rel——

utterances according to the func——of the utterances. Thus an invitation
followed by an acc———— would be coh-—— whereas an invitation
followed by an anecdote would probably not be coh——.

C. Look at the following examples.

49
1. Mr Burns is often late. Yesterday I answered the phone.

2 A: Which platform does the London train go from?

B: London? My daughter lives in London. She married a banker there

last year.

Example 1 could be coh—— because it could consist of a generalization

followed by an example and a consequence. But it is not coh——
because there is no indicated conn——— between the two utterances.

Example 2 is coh—— because the two utterances are connected by the

repetition of London. But it is not coh—— because there is no apparent
connection between the function of the question and the function of the reply.

IV. Information structure

It is important to make well-formed sentences and be able to arrange
elements within them according to what one wants to emphasise.
However, there is more than that when it comes to producing stretches of
sentences. Will a group of well-formed sentences alone make a text
coherent? How should information be arranged within sentences and
between sentences so that when they are put together, a text achieves
coherence?

In order to understand this relationship between grammar and discourse,

let‘s do the following activity based on Cook (1989).

Activity 10

The following are both sequences of grammatically correct sentences.

They both contain exactly the same information. One of them is the
beginning of the biographical sketch of Ernest Hemingway as it appears
in the Penguin edition of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls; the other is
the same biographical sketch with the order of information in each
sentence altered. Can you tell which is which? If yon can, how did you
do it?

50
 Version 1

It was in 1899 that Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, a
highly respectable suburb of Chicago. Being a doctor was the
occupation of his father, a keen sportsman. Of six children, Ernest was
the second. A lakeside hunting lodge in Michigan, near Indian
settlements, was the place where holidays were spent by the family.
Although in school activities Ernest was energetic and successful,
twice he ran away from home before the Kansas City Star was joined
by him as a cub reporter in 1917. The Italian front was the place
where he volunteered to be an ambulance driver during the next year,
and was badly wounded. Writing features for the Toronto Star Weekly
was what he did when he returned to America in 1919. 1921 was the
year he married. As a roving correspondent he came to Europe that
year, and several large conferences were covered by him.

Version 2

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 at Oak Park, a highly

respectable suburb of Chicago, where his father, a keen sportsman,
was a doctor. He was the second of six children. The family spent
holidays in a lakeside hunting lodge in Michigan, near Indian
settlements. Although energetic and successful in all school activities,
Ernest twice ran away from home before joining the Kansas City Star
as a cub reporter in 1917. Next year he volunteered as an ambulance
driver on the Italian front and was badly wounded. Returning to
America he began to write features for the Toronto Star Weekly in
1919 and was married in 1921. That year he came to Europe as a
roving correspondent and covered several large conferences.

It should be apparent from the fact that we can tell which one is discourse
(stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified, and
purposive), and which a constructed text. The first text is in fact

51
comprehensible, but processing it is a much slower and more laborious
affair. We may go some way towards explaining that strange feeling
teachers have when reading a piece of written work in which every
sentence is grammatically correct, and yet there is something not quite
right. That something may well be to do with these choices- the ways of
ordering sentence elements (information).

As we do make important choices between alternative versions of

sentences, even though each one is correct in itself, then in a succession
of sentences, it is possible that the choice is being dictated by the
sentence before, each one having a knock-on effect on the structure of the
next. At first then, it would seem that this ordering of information is
another instance of a formal connection between sentences in discourse.
On closer inspection it turns out to be also contextual, dictated by what is
going on in the mind of the sender and the assumptions he or she makes
about what is going on in the mind of the receiver.

One way of understanding this is to view the discourse as proceeding by

answering imagined and unspoken questions by the receiver. In this light,
all discourse seems to proceed like a dialogue, even if the other voice is
only present as a ghost.

Where and when was Ernest Hemingway born?

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 at Oak Park, a highly respectable

suburb of Chicago.

What did his father do?

(where) his father, a keen sportsman, was a doctor.

What was his position in the family?

He was the second of six children.

Where did the family spend their holidays?

The family spent holidays....

52
It should be clear, on reflection, that the order of information in each
answer is dictated by the question. In this sense we can say that the
structuring principle of all discourse is dialogue; but we will need to
examine the relationship between the word order and this dialogue more
thoroughly.

1. Given and new information

Any utterance or sentence can be said to contain given and new

information. Given information is that which the speaker or wrier
assumes is known by the listener or reader. New information, on the
other hand, is that which is assumed to be unknown. Given and new
information will be reflected in the structure of sentences and utterances.

Example ( from Nunan, 1993): It is the cat which ate the rat. (Given:
Something ate the rat. New: The cat did the eating) What the cat ate is
the rat. (Given: The cat ate something. New: The rat got eaten.)

Exercises
1. Consider the ways of arranging the elements in the following sentences
(Jackson, 1982).

e.g. Christopher Columbus discovered America.

America was discovered by Christopher Columbus.

It was America that Christopher Columbus discovered.

What Christopher Columbus did was discover America.

1. The old man sent his favourite grandson a wooden lorry for his first birthday.

2. 1 can't believe that Jim would do such a thing.

3. They found the man who had a scar on his cheek guilty.

4. Hundreds of elephants were gathering in the clearing.

5. Changing a car wheel is no easy task for a woman.

53
2. This exercise helps you to focus on the organisation of the information
in a sentence from a different angle. Below is part of an essay:
Inequalities in health care cannot be avoided. The sentences of the
second paragraph are divided into two. The parts indicated by letters,
which contain the text references, are jumbled, but those indicated by
numbers, containing the ideas, are in the correct order. Match the two
sections of each sentence and you will have a complete paragraph (Mc
Carter, 1995, pp. 48-49).

Read through the part of the text below carefully. Use the connecting
words and phrases, the grammar and the sequence of information, to help
you find your way through the text.

As you do the exercise think about the relationship between the two
parts of each sentence and how they connect.

Introduction

Not all people in the world enjoy equal standards of health care, simply
because not everyone in the world has equal access to such care.

Second paragraph

a. This treatment is available, because there are.

b. In the latter, however, there are.

c. First of all, the rich can afford to go to.

d. What is more, those living in.

e. Second, for people living in big cities it is.

f. Thus, for poor people living in remote areas.

g. Poor patients, on the other hand, have to go to.

……………………………………………………………

54
1. a private hospital where they are able to have better investigations and
treatment without delay.

2. a government hospital where they may encounter many difficulties,

including long waiting lists for treatment, or even a lack of basic supplies
like bandages.

3. easier to find modern treatment.

4. many highly equipped hospitals available in large cities compared with

small towns.

5. often no hospitals at all and public transport is non-existent.

6. large urban areas have access to more specialists in different fields

with modern technology like CT scans, dialysis machines, etc.

7. access to health care is not easily available.

3. This exercise helps make you aware of the organisation of the

information in a sentence. Below is part of an article entitled Violence in
our Society. The sentences of the first paragraph are divided into two
parts. The part on the left is in the correct order, but the part on the right
is jumbled. Match the two sections and you will have a complete
paragraph. As you do the exercise, think about the balance of the
information in each sentence (Mc Carter, 1995, pp. 48-49).

55
 1. One of the most pressing problems a. is the inability of society to
tackle the root of the problem,
namely poverty.
2. This increase can be attributed
b. operate in isolation.
Lack of discipline in the home
c. to many different causes
and at school
depending on one's particular
viewpoint.
4. The break-up of marriages and
d. is often quoted as a reason for
the increase in one-parent
the disintegration of our society.
families

5. But without doubt the primary e. are also blamed for the
cause increasing violence in our lives.
6. Poverty is often the source of a
f. like the lack of opportunity,
host of other contributory factors,
squalor and unemployment, to
name but a few.
7. However, rarely does one of the
g. facing our society today is the
above causes
increasing incidence of violence.

2. Theme and rheme

According to Nunan (1993), another consideration in the arrangement of

information in a sentence or utterance will be the prominence or
importance that the speaker or writer wishes to give to different pieces of
information. Theme is a formal grammatical category which refers to the
initial element in a clause. It is the element around which the sentence is
organised, and the one to which the writer wishes to give prominence.
Everything that follows the theme is known as the rheme.

We saw that the same information can be organized in different ways

within the sentence. In the following sentences, the same information is
presented:
56
The cat ate the rat.

The rat was eaten by the cat.

Thematically, however, both sentences are different. In the first sentence

the theme is The cat. It is the cat and what the cat does that is of primary
interest, and that forms the point of departure for the sentence. In the
second sentence, it is the fate of the rat that is of primary interest.

Within the school of linguistics known as functional linguistics. three types

of theme are identified - topical, interpersonal and textual. Topical themes
have to do with the information conveyed in the discourse. In the above
examples, the themes the cat and the rat are topical themes. Interpersonal
themes, on the other hand, reveal something of the attitude of the speaker
or reader. Finally, textual themes link a clause to the rest of the discourse.
These different types of theme are illustrated in the sentences below which
also show that a sentence can have more than one theme:

Frankly, the movie was a waste of money.

(INTERPERSONAL THEME) (TOPICAL THEME)

However, You should see it and

make up your own
(TEXTUAL THEME) (TOPICAL
mind
THEME)

2.1. Theme progression

According to Paltridge (2000),the notions of theme and rheme are also

employed in the examination of thematic progression, or method of
development of a text. Thematic progression refers to the way in which
the theme of a clause may pick up, or repeat, a meaning from a preceding
theme or rheme. Thematic progression is of three options: (a) zigzag

57
theme, (b) Theme reiteration/ constant theme, (c) multiple theme/split
rheme as can be seen in the following examples.

(a) zigzag theme

As you will no doubt have been told, we have our own photographic club
and darkroom. The club is called 'Monomanor' and there is an annual fee
of £5. The money goes towards replacing any equipment worn our by
use, or purchasing new equipment. Monomanor runs an annual
competition with prizes, judging being done and prizes awarded at the
garden party in the summer term. Besides the competition, we also have
talks and/or film shows during the other terms.

(McCarthy, 1991, p. 55)

The extract reflects option (a) quite strongly, where elements of rhemes
become themes of subsequent sentences (relevant items are in italics).
This pattern can be summarised in the following figure:

Theme 1 rheme 1

Theme 2 rheme 2

Theme 3 rheme 3

(b) Theme reiteration/ constant theme

The bat is a nocturnal animal. It lives in the dark. There are long
nosed bats and mouse eared bats also lettuce winged bats. Bats hunt at
night. They sleep the day and are very shy.

In this text, theme 1 (the bat/ Bats) is picked up and repeated at the
beginning of each clause, signalling that each of the causes will have
something to say about bats.

58
This pattern can be summarised in the following figure:

Theme 1 Rheme 1

Theme 1 Rheme 2

Theme 1 Rheme 3

Theme 1 Rheme 4

(c) Multiple theme/split rheme

Texts may also contain a multiple theme or split rheme pattern. In this
pattern, a rheme may include a number of different pieces of information,
each of which may be picked up as the theme in a number of subsequent
clauses.

In the camera club text, let‘s look at sentences 2,3,4. The rheme of (2)
contains two elements (Monomanor and £5) which are taken up as
themes in the two separate subsequent sentences giving us the pattern:

Theme 2 rheme 2

Theme 3 rheme 3 theme 4 rheme 4

Sample analysis of theme development

Sample text

Understanding Japanese Culture

59
Seasons and seasonal events

Japan is in the northern hemisphere. It has four clearly defined seasons

beginning with spring from March to May. Many events take place each
month either directly or indirectly related to the weather and the seasons.
Spring is traditionally the season for cherry blossom viewing. In summer
people enjoy cooling fruits such as watermelon. Winter is, of course, the
season for skiing and the taste of o-nigiri or rice balls is especially
delicious in autumn. Some weather influences are not so welcome.
Taifuu or typhoons are common from summer through autumn and this
usually follows a period of rain called tsuyu or the rainy season. Japan
often has earthquakes as well. These are called jishin and the large waves
sometimes accompanying offshore earthquakes are called tsunami.

(Paltridge, 2000, pp.43-44)

Sample analysis

Textual Topical Rheme

Theme Theme
Japan is in the northern hemisphere.

It has four clearly defined seasons.

beginning with spring from March
to May.

Many events take place each month either

directly or indirectly related to the
weather and the seasons.

Spring is traditionally the season for cherry

blossom viewing.

In summer people enjoy cooling fruits such

as watermelon.
60
 Winter is, of course, the season for skiing

and he taste of o-nigiri

or rice balls is especially delicious in autumn.

Some weather influences are not so welcome.

Taifuu or typhoons are common from summer

through autumn

and this usually follows a period of rain

called tsuyu or the rainy season.
Japan often has earthquakes as well.
These are called jishin

and the large waves

sometimes
accompanying offshore
earthquakes are called tsunami.

(Paltridge, 2000, p. 147)

Thematic progression can be shown as follows:

61
(Paltridge, 2000, p. 148)

Exercises
A. Identify the theme pattern of each of the following texts.

1) The American Psychological Association specifies a documentation

format required by most psychology, sociology, communication,
education and economics instructors. This format includes parenthetical

62
documentation in the text that refers to an alphabetical reference at the
end of chapters.

(Paltridge, 2000)

2) When Japanese people write their language, they use a combination of

two separate alphabets as well as ideograms borrowed from Chinese. The
two alphabets are called hiragana and katakana. The Chinese ideograms
are called kanji. Hiragana represents the 46 basic sounds that are made in
the Japanese language. Katakana represents the same sounds as hiragana
but is used mainly for words borrowed from foreign languages and for
sound effects. Kanji are used to communicate an idea rather than a sound.

(Paltridge, 2000)

3) The brain is our most precious organ -the one above all which allows
us to be human.

The brain contains 10 billion nerve cells, making thousands of billions of

connections with each other. It is the most powerful data processor we
know, but at the same time it is incredibly delicate. As soft as a ripe
avocado, the brain has to be encased in the tough bones of the skull, and
floats in its own waterbed of fluid. An adult brain weighs over 30lb and
fills the skull. It receives one-fifth of the blood pumped out by the heart
at each beat.

The brain looks not unlike a huge walnut kernel: it is dome-shaped with a
wrinkled surface, and is in two halves joined in the middle. Coming out
from the base of the brain like a stalk is the brain stem. This is the
swollen top of the spinal cord, which runs on down to our 'tail'. Parts of
the brain stem control our most basic functions: breathing, heart beat,
waking and sleeping.

(McCarthy, 1991)

4) Sydney is Australia‘s most exciting city. The history of Australia

begins here. In 1788 Captain Arthur Phillips arrived in Sydney with 11
ships and 1024 passengers from Britain (including 770 prisoners). Today

63
there are over 2 1/2 million people in Sydney. It is the biggest city in
Australia, the busiest port in the South Pacific, and one of the most
beautiful cities in the world (From Paltridge, 2000).

5) (1) Dear Joan,

(2) I'm sitting here at my desk writing to you. (3) Outside my window is
a big lawn surrounded by trees, (4) and in the middle of the lawn is a
flower bed. (5) It was full of daffodils and tulips in the spring. (6) You'd
love it here. (7) You must come and stay sometime. (8) We've got plenty
of room.

(9) Love,

(10) Sally

(McCarthy, 1991)

B. Study sentence (a) below, and decide whether it should be followed by

sentence (b) or sentence (c).

(a) The victorious footballers stepped off the plane.

(b) Cheering fans immediately swamped them.

(c) They were immediately swamped by cheering fans.

Which sentence would you prefer if the choice were between (d) or(e)

(d) They were immediately buffeted by the wind.

(e) The wind immediately buffeted them.

Finally, decide which you would select if the choice were between
sentence (f) or sentence (g).

(f) All the journalists were immediately smiled at by them.

(g) They immediately smiled at all the journalists.

(Nunan, 1993, p. 48)

64
V. Genres
1. Introduction
As Johnson & Johnson (1998) observes, genres are types of spoken and
written discourse recognized by a discourse community. Examples are
lectures, conversations, speeches, notices, advertisements, novels, diaries,
shopping lists. Each genre had typical features. Some may be linguistic
(particular grammatical or lexical choices), some paralinguistic (e.g. print
size, gesture) and some contextual and pragmatic (e.g. setting, purpose).
Some genres overlap (a joke may be a story) and one can contain another
(a joke can be a part of a story).
Text types have schematic structures. For example, narratives begin
with an orientation stage, in which the main characters of the narrative
are introduced and in which the setting of the narrative is established.
This is followed by a complication stage, in which a series of event are
described which leads to some sort of crisis, which is followed by a
resolution stage, in which the crisis is resolved. The narrative may then
be completed by a coda, in which the writer expresses his or her own
perspective on the story that has just been told. An example is presented
in the following example. This particular example does not include a
coda stage.

Schematic structure Text

Orientation Once upon a time there was a wizard.

Complication He did a spell on me.
Resolution My dad saved me from the wizard at last

Narratives are contrasted with factual texts. An example of a factual

text is a written report. In reports, classes of things are described in a text
which opens with a title and a general classification stage, in which the
subject of the text is classified as a member of a particular class. These
are then followed by a description stage, in which the particular thing (or
phenomenon) is described, for example, in terms of its appearance,

65
behaviour and any other distinguished characteristics. An example of this
kind of analysis is shown as follows:

Schematic structure Text

Title The Bat
General classification The bat is a nocturnal animal.
Resolution It lives in the dark. There are long nosed bats
and mouse eared bats also lettuce bats. Bats
hunt at night. They sleep in the day and are
very shy.

Exercises
1. The following are summaries of schematic (generic) structures of text
types from Paltridge (2000, pp. 109-111). Match each of them with the
appropriate purposes given below.
Recount
Schematic structure
1 Orientation
2 Events
3 Reorientation
4 (coda)
Instruction/Procedure
Schematic structure
1 Goal
2 (Material)
3 Steps
Argument
Schematic structure
66
 1 Thesis statement/Position
2 Argument A, Argument B, ect.
3 Restatement of position/summing up/recommendation
Discussion
Schematic structure
1 Statement
2 Different points of view
3 Arguments against
4 (Considered option/recommendation)
Narrative
Schematic structure
1 Orientation
2 Complication
3 (Sequence of events)
4 Resolution
5 (Comment)
6 Coda
Anecdote
Schematic structure
1 Structure
2 Crisis
3 Reaction
4 (Coda)
Report
Schematic structure
67
 1 Title
2 General statement
3 Description
Explanation
Schematic structure
1 Phenomenon
2 Explanation
Description
Schematic structure
1 Identification
2 Description

a) To tell what happened, to record events for the purpose of informing;

b) To explain how something works, to give reasons for some
phenomenon; c) To take a position on some issues, to justify, to persuade
the reader or listener that something is the case; d) To share an account of
unusual or amusing incident; e) To tell a story, to entertain, to amuse; f) To
present information about more than one point of view; g) To describe a
particular person, place or thing; h) To tell someone to do or make
something, to describe how something is accomplished through a sequence
of steps or actions; i) To provide information about natural and non-natural
phenomena, to classify and describe the phenomena of our world.

(Paltridge, 2000)

2. Identify the genres of the texts given below, pointing out their generic structures.

A. (1) Hawaii has some special traditions. Hawaiians are very friendly
and always welcome visitors; (2) They give visitors leis; (3) Alei is a
long necklace made from beautiful fresh flowers from Hawaiian islands;
(4) Men wear bright flowered shirts, and women often wear long
flowered dresses; (5) People celebrate traditional Chinese, Japanese, and
68
Filipino holidays as well as the holidays from the United States;
(6) Hawaii is known as Aloha State; (7) Aloha means both "hello", and
"goodbye" in Hawaii; (8) It also means "I love you".

B. (1) The wiki is very strange bird because it cannot fly; (2) The wiki
has the same size as chicken; (3) It has no wings, or tails; (4) It does not
have any feather like other birds; (5) It has hair on its body; (5) Each
foot has four toes; (6) Its beak(mouth) is very long; (7) It sleeps during
the day because the sunlight hurts its eyes; (8) It can smell with its nose;
(9) It is the only bird in the world that can smell things; (10) The wikis‘
eggs are very big.

C. (1) Elevators are very important to us; (2) Why? Think about a tall
building; (3) May be it has twenty floors; (4) Maybe it has fifty or more;
(5) Who can walk up all those stairs? Maybe people can climb them one
time; (6) Can someone climb thirty floors to an office every day? (7) Can
small children walk up to their apartments on the twenty-four floor? (8)
Can their mother and father carry food up all these stairs? (9) Of course
not; (10) We can have building because we have elevators; (11) We
could hot have all the beautiful tall buildings in the world without
elevators. (12) They are really wonderful.

D. (1) Thai boxing is rather different from another country in the world;
(2) The boxing match begins with music from drums and flutes; (3) Then
the two fighters kneel and pray to god; (4) Next they do a slow dance that
copies the movement of Thai boxing; (5) During this dance, each fighter
tries to show the other that he is best; (6) Then the fight begins; (7) In
Thai boxing, the fighters can kick with their feet and hit each other with
their elbows and knees; (8) Of course they hit with their hands too; (9)
Each round is 3 minutes long. Then the boxers have two minute-rest; (10)
Most boxers can fight only five rounds because this kind of fighting is
very difficult.

E. (1) People cry for many reasons; (2) They cry when they feel very
bad; (3) They cry when something terrible happens, like a death in the
family; (4) They cry in sorrow when a close friend becomes seriously ill;
69
(5) They cry when they feel very sad and angry; (6) They cry when they
fell helpless to do anything about a problem; (7) People also cry when
they feel very good; (8) They cry when they have been worried about
something but find out that everything is all right.(9) They cry when
something wonderful happens.

F. (1) The world is overpopulated; (2) It is difficult to say that how many
people the earth can support, but it will; (3) Some of the world social and
natural disasters can be caused by overpopulation, the clearest is famine
help everyone if we can limit population growth before serious shortages
develop; (4) The problem is how to do it; (5) Firstly, each individual
must decide to help limit population; (6) Each person must decide how
many children to have and be conscious of the importance of birth
control; (7) Furthermore, government and international organizations can
provide safe, inexpensive birth control methods; (8) Individuals can
decide to use them; (9) Then the world population growth can decrease
instead of continuing to increase.

G. (1) For some people, plane is something dangerous; (2) They are afraid
of flying; (3) In case they have to fly if they want to continue in their
profession, the fear of flying really becomes a problem; (4) To help these
people, there are special classes in which people learn how to control their
fear; (5) The class visits an airport and learns how airplane traffic is
controlled and how planes are kept in safe condition; (6) A pilot talks
about flying through storms, the different noises and airplane makes, and
air safety in general; (7) The class learns to do relaxation exercises, and the
people talk about fear; (8) Next, the class listens to tape recordings of a
takeoff and landing and later people ride in a plane on the ground around
the airport; (9) Finally, they are ready to take a short flight.

H. (1) Within the last 100 years, deserts have been growing at a
frightening speed; (2) This is particular because of natural changes, but
the greatest desert markers are humans; (3) Therefore, the problem is
how people stop the growth of the world's desert and save land that is
essential to life; (4) It is found that there are some solutions for this

70
problem; (5) Algeria planted the green wall of trees across the edge of the
Sahara to stop the desert sand from spreading; (6) Manitania planted a
similar wall around Nouakchott, the capital; (7) Iran puts a thin covering
of petroleum on sandy areas and plants trees; (8) The oil keeps the water
and trees in the land, and men on motorcycles keep the sheep and goats
away; (9) Other countries build long canals to bring water to desert areas.

2. Text structures (Generic characteristics)

Activity 11

Consider the following text types:

1) recipes

2) answer phones messages

3) holiday postcards

4) newspaper reports

Read the description of generic characteristics and match them with the
corresponding text types.

List particular linguistic features (grammatical, lexical, etc.) that are

typical of each text type.

The features of these text types as follows:

a) These typically begin with some introductory comment by the writer,

e.g. ‗This is a very rich and popular winter dish and is made of veal, beef
or hare. It may be cooked in a saucepan but it is better if an earthenware
casserole is used. Then follows a list of ingredients; then the procedure,
each sentence typically introduced with an imperative, and with verb
objects omitted if these are understood, even where, normally, they
would be obligatory: ‗Remove from the fire and stand for at least fifteen
minutes before serving‘.

71
b) These typically begin with a self-identification on the part of the
caller, followed by the reason for the call, e.g. ‗I‘m just calling to ask you
if you would be able to … ‘. This is followed by either a request or an
offer, e.g. ‗Can you call me on …?‘; ‗I‘ll phone back later.‘; then some
form of closure, e.g. ‗Thanks. Bye‘. Depending on the relationship
between caller and message receiver, the language can range from very
informal to relatively formal.

c) This is probably the least structured of all the text types we have
looked at so far, for both in terms of what might be considered obligatory
features (as opposed to optional ones) and in terms of the order in which
these features occur. Usually, however, the reader expects some
reference to places visited and some evaluation of the holiday experience
as a whole or specific details, such as the weather. In many cultures the
postcard serves to convey only minimal information, perhaps just a
greeting. Postcards in English tend to be more anecdotal. There is often
also some reference to the picture on the reverse side, which may become
the ‗deictic center‘, e.g. ‗Arrived here three days ago …‘. Notice that
redundant subject pronouns and associated auxiliary verbs are often
omitted, e.g. ‗(We are) Having a wonderful time…‘.

d) Typically, these begin with a summary of the story (which is in turn an

elaboration of the headline), focusing on its most newsworthy aspect.
This often involves using the present perfect, e.g. ‗The prime Minister
has resigned‘ (where the headline is typically in the present simple: ‗PM
RESIGNS‘), thus conveying both recency and relevance to the present.
The background is then sketched in, using past tense structures. Because
the events are not presented in chronological sequence, you often have to
read some way into the text before the full sequence of events becomes
clear. Newspaper styles vary widely, however, popular tabloid papers
opting for shorter, punchier sentences, often one per paragraph.
Nevertheless, and especially in opening sentences, there are often very
long noun phrases, in which a great deal of background information is
condensed, e.g. ‗A cheating husband who persuaded a hitman to petrol-

72
bomb his teenage lover’s home after she jilted him was jailed for 10 years
yesterday.‘ (Daily Mirror)

(Adapted from Thornbury, 1997)

Exercises

Examine the following texts and identify their text types and generic
characteristics- overall structure, grammar, and vocabulary. Do these texts
have all the typical generic features mentioned in the above activities?

1)

CURRIED FISH OR PRAWNS

Chu-chi pla or goong
9 large dried chillies (or to taste)
Chopped and soaked
4 cloves of garlic
6 shallots
1 tablespoon diced lemongrass
3 slices galanga

3 cups coconut cream

3 tablespoons fish sauce
1 shelled and deveined prawns
or a whole fish or fish slices
Chilli strips and kafflir lime leaf
Shreds, for garnish
Blend or pound chilli, shallots, lemongrass, galangal, shrimp paste
and a teaspoon of salt to taste. In a large heavy pan or cook, heat 1
cup coconut cream and fry until it has an oily surface, then add the

73
paste and cook until thick and fragrant. Reduce further until oil seeps
out from frying. Season to taste with fish sauce and sugar. Add
remaining coconut cream and cook until thick and reduced. Add
prawns or fish, stir lightly and simmer until just cooked.
(Alternatively, the fish can be deep-fried in advance. The sauce is then
poured over.) Garnish with chilli strips and lime leaf shreds and serve
with cooked rice.

Serves 3-4

(Based on an original recipe)

(Nunan, 1993, pp. 49-50)

2)

A: What did you do last night?

B: Well, Mum and Dad went out so we went to Marg‘s to sleep, and
Sarah wouldn‘t go to sleep, and she wanted to ring Mum, and Marg
said she couldn‘t, and so she cried, and so Marg combed her hair, and
then she went to sleep. She was really naughty…

A: What time did she go to sleep?

B: Mmm- ‗bout one o‘clock.

(Nunan, 1993, p.50)

3)

Hanging bungle Uncovered

By Geoff Easdown, Mike Edmons and Barry MacFadyn

Melbourne: A sensational development in the case of Ronald

Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia, shows a bungle almost
certainly cost him his life.

74
It was revealed last night that four letters written by jurors in the trial,
appealing for Ryan not to be hanged, were never sent to the Victorian
Cabinet which decided to execute him.

And a member of the Victoria cabinet that voted 11-4 to hang Ryan,
Sir Rupert Hamer, says the mercy pleas by four jury members could
have saved Ryan.

(The Advertiser, 6 January 1992)

(Nunan, 1993, p.51)

4)

Most people like to take a camera with them when they travel abroad.
But all airports nowadays have X-ray security screening and X-rays
can damage film. One solution to this problem is to purchase a
specially designed lead-lined pouch. These are cheap and can protect
film from all but the strongest X-rays.

(McCarthy, 1991, p. 30)

75
Chapter III

Conversation analysis

Conversation analysts attempt to describe and explain the way in which

conversations work. Their central question is: ‗How is it that
conversational participants are able to produce intelligible utterances, and
how are they able to interpret the utterances of others.‖

Questions that conversation analysts have investigated include the

following:

- How do topics get nominated, accepted, maintained and changed?

- How is speaker selection and change organized?

- How are conversational ambiguities resolved?

- How are non-verbal and verbal aspects of conversation organized

and integrated?

- What role does intonation play in conversation management?

- What recurring functional patterns are there in conversation, and

how are these organized?

- How is socially sanctioned behaviour (for example, politeness versus

rudeness, directness versus indirectness) mediated through language?

I. Spoken interactions
Spoken interactions fall into two broad categories - transactional and
interactional. Transactional situations usually involve people in
interactions where they wish to obtain information or goods and services.
Going to the bank to obtain a new credit card, phoning a library for
information about joining or being interviewed for a job are all examples
of transactional interactions. Interactional situations usually involve

76
speakers in casual conversations where the main purpose is to establish
or maintain social contact with other people. Examples include talking to
old friends over a meal, chatting to your son's new school friend and
talking to your partner after work. The language we choose to use in
these conversations will be affected by a number of variables such as
how well we know the other speakers, how often we speak to them, how
we feel about them and how we judge our relative status. Although many
interactions are a mixture of both, it is helpful for teaching purposes to be
able to classify speaking activities broadly in this way.

As their experience of spoken interaction within their culture develops,

native speakers learn the typical patterns which characterise different
social interactions and use this knowledge to predict how talk is likely to
unfold and to make broad predictions about the different stages and
patterns an interaction will follow. Native speakers know how
interactions are likely to begin, how they will continue and how they may
end. We refer to these typical structurings of interactions as genres.

1. Transactional interactions

Transactional talk is for getting business done in order to produce some

change in the situation. It could be to tell somebody something they need
to know, to effect the purchase of something, to get someone to do
something, or many other world-changing things.

If we take the service encounter as an example of a transactional genre

we can examine how this genre is staged. In most service encounters in
shops in Western cultures the following structure is common (^ =
followed by):

Offer of service ^ Request for service ^ Transaction ^ Salutation

We can see this structure in the Table below which is a service encounter
between a shopkeeper (S) and a customer (C)

77
Structure in a service encounter

Interaction Structure

S: Yes please [rising tone] Offer of service

C: [C turns to S] Six stamps, please Request for service

5: [getting stamps and handing them over the Transaction

counter] A dollar twenty.
[C hands over a $20 dollar note to S]
S: Thank you, twenty dollars [handing over the
change] It's a dollar twenty that's... two, four, five,
ten, and ten is twenty. Thank you.

C: Thanks very much Salutation

The language that speakers actually use in such encounters varies from
situation to situation, but the underlying pattern; many kinds of
interactions, particularly transactional interactions, are largely
predictable. This is not to suggest that they are rigidly fixed, but rather
that there are recognisable stages which will unfold as the speakers
negotiate a particular transactional interaction.
It is also important to note that natural data show that even in the most strictly
‗transactional‘ of settings, people often engage in interactional talk,
exchanging chat about the weather and many unpredictable things as follows.
Customer: Can you give me a strong painkiller for an abscess, or else a
suicide note.
Assistant: (laughing) Oh, dear! Well, we’re got … (etc.)
(McCarthy, 1994, p. 137)
The borders between transactional and interactional language are often
blurred.

78
Exercise
List the typical stages or patterns that occur in the following situations:
• consulting a general practitioner.
• having a job interview.
• ordering a meal in a restaurant.
• checking into a hotel.
(Burns & Joyce, 1997)
2. Classroom discourse/Three–part exchanges
According to Mc Carthy (1991), the basic structure of discourse is a single
exchange. However, most of conversation consists of longer stretches of
related exchanges, even where small children are involved as small
participants. One way in which such longer stretches may be built up is
simply by chaining a series of topical-related exchanges one after another.
In this pattern, typified by a teacher asking around a class, followed each
response by a further question on the same, or related, topic the
coherence that is perceived stems partly from the repeated exchange
structure of question and answer, and partly from the semantic continuity
realized through syntactic and lexical cohesive links between the separate
exchanges. One frequent pattern is the use of strategies that extend the
first exchange by linking a further exchange to it.
1. Teacher: Who knows what ice is?
Pupil: I have that in my drink at home.
Teacher: That’s right.
2. Adult: What’s down there?
Child: A tape-recorder.
Adult: That’s right.

79
Activity 12

As you read the following extract from a second language classroom,

see if you can identify any recurring patterns or regularities.
T: The questions will be on different subjects, so, er, well. one will be
about, er, well. some of the questions will be about politics, and some
of them will be about, er,... what?
S: History.
T: History. Yes, politics and history and, urn, and...?
S: Grammar.
T: Grammar's good, yes,... but the grammar questions were too easy.
S: No.
S: Yes, ha, like before.
S: You can use... [inaudible}
T: Why? The hardest grammar question I could think up – the hardest
one, I wasn’t even sure about the answer, and you got it.
S: Yes.
T: Really! I'm going to have to go to a professor and ask him to make
questions for this class. Grammar questions that Azzam can't answer.
[laughter]
Anyway, that's um, Thursday... yeah, Thursday. Ah. but today, er,
we're going to do something different...
S:...yes...
T: … today, er, we're going to do something where we. er, listen to a
conversation - er, in fact, we're not going to listen to one conversa-
tion. How many conversations're we going to listen to?
S: Three?
(Nunan, 1993, p. 35)

80
In the words of McCarthy (1991), the pattern of three-part exchanges was
first described by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) who found in the
language of traditional native-speaker school classrooms interactions
typically followed a rigid pattern - regardless of the subject matter being
taught or of the age range of the pupils in the class. Teachers and pupils
spoke according to very fixed perceptions of their roles and the talk could
be seen to conform to highly structured sequences. The pattern is as
follows:
1. Teacher: Ask What do we do with a saw, Marvelette?
2. Pupil: Answer Cut wood.
3. Teacher Comment We cut wood.
(McCarthy, 1991)

Sinclair and Coulthard called the three-part structure an exchange. The

three components making up the exchange they called moves, which
were made up of speech acts.

Here are some examples of exchange with three moves:

(1) A: What time is it?

B: Six thirty.

A: Thanks

(2) A: Tim’s coming tomorrow.

B: Oh, yeah.

A: yes.

(3) A: Here, hold this.

B: (takes the box)

A: Thanks.

(McCarthy, 1991)

81
They found that entire lessons consisted of transactions, which were made
up of these three-part exchanges. Each transaction within the lesson is
explicitly signalled by a 'framing' move consisting of a phrase such as OK,
right, then, now. Lessons could therefore be represented in the diagrammatic
way shown below. The basic building block of the lesson, then, is the speech
act, which is an utterance, described in terms of its function.

(Nunan, 1993,p. 36)

Some of the speech acts identified by Sinclair and Coulthard are as follows:

ACT FUNCTION EXAMPLE

Shows that the teacher has heard

student's utterance.
ACCEPT OK. Good

BID Signals student's desire to respond Sir! Teacher

NOMINATION Teacher selects student for response Azzam

82
In Nunan‘s (1993) words, Sinclair and Coulthard used this model to draw
up 'rules of discourse' which specified the optional and obligatory
elements within a given exchange. Sinclair and Coulthard were not
necessarily interested in classrooms as interactional worlds in their own
right. Their main aim was in developing a method for analysing
discourse. Classrooms happened to be convenient places to start. In the
first place, they are formal environments in which there are relatively
clear rules of procedure. In addition, the roles, functions and power
relationships between the participants are well defined.

3. Interpersonal interactions

Although stages in casual interaction are less easy to predict than those in
transactional texts, it is still possible to identify the range of possible
conversational genre types. The genre types in casual conversation can be
ordered along a continuum from those that display a clear generic
structure at the left hand end to the non-generically structured segments
(chat) at the other end.

Story telling Opinions Gossip Chat

Casual conversations, or interpersonal interactions, are genres less easy to

predict than transactional interactions because they tend to be more open-
ended and involve more frequent shifts in topic. Where talk is more casual,
and among equals, everyone will have a part to play in controlling and
monitoring the discourse. Nevertheless, they generally have broad elements
of predictable structure embedded in them as shown in the table below.

Discourse Structure of Conversation

Opening stages Beginnings (e.g. salutations and greetings such as

Hello, How are you)

Initiating exchanges which establish social relations

(e.g. formulaic expressions such as How're things,
What've you been up to since I last saw you)

83
Middle stages Development of a wide range of topics using
conversational strategies for turn-taking, turn
allocation, and keeping a turn, adjacency pairs,
preferred and dispreferred responses, ways of
giving feedback, changing a topic, asking for
clarification, correcting what was said, etc.

Ending stages Pre-closing exchanges signalling the ending (e.g.

discourse markers and formulaic expressions such
as Anyway, Well, I'd better be off, Thanks for
calling)

Closings (e.g. formulaic expressions such as Bye,

See you)

(Burns & Joyce, 1997)

Openings and closings

Openings and closings in conversations are often carried out in typical

ways. They are also context- and speech-event-specific. For example,
how we open a conversation at the bus stop is very different from how
we do it on the telephone. Openings and closings often make use of pairs
of utterances such as ‗Hi‘, ‗How are you?‘, and ‗Bye‘, ‗See you later’,
which are often not meant to be taken literally. Closings are often
preceded by pre-closings such as ‗Okay‘, ‗Good’, statements such as
‗Well, it’s been nice talking to you‘ or ‗Anyway, I’ve got to go now‘, and
an accompanying fall in intonation.

These kinds of conversational rituals vary, however, from culture to

culture. Just because someone is able to open and close a conversation in
their first language does not mean that they will necessary know how to
do this in a second language and culture.

Belton (1988) criticizes that there is a tendency in language teaching to

overemphasize transactional language at the expense of interactional, and

84
makes a plea for a better balance between the two. Otherwise, a foreign
language learner when engaging in a transactional encounter may find it
confused by unexpected friendly chat from other party.

4. Adjacency pairs

Pairs of utterances in talk are often mutually dependent; a most obvious

example is that a question predicts an answer, and that an answer
presupposes a question. It is possible to state the requirements, in a
normal conversational sequence, for many types of utterances, in terms
of what is expected as a response and what certain responses presuppose.
Some examples may be:

Utterances function Expected response

greeting greeting

congratulation thanks

apology acceptance

inform acknowledge

leave-taking leave-taking

(Paltridge, 2000, pp. 87-88)

Pairs of such utterances are called adjacency pairs. One way in which
meanings are communicated and interpreted in a conversation is through
use of adjacency pairs. Adjacency pairs are utterances produced by two
successive speakers in such a way that the second utterance is identified
as related to the first one as an expected follow up (Richards and
Schmidt, 1983). For example:

1. A: Greeting Hello

B: Greeting Hi

85
 2. A: Farewell OK, see ya

B: Farewell So long

3. A: Question Is that what you mean?

B: Answer Yes

(Richards and Schmidt 1983, p.128)

4. (On a train)

Ticket collector: informing (inspecting passenger‘s ticket) Change at

Peterborough.
Passenger: Acknowledging Thank you.

(McCarthy, 1994, p. 120)

In some cases we can predict the second part from the first pair part, and
in some cases we cannot. Equally, what is an expected follow-up to a
seemingly everyday utterance in one language and culture might be quite
different in another. The particular context and stage of the conversation,
then, are important for assigning an utterance the status of a particular pair
part, For example, 'Hello' can perform many different functions in a
conversation. It can be a greeting a summons as in 'Hello... anybody home?',
or a response to a summons, as in answering the telephone (Richards and
Schmidt, 1983). Equally 'thanks' could be a response to a statement of
congratulation, a compliment or an offer (Burns and Joyce, 1997).

Further, a pair of utterances may play more than one role in a conversation.
For example, the 'question-answer' pair in the third example could also be
described as a 'clarification seek' followed by a 'clarification provide'.
The basic rule for adjacency pairs is that when a speaker produces a first
pair part, they should stop talking and allow the other speaker to produce
a second pair part. When the second speaker does not do this, this is often
commented on—such as, when someone says 'You didn't answer my
question' or continue with variations on the first pair part until they get an
appropriate response.

86
Different roles and settings will generate different structures for such
adjacency pairs, and discourse analysts try to observe in natural data just
what patterns occurs in particular settings. Compared with non-native
speakers‘ strategies for giving informal invitations, native speakers
preface their invitations (e.g. ‗I was wondering, uh, we’re having a party
…‘), while non-native speakers are sometimes too formal or too blunt
(e.g. ‗I would like to invite you to a party’; ‗I want to invite you to a
party’). Similarly, it seems that native speakers usually preface
disagreement second pair-parts in English with partial agreement (‗Yes,
but….‘) and with softeners such as ‗I’m afraid’ when people want to
sound more respectful. Learners of a foreign language should be aware of
such linguistic devices if they want to be skillful speakers (McCarthy,
1991, p. 121).

Adjacency pairs may be found within their boundaries, but first and
second pair-parts do not necessarily coincide with initiating and
responding moves. In (1) below, there is such a coincidence, but in (2)
adjacency pairing occurs in the initiation and response (statement of
achievement- congratulation), and in the responding and follow-up move
(congratulation-thanks).
1. A: Congratulations on the new job, by the way.
B: Oh, thanks.
2. A: I’ve just passed my driving test.
B: Oh, congratulations.
A: Thanks.

Particularly noticeable in Sinclair-Coulthard data was the pattern of the

three-part exchange in traditional classrooms, where the teacher made the
initiation and the follow-up move, where students were restricted to
responding moves. In such classrooms, learners rarely get the opportunity
to take other than the responding role. While speakers outside classrooms
do not usually behave like teachers and evaluate the quality of one
another‘s utterances (in terms of correctness, fluency, etc.), they often
evaluate (or at least react to) its content. Follow-up moves of this kind
87
might include: how nice, that’s interesting, oh dear, how awful, lucky
you, oh no, I see, did you, right.

(McCarthy, 1991, p.121).

Preference organization

There is, however, a certain amount of freedom in responding to some

first pair parts, such as:

A: That’s a nice shirt. Compliment

B: Oh, thanks. Accept

(Actually, I don’t like it. I got it for Christmas.) Reject

Thus, some second pair parts may be preferred and others may be
dispreferred. For example, an invitation may be followed by an
acceptance (the preferred second pair part) or ejection (the dispreferred
second pair part). When this happens, the dispreferred second pair part is
often preceded by a delay, a preface, and/or an account. For example:

A: Would you like to come to a movie on Friday? Invitation

B: Uhhh …. Delay

I don’t know for sure. Preface

I think I might have something on that night. Account

Can we make it another night? Rejection

Below are some common adjacency pairs, together with typical preferred
and dispreferred second pair parts.

First parts Second parts

Preferred Dispreferred

request acceptance refusal

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offer/invite acceptance refusal

assessment agreement disagreement

question expected answer unexpected answer

or non-answer

compliment acceptance rejection

(Paltridge, 2000, p. 90)

Pre-announcement

We can also use an adjacency pair as a ‗pre-announcement‘ to another

adjacency pair. For example:

A: Guess what?

B: What?

A: I got an IBM PC!

B: That’s great!

(Paltridge, 2000, p.90)

Insertion Sequences

Sometimes we might also use what is called an insertion sequence; that

is, when an adjacency pair comes between the first and the second pair
part of another adjacency pair. For example:

A: May I speak to the director?

B: May I ask who’s calling?

A: John Cox.

B: Okay.

(Paltridge, 2000, p.91)

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Post-Expansions

On other occasions we may follow an adjacency pair with a post-

expansion; that is one adjacency pair follows and expands another
adjacency pair. For example:

A: Do you like Virginia?

B: Yeah.

A: You do?

B: Well, not really.

(Paltridge, 2000, p.92)

To develop learner speaking skills, one possible way is getting learners to

practice adjacency pairs and exchange structures and encourage them to
practice common follow-up strategies and the roles learners are to perform.

(Paltridge, 2000)

Exercises
1. Look at these extracts and consider the different functions of ‗thank
you‘ in each case.

Bus conductor: One pound twenty

Passenger: (gives £1.20)
Bus conductor: Thank you.
Passenger: Thank you.
(University seminar, lecturer is facing the class, using an overhead
projector.)
Student: It’s not focused.
Lecturer: Thank you (adjusting the projector).
(McCarthy, 1994)

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2. Divide the following first and second pair parts into adjacency pairs:

Threat Denial Offer Granting Request Acceptance

Counter-threat Warning Blame

Acknowledgement Complaint Apology

3. Analyse the following conversation between two ESL students using the
categories 'Greeting', 'Information seek', 'Information provide', 'Information
check', 'Feedback', 'Opinion seek', 'Opinion provide', 'Clarification seek',
Invitation', 'Comment', 'Acceptance' and 'Leave-taking'. Then identify as
many adjacency pairs as you can in the conversation.

A: How do you do?

B: How do you do? What's your name?
A: I'm Megumi How about you?
B: My name is Rudy Where do you come from? :
A: I'm from Japan
B: Japan?
A: How about you?
B: I'm from Indonesia
A: Indonesia?
B: How long have you been here Megumi?
A: About four months How about you Rudy?
B: Mmm... about two months
A: And... how long are you staying here?
B: Maybe for six months And how about you Megumi?

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 A: Eight months altogether
B: Oh I see… Megumi what do you think of Australia?
A: Yes... good
B: Where have you been in Australia?
A: Opera House Harbour Bridge Taronga Zoo Bond! Luna Park almost...
B: Mmm... that‘s very good
A: How about you?
B: Me? Only Wonderland And what have you been doing at the
weekend Megumi?
A: Usually I watch a film and I visit my friends How about you?
B: Me? I always visiting my friends at the weekend
A: Would you like to have lunch with me today?
B: Of course...why not? Okay. See you later Megumi
A: See you.
(Paltridge, 2000)

4. Identify the roles of the two speakers in the conversation below. What
is the purpose of this conversation? How do the follow-up moves occur?

B: Well, I studied theology and qualified as a priest.

A: Oh!

B: But after I saw this job, this job as a priest is nothing for me, I …

A: Did you not like it?

B: It was much too stressing.

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 A: It … is it not a bit like a social worker?
B: Yes, it‘s … most part of it is social work, but that, that troubles and
the psychological troubles, they, they told to me, ah, I couldn‘t
manage to, to stand all, you understand? And then I get sick, and my
heart was and so …
A: Become ill.
B: Yes, ill, and, and I left the job. It wasn‘t, I wasn‘t able to stand it.
A: Do you think you were too young?
B: Perhaps, I thought, yes, perhaps this is … the, the young people
didn‘t come to the church, and there were too less young people, and
too … ma … too mu … too many old peoples, and I felt I‘m too
young for this job, I, in ten years perhaps …
A: You might go back?
B: Or in fifteen I can go back, yes …
(McCarthy, 1994, p. 125)

5. How do the speakers perceive their role in this conversation?

(Student B is explaining his surname to student A.)

B: The name Akkad is a very, has a very long story, it goes back to at
least 2,000 years. It was a state between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, they
called it the the Akkad … and this is where my name been, ah,
derived, you know … I‘m not bluffing, but this is a small story about
name.

A: It‘s quite interesting, and erm, so you, where are you from?

B: Syria, Middle East.

A: And you live here in Switzerland?

B: Yes, ah, for about 23 years.

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 A: Can you tell me a bit about you?
B: About myself, well, I …
A: About what, what …
B: What I‘ve done here? Well, I‘ve, erm, when I first came to
Switzerland, I‘ve studied first a little German language.
A: Yes.
B: I mean, I learnt the German language, it was very difficult.
A: It‘s hard, isn‘t it?
B: Yes, particularly the Swiss German … (etc.)
(McCarthy, 1994, p.126)

II. Negotiation of meaning

1. Turn taking
We will now turn to one of the micro-level aspects of negotiating spoken
discourse - how speakers manage turns in an interaction. In any natural
English discourse, turns will occur smoothly, with only little overlap and
interruption, and only very brief silences between turns (on average, less
than a second). People take turns when they are selected or nominated by
the current speaker, or if no one is selected, they may speak of their own
accord (self-selection). If neither of these conditions is applied, the
person who is currently speaking may continue. While the current
speaker is speaking, listeners are attentive to syntactic completeness or
otherwise of the speaker‘s contribution, and to clues in the pitch level
that may indicate that a turn is coming to a close. There are specific
linguistic devices for getting the turn when one is unable to enter the
normal flow of turn-taking or when the setting demands that specific
conventions be followed. These vary greatly in level of formality and
appropriacy to different situations (‗If I may, Mr Chairman’, ‘I wonder if
I might say something’, ‘Can I just come in here’, ‘Hang on a minute’,
94
‘Shut up will you, I can’t get a word in edgewise’). There are also
linguistic means of not taking the turn when one has opportunity, or
simply of making it clear to the speaker that we are attending to the
message. These are usually referred to as back-channel responses, and
consists of vocalizations such as mm, ah-ha, and short words and phrases
such as yeah, no, right, sure. Back-channel realizations vary interestingly
from culture to culture. Another feature of turn-taking is the way
speakers predict one another‘s utterances and often complete them for
them, or overlap with them as they complete (McCarthy 1994, p. 127).
An examination of turn taking includes looking at such things as:
• How speakers move from one turn to the next.
• The types of turns which are expected in response to other turns.
• How speakers self-select or give up their turns to others.
• What interruptions and overlaps occur.
Natural conversational data can often seem chaotic because of back-
channel, utterance-completions and overlaps. When an interaction is very
cooperative and mutually supportive there are likely to be few overlaps in
turns. In contrast, overlaps in less cooperative situations may be frequent
and the utterances quite short as speakers compete to gain and keep a
turn. In the following exchange Brian (B) and Tony (T) compete for turns
in a discussion about the production of a newsletter:
B: I'd like to get our [own...
T: . [A glossy for us would be good too
B:... I'd tike to get our own so that maybe we can even put two together.
Turn taking conventions will vary according to particular contextual
situations and will depend on such factors as:
• the topic.
• whether the interaction is relatively cooperative how well the
speakers know each other.

95
 • the relative status of the speakers.

In some situations certain speakers are clearly given more right to speak
than others. This is true of a teacher in a classroom, a judge in a court of
law or speakers who are considered to have particular expertise in
relation to the topic under discussion.

Speakers often indicate when they do not wish to take a turn, but are
merely attending to the interaction through devices known as back-
channels, such as Uh-hu, Mm, Yes, Right, and Sure. It is also not
uncommon in turn taking for speakers to complete or echo each other's
utterances as they build on each other's contributions to extend the topic
further or to predict what will be said next (Burns & Joyce, 1997).

We may keep a turn by not pausing too long and starting straight away
on another one. We can also keep the turn by pausing in the middle of an
utterance rather at the end of it, increasing the volume of what we are
saying, or speaking over someone else‘s attempt to take the turn (Fox,
1987). Look at the example below. The transcription conventions used in
this extract illustrate these points. Thus, /:/ indicates a lengthened
syllable, // indicates the point at which overlap occurs between the two
speakers, and italics indicates a stressed syllable. Also, the way in which
the transcription is written aims to capture features of pronunciation, such
as in ‗rea:s‘nble‘ and point of overlap for the second speaker by placing
the start of her/his utterance directly below the point of overlap.

A: We::ll I wrote what I thought was a a-a rea:s‘n//ble explanation:n.

B: I: think it was a very rude le:tter

(Levinson 1983, p. 299)

A tries to keep the turn by lengthening ‗well‘ and the first syllable in
‗reasonable‘ as well as by hesitating mid-sentence with ‗a-a‘. However,
B interrupts and tries to steal and keep the floor by lengthening the first
vowel in ‗letter‘. A completes for the floor and keeps it by completing
the syntactic until they had started and by stressing the second to last

96
syllable in explanation. Neither speaker gives up their turn until their turn
is complete.

When speakers pause at the end of a turn, it is not always the case that
the next speaker will necessarily take it up. In this case, the pause and the
length of it, become significant. For example, in the following extract, B
self-select after a one-second pause because A fails to take turn after B‘s
‗hhh‘. The same happens again when A next fails to take a turn; this time
B changes the topic. The brackets () indicate the analyst was unsure of
what was said, and the figure in brackets include the length of the pause
in seconds.

A: Well no I‘ll drive (I don‘t mi//nd)

B: Hhh

(1)

A: I mean to offer:

(16)

B: Those shoes look nice.

The traditional classroom, as observed by Sinclair and Coulthard, has

very ordered turn-taking under the control of the teacher, and people
rarely speak out of turn. More recent trends in classroom organization,
such as pair and group work, attempt to break this turn-taking pattern, but
do not always succeed in recreating more natural pattern.

Two problems might arise with turn-taking is dominant speakers and

culture-specific conventions, of which the latter is more complex. In
some cultures, silence has a more acceptable role than in others. For
instance, for Finns longer silences seems to be tolerated in conversations
or ‗thinking time‘, a tendency observable among Japanese before a
response seems agonizingly long. Discourse analysts have looked at such
phenomena and try to describe the different norms that speakers from
different cultures orient to during such behavior. A set of norms in one

97
culture might decree that talk must be kept going, whenever possible, and
not put at risk by unconsidered talk. Rule-conflicts of this type are often
seen to be the underlying cause of conversation breakdown (e.g. for
Japanese versus American norms).

Other features of how turns are given and gained in English may also
prompt specific awareness training where necessary; these include body
language such as inhalation and head movement as a turn-taking signal,
eye contact, gestures, etc., as well as linguistic phenomena such as a drop
in pitch or use of grammar tags.

Lexical realizations of turn management can be taught directly. There are

conventional phrases for interrupting in formal and informal settings
(‗Can I interrupt for a moment?’, ‘Hang on a minute, I’ve got something
to tell you’, ‘Sorry to butt in, but…’), for pre-planning one‘s turn (‘I’ll try
to be brief, but there are a number of things …’; ‘There were three things
I wanted to say’; ‘Just two things, Mary, …’) and for closing (‘And just
one last point’; ‘One more second and I’ll finish’; ‘One last thing, Bill’;
‘And that’s it’).

Native speakers normally find it relatively easy and natural to know who
is to speak, when and for how long. This skill is not however
automatically transferred to a second language. Indeed many second
language learners have great difficulty in getting into a conversation,
knowing when to give up their turn to others, knowing when they are
expected to take a turn, and in knowing how to close a conversation in
English.

Exercises

1. Identify the adjacency pairs and turn-taking mechanisms in the

following extracts:

98
 Extract 1
A: so if there's a hardware store we could call in and get one on the
way back
B: do you think there is one
A: yes
B: OK then
A: that would be nice wouldn't it?

B: yes it would
A: I mean the job not the hardware shop
B: yes I REAlize what do you keep telling me for
Extract 2
Oh listen I wanted to tell you one of the girls in my supply class we'll
hoover when we come back won't we she said to me she looked at my
slices and she said you've got flashy shoes or something I said I got them
in Spain she said Miss are you Spanish I thought it was really funny.
(Burns & Joyce, 1997)

2. Read the following text and identify instances of:

• overlap.

• backchannel.

• bids for a turn.

• giving up a turn to the other speaker.

• adjacency pairs - inform/acknowledge - offer/acceptance - request/ response.

In this text Liz (L) is talking to the Receptionist (R) at the Art Gallery.

99
 R: Good morning. Art Gallery, can I help you?
L Hi! I'd just like some... information about what exhibitions you
[have on...
R (Right...
L: Is there anything special on... at the moment?
R: Well, we just have an exhibition that started yesterday. That's the
'Magnum in Our Time' Exhibition... it's a photo [journalists...
L: [Right...
R:... exhibition... and the Cooke and Hinde exhibition from New York
is coming, er... on the twenty-second of September...
L: [Oh, yeah...
R: [... and if you're a member of the society you'll get the information
in the magazine...
L: [ No, no, I'm not..
R: [and it'll also inform you of things that are coming up at the
Gallery, exhibitions and that kind of thing...
L: Oh good...
R: If you're interested I could send you one...
L: Yes, that would be good...
(Burns, & Joyce, 1997)

3. Examine the following conversations and identify instances of three-

part exchanges, adjacency pairs, turn-taking.

a)
A.That's the telephone.
B.I'm in the bath.
A. O.K. (Widdowson in Nunan, 1993, p. 59)

100
b)
A. What's this?
B. That? It's a watch. Why?
A. Funny looking one if you ask me
(Nunan, 1993, p. 60)

c)
A. How much was it?
B. Oh, you don't really want to know, do you?
A. Oh, tell me.
B. Wasn't cheap.
A. Was it a pound?
B. Pound fifty.
(Nunan, 1993, p. 60)

d)
A. Are you wearing gloves?
B. No.
A. What about the spiders?
B. They're not wearing gloves either.
(Nunan, 1993, p. 62)

e)
A. I have 2 tickets to the theatre tonight.
B. My examination is tomorrow.
A. Pity.
(Widdowson in Nunan, 1993, p. 74)
101
2. Topic management

The final aspect of negotiating meaning we will discuss is the way in

which speakers manage the topic. Topic management is an important
aspect of conversations. It includes a knowledge of appropriate topics
and ‗taboo‘ topics in particular settings. Nolasco and Arthur point out:

Different cultures talk about different things in their everyday lives.

Native speakers are very aware of what they should and should not talk
about with specific categories of people in their own language, but the
rules may be different in a foreign language. Both teachers and students
need to develop a sense of ‗taboo‘ subjects if they are to avoid offense
(1987, p. 11).

Topic management also includes an awareness of how speakers how

speakers deal with changes in a topic, how they maintain a topic and how
they repair the interaction when misunderstandings occur (Burn and
Joyce, 1997). Moreover, there are often culture-specific rules for who
initiates a topic and how it is done, and who develops the topic and how
it is developed. That is, there are often culture-specific strategies that
people use to introduce, develop or change a topic in a conversation.
Equally, there are conventions and constraints on the choice of topic in
particular conversational contexts, depending on genres, or speech event,
situation and culture in which they occur.

During spoken interactions topics are introduced, taken up and changed

as a joint activity among speakers. Topics which are put up for discussion
by any one speaker are either developed further or lapse through a kind
of mutual consent between the speakers involved. Discussion of a
particular topic generally proceeds until a new topic is introduced and
taken up. The introduction of a new topic places an obligation on other
speakers to respond and to join the speaker in moving the topic forward.
Casual conversations are particularly prone to rapid changes of topic as
people engage in freer and more spontaneous interaction than is generally
found in transactional talk.

102
3. Lexis in talk
McCarthy (1994, pp. 68-70) points out that one of the key ways in which
topics are developed lies in how speakers take up, repeat and modify the
vocabulary selections of others in order to expand, develop or change
topics. McCarthy refers to this as relexicalisation.
We will use McCarthy's model to show how this occurs in the following
transactional text. The topic management in the first fifteen lines of the
text is outlined below.
An enquirer (E) is telephoning an immigration officer (IO) on behalf of a
friend to find out how to sponsor a family member to the country.
1 E: So the children want to sponsor their mother.
2 IO: How old are the children?
3 E: Well, the oldest one's about 20 or so... but they haven't been
4 here for very long. They've only been here for about six months...
5 IO: I see and they've been told that they can't sponsor her because
6 they haven't been here long enough. Yeah... there's a two
7 year residency requirement if she's an aged parent How old is she?
8 E: I don't know how old she is...
9 IO: If she's below 60 years of age and that... she'll have to be
10 put through the points test
11 E: Urn...
12 IO: And if that's the case then there's no resident requirement.
13 However if she's an aged parent... that's 60 years for women
14 ... then, there's the two years residency requirement.
15 E: Sorry, I didn't quite get what you mean... if she's under 60 she
16 can apply under the normal points system?

103
Topic management

E's first turn concludes his description of the circumstances of the

family on whose behalf he is enquiring and summarises the specific
nature of his enquiry (i.e. sponsorship) (line 1)

IO shifts to the related topic of the age of the children (line 2)

E relexicalises the topic of the children's ages as 'oldest' (line 3)

E then goes on to introduce the topic of length of residence through

'but they haven't been here for very long' (lines 3-4)

IO develops the sponsorship-residency link through:

• repetition of sponsor (line 5)

• they haven't been here long enough (line 6)

• there's a two year residency requirement (line 7)

The topic of age is repeated through the relexicalisations of

• 'aged parent' (line 7)

• 'How old is she?' (line 7)

• 'I don't know how old she is...' (line8)

• 'If she's below 60 years of age' (line9)

IO then introduces the new sub-topic of the points test (line10), which
is again related to age and residency through the repetition of:

• 'residency requirement' (line14)

•'under 60' (line15)

(Burns & Joyce, 1997)

104
Another example of analysing of relexicalisation is in the following
interactional conversation.
Two women are talking about ‗Bonfire Night‘, the night when many
people in Britain have large bonfires and fireworks in their garden.

A: No, I don‘t think we can manage a large bonfire but the fireworks
themselves er we have a little store of …
B: Oh, yes, they‘re quite fun, yes.
A: Mm yes, the children like them very much so I think as long as one
is careful, very careful. (B. Oh yes) It‘s all right.
B: Mm
A: But erm I ban bangers, we don‘t have any bangers (B: Yes) I can‘t
stand those. (B. Oh yes) just the pretty ones.
B: Sparklers are my favourites.
A: Mm Catherine Wheels are my favourites actually but er you know
we have anything that‘s pretty and sparkly and we have a couple of
rockets you know, to satisfy Jonathan who‘s all rockets and
spacecrafts and things like this.
(Crystal & Davy, 1975, p. 28)

In A‘s first turn, she concludes a few previous exchanges about bonfires
and then shift the topic to the closely associated fireworks. B accepts the
topic and just says that fireworks are fun. A takes up B‘s use of fun and
relexicalizes it as like them and then adds that one should be careful. B
simply replies ‗Mm’. A (seems to work hardest at this point in developing
topics) returns to fireworks and talk of particular fireworks: bangers and
pretty ones. B continues this with sparklers. A comes back with
Catherine Wheels, then repeats pretty and sparkly and expands to
rockets. At the same time she exploits the double association of rocket to
bring in its near-synonym spacecraft, thus expanding the topic to talk
about her child, Jonathan.
105
Other relexicalisations are fun in B‘s turn, which becomes like in A‘s
turn, is taken up as can’t stand in A‘s next turn, then as favourites by B,
and finally as favourites A, representing, by moving from near-synonym
to antonym and vice-versa, the sub-topic of ‗likes and preferences‘ with
regard to fireworks. Another relexicalisation can be seen in the sub-topic
of ‗precautions and restrictions‘: careful, ban, don’t have carry this
strand over the turn boundaries. This small number of lexical chain
accounts for almost all the content items in the extract. The intimate bond
between topic development and the modification of reworking of lexical
items already used makes the conversation develop coherently, seeming
to move from sub-topic to sub-topic as a seamless whole. In this way the
scope of the topics is worked out between the participants with neither
side necessarily dominating.
Relexicalisation of some elements of the previous turn provides just such
a contribution to relevance and provides other important ‗I am with you‘
signals to the initiator. Thus topics unfold, and the vocabulary used by
the speaker offers openings for possible development, which may or may
not be exploited. The discourse then develops in predictable directions.
(McCarthy, 1994, pp. 69-70)

Exercises

1. Analyze the sub-topic shifts in terms of linguistic features in the

following extract.

B: No … it was generally quiet and the weather was … what did it do,
it just [it was quite sunny actually.

D:
[it was quite sunny a couple of day.

B: Christmas Day was quite sunny [we went for a walk, had a
splendid walk.

D: [In the morning, it rained in the afternoon.

106
 A: British Christmases rarely change, it‘s time for gorging yourself
and going for walks.
B: Yeah, that‘s right, and you never get any snow.
C: Yes, it was very sunny Christmas Day.
B: Mm
A: Mm
B: Mm … when are you heading off again, Bob?
A: A week today … I shall be off to Munich this time … so I‘m just
wondering where the luggage is going to go, and looking at my case
now, I find that it‘s burst open, and whether it‘s fair wear and tear I
don‘t know, because last time I saw it it was in perfect nick.
B: You reckon it might have suffered from its journey.
A: Oh, they get slung about you know, I never used to get a decent
case, I buy a cheap one.
B: Mm
A: Because they just get scratched
B: Mm
(McCarthy, 1994, pp. 133-134)

2. Read the extract below and trace the repetitions and relexicalizations
of the italicized items, in the way that was done for the fireworks text.
You can use the framework of analysis by (Burns &Joyce, 1997) or
McCarthy (1994) above.

A: You‘re knitting … what are you knitting, that‘s not a tiny garment.
B: No. (A. laughs) no it‘s for me, but its very plain.
A: It‘s a lovely color.
B: It‘s nice.

107
4. Feedback

Another important aspect of spoken interaction that CA has examined is

the ways speakers provide each other with feedback: that is, the way that
listeners show they are attending to what being said. Feedback can be
done both verbally, using tokens such as ‗hm’, and ‗uh huh‘, by
paraphrasing what the other has just said, or non-verbally through body
position and eye contact. Feedback also varies cross-culturally. For
example, a common feedback taken in Japan is ‗hi‘ which, taken literally,
means ‗yes‘. However, in Japanese interactions the use of feedback token
does not necessarily mean agreement – as ‗yes‘ might in English – but
rather simply, ‗I am listening to what you are saying‘- much as ‗uh huh‘
might in English.

5. Repair

An important strategy speakers use in spoken interaction is repair. That

is, the way speakers correct things that have been said in a conversation.
For example, we might correct things that have been said in a
conversation. This is often done through self repair and other repairs.
For example, we might correct what we have said (self repair) as in:

A: I’m going to the movie tomorrow… I mean, the opera.

Or other person might repair what we have said (other repair):

A: I’m going to that restaurant we went last week. You know the
Italian one in Brunswick Street.

B: You mean Lygon Street, don’t you?

A: That’s right Lygon Street.

In order to achieve mutual understanding, participants must negotiate

meaning to ensure that they are being understood correctly, and that they
are correctly interpreting the utterances of the other participants.

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Exercises

1. Analyse the following extract and indicate how the speakers keep the
floor, give up the floor, claim the floor, and signal the end of a turn.
A: Twelve pounds I think wasn’t it. =
B: = Can you believe it?
C: Twelve pounds on the Weight Watchers’ scale.
In this extract, = indicates no gap between the end of one utterance
and the start of another. A full stop at the end of the first utterance
indicates falling intonation falling intonation, and ? at the end of the
second utterance indicates rising intonation.
(Paltridge, 2000, p 96)
2. Find examples of self repair and other repair in the below extract.
A: What would happen if you went back home and didn’t get your
diploma?
B: If I didn’t get my degree?
A: Yeah.
B: Well … it wouldn’t be too serious really … No … actually … I’d
get into a lot of trouble … I don’t know what to do.
(Paltridge, 2000,p. 96)
3. Conversation analysis
Collect several examples of the same spoken genre and carry out a
conversation analysis of them. The main categories you could explore,
depending on your text, are adjacency pairs, topic initiation, topic
development, topic change, turn taking, feedback, repair, openings,
pre-closing and closings.
(Paltridge, 2000, p. 97)

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III. How to analyse spoken language
Activity 15

Following the features of conversational discourse presented above, it is

now time to practise analysing an entire piece of oral discourse. Read the
extract below and note how features of spoken language can be identified
and analysed in a systematic way.

A Framework for Analysing Spoken Language

(Burns, A., Joyce, H.,Gollin, S., 1996, pp. 66-69)

When analyzing spoken language, it is useful to have a framework which

can assist you in analysis. The following framework can be used to
analyze. Note that it is not necessary to analyze all aspects.

1. Transcribe the recording

• Give the text a title.

• Leave a line between each speaker and number lines for easy reference.

• Label each speaker using letters, first names or positions (e.g., Officers,
Receptionists).

• Insert contextual information.

• Retain the wording of discourse as accurately as possible.

2. Analyze the transcript

Background to the text

• Include information about where, when, how and why the text was collected.

• Include relevant social and cultural information.

Type of interaction

• Identify the text as transactional or interactional.

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General comments

• Make some general comments to help understand general features of

the text.

Generic structure analysis

• Categorize the text according to its social purposes

• Label the stages of the text of the texts with functional labels (e.g.
examination, interview).

• Indicate which stages are obligatory and which are optional (if
possible).

Conversation analysis

• Identify adjacency pairs (if any).

• Analyse turn-taking patterns and related discourse signals and markers.

• Analyse turn types and related strategies (negotiation of meaning, topic

management).

A SAMPLE ANALYSIS

Authentic dialogue

Bank enquiry

B = Bank employee

C = Customer

1. B: <Mountain Investment> James speaking.

2. C: Hello um I have an enquiry about depositing into a cash management.

3. fund.

4. B: Yeah.
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 5. C: Um I have a cash m … I have an account with you.

6. B: Yeah.

7. C: Um in September um my boyfriend is going to get a sum of

money in the.

8. form of a cheque.

9. B: Yeah.

10. C: And he would like to deposit it into my account.

11. B: Right.

12. C: how do we go about that?

13. B: Is the cheque gonna be made out to him?

14. C: Yeah.

15. B: Ah, you won‘t be able to um we have a big problem

accepting third party.

16. cheques which is what this is classified as.

17. C: Right.

18. B: Um now you may be able to get away with it by actually

both of you

19. coming.

20. C: Yes.

21. B: To the office.

22. C: Yes.

23. B: Um and er in front of the receptionist.

24. C: Yes.

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 25. B: Just your boyfriend signing it over to you.

26. C: Mm

27. B: Or to trustees and then so that we can actually have

28. something like a driver‘s licence.

29. C: Yes.

30. B: So that he can verify his signature.

31. C: OK So …

32. B: That‘s the only way we will be, we would be able to do it. You

33. wouldn‘t be able to post the cheque or pay it in via the National

34. Australia, you‘d both have to come in unfortunately.

35. C: That‘s the Pitt St office [is it?

36. B: [Yeah yeah.

37. C: OK and that should be no problem.

38. B: It should be no problem so long as we can sort of verify that your.

39. boyfriend is who he is with some some sort of ID [with a picture o.

40. C: [Driver‘s licence

41. B: Yeah, that‘s fine.

42. C:[OK

43. B: [ and he signs it over in front of the… receptionist. Then

there shouldn‘t.

44. be any problem with that.

45. C: OK then.

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 46. B: OK.

47. C: Thank you very much.

48. B: Right you are.

49. C: Bye bye.

50. B: Bye bye.

Background to the text

This is a telephone text recorded as authentic spoken language. In this

text the customer asks for information about banking a cheque. The bank
employee explains the difficulty of banking the particular category of
cheque and poses a solution for the customer.

Type of interaction

Service encounter – obtaining service information.

Generic analysis

Telephone service encounter

• Service initiation: line 1^

• Service request: Lines 2-12 ^

• Service compliance: lines 13-17 ^ (Procedural explanation): lines 18-43 ^

• Service closure: lines 45 -48 ^

• Finish: lines 49-50

Conversation analysis

• Very cooperative text with the employee being very helpful and
showing solidarity with the customer.

• No overlapping of turns but customer carefully backchannels in

response to the information given.

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Teaching implication

• Cultural awareness of banking procedures to understand the

problems with banking the cheque.

• Generic staging- especially important to initiate and fully explain

the purpose of the call.

• Importance of back channelling in the telephone call to maintain

the solidarity set up by the employee.

Exercises

1. Record and analyse a 5-10 minute piece of casual conversation. Identify

the following:

- topic selection and change.

- the negotiation of meaning.

- techniques for keeping the interaction going (e.g., back-channel

feedback in which the listener indicates that he or she is following the
speaker by using terms such as I see and Uh-huh).

2. Collect several examples of the same spoken genre and carry out a
conversation analysis of them. The main categories you could explore,
depending on your texts, are adjacency pairs, topic initiation, topic
development, topic change, turn-taking, feedback, repair, openings, pre-
closings and closings.

3. Analyse the following two conversations.

a. Mother chatting to son’s new friend

M = mother
S = Sarah
1. M: Hello …um … Hi. What‘s your name again?
2. S: Sarah Pinter.

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3. M: Sarah?
4. S: Yes.
5. M: Pinter?
6. M: Pinter yeah.
7. M: That‘s real … sort of English name, isn‘t it?
8. S: Um … actually I think it‘s Hungarian. I‘m not sure. I think so.
9. My grandfather came from Hungary so …
10. M: Yeah. Right. And you‘re Jewish, are you?
11. S: Yep.
12. M: Oh, … um… And how did you come to know David?
13. S: Ah, well … Jill lives in the same house in Glebe where I live …
14. M: Right.
15. S: So … um … and Jill knew David … so they said that they were
going on.
16. a holiday weekend and they invited me along … actually a
holiday a
17. a couple of days, because it wasn‘t a weekend, it was Monday
through to.
18. Wednesday … so I just went with them.
19. M: How long have you been in Australia?
20. S: Three weeks. Not very long.
21. M: Yeah.
22. S: And I‘ve only been in Sydney. I haven‘t been out of Sydney.
Well now.
23. I‘ve been you know up past Newcastle and … but I haven‘t really been
24. much … to anywhere else.
25. M: Mmm so what do you think of Australia?
26. S: Well that‘s … it‘s hard to make any kind of … anything because I haven‘t.

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27. really been anywhere else … um … Sydney is … is a very fun
city. I‘ve
28. had a great time staying here.. um … I can‘t … it‘s not that different
29. though from America. I mean … there are a lot of differences but, in
30. general it‘s another Westernised city … and it‘s not that different.
31. M: Right.
32. S: So I‘m really looking forward to going into the Outback … and
just …
33. other areas of Australia … so I can see what Australia is really like.
34. M: Right. Which parts of Australia? Which parts of the Outback are you
35. going to?
36. S: Um I don‘ … everything is … completely up in the air. I just keep
37. hearing what people tell me and try then to go where they suggest … um
38. … so far everyone has said Alice Springs and Ayers Rock.
39. M: Oh yes yes … except that it‘s probably the wrong time of the year.
40. S: Now why … is it the the wrong time of the year?
41. M: Er … well if you were thinking of going now, it probably would
be quite
42. hot.
43. S: Right. Well actually, I think we‘re going to be going in … um …
at the
44. end of March, beginning of April.
45. M: Oh. [ That would be a good time.
46. S: [Is that better? OK.
47. M: Yes, yes. But it‘s beautiful, really spectacular country.
48. S: Yeah that‘s what I‘ve heard.
49. M: Yes, We just … went for a holiday to Ayers Rock and Alice
Springs … um …
50. last September in the school holidays. And I loved it. It was beautiful.

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51. S: That‘s what I‘ve heard from everybody.
52. M: Mmm.
53. S: So I‘m looking forward to it … The one thing that is typical of Australia.
54. I was told by Bill and David, is that when we were driving … um
… two days
55. ago I guess it was … um I saw signs with kangaroo and a koala
56. bear on it … and obviously, I‘m not used to that … it was great! I went
57. out and took pictures of it.
58. M: [laughs] You didn‘t see the real kangaroos or the real koalas.
59. S: We saw real koalas.
60. M: Did you?
61. S: Yeah … up in the trees.
62. M: Did you?
63. S: Yep.
64. M: In the daytime?
65. S: Yes.
66. M: Oh you were very lucky.
67. S: Yeah. That‘s what I‘ve been told. Yeah. That‘s very exciting. I still
68. haven‘t seen a kangaroo yet, but considering I‘ve been around
Sydney, I
69. don‘t really expect to see one for a while.
70. M: Yeah well I hope you enjoy your stay here.
71. S: Thank you.
72. M: Nice talking to you.
73. S: Thanks. You too.

c. Making an appointment
R = Receptionist
P = Patient
1. R: Good morning. Dr Wong‘s surgery. Ros speaking.
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2. P: Hi Ros. It‘s Emily here.
3. R: How are you Emily?
4. P: Hi I‘m fine.
5. R: That‘s good.
6. P: I‘m ringing to make an appointment for Jennifer to see Wen …
for a
7. check-up.
8. R: Right.
9. P: During her school holidays.
10. R: When is … when is the school … first to the thirteenth?
11. P: Er no … well any day from the twentieth of September.
12. R: Oh that‘s nice.
13. P: Oh.
14. R: Yes.
15. P: That always happens … ah … when are you back?
16. R: Um we‘re back on the fourteenth.
17. P: Is that school …
18. R: October … um … and … then school‘s back, isn‘t it? Oh well
actually
19. that‘s very interesting. We‘re away for the whole of the school
holidays …
20. because she breaks on the nineteenth, does she?
21. P: Yes yes.
22. R: Then she resumes on the fourteenth.
23. P: Yes yes.
24. R: Oh.
25. P: What about the actual fourteenth. I think she might have to go in
on the
26. Fourteenth, on the evening of the fourteenth.

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27. R: Oh, on the evening of the fourteenth. Well then that‘s fine. We
could
28. make it on the day. We could make it as early as nine.
29. P: Nine? OK.
30. R: Course you‘ll be back at work then, won‘t you?
31. P: Yes yes.
32. R: Is that a problem for Jennifer?
33. P: Um … that‘s a thought.
34. R: Do you want me to make it after four?
35. P: Well … make it after school … yeah.
36. R: That‘s not cutting it too fine for you, is it?
37. P: Um … yeah … that‘s problem.
38. R: {laughs} ((?)) here and back home again.
39. P: Well how about … I could drop her there and she could get her back
40. home she could go out for the day.
41.R: Right.
42. P: OK, well we‘ll leave it for nine … er … nine o‘ clock.
43. R: Yes on the fourteenth.
44. P: Right that‘s Monday isn‘t it?
45. R: Right yes.
46. P: OK good.
47. R: Good. Are we going to see you on Saturday? You weren‘t there last
48. Saturday.
49. P: No. Er yes I will be coming next Saturday.
50. R: Good. Even though it was windy, the weather bad actually, dropped
51. when we were on the counts. It wasn‘t as bad as I thought it
would be.
52. P: Oh really? Actually that‘s why I didn‘t come because it was so
windy and

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53. I thought I‘d get on with other things.
54. R: {laughs} Yes I was tempted to do the same and Wen said no
we‘re going.
55. {laughs}
56. P: OK. Well see you Saturday.
57. R: Thank you Emily.
58. P: Bye Ros.

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Chapter IV

Discourse processing and discourse in

language teaching

I. Discourse processing
Activity 16

Read the extract below about how discourse is interpreted and answer the
questions.

a) What are bottom-up processing and top-down processing?

b) What are the weak and strong points of these processes?
c) How can interactive processing help to overcome the drawbacks
of these two processes?
How we process discourse

…the mental processes used by readers and listeners as they interpret

discourse and relate it to their background knowledge and experience.
…bottom-up and top-down models of how the comprehension process
works.

Bottom-up processing

In bottom-up processing, the smallest units of language are identified

first, and these are 'chained together' to form the next highest unit and
so on. In the case of reading, the bottom-up model assumes that the
reader first identifies each letter in a text as it is encountered. These
letters are blended together and mentally 'sounded out' to enable the
reader to identify the words that they make up; words are chained
together to form sentences: sentences are linked together into
paragraphs; and paragraphs are tied together to form complete texts.

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Comprehension is thus the final step in a lengthy process of decoding
ever larger units of language.
Until comparatively recently, the bottom-up approach dominated
reading research and theory. It is the basis of the vast majority of
reading schemes, and also of phonics-based reading primers. Although
there is now a great deal of empirical evidence that demonstrates the
inadequacy of this bottom-up model, it still has many adherents within
the language teaching profession.
One reason for the survival of this model (particularly in the initial
teaching of reading) in the face of empirical attack is that it seems
reasonable and logical explanation of what happens when we read.
Letters do represent sounds, and, despite the fact that in English
twenty-six written symbols have to represent over forty aural symbols,
there is a degree of consistency. On the surface it seems more logical
to teach beginning readers to exploit the systematic correspondences
between written and spoken symbols than to teach them to recognize
the words they encounter by memorizing each word's unique shape.
One of the assumptions underlying phonics is that once a reader has
blended the sounds together to form a word, that word will then be
recognized. Implicit in the approach is the assumption that the reader
possesses an oral vocabulary that is extensive enough to allow decoding
to proceed. Such an assumption is questionable with both first and
second language readers. Most primary and elementary teachers are
familiar with children who can decode written symbols into their aural
equivalent and 'sound out‘ words and who therefore appear able to read;
but who do not actually understand what they read.
A number of other major criticisms have been made of the bottom-up
approach to reading, much of it based on research into human
memory. The first of these criticisms is that, in English at least, with
twenty-six symbols and over forty sounds, the correspondences
between letters and sounds are both complex and relatively
unpredictable. It was acknowledgement of this complexity and

123
unpredictability that led to the development of initial reading primers,
composed almost entirely of words with regular sound-symbol
correspondences. Although this made word recognition easier, it led to
stories that were unnatural and tedious for children to read.
Another criticism, once again growing out of research into human
memory, is that the processing of each letter as it is encountered in a
text would slow reading down to the point where it would be difficult
for meaning to be retained. For example, it takes a quarter to a third of
a second to recognize and assign the appropriate sound to a given
letter of the alphabet. At this rate, given the average length of English
words, readers would only be able to read around sixty words a
minute. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the average read can
read and comprehend 250-350 words a minute. Given the fact that we
can only hold in working memory about seven different items at any
one time, the reader should, according to the bottom-up model, very
often forget the beginning of a sentence (and often a word) before
reaching the end.
…
Evidence against the bottom-up approach has also come from
investigation of errors made when reading a text aloud. Fluent readers
do not always read the words that are on the page. Deviations from the
text (called ‗miscues‘) provide evidence that something other than
mechanical decoding is going on when readers process written
discourse.
Top-down processing
Evidence from sources such as the reading miscues have led to an
alternative model of language processing known as the top-down
approach. This operates in the opposite direction from bottom-up
processing: listeners/readers make sense of discourse by moving from
the highest units of analysis to the lowest.
Cambourne(1979) provides the following diagrammatic representation
of the way top-down processing works in relation to reading.

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TOP-DOWN PROCESSING MODEL
Pass experience → Selective → Meaning → Sound
and language aspects pronunciation
intuitions of print if necessary
According to this theory, the listener/reader makes use of his or her
background knowledge of the subject at hand, knowledge of the
overall structure of the text, knowledge and expectations of how
language works, and motivation, interests and attitudes towards the
text and context it contains. Rather than decoding every symbol, or
even every word, he or she forms hypotheses about what might follow
in the text and then reviews or ‗samples‘ these to determine whether
the original hypotheses were correct.
Top-down strategies that good readers employ, and that can be taught
to young readers, include the following:
1. Using background knowledge to assist in comprehending a
particular text;
2. Scanning the text for headings, sub-headings and non-text material
such as pictures, graphs and diagrams to acquire a broad understanding
before more detailed reading;
3. Skimming the text and thinking about the content, and then writing
down a number of questions that you would like the text to answer
for you.
4. Identifying the genre of the text (knowing that you are about to read
a procedural, instructive, allegorical text etc, can facilitate reading
comprehension);
5. Discriminating between more and less important information (for
example, discriminating between key information and supporting detail).

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…The link between our knowledge of language forms and our
knowledge of the world has a number of implications for discourse
processing. First, it suggests that the more predictable the sequences
of language in a text, the more readily it will be understood. Texts for
children learning to read should therefore be written in a style that is
consistent with the children‘s oral language patterns. The phonics
approach to reading presents children with more predictable language
at the level of the word, but less predictable language beyond the
word. A second way or exploiting the relationship between the world
of the text and the world beyond the text is to ensure, not only that the
linguistic elements are more predictable, but that the content is more
familiar and therefore more predictable to the reader.

One of the criticisms that could be made of top-down processing as it

is applied-to the teaching of reading, is that it fails to distinguish
adequately between beginning readers and fluent readers. Smith
(1978) argues that, as fluent readers recognize words on sight, then
this is how beginning readers should be taught. (He points out that
children learning ideographic written systems such as Chinese learn in
this way - that is, by recognizing the unique shape of each character).
However, it does not logically follow that, because fluent readers
proceed mainly through sight recognition (assuming that they do),
then this is the way that beginning readers should be taught.

Interactive processing

More recently top-down processing has come in for some serious

criticism. Stanovich (1980)…criticizes the notion that processing
proceeds models through making hypotheses and predictions about what
might follow in the text and about content. Given problems with bottom-
up and top-down models, he proposes a third, which he calls the
interactive-compensatory model. As the name indicates, this model
suggests that, in comprehending discourse, we use information from
more than one level simultaneously. In other words, comprehension is

126
 not a simple matter - either of moving lower to higher, or from higher
to lower elements – but is an interactive process.

This third model is superior to the two preceding it in several regards.

The bottom-up model is deficient because it assumes that the initiation
of higher level processes (for example, making inferences must await
the completion of lower ones. The top-down model, on the other hand,
does not allow lower-level processes to direct higher level ones. There
are also problems with the top- down suggestion that listeners/readers
form hypotheses which they test out through the selective sampling of
discourse elements.

In interactive models, deficiencies at one level can be compensated,

for by any other level, regardless of whether it is higher or lower in
the hierarchy. For example, higher level processes can make up for
deficiencies at lower levels, and this allows for the possibility that
readers with, say, poor reading skills can compensate for these by
using other factors. These factors might include knowledge of the
syntactic class of a given word or higher-level semantic knowledge.
According to Stanovich, most top-down models do not allow for the
possibility that less proficient readers may use higher-level processes
to compensate for lower-level ones. He goes on to suggest that, given
deficient decoding skills, poor readers may actually be more
dependent on higher-level processes than proficient readers, a
suggestion that is consistent with several empirical studies into
reading comprehension.

(Nunan, 1993, pp. 78-84)

Exercises

1. The following are a list of possible activities to aid students in

discourse comprehension. Arrange them in a top-down sequence:
- identifying the meaning of pronouns.

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 - predicting the contents.
- answering factual questions.
- practising grammatical structures.
- identifying the sender and intended receiver.
- scanning for information.
- discussing issues raised.
- defining words.
- giving a title.
- taking notes on a given topic.

(Cook, 1989, p.80)

2. In their book Discourse in Action in the series Reading and Thinking

in English Moore et al. (1980, p. x-xi) use the following sequence of
activities with reading comprehension:
- Prediction of contents based on the title, before reading the passage.
- Extensive reading: (―to identify important ideas‖); scanning (―to
pick out points of detail).
- Intensive reading: questions helping students understand sections
more closely.
- Information retrieval: students are guided to use information for
summaries, diagrams, and tables.
- Evaluation: students express their opinions, compare the passage
with others.
- Follow-up: a challenging activity to make use of and extend the
information.
To what extent does this sequence correspond to a native speaker‘s processing
of discourse? Is it a top-down or a bottom-up approach, or a mixture? (Cook,
1989, p.82)

128
3. Consider the following sequence of activities around a reading passage
in Roy Kingsbury‘s (1983) Longman First Certificate Coursebook Unit 21,
entitled ―Daydreaming: This time tomorrow…‖ Consider the extent to which
the approach can be said to be bottom-up, top-down or interactive.
- Instruction: students are told to read the passage, then do the
exercises.
- Reading passage: a secretary‘s thoughts about her job (written in
a ―thought bubble‖ beside a drawing of the secretary).
- Exercises: students decide if statements about the passage are true
or false; in small groups, they list, discuss, and tell each other what the
woman will be doing tomorrow, and what she will have done by 5:30;
they then discuss the woman ‗s feelings and decide what advice they
would give her.
- Grammar exercises (each preceded be examples and statement of
rule) on various verb forms occurring in the passage.
(Slightly adapted from Cook, 1989, p. 83)

4. Here is a sequence of activities around a reading passage form Simon

Greenall‘s and Michael Swan‘s (1986) Effective Reading Unit 20,
entitled ―Save the jungle-save the world‖. Activities are grouped under a
number of headings.
- Predicting: students look at the title of the passage and discuss
their expectations in pairs; they then write down ten words they expect to
find; they then read the passage and see if their words appear.
- Extracting main ideas: students choose one of six statements
which gives ―the most accurate summary of the passage as a whole‖;
they decide who is responsible for the destruction of the jungle from four
alternatives; they then read the passage again and make notes on how to
- Dealing with unfamiliar words: students look for words and
save the jungle.
phrases which are defined in the passage; find typographical indicators
- Linking ideas: students identify the meaning of selected cohesive
of explanation; indicate whether
they thenlisted words from questions
the passage havethe
a
devices in the passage; answer factual about
positive
passage. or negative connotation.
- Understanding writer‘s style: students discuss the meaning and
the reasons for given stylistic choices.

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 - Further work: students prepare ―a similar document‖ on related issues.

Consider the extent to which the approach is bottom-up, top-down or

interactive.

(Slightly adapted from Cook, 1989, p. 84)

II. Applications in language teaching

The knowledge and information from findings in discourse analysis have
been used in language teaching to bring about more effective pedagogical
outcomes. In this section, you will examine discourse-based strategies
and techniques which can be applied to gain such expected pedagogical
effectiveness.

Activity 17

Read the two extracts below and answer the guided question.

a. What is text-based syllabus?

b. What are the purposes of text-based syllabus?

c. What pedagogical issues is it expected to address?

Extract 1

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THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A TEXT-BASED SYLLABUS
The text-based syllabus is a response to changing views of language
and language. It incorporates an increasing understanding of how
language is structured and how language is used in social contexts.
The characteristics of the text-based syllabus are outlined in Table 1.1

Syllabus type A text-based syllabus can be thought of as a

type of mixed syllabus. This is because all
the elements of various other syllabus types
can constitute a repertoire from which a
text-based syllabus can be designed

View of language Language occurs as whole texts which are

embedded in the social contexts in which
they are used.
View of language learning People learn language through working with
whole texts.
Syllabus elements All the elements of a text-based syllabus are
given unity and direction by being organised
with reference to holistic models of content
and methodology.
Content The content of a text-based syllabus is based
on whole texts which are selected in relation
to learner needs and the social contexts
which learners wish to access.
Methodology The methodology which supports a text-based
syllabus is based on a model of teaching and
learning in which the learner gradually
gains increasing control of text-types.
model, it is possible to develop sound
principles for selecting and sequencing the
content elements of the syllabus and for
determining the methodology with which to
implement the syllabus.
(Feez & Joyce, 1998, pp. 3-4)

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Extract 2

Text-based syllabuses

The interdependence of text and grammar suggests a more central role

for texts in the design of language courses. Normally the process of
course design begins with a list of pre-selected grammar items, such
as the past continuous, the second conditional, adverbs of frequency,
etc. Texts are then found - or created - that have these items embedded
in them. Next, tasks are designed to exploit the texts as texts (TAVI-
type tasks) and to tease out their language features (TALO-type tasks).
The process can be summarized like this:

design grammar syllabus → write or find texts → design tasks

An alternative, more radical, approach to course design is to start not

with the grammar items, but with the texts. Texts are selected and then
analysed for their characteristic language features. These features a re
then taught not as entities in themselves, but as components of the
high-order structures of language, i.e. texts. The process of course
design can be represented like this:

find texts → extract grammar syllabus → design tasks

Such an approach prioritizes texts over grammar and targets only the
grammar that is necessary to produce and interpret particular texts.
But what is the rationale for text-driven course design? One argument
is that, as one scholar put it, 'Language always happens as text, not as
isolated words and sentences. That is to say, people use language not
to trade grammatical structures back and forth, but to produce
coherent text-both spoken and written. A knowledge of discrete items
of grammar is no guarantee that learners can produce whole texts.
Whereas a familiarity with whole texts does entail some kind of
grammar competence -not as an end, but as a means.

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Moreover, the meaning and use of many grammar and vocabulary
items are simply not inferable at the level of the sentence. (The use of
the words whereas and does in the last sentence of the preceding
paragraph is a case in point.) By basing a course on texts rather than
sentences, it is argued that teaching and learning are more firmly
grounded and have a better chance of success.
A text-based course is particularly suited to learners whose textual
needs can be clearly identified, for example, a group of learners
preparing to study a specific subject at an English-speaking university.
Or a group that has to interpret instruction manuals for the machinery
that their company has invested in. Where specific purposes can be
identified, a text-based syllabus would seem to be the direct route, as
opposed to the scenic, grammar-based one.
Even with general English it‘s not impossible to imagine a text-driven
course and graded on the basis of such criteria as:
• frequency: how common is this text type?
• usefulness: how likely is it that the learner will need to produce or
interpret this text type?
• difficulty: how difficult are texts of this type, on the whole?
So long as the range of text types chosen is sufficiently broad,
including both spoken and written ones, and the example texts are
sufficiently representative then learners should be getting all the
grammar they are likely to need. They will also be getting exposure to
all the text types they are likely to meet. With a purely grammar-
driven syllabus, however, such a wide-ranging exposure to different
kinds of texts occurs accidentally, if at all.
As I said, such an approach represents a radical departure from
conventional course design and it may simply not be feasible in
contexts where a traditional grammar syllabus is imposed from above.
Even so, teachers may still be able to select their own texts, or some of them.

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 In which case, they should at least try to select texts that not only meet
the syllabus requirements - by embedding instances of the target
grammar, for example - but that also expose learners to a range of
different text types and of topics, so that the chances of incidental
learning are maximized.
Moreover, if the texts are at least notionally relevant to the learners'
own needs, experiences and interests, there is a better chance, perhaps,
that they will engage with these texts in ways that encourage a deeper
level of language processing.
(Thornbury, 2005,pp. 126-127)

Exercise

The following list of text types comes from the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) a document that provides
exhaustive descriptions of what is involved in language mastery.
Examine the course book you are using or one that you are familiar with.
Which of these text types are represented? (Thornbury, 2005).
Spoken, eg.
public announcements and instructions
public speeches, lectures, presentations, sermons
rituals (ceremonies, formal religious services)
entertainment (drama, shows, readings, songs)
sports commentaries (football, cricket, boxing, horse-racing,etc)
news broadcasts
public debates and discussion
interpersonal dialogues and conversations
telephone conversations
job interviews

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Written, eg.
books, fiction and non-fiction, including literary journals
magazines
newspapers
instruction manuals (DIY, cookbooks, etc)
textbooks
comic strips
brochures, prospectuses
leaflets
adverstising material
public signs and notices
supermarkets, shop, market stall signs

Activity 18

Read the extract below and identify how materials and activities can be
developed for teaching (spoken) discourse features.

Principles for teaching discourse

1. Help learners achieve discourse skills through discourse.

The classroom ís where most learning happens for most learners

around the world. In the classroom exchanges, turn-taking, topic
management, and all the things we can observe in everyday language
outside the classroom are present, but in different and special ways.
Learn to observe the discourse process in the classroom.

2. Remember that the classroom is not the outside world; it has its
own discourse

Sometimes it will be appropriate to engage in typical teacher-talk

(e.g., asking questions to which you already know the answer,
evaluating the students' responses), other times it will be advisable to

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be more natural and genuinely communicative (getting students to
exchange real information about themselves and their worlds). Plan
lessons to create a balance between language as display (i.e., skills and
systems mode of discourse) and language as genuine communication
(e.g.,listening to authentic recordings, allowing relaxed, natural
conversation without constant error correction).

3. Wherever possible, make language dialogues and classroom

activities as natural as you can

Listen to people speaking, in English or in any other language, and

observe all the time! If possible, make transcripts of real conversations
(starting with very simple ones) from tape recordings you have made.
You may not wish to use dialogues in class that look as messy as our
example of a CA analysis, so editing the script might be the best way.
Alternatively, edit coursebook dialogues by adding small items that
will make them seem more natural. Make sure any dialogue you use
from your textbook has natural patterns of IRF that occur in the real
world. Make sure dialogues contain natural features such as
contractions (e.g., I'm instead of I am), tags (You're from Taiwan,
aren't you?), backchannels (uhuh, mm), discourse markers (right, well)
and so on, and add them where you feel they are unnaturally absent.

4. Use recordings of spoken language

These can either come from published sources (e.g., Carter and
McCarthy, 1997) or from radio/TV/Web casts. Or make your own in
natural situations, building activities around them, which will help
raise awareness of discourse in different contexts. These extracts need
only be brief snapshots of dialogue, rather than whole conversations.
Dramas, soap operas, talk-shows, and other types of discourse offer
good data where natural, casual conversation is not available. Set up
role-plays and simulations in class which will enable everyone to have
something to say, and where students can prepare what they are going
to say to lessen the stress of having to speak spontaneously.

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5. Create conditions in the classroom where real-world discourse is
most likely to be encouraged

Sometimes you will want to move from a focus on grammar,

vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. to a more relaxed, natural
"conversation class." Make sure the classroom is set up to facilitate
this. Is everyone facing you, or are they able to look at one another?
Where have the topics come from? You? The coursebook? The
students? Are the students allowed to be more relaxed, with you
taking a back seat temporarily?

6. Make sure your learners are exposed to the language they will
need to manage their own discourses, both in and out of class

Help learners to become aware of how discourse markers such as

right, good, now, you see, etc. are used. Practice ways of opening and
closing conversations in different contexts. Expose your learners to
typical ways of responding and following up, which are different from
your evaluative responses to their performances (e.g., responding
appropriately to good/bad news, expressing interest, frustration, etc.).

7. Observe yourself and your learners in class; remember, in trying

to teach discourse you yourself and your learners are engaged in a
discourse

Monitoring the discourse of your classroom is central to being a good

teacher. Record yourself occasionally, monitor how evenly turn-taking
has been distributed among the students. And monitor your own turns:
do you give enough waiting time for students to answer questions, or
do you always jump in and fill awkward silences or immediately
correct errors and slips before they have the chance to compose or
recast what they want to say? Do you engage in too many long
monologues? Use SETT to monitor the different modes that occur in
your classes.

(McCarthy & Walsh, 2003, pp. 183-184)

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Activity 19

Read the extract below and answer the questions about the development
of conversational discourse skills through activities and materials.

1. How is talk conceived from the discourse perspective?

2. What are the major features of each type of talk?
3. What types of skills can be developed corresponding to each
type of talk?

How to Develop Conversation Skills

Developing Classroom Speaking Activities: From
Theory to Practice
…In designing speaking activities or instructional materials for second
or foreign language teaching it is also necessary to recognize the very
different functions speaking performs in daily communication and the
different purposes for which our students need speaking skills.

Functions of speaking
…I use an expanded three part version of Brown and Yule‘s
framework (after Jones 1996 and Burns 1998): talk as interaction: talk
as transaction: talk as performance. Each of these speech activities
are quite distinct in terms of form and function and require different
teaching approaches.

1. Talk as interaction
This refers to what we normally mean by ―conversation‖ and
describes interaction which serves a primarily social function. When
people meet, they exchange greetings, engage in small talk and chit
chat, recount recent experiences and so on because they wish to be
friendly and to establish a comfortable zone of interaction with others.
The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to present
themselves to each other than on the message. Such exchanges may be

138
either casual or more formal depending on the circumstances and their
nature has been well described by Brown and Yule (1983). The main
features of talk as interaction can be summarized as follows:
• Has a primarily social function.
• Reflects role relationships.
• Reflects speaker‘s identity.
• May be formal or casual.
• Uses conversational conventions.
• Reflect degrees of politeness.
• Employs many generic words.
• Uses conversational register.
• Is jointly constructed.
Some of the skills involved in using talk as interaction are:
• Opening and closing conversations.
• Choosing topics.
• Making small-talk.
• Recounting personal incidents and experiences.
• Turn-taking.
• Using adjacency-pairs.
• Interrupting.
• Reacting to others.
Examples of these kinds of talk are:
- Chatting to an adjacent passenger during a plane flight (polite
conversation that does not seek to develop the basis for future social
contact).
- Chatting to a school friend over coffee (casual conversation
that serves to mark an ongoing friendship).

139
 - A student chatting to his or her professor while waiting for an
elevator (polite conversation that reflects unequal power between the
two participants).
- Telling a friend about an amusing weekend experience, and
hearing her or him recount a similar experience he or she once had
(sharing personal recounts).

Mastering the art of talk as interaction is difficult and may not be a

priority for all learners. However students who do need such skills and
find them lacking report that they sometimes feel awkward and at a
loss for words when they find themselves in situation that requires talk
for interaction. They feel difficulty in presenting a good image of
themselves and sometimes avoid situations which call for this kind of
talk. This can be a disadvantage for some learners where the ability to
use talk for conversation can be important.

2. Talk as transaction

This type of talk refers to situations where the focus is on what is said
or done. The message is the central focus here and making oneself
understood clearly and accurately, rather than the participants and how
they interact socially with each other. In transactions,

…. talk is associated with other activities. For example, students may

be engaged in hand-on activities [e.g. in a science lesson] to explore
concepts associated with floating and sinking. In this type of spoken
language students and teachers usually focus on meaning or on talking
their way to understanding.

Burns distinguishes between two different types of talk as transaction.

One is situation where the focus is on giving and receiving information
and where the participants focus primarily on what is said or achieved
(e.g. asking someone for the time). Accuracy may not be a priority as
long as information is successfully communicated or understood.

140
The second type is transactions which focus on obtaining goods or
services, such as checking into a hotel.
Examples of these kinds of talk are:
- Classroom group discussions and problem solving activities.
- A class activity during which students design a poster.
- Discussing needed repairs to a computer with a technician.
- Discussing sightseeing plans with a hotel clerk or tour guide.
- Making a telephone call to obtain flight information.
- Asking someone for directions on the street.
- Buying something in a shop.
- Ordering food from a menu in a restaurant.
The main features of talk as transaction are:
• It has a primarily information focus.
• The main focus is the message and not the participants.
• Participants employ communication strategies to make themselves
understood.
• There may be frequent questions, repetitions, and
comprehension checks.
• There may be negotiation and digression.
• Linguistic accuracy is not always important.
Some of the skills involved in using talk for transactions are:
• Explaining a need or intention.
• Describing something.
• Asking questioning.
• Confirming information.
• Justifying an opinion.
• Making suggestions.
• Clarifying understanding.
• Making comparisons.
• Agreeing and disagreeing.

141
3. Talk as performance

The third type of talk which can usefully be distinguished has been
called talk as performance. This refers to public talk, that is, talk
which transmits information before an audience such as morning talks,
public announcements, and speeches.

Spoken texts of this kind according to Jones (1996, p.14), …often

have identifiable generic structures and the language used is more
predictable. …Because of less contextual support, the speaker must
include all necessary information in the text - hence the importance of
topic as well as textual knowledge.

And while meaning is still important, there will be more emphasis on

form and accuracy. Talk as performance tends to be in the form of
monolog rather than dialog, often follows a recognizable format (e.g.
a speech of welcome) and is closer to written language than
conversational language. Similarly it is often evaluated according to
its effectiveness or impact on the listener, something which is unlikely
to happen with talk as interaction or transaction. Examples of talk as
performance are:
- Giving a class report about a school trip.
- Conduct a class debate.
- Giving a speech of welcome.
- Making a sales presentation.
- Give a lecture.
The main features of talk as performance are:
• There is a focus on both message and audience.
• It reflects organization and sequencing.
• Form and accuracy is important.
• Language is more like written language.
• It is often monologic.

142
 Some of the skills involved in using talk as performance are:
• Using an appropriate format.
• Presenting information in an appropriate sequence.
• Maintaining audience engagement.
• Using correct pronunciation and grammar.
• Creating an effect on the audience.
• Using appropriate vocabulary.
• Using appropriate opening and closing.

(Richards, 2005)

Exercises (From Mc Carthy & Walsh, 2003)

1. Record five minutes of English conversation (either in real life, or

from a broadcast or Web cast source such as a soap opera or talk-show).
Write down the transcript.

2. What features described in the sections on exchange structure and

conversational analysis can you observe in your transcript (e.g., IRF
patterns, topic management, discourse markers, openings/closings,
adjacency pairs, etc.)?

3. How could your transcript be used in a class? Consider whether you

would need audio/ video as well as the printed script, whether you should
edit it first, and how, and what the script could be used for.

143
 REFERENCES

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Bower, J. and Kawaguchi, S. (2011). Negotiation of meaning and
corrective feedback in Japanese/English e Tandem. Language
Learning and Technology,15 (1), 41-71.
Brown, G. (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Prerss.
Brown, G. and H. Joyce. (1997). Focus on Speaking. Sydney: Macquarie
Press.
Burns, A, H. Joyce and S. Gollin. (1996). ‗I see what you mean‘. Sydney:
Macquarie Press.
Chalker, S. (1996). Linking Words. (2nd). NXBGiao duc.
Cook, G. (1989). Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crombie, W. (1986). Discourse and Language Learning: A Relational
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Hatch, E. (1992). Discourse and Language Education. Cambridge:
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Jackson, H. (1982). Analyzing English (2nd ed.) Pergamon.
Johnson, K. and H. Johnson (eds). (1998). Encyclopedic Dictionary of
Applied Linguistics: Oxford: Blackwell.
Levison, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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McCarter, S. (2003). A Book on Writing. NXB TP HCM.
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The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. Oxford: Oxford University
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Thornbury,S. (1997). About Language: Tasks for Teachers of English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thornbury, S. (2005). Beyond the Sentence: Introducing Discourse
Analysis. Macmillan: Oxford.
Trask, L.R. (1999). Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics.
Routledge: New York, NY.
Van Lier, L. (1995). Introducing Language Awareness. London:
Penguin.
Werth, P. (1981). Conversation and Discourse. London: Croom Helm Ltd.

Wright, T. (1994). Investigating English. New York, N.Y: Holder Education.

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 Glossary

Additive conjunctions: add on a sentence as if it were additional

information or an afterthought e.g. and, furthermore, besides,
incidentally, for instance, by contrast etc.

Adjacency pairs: utterances produced by two successive speakers in

such a way that the second utterance is identified as related to the first
one and as an expected follow up.

Adversative conjunctions: draw a contrast between the sentence they

introduce, with which they form a cohesive relationship e.g. yet, however,
nevertheless, on the other hand, on the contrary, in any case etc.

Anaphoric reference: backward pointing or a backward reference

Cataphoric reference: forward pointing or a forward reference

Causal conjunctions: make a causal link between two sentences e.g.

hence, therefore, consequently, as a result, that being so, otherwise, in
this respect etc.

Clausal ellipsis: the omission of whole clauses or large parts of clauses

Clausal substitution: the substitution by means of so, for a positive

clause and not, for a negative one.

Collocation: refers to the habitual company which words keep.

Comparative reference: two things are said to be the same or different,

without going into detail.

Conjunction: specific devices (conjunctions) for linking one sentence to

another.

Conversation analysis: the study of conversations where the emphasis is

not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the
behaviour of participants in talk and on patterns which reoccur over a
wide range of natural data.

146
Demonstrative reference: reference with the use of the demonstratives
(this, that), the definite article (the) and the adverbs here, there, now
and then.

Discourse analysis: the study of written texts of all kinds, and spoken
data from conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk.

Discourse: a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger

than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon,
argument, joke or narrative. (Crystal 1992, p 25)

Ellipsis: omission of one or more words in a sentence.

Endophoric reference: reference to items within the text.

Exophoric reference: reference outside the text to the situation

Genres: types of spoken and written discourse recognized by a discourse

community.

Grammar of texts: rules that give both structure and meaning to units of
discourse beyond the sentence level.

Interpersonal theme: reveals something of the attitude of the speaker

or reader.

Lexical cohesion: the use of the same, similar, or related words in

successive sentences, so that later occurrences of such words refer back
to and link up with previous occurrences.

Negotiation of meaning: a process that speakers go through to reach a

clear understanding of each other.

Nominal ellipsis: the omission of the head of a noun phrase.

Nominal substitution: the substitution of a noun as head of a noun

phrase by one or ones, or the substitution of a whole noun phrase by
the same.

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Personal reference: reference by means of the personal pronouns,
possessive pronouns (mine, yoursetc.) and possessive identifiers
(my, youretc.).

Reference: as defined by Halliday and Hasan as 'a semantic relation that

ensures the continuity of meaning in a text'. It involves items that cannot
be interpreted in their own right, but which make reference to something
else for their interpretation.

Reiteration: may be of four kinds. Firstly, the same word may be

repeated in successive, though not necessarily contiguous sentences.
Secondly, a synonym or near-synonym of a word may appear in a
following sentence. Thirdly, a word may be replaced in a following
sentence by another which is semantically superordinate to it. Fourthly, a
word may be replaced in a following sentence by a 'general word' which
describes a general class of objects.

Relexicalisation: the key ways in which topics are developed lies in how
speakers take up, repeat and modify the vocabulary selections of others
in order to expand, develop or change topics (McCarthy, 1991)

Rheme: is what being said about theme.

Substitution: a grammatical relation, where one linguistic item

substitutes for a longer one.

Temporal conjunctions: make a time link, usually of a sequential

nature, between one sentence and another e.g. then, after that, previously,
thereupon, meanwhile, finally, from now on, up to now etc.

Text analysis: the study of the formal linguistic devices that distinguish
a text from random sentences.

Text: a piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed discourse

identified for purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit with a
definable communicative function.

Textual themes: link a clause to the rest of the discourse.

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Topic management: includes an awareness of how speakers how
speakers deal with changes in a topic, how they maintain a topic and how
they repair the interaction when misunderstandings occur (Burn and
Joyce, 1997).

Theme: the initial part of a clause.

Topical theme: has to do with the information conveyed in the

discourse.

Verbal ellipsis: the omission of the lexical verb from a verb phrase, and
possibly an auxiliary or two, recoverable from a previous verb phrase.

Verbal substitution: the substitution by means of do for the lexical verb.

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