Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity

Description

It is surprising how much of everyday conversation consists of repetitive expressions such as 'thank you', 'sorry', would you mind?' and their many variants. However commonplace they may be, they do have important functions in communication. This thorough study draws upon original data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English to provide a discoursal and pragmatic account of the more common expressions found in conversational routines, such as apologising, thanking, requesting and offering. The routines studied in this book range from conventionalized or idiomatized phrases to those which can be generated by grammar. Examples have been taken from face-to-face conversations, radio discussions and telephone conversations, and transcription has been based upon the prosodic system of Crystal (1989). An extensive introduction provides the theory and methodology for the book and discusses the criteria for fixedness, grammatical analysis, and pragmatic functions of conversational routines which are later applied to the phrases. Following chapters deal specifically with phrases for thanking, apologising, indirect requests, and discourse-organising markers for conversational routines, on the basis of empirical investigation of the data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1.1 Aim and scope of the present study 1.2 Material and method 1.3 Frequency of conversational routines in spoken language 1.4 Psychological aspects of conversational routines 1.5 Conversational routines and ritualization 1.6 Lexicalization, grammaticalization and idiomatization 1.7 Conversational routines and meaning 1.8 Criteria of fixedness 1.8.1 Repetitive phrases and pragmatic idioms 1.8.2. Prosodic fixedness 1.9 The processing of conversational routines 1.10 Routines and discourse 1.11 Conversational routines and grammatical analysis 1.11.1 Grammatical deficiency 1.11.2 Syntactic integration and position 1.12 A model for describing the structural flexibility of conversational routines 1.13 The pragmatic function of conversational routines 1.13.1 Conversational routines and illocutionary force 1.13.2 Indirect speech acts 1.13.3 Conventionalization of indirect speech acts 1.14 The pragmatics of conversational routines 1.14.1 Conversational routines and frames 1.14.2 Factors of speech-act frames 1.15 Conversational routines and language teaching CHAPTER TWO: Thanking 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Thank you/thanks as an illocutionary force indicating device 2.3 Thanking and politeness 2.4 Strategies of thanking 2.5 Gratitude expressions 2.6 Continuation patterns 2.7 The grammatical analysis of gratitude expressions 2.8 Prosody and fixedness 2.9 Distribution of thanking over different texts 2.10 Thank you/thanks as stems 2.10.1 Expanded forms of thanking 2.10.2 Thanking and intensification 2.10.3 Prosody and intensification 2.10.4 Patterns of compound thanks 2.11 The functions of gratitude expressions 2.11.1 Thanking and ritualization 2.12 Thanking as a discourse marker 2.12.1 Thanking as a closing signal in adjacency triplets 2.12.2 Thanking in proposal-acceptance sequences 2.12.3 Thanking in telephone closings 2.12.4 Thanking in different turn positions 2.13 The pragmatics of thanking 2.13.1 The constraints caused by the object of gratitude 2.14 Frames for thanking 2.14.1 Variation in standard situations 2.15 Conclusion CHAPTER THREE: Apologies 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Defining apologies 3.3 Apologizing strategies 3.4 The form of apologizing 3.5 Continuation patterns 3.6 The grammatical analysis of apology expressions 3.7 Apologies and prosody 3.8 Distribution of apologies over different texts 3.9 Collocational fixedness and flexibility 3.9.1 Fully expanded apology expressions 3.9.2 Apologizing and intensification 3.9.3 Prosodic devices emphasizing the politeness expressed by the apology 3.9.4 Compound apologies 3.10 Apologies and function 3.11 Retrospective and anticipatory apologies 3.11.1 Disarming apologies 3.11.1.1 Disarmers and corrections 3.11.1.2 Disarmers as requests for repetition 3.11.1.3 Disarmers in dispreferred responses 3.12 The structural function of apologies 3.12.1 Apologies in telephone openings 3.12.2 Apologies in telephone closings 3.13 The type of offence 3.13.1 Talk offences 3.13.2 Time offences 3.13.3 Space offences 3.13.4 Offences involving social behaviour 3.13.5 Offences involving inconvenience 3.14 Apologies and pragmatic frames 3.14.1 Frames for standard situations 3.15 Conclusion CHAPTER FOUR: Requests and offers 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The speech act assignment mechanism and indirect speech acts 4.3 Indirect speech acts and pragmatic principles 4.4 Indirect speech acts and implicature 4.5 Pragmatic ambiguity 4.6 Defining requests 4.7 Requestive strategies 4.8 A taxonomy of requests 4.8.1 Requestives, advisories and offers 4.8.2 Explicit and implicit indirect requests 4.9 Requests and politeness 4.9.1 Assertive and tentative indirect requests 4.9.2 Requests and style 4.10 Continuation patterns 4.11 The grammatical analysis of requestive routines 4.12 Describing request expressions 4.12.1 Prosodic modification 4.12.2 Requests and discourse type 4.13 Indirect requests and speech act stems 4.14 Types of stem 4.14.1 Mitigated indirect requests in the form of declarative sentences 4.14.2 Want and need statements 4.14.3 Mitigated indirect requests in the form of interrogative sentences 4.14.3.1 Can/could you 4.14.3.2 Will/would you 4.14.3.3 Requests in the form of permission questions 4.15 Lexical mitigating devices 4.15.1 Please 4.15.2 Just 4.16 Internal and external modifiers 4.16.1 Requests and external modifiers 4.16.2 Combinations of modifiers 4.17 Referential strategies 4.18 Requests and pragmatic conventions 4.18.1 Requests and the situation 4.18.2 Frames for requests 4.19 Imperatives 4.19.1 Imperatives and politeness 4.19.1.1 Do + imperative 4.19.1.2 You + imperative 4.20 Patterns expressing offers 4.21 Conclusion CHAPTER FIVE: Discourse markers as conversational routines 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Coherence and discourse markers 5.3 Discourse markers characterized 5.4 The metalinguistic function 5.5 Relevance theory and communication 5.5.1 The interpretation of discourse markers in relevance theory 5.6 The approach to discourse markers in this work 5.7 The linguistic properties of discourse markers 5.7.1 'The discourse marker slot' 5.7.2 Prosodic fixedness 5.7.3 Positional fixedness 5.7.4 The grammatical analysis of discourse markers as stems 5.8 Contextual properties of discourse markers 5.8.1 Discourse markers as deictic 'pointers' referring backwards and forwards in the discourse 5.8.2 Discourse markers and person deixis 5.9 Functional properties of discourse markers 5.9.1 Global and local discourse markers 5.9.1.1 The pragmatic functions expressed by local discourse markers 5.9.1.2 Functions of global discourse markers 5.10 Combinations in the discourse marker slot 5.11 Discourse markers and cognitive frames 5.12 Conclusion References Index