Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity

by Aijmer; Karin

• ISBN13: 9780582082113
• ISBN10: 0582082110
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-10-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Aim and scope of the present study

Material and method

Frequency of conversational routines in spoken language

Psychological aspects of conversational routines

Conversational routines and ritualisation

Lexicalization, grammaticalisation an idiomatisation

Conversational routines and meaning

Criteria of fixdedness

The processing of conversational routines

Routines and discourse

Conversational routines and grammatical analysis

A model for describing the strucural flexibility of conversational routines

The pragmatic function of conversational routines

The pragmatics of conversational routines

Conversational routines and language teaching

Thanking

Introduction

Thank you/thanks as an illolcutionary force indicating device

Thanking and politeness

Strategies of thanking

Gratitude expressions

Continuation patterns

The grammatical analysis of gratitude expressions

Prosody an fixedness

Distribution of thanking over different texts

Thank you/thanks as stems

The functions of gratitutude expressions

Thanking as a discourse marker

The pragmatics of thanking

Frames for thanking

Conclusion

Apologies

Introduction

Defining apologies

Apologising strategies

The form of apologising

Continuation patterns

The grammatical analysis of apology and expression

Apologies and prosody

Distribution of apologies over different texts

Collocational fixedness and flexibility

Apologies and function

Retrospective and anticipatory apologies

The structural function of apologies

The type of offence

Apologies and pragmatic frames

Conclusion

Requests and offers

Introduction

The speech act assignment mechanism and indirect speech acts

Indirect speech acts and pragmatic principles

Indirect speech acts and implicature

Pragmatic ambiguity

Defining requests

Requestive strategies

A taxonomy of requests

Requests and politeness

Continuation patterns

The grammatical analysis of requestive routines

Describing request expressions

Indirect requests and speech act stems

Types of stem

Lexical mitigating devices

Internal and external modifiers

Referential strategies

Requests and pragmatic conventions

Imperatives

Patterns expressing offers

Conclusion

Discourse markers as conversational routines

Introduction

Coherence and discourse markers

Discourse markers characterized

The metalinguistic function

Relevance theory and communication

The approach to discourse markers in this work

The linguistic properties of discourse markers

Contextual properties of discourse markers

Functional properties of discourse markers

Combinations in the discourse marker slot

Discourse markers and cognitive frames

Conclusion

References

Index

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