Discourse analysis

Rituals (church prayers, sermons, weddings)
Monologues (speeches, stories, jokes)
Language in action (talk accompanying doing: fixing, cooking, assembling, demonstrating, etc.)
Casual conversation strangers, friends, intimates
Organizing and directing people (work, home, in the street)
Home task: Read the following extracts and say if the particular speech act has beginning, middle and end, if it has identified them all? What type of speech acts it refers to? Can you guess the context where the exchanges happen and who are the participants? What clues did it help you to predict correctly?
A: Well, try this spray, what I got, this is the biggest they come.
B: Oh . . .
A: . . . little make-up capsule.
B: Oh, right, it's like these inhalers, isn't it?
A: And I, I've found that not so bad since I've been using it, and it doesn't make you so grumpy.
B: This is up your nose?
A: Mm.
B: Oh, wow! It looks a bit sort of violent, doesn't it? It works well, does it?
(Birmingham Collection of English Text)

Lesson plan 24 Spoken discourse (2)

Activity 1. Think and try to respond to the following invitation in three different ways

1. 
   Would you like to come over for a drink tomorrow?
   

1. 
   Accept,
   
2. 
   Accept with condition
   
3. 
   Reject
   

It is not normal to answer directly NO in English. Instead we can use more polite way of saying it.
e.g. Thanks very much, but I'm afraid I'm booked up tomorrow night,
what about . . . (etc.)


The polite refusal of the invitation can be divided into
appreciation ('thanks very much'),
softener (I'm afraid'),
reason ('I'm booked up') and
face-saver ('what about ...').
This pattern would typically be found between adult friends, colleagues, etc. in informal but polite situations. In more intimate situations the 'softener' may be omitted. It is very effective to practice adversary pair in learning the language

• 
  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. Most of them is ritualized hello- hello, Happy New Year –Happy New Year
  

Utterance(nutq) function

• 
  Greeting…………………..
  
• 
  Congratulation…………....
  
• 
  Apology…………………..
  
• 
  Inform……………………
  
• 
  leave- taking
  

Expected response

• 
  greeting
  
• 
  thanks
  
• 
  acceptance
  
• 
  acknowledge
  
• 
  leave- taking
  

This pairs of utterance are called ADJECENCY PAIRS

• 
  Pairs of utterances such as greeting-greeting and apology-acceptance are called adjacency pairs (see Schegloff and Sacks 1973).
  
• 
  Adjacency pairs have different types. There are the first pair-part and the second pair-part. The first pair part is initiating utterance hello- hello, Happy New Year - Happy New Year. The second pair-part is contextualized with the response. Congratulation- thanks, but some first pair-parts may have an identical second pair-part (thus 'hello' in English could be a greeting, a request to a telephone caller to identify themselves, or an expression of surprise: 'Hello! What's this here?'