Discourse analysis

Activity 4 Work with your partner, can you put the moves of this discourse into an order that produces a coherent conversation? The conversation takes place at a travel agent's. What clues do you use to establish the correct order? Are there any moves that are easier to place than others; and if so, why?
'You haven't no, no.'
'No ... in Littlewoods is it?'
'I'm awfully sorry, we haven't. . . um I don't know where you can
try for Bath actually.'
'Can I help you?'
'Okay thanks.'
'Yeah they're inside there now.'
'Um have you by any chance got anything on Bath?'
'Um I don't really know . . . you could try perhaps Pickfords in
Littlewoods, they might be able to help you.'
(Birmingham Collection of English Text)

• 
  Think of a typical encounter with a stranger in the street (e.g. asking the way, asking for change). What is the minimum number of moves necessary to complete a polite exchange in a language that you know other than English?
  
• 
  Referring to the previous lesson say to what types of speech act the exchange we discussed here refer to.
  

Summary:
Spoken language is a vast subject, there are hundreds of different types of speech in people's everyday lives. If we list at random a number of different types of speech and consider how much of each day or week we spend engaged in each one, we can only roughly guess at some sort of frequency ranking, other than to say that casual conversation is almost certainly the most frequent for most people. The rest will depend on our daily occupation and what sorts of contacts we have with others. Some different types of speech might be
Telephone calls (business or private)
Service encounters (shops, ticket offices, etc.)
Interviews (jobs, journalistic, in official settings)
Classroom (classes, seminars, lectures, tutorials)