Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish: 129 (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series) - Hardcover

Taboada, Maite

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027253722 ISBN 13: 9789027253729

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 2004

Synopsis

This book examines the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, which speakers create and maintain interactively as they build on each other’s contributions. The study is cross-linguistic, drawing on parallel corpora of task-oriented dialogues between dyads of native speakers of English and Spanish. The framework of the investigation is the analysis of speech genres and their staging; the analysis shows that each stage in the dialogues exhibits different thematic, rhetorical, and cohesive relations. The main contributions of the book are: a corpus-based characterization of a spoken genre (task-oriented dialogue); the compilation of a body of analysis tools for generic analysis; application of English-based analyses to Spanish and comparison between the two languages; and a study of the characteristics of each generic stage in task-oriented dialogue.

About this title

Synopsis

The goal of this book is to examine some of the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, constructed interactively as speakers build on each other's contributions. The book furthers the study of coherence at all levels, from surface structure to internal organization. Typical dialogues are considered to be coherent by those participating, and often by those observing as well. However, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes a dialogue or a conversation coherent, and how that coherence is achieved dynamically. Similarly, cohesion, as an internal property of togetherness in a text, is usually considered to be present in conversation. Coherence and cohesion together give us texts and conversations that we recognize as such. In this book, I present a study of coherence and cohesion. The study is cross linguistic, based on a corpus of task-oriented conversations between dyads of two speakers each. The corpus contains conversations between two native speakers of English on the one hand, and two native speakers of Spanish on the other.

The interlocutors have conflicting agendas that cover a two to four week period; their task is to agree on an appointment within that time. The conversations are viewed as collaborative efforts, yielding texts built interactively by the speakers. My analysis is concerned with the discourse characteristics that make the dialogues hold together as texts.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027253722
• ISBN 13: 9789027253729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 282