The co-construction of coherence at episode boundaries in cooperative dialogues (original) (raw)

Coherence at episode boundaries in cooperative dialogues

2021

The findings informed in this paper are part of an ongoing project about coherence and cohesion in casual conversation, under development at University of La Plata. In this study we analyze the ‘communicative labour’ done by speakers to contribute to the global coherence of the text. We focus on the strategies used by actors to co-construct coherence at episode boundaries (Linell, 1998; Korolija, 1998). The corpus comprises 52 audio or video-recorded dyadic and polyadic conversations among university students aged between 18 and 28, from different universities in Argentina. We agree with Linell (1998) and Korolija (1998) that participants in this kind of interaction –and analysts– assume that both parties cooperate in the process of building coherence. We adopt the concept of episode (Linell, 1998; Korolija, 1998), since it is appropriate for the fragmentation and analysis of the colloquial conversations under study, which consist of both ‘chunks’ and ‘chat’ segments (Eggins & Slade...

La co-construcción de la coherencia en las fronteras del episodio en diálogos cooperativos

Lenguas Modernas, 2012

The findings informed in this paper are part of an ongoing project on coherence and cohesion in casual conversation, in progress at University of La Plata. In this study we analyze the ‘communicative labour’ done by speakers at transition points between episodes to contribute to the global coherence of the text. We focus on the strategies used by actors to co-construct coherence at episode boundaries (Linell, 1998; Korolija, 1998). The corpus comprises 60 audio or video-recorded dyadic and polyadic conversations among university students aged between 18 and 28, from different universities in Argentina. We agree with Linell (1998) and Korolija (1998) that participants in this kind of interaction –and analysts– assume that both parties cooperate in the process of building coherence. We adopt the concept of episode (Linell, 1998; Korolija, 1998), since it is appropriate for the fragmentation and analysis of the colloquial conversations under study, which consist of both ‘chunks’ and ‘c...

Collaborating towards Coherence

Pragmatics & beyond, 2006

Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen's book targets the relationship between some contextual conditions and lexical cohesion. It aims at developing a comprehensive model for analyzing lexical cohesion in texts with variable nature, and to find out if and how the use of cohesive ties varies depending on the conditions under which the texts have been produced. The study fills two gaps in cohesion research. First, studies comparing cohesion across several types of discourse have been scarce. In contrast, the material used in this study consists of four different groups of texts: face-to-face conversation, prepared speech (radio talk and lectures), electronic (e-mail mailing list) language, and academic writing. Second, many earlier studies have covered only a part of lexical cohesion, or have alternatively become extremely complicated by trying to describe all the possible cohesive relations in a detailed way. The current study optimizes the model of cohesion by accounting for all the different relationships but grouping them into larger categories. The two basic categories are called reiteration and collocation, defined already in Halliday and Hasan (1976). Reiteration involves repetition of a lexical item, either in identical or modified form, and collocation is an associative meaning relationship between regularly co-occurring lexical items. The latter is more intuitive and dependent on intersubjective understandings, but as the author aims at comprehensiveness, she also ventures into this less explored area. The more specific research questions posed in the book concern the overall classification of lexical relations for the study of cohesion, the differences in the use of different kinds of cohesion, the import of communicative conditions under which the texts were produced, and the role of cohesion in the communication process. The book has a clear and pedagogical structure. It starts out by defining the aims of the study and distinguishing between the most relevant terms, cohesion vs. coherence. Cohesion refers to the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface of a text which can form connections between parts of the text. Coherence, on the other hand, is an outcome of a dialogue between the text and its listener or reader. Some texts are coherent for a particular listener/reader and not for others. Cohesion is one of the ways of signaling coherence. The relationship between the two concepts is explored in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 starts with a thorough discussion of prior models of lexical cohesion, focusing on their underlying similarities. After that the author proposes her own model. The suggested classification of cohesive ties is illustrated with several examples, with special attention paid to the less studied collocation relations. Chapter 4 discusses continua of features characterizing spoken and written discourse and introduces the material of the study. Chapters 5-8 present the analysis separately within each of the four text types, and Chapter 9 summarizes the findings. In regard to the overarching structure, the research questions are explicitly stated at the beginning of the book and adequately addressed one-by-one in the end. The only structural problem is the division of labor between the introduction (particularly section 1.7), Chapter 2 and section 3.2.1, in which several points are repeated, thus halting the otherwise enjoyable flow. Tanskanen's study is grounded in the belief that the choice of lexis is among the primary means available to speakers and writers for creating continuity in their messages. Focusing on lexical cohesion is challenging in many ways. The author explains her reasons for using lexical unit rather than word as the basic unit of her analysis. She also states that the analysis of lexicon is still relatively unrefined, lagging behind grammatical description. Most crucially for the current study, lexical relations are very flexible. In situated use they can be endlessly new, always contingent on contextual matters. The discourse-specific nature of lexical meaning is underlined in the classification of cohesive ties. The classification does not rely on the abstract semantic categories (synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, antonymy) but uses www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Establishing coherence in dialogue: sequentiality, intentions and negotiation

Proceedings of the 14th …, 2010

Dialogue, the primary site of language use, is fundamentally part, and constitutive of everyday social settings. Interaction situated in these set-tings is underpinned by constraints on expected and permissible contributions which provide the foundation of interlocutors' meaningful ...

Lexical cohesion in multiparty conversations

Language Sciences, 2011

Ever since the publication of Halliday and Hasan's (1976) seminal work on cohesion, many scholars have sought to explain different aspects of this textual relation in discourse. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to add to the study of the interaction between lexical cohesion and coherence (Hellman, 1995; Hoey, 1991b; Sanders and Pander Maat, 2006); and second, to contribute to the exploration of lexical cohesion as a measure in generic and register analysis (Louwerse et al., 2004; Taboada, 2004; Tanskanen, 2006; Thompson, 1994). I present an integrated model of lexical cohesion which challenges existing proposals affording particular attention to what I call 'associative cohesion'. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the adequacy of this model is tested against a 15,683 wordcorpus of broadcast discussions extracted from the International Corpus of English. The analysis of 11,199 lexical ties reports repetition (59%) as the most frequent lexical cohesion device, followed by associative cohesion (24%) and inclusive relations (8.2%), which are mostly produced in remote-mediated ties (81.8%) over speakers' turns (90.7%). These are shown to be sensitive to genre-specific factors and to collaborate in topic management processes, thereby demonstrating the descriptive potential and applicability of the framework.

On dialogue cohesion

1992

It has been claimed that conversations is the basic form of social organization (cf.Schegloff (1986) and it seems correct to say that conversation, or with a more general term dialogue (from the Greek dia logos through words), exhibits characteristics which are basic to social ...

Discourse markers and coherence relations: Comparison across markers, languages and modalities

Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2012

We examine how one particular coherence relation, Concession, is marked across languages and modalities, through an extensive analysis of the Concession relation, examining the types of discourse markers used to signal it. The analysis is contrastive from three different angles: markers, languages and modalities. We compare different markers within the same language (but, although, however, etc.), and two languages (English and Spanish). We aim to provide a contrastive methodology that can be applied to any language, given that it has as a starting point the abstract notion of coherence relations, which we believe are similar across languages. Finally, we compare two modalities: spoken and written language. In the analysis, we find that the contexts in which concessive relations are used are similar across languages, but that there are clear differences in the two modalities or genres. In the spoken genre, the most common function of concession is to correct misunderstandings and contrast situations. In the written genre, on the other hand, concession is most often used to qualify opinions.

COHERENCE RELATIONS IN ACADEMIC SPOKEN DISCOURSE

In this paper, we claim that some intrinsic spoken discourse phenomena like paraphrasing, correction, repetition and parenthetical insertion hold coherence relations with other portions of discourse and, thus, may be considered strategies for the construction of coherence in spoken language. According to Rhetorical Structure Theory (henceforth RST), implicit propositions emerge from the combination of pieces of text which hang together. Various authors have labeled implicit propositions as coherence relations, discourse relations, rhetorical relations or relational propositions. When two portions of a text hold a relation, the addressee of the text may recognize the connection even without the presence of a formal sign as a conjunction or a discourse marker. Thus, this paper also aims at investigating how these relations are established linguistically.