Spoken discourse Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Relatore: Prof.ssa Rosanna Sornicola L'obiettivo principale del nostro lavoro è quello di fornire una descrizione critica delle strutture realizzate dai connettivi avversativi nell'italiano parlato contemporaneo.

For current and future language teachers, a working knowledge of the study of spoken discourse is essential. As with most academic fields, though, the range of approaches available can seem dizzying to those for whom discourse is not a... more

For current and future language teachers, a working knowledge of the study of spoken discourse is essential. As with most academic fields, though, the range of approaches available can seem dizzying to those for whom discourse is not a primary research area. In Spoken Discourse, Jones demystifies the study of how we use speech in society and expands the traditional definition of speech beyond the notion of two or more speakers talking faceto-face to include both material, technological mediations such as YouTube videos as well as the meaning-making, semiotic technologies we use to create, affirm, and challenge identities. In doing so, Jones provides a workable and coherent framework that enables new researchers in spoken discourse, as well as students and teachers in this field, to access and analyze speech and its material effects in the world. To do this, Jones develops what he calls "an analytical approach that focuses on the relationship between spoken discourse and the concrete actions [emphasis in original] we take with it" (p. 183). Jones approaches the study of spoken discourse from the triadic, social semiotic perspective he has developed elsewhere (e.g., Jones, 2012). Accordingly, in this volume, he simultaneously focuses on language above the clause (forming cohesive texts), language in action (performing concrete social goals), and language as a means of creating social worlds mediated by ideology.

This article contains the script, or the conference speech of my 45-minute talk that was presented on September 19th, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The event (titled ELT Day II) took place at Disal Botafogo and provided a setting for... more

This article contains the script, or the conference speech of my 45-minute talk that was presented on September 19th, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The event (titled ELT Day II) took place at Disal Botafogo and provided a setting for discussing recent developments in ELT. I hope this article equips you with better solutions for global challenges on fostering an atmosphere that is conducive to fluency and language development. Motivating students and caring about the learning environment is what keeps me going. Devising solutions usually brings challenges to any setting, and that is part of an inclusive environment, which embraces critical thinking and positive dissent.

Hedges are linguistic devices that largely diminish the force of an utterance and soften the impact of a statement. As such, they are useful pragmatic devices that speakers use to achieve their desired communicative goals. Motivated by... more

Hedges are linguistic devices that largely diminish the force of an utterance and soften the impact of a statement. As such, they are useful pragmatic devices that speakers use to achieve their desired communicative goals. Motivated by Lakoff's (2004) study which reveals that women are more inclined to use hedges than men, this exploratory study attempts to verify this notion by comparing the use of hedges in informal conversations between female and male ESL students in the light of Politeness Theory. The comparison is made between both genders by examining the pattern of frequency and the linguistic realizations of hedges used in the spoken discourse. To realize the objectives, a mixed method was employed in this study. Voice recordings of both single-sex and mixed-sex groups were transcribed and the hedges were analysed based on an adapted framework of categorization of hedges by Riekkinen (2009) and Svarova (2008). The findings revealed that in single-sex groups, the frequency of use of hedges used were similar for both genders. However, in a mixed-sex group, females hedged more than males. This study confirms the claim of Lakoff (2004) in which females are seen to be more sensitive to the use of hedges when compared with male speakers.

Speaker produces paratones in communication (giving information to other). The phenomenon encourages the writers to conduct this study on paratone in news discourse. This study emphasizes on how paratones in news discourse produced by... more

Speaker produces paratones in communication (giving information to other). The phenomenon encourages the writers to conduct this study on paratone in news discourse. This study emphasizes on how paratones in news discourse produced by students. This study employs descriptive qualitative research. The data of this study is spoken monologue. The data are obtained through recording the subjects while they are reading. The subjects use a microphone and laptop in recording process through adobe audition 1.5. In term, students read the texts and their speech production is analysed through pitch tracks and spectrograms using speech analyzer. Based on the findings, students produce some paratone patterns in both deductive and inductive paragraphs, mainly: a) major -major paratone pattern, b) major -minor paratone pattern, c) minor -major paratone pattern, and d) minor -minor paratone pattern. Next, the use of paratone patterns in both deductive and inductive paragraphs are: a) to tell information, b) to indicate a topic-shift, c) to emphasize on the sentence that is considered the important one. Then, there are two factors that influence students to produce certain paratone patterns, mainly: students' first language and, knowledge.

We report an annotation experiment aiming at assessing the use of a single functional taxonomy of sense relations for discourse markers in spoken and written data. We start by presenting an operational definition of the category of DMs... more

We report an annotation experiment aiming at assessing the use of a single functional taxonomy of sense relations for discourse markers in spoken and written data. We start by presenting an operational definition of the category of DMs and its application to identify tokens of DMs in corpora. We then present an original annotation experiment making use of a unified taxonomy to annotate written and spoken data in English and French. In this experiment, we test the reliability of the annotations made separately by two annotators and the applicability of the tag set across two languages in the
spoken and written modes. Our experiment leads us to conclude that: i) spoken data is not more difficult to annotate than written data in terms of inter-annotator agreement, ii) recurrent problems are found across the two languages and modes, iii) the reliability of the annotation scheme is improved
by the use of more explicit instructions and training.

This exploratory study investigates the impact of class size on the rhetorical move structures and lexico-grammatical features of academic lecture introductions. From the MICASE corpus (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), two... more

This exploratory study investigates the impact of class size on the rhetorical move structures and lexico-grammatical features of academic lecture introductions. From the MICASE corpus (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), two small corpora of lecture introductions of small- and large-class lectures were compiled. Using a genre-based analytical approach, the lecture introductions in the two corpora were compared to examine how the size of the audience influences the rhetorical and linguistic choices lecturers make in university settings. Findings of the comparative analysis suggest that class size does affect lecturers’ discursive decisions. A large audience seems to compel experienced lecturers to use more of certain discursive strategies as a way to create positive and friendly learning environments in settings that may not be particularly favorable for establishing such conditions. However, due to the nature of small classes in which the number of students is smaller and the proximity between lecturers and students is closer, reinforcing positive rapport seems to take less rhetorical and linguistic effort on the part of lecturers. The paper ends with a number of tentative pedagogical implications for lecturer training.

This paper examines how spoken discourse is represented and then dubbed into Italian in the four sound cinema adaptations of Little Women (Cukor , LeRoy , Armstrong , Gerwig ). One of the peculiarities of Little Women,... more

This paper examines how spoken discourse is represented and then dubbed into Italian in the four sound cinema adaptations of Little Women (Cukor , LeRoy , Armstrong , Gerwig ). One of the peculiarities of Little Women, both as a novel and film, is the central narrative role played by conversations and conversational styles. The storyline, in fact, mainly focuses on the daily life of the characters and their social chit-chat with their relatives and friends. Conversation and the selection of different features of spoken discourse are the chief ingredients employed to structure the plot and to build character identity. By taking a comparative perspective across original and dubbed versions spanning several decades during which conversational styles and audiences have radically changed, we aim to shed light on the features of spoken discourse that have been considered crucial in representing believable and effective interactions in original and dubbed films at different moments in time.

The stylistics of recontextualization in selected American, Italian and Polish gaming videos on YouTube One striking aspect of the popular video sharing platform YouTube is that it appears to allow for a great number of repetitive content... more

The stylistics of recontextualization in selected American, Italian and Polish gaming videos on YouTube One striking aspect of the popular video sharing platform YouTube is that it appears to allow for a great number of repetitive content to co-exist and still enjoy a high viewer count. The author of the present article, by looking at selected gaming videos on YouTube in three languages, namely American English, Italian and Polish, attempts to demonstrate that this repetitiveness is in fact creative recontextualization which brings into prominence the personality of the YouTuber, their idiolect included. While the videos share a number of similarities at the linguistic and extralinguistic level across the three cultures of interest, the creation of what the author calls personal storylines is the most salient distinguishing factor in the videos of particular vloggers. The present article will contribute to the developing area of research dedicated to spoken language on the Internet, and will constitute one of the few attempts, to date, to examine the phenomenon in three different languages and across three different cultures.

This article examines the distribution of the nucleus around selected formulaic expressions in the IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus (SEC). The study reveals the presence of a positional bias such that formulaic expressions found at the... more

This article examines the distribution of the nucleus around selected formulaic expressions in the IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus (SEC). The study reveals the presence of a positional bias such that formulaic expressions found at the end of intonation units are more likely to receive the nucleus than those found at the beginning. Amongst the formulaic expressions located at the end of intonation units, 70 percent have the nucleus assigned to the last lexical word of the expressions. For the remaining cases, the obligatory nuclei are found either on the lexical words immediately preceding the expressions or on the first words, the degree words or the flexible slots within the expressions. The study shows how prosodically annotated corpora may facilitate research on the prosody of formulaic expressions. At the same time, it also raises awareness of the issues confronting this new research avenue.

Praca jest próbą komentarza badania potocznej konceptualizacji ripost wykonanego przez Wojciecha Laskowskiego (Instutut Językoznawstwa UAM). Przedstawię analizę przypadku żartobliwego dialogu, opartego na droczeniu się, na podstawie... more

Praca jest próbą komentarza badania potocznej konceptualizacji ripost wykonanego przez Wojciecha Laskowskiego (Instutut Językoznawstwa UAM). Przedstawię analizę przypadku żartobliwego dialogu, opartego na droczeniu się, na podstawie której można poddać w wątpliwość cechę natychmiastowości (odnoszenia się do pierwszej wypowiedzi z pary przylegającej) ripost dialogowych. Podczas wyodrębniania ripost z dialogu posługiwałam się pozostałymi elementami potocznego pojęcia (jak trafność, zwięzłość, dosadność, czy odniesienie do sytuacji). Przeanalizowałam dialog w paradygmacie realtedness Trauma i Heemara, którego podstawą jest założenie, że większość wypowiedzi uczestnika dialogu jest reakcją na poprzednie wypowiedzi rozmówcy i odnosi się do konkretnych fragmentów dialogu.

В докладе рассматриваются форматы и конвенции дискурсивной транскрипции. Анализируются некоторые различия в макроструктуре транскриптов, обусловленные использованием определённых инструментов расшифровки и аннотирования (типы нотации,... more

В докладе рассматриваются форматы и конвенции дискурсивной транскрипции. Анализируются некоторые различия в макроструктуре транскриптов, обусловленные использованием определённых инструментов расшифровки и аннотирования (типы нотации, способы расположения аннотации). Рассматриваются параметры отличий между конвенциями дискурсивной транскрипции (resp. различия в микроструктуре транскриптов). Перечисляются и кратко характеризуются инструменты расшифровки и аннотирования. Затрагивается проблема обмена данными и совместимости (interoperability) разных форматов.

Discourse analysis is one of the linguistics which investigate language use naturally. The classroom interaction is one of the field of the study of the language use naturally. How is the English teachers and their students developed... more

Discourse analysis is one of the linguistics which investigate language use naturally. The classroom interaction is one of the field of the study of the language use naturally. How is the English teachers and their students developed discourse pattern in the classroom interaction? The purpose of this study is to describe the using of discourse pattern implemented in the classroom by English teachers and their students. The results of this study gives significant contribution to the English teaching leaning process, particularly for the teachers in order that they can cultivate and organize the classroom dynamically, further teachers and students are able to create challenging classroom interaction. To analyze the data, the researcher used the qualitative descriptive research. The researcher used the qualitative descriptive analysis which is developed by Mile &Huberman, (1994). Based on the data analysis, it is fund that discourse pattern which is created by Siclair-Coulthard analysis model (1975) cited in (Charthy, 1993) is used by English teachers and their students differently. It meant that the English teachers and their students implemented the discourse pattern in the classroom based on the setting of nine different senior high schools in the different environments. Discourse pattern used in the excellent senior high schools are different from the classical senior high schools in the southern part of central Java, Indonesia.

Disciplinary norms or conventions could affect how a text is structured and what lexicogrammatical choices are preferable. However, relatively, discourse studies on academic spoken texts are still much underrepresented in the literature,... more

Disciplinary norms or conventions could affect how a text is structured and what lexicogrammatical choices are preferable. However, relatively, discourse studies on academic spoken texts are still much underrepresented in the literature, in particular, examinations across various disciplines. Hence, the present study attempts to go some way towards filling this gap by analysing academic speech to investigate if variations exist between the soft and hard sciences with reference to Hyland's (2005) 'stance and engagement' interaction model in academic discourse. The results indicate that, unlike the distinct diversities in written discourse, the employment of hedges, boosters, self-mention and pronouns used to refer to speakers and audience are less diverse across disciplines in spoken discourse. However, with regard to word frequency and ranking, subtle differences in the use of these devices are still identified. It is believed that the various ways in which the different disciplines shape their arguments and construct their knowledge through discourse contribute to these subtle variations . Implications and suggestions for researching the markers to represent a speaker's stance and the audience's engagement in academic spoken discourse across disciplines as well as for teaching academic speech in ESP courses are also discussed.

In questo articolo si discutono alcune tecniche di elicitazione e se ne valuta l’adeguatezza per lo studio della variazione fonetica nei dialetti italiani. Le riflessioni teoriche sono ancorate all’analisi di uno specifico fenomeno... more

In questo articolo si discutono alcune tecniche di elicitazione e se ne valuta l’adeguatezza per lo studio della variazione fonetica nei dialetti italiani. Le riflessioni teoriche sono ancorate all’analisi di uno specifico fenomeno linguistico: l’alternanza sincronica tra dittonghi e monottonghi nel dialetto di Pozzuoli (in provincia di Napoli). In rapporto a questo fenomeno di variazione, vengono messi a confronto dati raccolti con l’intervista libera e risposte a un questionario di traduzione. L’analisi mette in luce l’opportunità del ricorso a materiale parlato spontaneo elicitato in situazioni il meno artificiose possibili. Nello stesso tempo, si argomenta in favore di un metodo di analisi che parta dai dati dell’uso per risalire induttivamente ai patterns di variazione, limitando così il ricorso ad assunzioni fonologiche a priori.

Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm we investigated children's and adults' online processing of reference in a naturalistic language context. Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook while wearing... more

Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm we investigated children's and adults' online processing of reference in a naturalistic language context. Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook while wearing eye-tracking glasses. The gaze data were analyzed relative to the onset of referring expressions (i.e., full noun phrases (NPs) and pronouns) that were mentioned throughout the story. We found that following the mention of a referring expression there was an increase in the proportion of looks to the intended referent for both children and adults. However, this effect was only found early on in the story. As the story progressed, the likelihood that participants directed their eye gaze towards the intended referent decreased. We also found differences in the eye gaze patterns between NPs and pronouns, as well as between children and adults. Overall these findings demonstrate that the mapping between linguistic input and corresponding eye movements is heavily influenced by discourse context.

The emergence of a new mode of communication called vlogging allows the spoken variety of language to manifest itself in new settings. Vloggers appear to draw both from traditional television aesthetics and from the videos of other... more

The emergence of a new mode of communication called vlogging allows the spoken variety of language to manifest itself in new settings. Vloggers appear to draw both from traditional television aesthetics and from the videos of other vloggers. The content which circulates on the website globally is often recontextualised (cf. Rymes, 2012). The plethora of different types of vlogs and the sheer number of videos created daily call for an attempt to find a common stylistic denominator within specific types of vlogs. The chapter discusses characteristic stylistic features of a selected type of such videos, namely, challenge videos in American English, Italian and Polish. The chosen videos form the basis for an analysis in search of similarities and differences in style. The findings suggest that the analysed challenge videos have many common features, and if differences ensue, they are not generally found within specific national or linguistic groups but in mixed sets of videos in the three languages of interest. The author seeks to find explanations for the similarities.

— The present research study examined the grammatical errors of Technology student teachers' utterance structure. This qualitative study was conducted to answer two questions: (1) what are the language backgrounds of the Technology... more

— The present research study examined the grammatical errors of Technology student teachers' utterance structure. This qualitative study was conducted to answer two questions: (1) what are the language backgrounds of the Technology student teachers; and (2) what are their common grammatical errors during the on-campus teaching. To address the first question, the participants were personally interviewed for their language background utilizing the developed and modified interview guide. On the other hand, to address the second question, the participants' Technology classes were observed and video recorded for transcriptions. Results demonstrate that the native language (Filipino) of the student teachers was the most commonly used. The findings also show that as regard to the grammatical errors, misinformation and omission account for most of the total errors identified, with addition and ordering of elements being less frequent among the student teachers' utterances. Further, it is also observed that technology student teachers repeatedly use the wrong forms of the words in place of the correct ones. These errors in their utterance structure are the results of the influence of their native language structures to produce a spoken discourse of the English language (L2).

Adopting a usage-based approach, this chapter compares '(I’m) just saying' and related phrases in English with their Polish correspondences. The phrase '(I’m) just saying', thought of by some as irritating and inflammatory, has recently... more

Adopting a usage-based approach, this chapter compares '(I’m) just saying' and related phrases in English with their Polish correspondences. The phrase '(I’m) just saying', thought of by some as irritating and inflammatory, has recently gained currency in informal English, particularly in online environments, where anonymity encourages blatant statements. It also serves as a conversational filler enabling speakers to express their perspectives, even if what they said might not be liked by others. Additionally, '(I’m) just saying' has given rise to numerous online memes and its frequent use has been recorded by several dictionaries. Polish counterparts of the focal phrase, on the other hand, including standalone '(tak) tylko mówię', seem to be less readily employed by speakers of Polish and they have not made their way into dictionaries yet.
To explore the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of '(I’m) just saying' and related phrases in English and Polish, in what follows, I examine aligned translated texts from the Paralela corpus. In doing so, I adopt the view that bilingual corpora can enrich the study of individual languages and, at the same time, raise our awareness of language features – and the discourse patterns in which they occur – which might go unnoticed if only monolingual data were analysed.

The present research study examined the grammatical errors of Technology student teachers' utterance structure. This qualitative study was conducted to answer two questions: (1) what are the language backgrounds of the Technology student... more

The present research study examined the grammatical errors of Technology student teachers' utterance structure. This qualitative study was conducted to answer two questions: (1) what are the language backgrounds of the Technology student teachers; and (2) what are their common grammatical errors during the on-campus teaching. To address the first question, the participants were personally interviewed for their language background utilizing the developed and modified interview guide. On the other hand, to address the second question, the participants' Technology classes were observed and video recorded for transcriptions. Results demonstrate that the native language (Filipino) of the student teachers was the most commonly used. The findings also show that as regard to the grammatical errors, misinformation and omission account for most of the total errors identified, with addition and ordering of elements being less frequent among the student teachers' utterances. Further, it is also observed that technology student teachers repeatedly use the wrong forms of the words in place of the correct ones. These errors in their utterance structure are the results of the influence of their native language structures to produce a spoken discourse of the English language (L2).

Рассматриваются русские разговорные конструкции, в которых в качестве формального средства связи между предикациями выступает сочетание беспредложной формы то и формы что, не интерпретируемой как союзное слово. На основании просодических... more

Рассматриваются русские разговорные конструкции, в которых в качестве формального средства связи между предикациями выступает сочетание беспредложной формы то и формы что, не интерпретируемой как союзное слово. На основании просодических и семантико-синтаксических факторов демонстрируется, что в непубличной устной речи данное сочетание регулярно функционирует как слитный союзный комплекс. В частности, то что может использоваться в тех контекстах, в которых употребление расчлененного сочетания местоимения то и союза что семантически неуместно или даже грамматически недопустимо. Выдвигается предположение о том, что в ряде случае сложный союз то что заменяет простое что.

Previously we developed an approach to spoken Russian monologic discourse, now extending that, looking primarily at interactional multi-party discourse, contextualizing speech phenomena as multichannel (multimodal) communication. The... more

Previously we developed an approach to spoken Russian monologic discourse, now extending that, looking primarily at interactional multi-party discourse, contextualizing speech phenomena as multichannel (multimodal) communication. The evidence analyzed is the Russian Pear Chats and Stories corpus, see http://multidiscourse.ru/. Scores transcripts are introduced to annotate the interlocutors’ shared time line, including periods of silence. Elementary discourse unit (EDU) is posited as a central building block of local discourse structure. Canonical EDUs coincide with clauses; additionally, subclausal, superclausal and paraclausal EDUs are found. Prosodic phenomena are considered; EDUs and groups of EDUs are accounted through a discourse-semantic category of phase. Disfluencies and other structural phenomena are systematically treated. Conventions of discourse capture both prosodic and functional aspects of discourse.

Two opposing accounts of early language evolution, the compositional and the holistic, have become the subject of lively debate. It has been argued that an evolving compositional protolanguage would not be useful for communication until... more

Two opposing accounts of early language evolution, the compositional and the holistic, have become the subject of lively debate. It has been argued that an evolving compositional protolanguage would not be useful for communication until it reaches a certain level of grammatical complexity. This paper offers a new, discourse-oriented perspective on the debate. It argues that discourse should be viewed, not as a level of language structure 'beyond the sentence', but as sequenced communicative behaviour, typically but not uniquely involving language. This provides for continuity from exchanges making use of simple communicative resources such as single words and gestures to those making use of complex grammatical conventions. Supporting evidence comes from child language and from original experiments with adults using constrained language systems. The paper shows that the utility of emerging compositional language is not dependent on some critical level of complexity.

Intonation, long thought to be a key to effectiveness in spoken language, is more and more commonly addressed in English language teaching through the use of speech visualization technology. While the use of visualization technology is a... more

Intonation, long thought to be a key to effectiveness in spoken language, is more and more commonly addressed in English language teaching through the use of speech visualization technology. While the use of visualization technology is a crucial advance in the teaching of intonation, such teaching can be further enhanced by connecting technology to an understanding of how intonation functions in discourse. This study examines the intonation of four readers reading out-of-context sentences and the same sentences as part of coherent discourse-level texts. Two discourse-level uses of intonation, the use of intonational paragraph markers (paratones) and the distribution of tonal patterns, are discussed and implications for teaching intonation are addressed.

According to the Appraisal framework (Martin & Rose, 2003), when we speak or write, we may express three main types of attitudes: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. The present chapter focuses on Appreciation (i.e. the evaluation of... more

According to the Appraisal framework (Martin & Rose, 2003), when we speak or write, we may express three main types of attitudes: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. The present chapter focuses on Appreciation (i.e. the evaluation of things or processes) to map the transcriptions of three focus groups (cf. Barbour & Kitzinger, 1999), carried out in Portuguese, in which young undergraduates discuss the same topic, namely, Literature. The main research hypothesis is that, although they are majoring in Literature, these future teachers do not make specific comments on literary works of art, that is, they do not express the theoretical knowledge they have or should have acquired. The results show that the participants give more importance to their own reactions to Literature in comparison to (a) the composition of literary works of art or (b) the value these works have in the culture where the students are inserted. In other words, the present study reveals that the undergraduates here investigated prefer to comment on the way Literature has impacted them and on the quality they believe Literature has.