Last update:
9 February 2010
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Building Coherence and CohesionTask-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish
2004. xvii, 264 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 5372 9 / EUR 115.00 978 1 58811 563 8 / USD 173.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
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.
Table of contents
“It is an important addition to the study of genre, being one of only a handful of comprehensive empirical studies that examine the formal aspects of an oral genre. [...] the value of Taboada's study can be found in its extensive review of the literature on genre, coherence, and cohesion, its methods of text analysis for determining thematic progression and cohesion, and its results cocnerning cohesive chains and generic sequences. Her study will no doubt influence the direction of genre research in the future because of its methodology and findings.”
Michael Busch, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, on Linguist List Vol. 16.1688 (2005)
“Building Coherence and Cohesion is a rich source of information on key discourse-organization features. The book is a welcome addition to research in both systemic functional linguistics and contrastive discourse analysis. It offers valuable insights into theme identification and progression, rhetorical structure theory, Halliday and Hasan's work on cohesion, and functional discourse segmentation. The reader will find no shortage of frequency counts, examples, and extensive reviews of the literature for each main discourse feature. In conclusion, it should be of interest to readers seeking an in-depth investigation of the issues, both quantitatively and qualitatively.”
“Taboada's book undoubtfully is a highly interesting contribution to the field of discourse analysis. Its strenght, amongst other things, follows from the innovative combination in studying genre in its oral form and, in doing so by means of a contrastive analysis between Spanish and English. I am sure that specialists in the field of genre theory will agree that her study adds quite some thought-provoking insights to the existing body of research. Indeed, the book offers a panoply of important findings which open new horizons for future research.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics