Building Coherence and Cohesion

Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish

Maite Taboada | Simon Fraser University

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027253729 (Eur) | EUR 115.00

ISBN 9781588115638 (USA) | USD 173.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027295057 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00

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.

[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 129] 2004. xvii, 264 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.129

Table of Contents

List of figures | p. ix

List of tables | p. xi

Abbreviations and Conventions | p. xiii

Preface | p. xv

1. Introduction | pp. 1–5

2. A framework for the analysis of speech genres | pp. 7–36

3. Data description | pp. 37–52

4. The thematic structure of dialogue | pp. 53–104

5. Rhetorical relations in dialogue | pp. 105–154

6. Cohesion in dialogue | pp. 155–180

7. The generic structure of scheduling dialogues | pp. 181–206

8. Conclusions and consequences | pp. 207–210

Appendix A: Speech act inventory | pp. 211–222

Index | pp. 245–261

“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 concerning 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.”

Tony Berber Sardinha, Pontifical Catholic University of S ão Paulo, Brazil, in MIT Press Journals, Vol. 32:2 (2006)

“Taboada's book undoubtfully is a highly interesting contribution to the field of discourse analysis. Its strength, 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.”

Eva González Melón, Universidad de León, Spain, in ITL, review of Applied Linguistics 151

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