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CHAPTER 8
Spoken Discourse
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
The material in this chapter typically engages most students from the
beginning. The chapter gives them tools to analyze the day-to-day
interactions in which they participate, and they begin noticing new aspects
of spoken discourse, from indirect speech acts to back-channeling on the
phone to their own acts of style-shifting. As a result, students often want
to share these observations, as well as personal anecdotes about con-
versations. Instructors should be prepared for students’ desire to contribute
personal experiences during this unit and find ways to exploit this type of
participation, including explicitly sending students out to collect
observations for class discussion. We have included some ideas below.
Some of the material in Chapter 9 (Stylistics) also applies to spoken
discourse. Some instructors, for example, ask students to analyze the
cohesive devices or the structure of narratives in a transcribed
conversation (see Exercise 8.7).
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:
• Define discourse, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis.
• Explain how we accomplish actions with words.
• Distinguish between the locutionary act, illocutionary act, and
perlocutionary act for a given speech act.
• Explain how conversational maxims allow the successful exchange of
information and provide examples of how speakers conventionally
break the maxims.
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• Provide examples of how conversational implicature works.
• Distinguish between entailment and implicature and identify both
within a given text.
• Distinguish between positive and negative politeness and explain how
both can be used to mitigate a face-threatening act.
• Describe how conversations are typically structured to allow the
exchange of information.
• Identify the function of different discourse markers within a
conversation.
• Distinguish overlap and interruption within a conversation.
• Analyze a new segment of spoken discourse for its organization, use of
particular speech acts, and evidence of cooperation.
• Address the assertion that there is no ready answer to the question of
whether men and women speak differently.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
back-channeling
code-switching
commissive
communicative competence
constative speech act
conversational floor
conversational implicature
conversational maxims
cooperative principle
critical discourse analysis
declaration
direct speech act
directive
discourse
discourse analysis
discourse marker
entailment
expressive
face-threatening act
illocutionary act
implicature
indexical meaning
indirect speech act
interruption
locutionary act
minimal response
negative fact
negative politeness
overlap
performative speech act
speech act theory
perlocutionary act
positive fact
positive politeness
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relevance
representative
style-shifting
turn
utterance
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Most students find this material naturally engaging, as it allows them
to think more closely about the spoken interactions they hear and
participate in every day.
• Most students need the instructor to review the different kinds of
illocutionary speech acts and work through examples of speech acts
that differentiate locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.
• Some students may struggle with the difference between entailment
and implicature; their description of entailment may still include
implied meanings.
• In transcribing conversations (if you choose to do Exercise 8.7), some
students may encounter the following problems: using punctuation
according to standard conventions rather than marking intonation;
missing discourse markers and false starts; not marking pauses; not
lining up the brackets that signal simultaneous talk.
• Students often want to share anecdotal experiences relevant to the
material in the chapter and discuss cultural differences in
conversational styles and expectations.
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Speech Acts
Students learn to differentiate direct and indirect speech acts as well as
locutionary and illocutionary acts most effectively through trying to apply
the concepts to actual examples. We recommend either reviewing Exercise
8.1, #1-3 in class or making these exercises an in-class activity.
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Indirect Speech Acts
Exercise 8.1, #5 can work well as an in-class activity. Pair up students and
ask them to write, analyze, and then rewrite the dialogue. Then ask pairs to
volunteer to perform both dialogues for the class.
Felicity Conditions
At the end of the section on felicity conditions, How English Works uses
the example of President Clinton’s apology about the Monica Lewinsky
scandal to discuss speaker intention and audience reception (p. 243).
Another good, and more recent, example of a public apology that was not
initially accepted as an apology is Kanye West’s series of apology-like
speech acts after the incident with Taylor Swift at the Video Music
Awards: first with two different postings on his blog, and then in an
appearance on The Jay Leno Show. Finally Swift reports to ABC’s Andrea
Dresdale that West called her and apologized sincerely, and that she has
accepted his apology.
Structure of Conversation
It can be fun and instructive to contrast artificial conversation with
naturally occurring conversation. Create or locate a taped or videotaped
conversation in which participants are at least relatively unaware of being
recorded. Make this available to students and ask them to transcribe a
segment, or listen or view it together in class while you provide a
transcription. Together, produce a list of the turn-taking devices and
describe the amount and types of simultaneous talk. Then, watch a
conversation from a sit-com, soap opera, or movie. Contrast the turn-
taking in this artificial conversation to that in the naturally occurring
conversation.
For another activity that explores conversational dynamics (this works
better with a small class), divide the class into groups of three or four.
Provide a set of conversational “ingredients” that each group is required to
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incorporate into a conversation they write outside of class and then
perform in class. The “ingredients” can include structural elements of
conversation, like negative politeness, a face-threatening act, or a speech
act for which perlocution goes awry. They can also include types of words
(a text-message alphabetism, a curse word, a nickname). The same
ingredients can apply to all groups, or each group can be given a unique
recipe for its conversation. Take a few minutes to discuss each
conversation in class, inviting students to explain how conversational
structure, implicature, adjacency, politeness issues, Grice’s maxims, etc.,
operated in that conversation. Also, the group that performed it may want
to explain how they intended the conversation to work.
Cultural Differences in Politeness
Ask students to take 5 to 10 minutes to write about a time when they
encountered a cultural difference in politeness conventions. In small
groups or as a full class, share these experiences and highlight the idea that
one cannot assume politeness conventions across cultural boundaries.
Exercise 8.3, number 3 can provide interesting material to discuss about
this issue.
Classroom Conversation
For a meta-experience, hold a full-class discussion of how full-class
discussions typically work. You can ask students to prepare ahead of time
by observing full-class discussions in other courses. How does turn-taking
occur? How does the instructor facilitate? What work does silence do?
What about eye-contact and hand gestures?
Discourse Markers
Scott F. Kiesling’s article “Dude” (American Speech 79.3 (2004): 281–
305) received significant press attention: many people are interested in
dude as a discourse marker, and your students probably will be too. We
are able to discuss his study’s results only briefly in the textbook; there
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remains much to be said and analyzed. Using examples from Kiesling’s
article or ones you or they have collected, ask students to analyze how
dude functions as a discourse marker. Are there functions they would add
to Kiesling’s list? Would they describe any of the functions differently?
The use of discourse markers in Instant Messaging and texting remains
fairly unexplored territory. You could ask students to collect samples of
naturally occurring IM and text conversations and then analyze which
discourse markers appear and how they seem to be used.
Entailment and Implicature
Ask students to bring in an advertisement that they think is particularly
interesting in terms of the difference between what it entails and what it
implies. In small groups, have them share their ads and pick one that they
think is particularly striking; then ask a representative from each group to
share that ad and the group’s analysis of its message with the class.
The Different Uses of Like
Students are typically very interested in the word like, but they may
struggle differentiating its many uses. We recommend asking students to
analyze specific examples and reviewing their analyses together. Given
the many discourse functions of like, it is more effective to use taped or
videotaped examples rather than just transcribed ones. Select clips from a
movie such as Clueless or Mean Girls, from a sitcom with teenage
speakers, or from material that you have recorded. Ask students to
transcribe specific utterances that use like, and then analyze the function of
like given what they know about its conversational context.
Indexical Meaning
Ask students to provide one additional example of a fashion item, hairstyle,
or other element of appearance that indexes a particular identity at the
school. Then, ask for one additional example of a linguistic feature that
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indexes a particular identity, either at school or, for example, in their
hometown.
The Politics of Conversation
Students often disagree with Robin Lakoff’s assertion that all language use
is political. Use Exercise 8.2, #4 as a jumping-off point for a full-class
conversation on this issue.
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
Homework Progression
We encourage instructors to pick and choose from the wide-ranging
exercises in this chapter; there are probably more exercises here than can
be assigned, given the limits of the term. Almost all the exercises are
readily accessible to students once they have read the material in the
chapter. As mentioned above, students often struggle with the different
types of speech acts, and Exercise 8.1, #1-3 can work well as an in-class
review of the material.
In-Class Activities Based on Homework
Many of the exercises in this chapter provide excellent fodder for
classroom discussion. Exercise 8.2, #1 asks students to create con-
versations that violate maxims and then share them with a classmate to see
if he or she agrees. Exercise 8.3, #4 asks students to run a small test about
compliments, compare results with classmates, and see if they can
discover any patterns. Exercise 8.3, #5 and #6 can prepare students to have
an informed conversation about the charged issue of when compliments
may not be compliments. Exercise 8.6 asks students to think about their
own style-shifting. You can tell students ahead of time that they will be
sharing these responses with their classmates, and then ask them in class
to exchange papers so that they can learn more about how their peers
style-shift.
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CHAPTER 9
Stylistics
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
Many students using How English Works will have one thing in common:
they all study literature. Some read it, some write it, some write about it
critically, and some do all three. This chapter shows students how
linguistic knowledge of English can enhance their literary experience and
proficiency. Chapter 9 brings English phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, and discourse structure to bear on literary texts. In some
courses on English language, it may be the ultimate chapter. From one
perspective, Chapter 9 focuses the preceding chapters and makes them
relevant to the daily concerns of most English majors.
In other versions of the course, though, instructors may be expected to
emphasize syntax in preparation for teaching grammar, phonology, and
language acquisition for teachers of younger students in bilingual settings.
In such cases, Chapter 9 may be less relevant to the course and may play a
smaller part on the syllabus, if it is included.
Thus, it is important to assess the role of stylistics, not only in the
particular course, but also in the departmental curriculum, in order to use
Chapter 9 effectively or decide to use it at all.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of the chapter, students should be able to:
• Distinguish text types from one another in terms of their respective
styles and speculate perceptively about the social work that different
genres perform.
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• Analyze a prose text in terms of cohesion.
• Analyze a narrative text in terms of its components (e.g., abstract,
orientation).
• Analyze the narration of a literary text in terms of perspective.
• Explain how a piece of literature functions as a speech act, as well as
analyze the speech acts and conversational strategies in narrative and
literary dialogue.
• Analyze a poem in terms of its phonological, morphological, syntactic,
and semantic structures.
In a course for advanced students, or one with high expectations, the
instructor might ask students to analyze a narrative poem (or poetic prose)
in terms of all of the stylistic issues mentioned above. Hip hop lyrics are
harder to analyze than students think, but their enthusiasm may carry them
through such an assignment.
NEW VOCABULARY TERMS
abstract
accentual-syllabic meter
alliteration
anaphora
anaphoric reference
assonance
caesura
cataphoric reference
coda
cohesion
complicating action
conjunction
consonance
description
direct speech
elaboration
ellipsis
endophoric reference
enhancement
enjambment
evaluation
exophoric reference
exposition
extension
eye rhyme
genre
indirect speech
lexical cohesion
meter
mimetic
narrative
onomatopoeia
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orientation
perspective
persuasion
prosody
pure accentual meter
pure syllabic meter
reference
register
resolution
rhyme
rhythm
scansion
stylistics
substitution
WHERE STUDENTS ARE
• Generally students have encountered at least some of the material in
this chapter in other courses, where close reading of literary texts has
been a mode of inquiry both in and out of class. Many will welcome
the opportunity to apply linguistics to literature, and many will also
grasp something that they have never grasped before: literary style is
systematic, insofar as it draws on the resources of language. If an
instructor takes time with Chapter 9, treats it seriously, and
demonstrates its relevance, student interest for the whole course will
quicken; if it is treated as an afterthought, the instructor loses a
wonderful opportunity to help students make sense of the whole
English curriculum.
• Students with a good background in poetry will adapt to linguistic
reading more quickly than those without this background.
• Instructors teaching Modern English in a department that offers
courses in narratology will encounter some students for whom the
chapter’s treatment of narrative structures is simplistic. Similarly, if
the department’s courses on poetry emphasize prosody, poetic form,
and poetic technique, some students may find the treatment of poetry
simplistic. In such cases, the instructor can direct the material and
students’ previous experience toward analysis of a complex text—
narrative poetry (for instance, Paradise Lost) or poetic prose (for
instance, Ulysses).
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IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
Depending on the class (its size, the level and experience of students, etc.),
an instructor may choose to review material. But the best way to work
through the rest of the chapter and to reinforce the preceding chapters by
means of this one is to practice on texts.
Text Type, Genre, and Register
Especially in a smaller class, the instructor can distribute examples of
many different text types to students and then ask each student to
articulate the salient conventions of his or her text, first in notes made
outside of class, then presented to the rest of the class. Students should
also speculate about the kinds of social interactions that the texts enable
and the way they position the writer and reader. The fun comes in
comparison and contrast of the types, and in an ensuing general discussion
of how convention and choice manifest themselves in texts and to what
effects. Such a discussion is appropriate to a larger class if the instructor
can count on students to work well in groups.
CLOSE READING
Students will learn to see more linguistics in texts and learn to close read
linguistically by participating in class-wide analysis. In class, no one is
responsible for seeing every linguistic element of a text under
consideration, and students can learn from one another and from the
instructor. The number of texts considered, the variety of types, the time
spent on each text in class, the advice given to students as they prepare
texts before class—all of these depend on the role that Chapter 9 plays in
the particular course, how the course figures in the English curriculum,
and how that curriculum figures in the professional training of students
enrolled in the course.
In smaller classes, or large lectures with graduate student support, students
can write critical essays that focus on linguistic issues. Good
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undergraduate essays on literature have often relied, somewhat
unconsciously, on linguistics; writing an essay while studying Chapter 9
allows students to exercise linguistic approaches while usefully reviewing
material from previous chapters. The chapter provides examples of such
approaches, including cohesion (Sedaris, King), speech acts (Spark,
Powell), politeness and conversational structure (Dickens), and poetics
(cummings). In some instances, when students are preparing to be primary
school teachers, they can apply linguistics to children’s literature, from
works of Dr. Seuss (the master of minimal pairs) to A. A. Milne’s Winnie-
the-Pooh (in which characters’ lexical innovations sometimes mirror
aspects of first-language acquisition, thus bridging Chapters 9 and 10).
Narrative
In a smaller class, before students read about narrative in the textbook, you
can introduce the components of narrative (abstract, orientation,
complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda) in an engaging,
interactive way by asking that students bring a story to the next class—not
more than two pages of text if they choose to write it out or not more than
four minutes of storytelling. As the students share their stories, discuss the
apparent similarities in structure regardless of content. By the time
students read the section “Telling Stories,” they will already be familiar
with the relevant vocabulary and will readily accept the idea that we have
structural expectations of stories and that successful stories usually meet
them, at least to a degree.
Poetry and Hip Hop
We strongly encourage you to bring to class the full text of the poems
mentioned in the “Linguistics into Poetics” section, or other poems of your
choosing, and to analyze their structure together as a class. You can also
provide selected hip hop lyrics and ask students to bring lyrics to class.
Together, examine the patterns of rhyme, phrasing, etc.
INTEGRATING THE HOMEWORK
As indicated above, the exercises integrate easily with other aspects of
class: they can be assigned to prepare students for discussion; they can
guide independent work following class, modeled on class discussions; or
they can prompt discussion, as long as the instructor provides appropriate
texts (obviously, some texts can be distributed in class for immediate
treatment, whereas others require earlier distribution and pre-class
preparation).
Choice of exercise may vary given curricular expectations of the course or
student interest. For instance, options within Exercises 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3,
are more closely aligned with discourse analysis than with literary
interpretation. If the course is meant to be specifically linguistic, or if
students from the social sciences frequently elect the course, or if some
students prefer to work on discourse and the instructor is flexible about the
assignments, then the discourse options are particularly appropriate. If the
course is meant to prepare teachers to teach literature, as well as language
and composition, if students are mostly English majors, or if Chapter 9 is
intended to reinforce the previous chapters, then the literary options in
these exercises, as well as Exercises 9.4, 9.5, and 9.6 would be especially
useful. Exercise 9.2 includes options that may be attractive to students
preparing to teach younger children and useful in courses where such
preparation is expected to occur.
EXTRA RESOURCES
There are some useful references for stylistic approaches to literature in
different cultures, periods, and genres. We recommend Richard W. Bailey
and Dolores M. Burton, English Stylistics (MIT Press, 1968); Richard W.
Bailey and Lubomír Doležel, Statistics and Style (American Elsevier,
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There is a selection of journals that may also be helpful: the quarterly
journal Style, published by Northern Illinois University; Language and
Literature, published quarterly by Sage; and the Journal of Literary
Semantics, published by Mouton de Gruyter twice a year. Elizabeth Closs
Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt’s excellent Linguistics for Students of
Literature (Harcourt, 1980) should be at hand for easy reference. Those
who want support in teaching literature and speech acts should consult
Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse
(Indiana University Press, 1977) and J. Hillis Miller’s Speech Acts in
Literature (Stanford University Press, 2001), both of which effectively
synthesize literary and linguistic interests, though from very different
theoretical orientations. Those who want support in teaching narrative
theory should turn to David Herman’s Story Logic (University of
Nebraska Press, 2002). Herman’s Universal Grammar and Narrative
Form (Duke University Press, 1995) will help interested instructors stretch
stylistics to intersect with syntax as presented in Chapter 6. Those who
want support in applying linguistics to poetry can turn to H. G.
Widdowson’s Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry (Oxford, 1982);
specialists will also find it a rewarding book. Those interested in pursuing
further the role of rhythm in poetry will be interested in Derek Attridge’s
Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995) and Richard Cureton’s
somewhat controversial but highly regarded Rhythmic Phrasing in English
Verse (Longman, 1992).