Dialogue and Discourse

At first glance, conversational interaction appears to be more loosely

organised than the other linguistic levels we have studied in this book. For one
thing, it is peppered with dysfluencies, non-sequiturs, false starts and hesitations. For
another, there is simply no telling what exactly someone engaged in talk is going
today. Nevertheless, although discourse seems more 'fluid' than other linguistic
levels, this is not to say that it has no underlying structure. On the contrary, we
have very strong expectations about what should occur in interaction: questions
normally evince answers, requests anticipate reactions while remarks and comments
require at least some acknowledgement from other interactants. Moreover, all these
speech activities will be expected to be delivered with a degree of politeness that befits
the situation or task in hand, and for a speaker or hearer to deviate from these
conventions is to do so at her interactive peril. Conversation. though complex and
multifaceted, is still structured. Good evidence of what happens when this
structure collapses is provided by communicative breakh downs. Here, for example,
is a piece of real conversation between two sisters (A and B). Speaker A is planning to
make a telephone call to a relative living abroad:

A: What's the code to Los Angeles?

B: Are you hungry?

A: What?
B: What?

This 'breach' in the discourse framework was created by speaker B's

misinterpretation of A's utterance. Curiously, she thought that A had asked 'Do you
want some coleslaw sandwiches?' and consequently believed her response to have
been appropriate in the context. As far as speaker A was concerned, it clearly wasn't
a coherent response and her second utterance precipitates the
communicative breakdown. Often taken as a benchmark in discourse analysis are the
following basic principles of conversational coherence: we have intuitions about what
constitutes well-formed discourse: we rely on speakers and hearers to be generally
co-operative m interaction; we assume that what people say to us has some degree
of relevance. Like many aspects of language organisation, these principles are
best illustrated when we encounter aberrant or ill-formed interaction.
Combinations in discourse operate on a similar principle to gram- matical
combinations, with the collocotion in lexical semantics broadly analogous to the
category of exchange in discourse. An exchange is a combination of
conversational contributors on the same topic produced by different speakers.
Exchanges commonly (though not necessarily) consist of two parts. Here are four
attested exchanges, each comprising two structural components:

A: Hi1 How's it going?

B: Oh, not so bad, and yourself?
A: Right now, have the bowels been working OK? B:
Mmm. . . yeah . . .
A: What now do you think should be our reaction to yesterday's mortar attack in
Sarajevo?
B: Well I'm someone who's said that unless we take firm action then these
problems will escalate. I mean, the best thing you can say about Bosnia – and there
aren't many good things you can say is that it is a crisis that came before
Europe was ready.
A: Come on now, eat up your Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. B:
No want it No want it!

With only decontextualized utterances to go on, our communicative

competence is still sophisticated enough to provide us with a lot of information
about these exchanges. Not only can we deduce their probable sources, but we can
even make predictions about the status, identity and power of the participants

1
involved in the dialogue. As it happens, the first exchange is an informal opening to a
conversation, the second is from a doctor-patient encounter, the third from a political
interview and the last from a domestic encounter between an adult and a toddler. All
four exchanges represent nothing out of the ordinary. However, by simply nudging
the second utterances in each exchange into the equivalent positions in the
exchange immediately following, the following rather surreal collection m produced:

A: Hi! How's it going?

B: No want it! No want it!
A: Right now, have the bowels been working OK? 0:
Oh, not so bad, and yourself?
A: What now do you think should be our reaction to yesterday's mortar attack in
Sarajevo?
B: Mmm . . . yeah. . .
A: Come on now, eat up your Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
B: Well I'm someone who's said that unless we take firm action then these
problems will escalate. I mean, the best thing you can say about Bosnia and
there aren't many good things you can say - is that it is a crisis that came
before Europe was ready.

It is through the very peculiarity of these shunted exchanges that the commonplace and
prosaic in 'normal' discourse is foregrounded. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the
original set with the second highlights the subconscious and perhaps takenn for-granted
assumptions that we have about coherence and wellformedness in discourse. It
also underscores expectations about the appropriateness of topic in interaction. For
instance, outside a medical context, human bodily emissions make an unsuitable or at
least unlikely topic of discourse.
There is however a crucial third dimension in discourse analysis. The
contextual setting of an interaction is both a significant determinant of discourse
structure and an important influence on discourse strategy. Setting is the noni
linguistic context which envelops a piece of communication. This does not,
however, just mean the physical environment of interaction; it also extends to the
assumptions and beliefs that people bring to discourse. The setting, moreover, is
constantly changing as a dialogue progress. And this change need not necessarily
occur because, say, a bull elephant happens to crash into the room during a
conversation. It may simply be that a new framework of shared knowledge develops
between interactants as discourse develops. For instance, if you suddenly blurt out to
someone m the course of a conversation that you love them, then clearly a new
discourse context is created which will affect profoundly subsequent patterns of
interaction.

The importance of setting as a third dimension in discourse can be illustrated

with
a brief example. Here IS an actual exchange between two speakers which I
witnessed a few years ago:

A: er . . you have to go to head office . . . please B:

[nods and rises to go]

Even without any description of its setting, it is still possible to work out that
this is a 'request-reaction' exchange of the sort we have just been discussing. However,
this structural description, while straight-forward enough, is not especially
interesting in itself. Exploration of the strategy axis reveals more about the exchange.
For example, the speaker employs two particles either side of the man content-bearing
component of the utterance: 'erg and 'please'. Both particles, in tandem with the
hesitation used around them, mitigate the overall force of the request function. The
impact of the central sequence of the utterance is also comparably softened. The
'have to' phrase, like its counterpart must operate as a marker of obligation. However,
unlike ‘must’ it express objective obligation. In other words, the requirement expressed
by ‘have to’ is presented as a general rule and not something that can be attributed
directly to the speaker. The use of 'must', on the other hand, makes the obligation

2
encoded in the request more like a subjective decree that is passed from speaker to
hearer. All of these features combine to push the utterance towards the indirect end
of the strategy continuum, reducing the overtly 'command-lie' status of the request
more to the status of a 'suggestion'. Yet it is only with an account of the setting in
which this exchange took place that the full picture begins to emerge.
The exchange took place in a travel agent's shop in Liverpool. Speaker A is a young
black manageress who emerges from her own office into the main office. The
addressee is a white middle-aged male employee who is positioned behind a desk
and is dealing with customers. Descriptions of discourse setting often help explain
the motivation behind linguistic strategy. Here, the woman is the 'powerful' interactant,
at least in terms of institutionally sanctioned employment practices. Nevertheless. in
spite of her status. she treads a cautious interactive path. In designing her
utterance, she avoids the higher risk ploys from further up the strategy continuum,
opting instead for an interactive gambit which appears less direct and less coercive.
This more cautionary strategy may also have been prompted by the fact that she
is entering the physical 'territory' of her addressee. She leaves her own space, and is
moving towards a stationary interlocutor who is comfortably ensconced behind a
desk. The outcome of her gambit e a successful one: she gets someone to do something
without having appeared to have given them an order. However, the exchange as a
whole raises a number of issues to do with the complex interaction between language
and social roles. Whereas perceived power and status is one determinant of strategy,
this is perhaps counter balanced in this exchange by a web, other social variables such
as gender, age and ethnicity. This interrelatedness of discourse strategy and discourse
setting will be spotlighted further m the next section when attention is focused on the
linguistic routines of politeness. We are now in a position to replace our two
dimensional discourse model with a model which comprises the three components:
structure, strategy and setting. These three 'Ss' can be employed as a handy
mnemonic for discourse analysis at its broadest level. Although clearly interrelated,
the three parameters enable the analyst to sift out and concentrate upon different
aspects of discourse organisation. Figure 5.3 is the revised model which depicts
setting as a concrete embracing the other two axes. Any piece of discourse can
he viewed as an intersection of the three Ss. As we saw in the hunting exercise
above, it is often possible to deduce information about the three Ss even with only
decontextualised utterances to go on. Further experimentation along these lines can
be carried out using setting as a contextual variable. By taking one utterance and
offering a selection of different contexts, the manner by which setting acts as a
constraint on discourse appropriateness can be highlighted. Here is a short two-part
exercise in which readers may care to participate. It involves takin: a decontextualised
chunk of language and mapping: it against three possible scenarios. The three
scenarios are:
A chance encounter between two middle-aged strangers at a bench in a public park
Setting
Setting I 2
An eight-year-old child in conversation with her father's adult bend whom she has
met for tile first time
Setting 3

A doctor engaged in a diagnosis of a patient's illness

The next stage involves taking the following utterance and assigning it to one of the
given settings:

I've been to the zoo. I said. I've been to the zoo.

MISTER! I'VE BEEN TO THE ZOO.

Make a note of your decision about which setting fits the utterance and if
possible, the reasons which led, led to make this decision. You could also try to
write brief utterances which would fit the remaining two settings. The second part of
the exercise is as straightforward as the first. It involves matching up vocabulary,

3
register and setting. The point that can be made here is that even a lexical set
which is much less developed than a fully formed utterance. is often strongly
associated with a particular discourse setting. Here then is a lexical set which
contains some rather grisly terms:

A revised discourse model of three S:

Again, the task is to assign this set to one of the three settings provided. If possible,
draw up a lexical set which would be predicted by the remaining two settings. I
imagine there will have been little difficulty in aligning the three settings with the two
pieces of data provided. Given the straight- forwardness of the exercise. readers may
indeed be wondering where its heuristic value lies. For now, simply make a note of
your reactions to the two protocols. We shall have good cause to return to them later.
There remains one final matter that needs to be cleared up in this section before
we move on to assess more specialised frameworks for discourse analysis. This is
to serve partly as a note of caution and partly as a way of consolidating one or
two earlier points. Although they have been touched upon earlier in the book
nowhere in this discussion bas there been any mention of the three important
grammatical terms imperative, interrogative and declarative. When talking about
discourse, we need to be very careful about how these terms are used. This is mainly
because they describe the formal make-up of sentences and nor the function of
utterances in context. Although they are often erroneously used interchangeably
with discourse terms. imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives are really
types of grammatical mood. Why this confusion is a particular problem in
discourse analysis will become clear soon.
Before that, a basic description of these three key categories of mood is
required. Imperatives differ principally from the two indicative moods, declarative and
interrogative, in that they express no grammatical subject. Furthermore, the verb
which fronts imperative constructions is always in its base form and so cannot be
marked for tense. (See what happens when you try to convert any of the four
imperatives above into a past tense. Indicatives, on the other hand, contain both
subjects and verbs. Although they may be further subdivided according to the
position of these elements. In declaratives the subject simply comes first. In many
interrogatives, either all or part of the verb phrase comes first which is then, in
turn, followed by the subject. In the following interrogatives, the verb phrases are
indicated by underlining and the subjects by italicisation:

12 Has Roisin closed the door?

13 Is the cat in the garden?
14 Can they sing well?

Sometimes a special verb, do, needs to be imported in order for this grammatical
operation to be carried out:

15 Did the snake eat it?

On other occasions, a so-called 'WH-word', like where, why or how, can be

mcorporated into the interrogative:

4
16 Where is the cat?

This enables the interrogative to he used to prompt a more open kind of response
rather than the 'yes' or 'no' that would be elicited by examples (12-15). The three
principal moods are commonly associated with particular discourse functions. An
interrogative is the form standardly used for asking questions; a declarative is the
form standardly used for making statements; an imperative is the form standardly used
for commands or requests. However, if ever there was a crucial axiom about the
interaction of grammar and discourse it is this: there is no necessary
correspondence between the mood of a sentence and its

Important types of mood in English

function in discourse. For instance, you can do a lot more with an imperative than just
give an order. Here are a few instances of imperatives which are clearly not
commands. Notional descriptions of their respective discourse functions are
provided beside each example:

Finally, the declarative form also has many discoursal possibilities. For instance, it
can function as a command in an utterance like the following:

The door is still open.

In fact, the same declarative sentence: can carry a number of discoursal functions
depending on the intonation (rises or falls in pitch) which it exhibits. Consider the
following declarative:

You've had enough coke.

If uttered with a rising tone in the context of. say, a polite dinner party, it can

5
function either as an offer or as a genuine request for information. Yet when uttered with
a pronounced falling tone, by a mother to a toddler. then it is clearly a command
and it signals to the youngster that she is out of luck. Sometimes, we don't even
need to have a recognisable mood at all to get things done in language. The following
construction contains no verb so it is moodless. Nevertheless, its request function
would be clear in any context:

The door, please.

This 'lack of fit' between form and function is an important strategy-framing

device in discourse. The strategy continuum, it may be recalled, runs between the
poles direct and indirect. The form-function asymmetry identified here provides a
valuable criterion for measuring this continuum systematically. The most direct
strategy will he one which draws on the mood type that is standardly associated with
a particular discourse function. For example, a direct request will be an oblique
which employs an imperative construction, as in 'Open the window' A less direct
utterance will employ an oblique grammatical form, such as the use of an
interrogative to make a request. This is precisely the tactic that is used in the
medial example on the strategy continuum: 'Could you open the window?', The
most indirect strategy of all is when an utterance employs not only an oblique form. hut
also has no overt semantic link with the ostensible purpose of the exchange Notice
how, in the most indirect request on the continuum, there is no actual mention of
the service requested: 'Goodness me, it's hot 12 here!' This is a kind of optimal
indirectness which is so opaque in character that it tests the strategic nature 'of
discourse to the limit.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Opening moves essential tops-carrying items which are recognisably 'new' in terms of
the immediately preceding talk

Supporting moves involves occuring after any other type of move and involving
items that concur with the initiatory moves they are supporting

Challenging moves functioning to hold up the progress of a topic or the introduction of a

topic in some way