Routledge

Resources

Pragmatics and Discourse 2e

Extra Activities

Topics and questions that you might like to pursue in the field of Discourse and Pragmatics are:

Discourse in context

  • Situational context and background context - which do you feel is the more necessary in giving meaning to words? To what extent does this depend on the situation itself?
  • Describe a discourse community that you know and say how exclusive you think the language of their interpersonal reference might be.
  • Analyse a serial or soap from the television from the point of view of deixis and say whether you think gender or age has any influence on the type of deixis use.

Co-text and cohesion

  • Small children sometimes use endophoric reference inefficiently because they assume that the referent is in the hearer's mind when it is not. Record a long conversation between an adult and a small child, and test this theory.
  • Do you think that cataphora is more frequent in written language than it is in spoken? Compare a written text and a transcription of natural speech to see if this is so, making sure that the two discourses are of the same level of formality.
  • Describe a poem that you enjoy, from the point of view of lexical cohesion, and say the effect that it has on the poem.

Function and speech acts

  • Do you agree that natural spontaneous discourse is difficult to analyse from the point of view of speech acts? Record a short conversation, transcribe it giving each utterance one line, and experiment with labelling the speech act in each line.
  • A comparison of the way that middle class people express/realise directives, and the way working class people do.
  • Women use more indirect speech acts than men do. Discuss.

Conversation structure and analysis

  • IRF has been used to analyse classroom discourse, doctor-patient exchanges and quiz shows. Do you think that there are any other speech events that could be analysed using it? Defend your point of view by analysing an exchange.
  • Compare the turn-taking in a conversation between strangers with that in a conversation between people who know each other very well.
  • The bigger the favour that you ask, the longer the pre-sequence. Discuss with examples.

Cooperative principle and relevance

  • The only cooperative maxim we need to explain how communication succeeds is the maxim of relation/relevance. Discuss.
  • Cooperative maxim flouting is said to be at the basis of much humour. Choose a form of humorous event (e.g. comedy film, Shakespeare, jokes) and say to what extent this is true.
  • Is maxim violation a cultural issue? Compare two countries that you know well and say a) if one violates maxims more than the other, and b) whether the function is different in each country

Politeness

  • Would you say that men's and women's politeness differ in the proportion of positive and negative politeness strategies used? Compare a men-to-men conversation with a women-to-women conversation, making sure that the speech event formality, depth or relationship are similar.
  • A criticism that could be levelled at Leech's model is that a new maxim could be added for every new situation that occurs. Examine a play-script from this point of view.
  • "The British are so polite!" my international students often exclaim. I answer that politeness and the way we express it differs from country to country. Do you agree? Defend your answer.