Overview

Conversation in Context examines real-life speech data from the British National Corpus to show how language is used in natural conversation. The monograph describes the composition, annotation and transcription of the corpus, as well as providing a discussion of the methodology used in corpus analysis. The book uses a situational framework for conversation and argues that conversation is adapted to constraints set by the situation and to speaker needs arising from these constraints. Such a contextual view reveals a greater complexity to conversation construction than could have been anticipated without the use of corpus-based methods. This book will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

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9780826497130

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Reviews

To sum up, Conversation in Context is not only another book about British conversation. Ruhlemann provides a coherent theoretical framework for analysing grammatical or discoursal phenomena in conversation as shown by the variety of case studies. The empirical case studies do not only fit and strenghten the model but they represent a new way of looking at grammar and offer a new and deeper understanding of many grammatical phenomena. It remains to be seen what other features (if any) are needed to account for spoken or conversational grammar and to test these factors on the basis of more data. The book can be recommended to anyone interested in pragmatics (and sociopragmatics), discourse analysis and corpora. The book is well-written with useful and frequent to-the-point summaries. It opens up new vistas for research on grammar in conversation and other registers and is likely to have an impact on many areas in applied linguistics. -- Professor Emeritus Karin Aijmer, ICAME Journal 33

Author Information

Dr Christoph Rüehlemann has a PhD in English Linguistics from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich and is an English and German teacher.

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