Connected discourse and the phraseology of spoken english : a corpus study of affirmative responses

• Ano de defesa: 2006
• Autor(a) principal: Pedro, Verônica da Silveira
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras; letras
• Palavras-chave em Português: Língua inglesa; Gramática; Lexicografia; Linguística; Lingüística de corpus; Colocações; Expressões lexicais; Fraseologia; Gramática de padrões; Respostas afirmativas em inglês língua materna; Análise de corpus; Análise de discurso; inglês L1; Corpus linguistics; Collocation; Lexical phrases; Phraseology; Pattern grammar; Affirmative responses in English as a mother tongue; English L1; CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS
• Link de acesso: https://app.uff.br/riuff/handle/1/21060

The present study presents an investigation of affirmative responses in a corpus of spoken English as a mother tongue. The theoretical background consists of a discussion of issues in spoken English and connected spoken discourse in light of the contributions from the fields of pragmatics, corpus linguistics, studies into collocation, phraseology and pattern grammar. Some relevant aspects of the literature in these fields are presented and discussed. The yeah and yes responses encountered in the corpus and their respective initiation moves were analysed in relation to their illocutionary values. The latter were identified and quantified. The most frequent illocutionary values of both the initiation moves and the responses were compared and contrasted. The responses which belonged to the most frequent illocutionary value were then submitted to deeper analyses. Firstly, the responses which contained continuations to the words yeah and yes were identified and quantified. Secondly, they were classified into independent and complex responses. Independent responses are those which contain independent phrases, whereas complex responses consist of responses which contain sequences of phrases, including, in some cases, instances of independent phrases. The patterns of occurrence of these responses were then identified. The words yeah and yes were also investigated in relation to their collocates within those responses which contained continuations. The responses which had the most frequent illocutionary value, namely, confirmings, were analysed in relation to the occurrence of verb forms and tenses, cohesive items and lexical phrases. Their recurrent patterns of use were identified and quantified. The analyses thus demonstrated that the yeah and yes responses encountered in the corpus of spoken English occurred in recurrent patterns of combinations of initiation moves and responses, collocations of word-forms and phrases, and independent and complex responses. In the latter case, the continuations within the responses contained verbs, cohesive items and sequences of lexical phrases which occurred in the corpus in patterns of frequency and sequences of phrases.