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Social Discourse

Decent Essays

The way how the language is used within a social context is the study of discourse and when the language is acknowledged in context it evolves into understanding that communication is more 'than just grammar and lexis' as North (2012) points out. Whether it is written or spoken when it is employed in real life situations, language has a function irrespective of its form. Also, different registers are applied in different backgrounds dependently on participants engaged in conversation. Therefore, this essay will examine the settings, participants background, social context, register, turn-taking and other elements that are contributing on creation and in analysing different kinds of conversations on different examples of transcripts. More …show more content…

The preferred and assumed response would be in this case 'yes, it is'. An example of model adjacency pair is from Extract 3, in Allington and Mayor (2012) chapter 1, where Jen asks in line 5 /Milk or water Russ?/ and gets the preferred response from Russ /Water please/. Sacks (1995) discuss how, however, perfectly proper answer 'I dont know' to the question 'May I help you?' is dispreferred, as this kind of the question is designed to avoid such an answer. Russ could react with similarly perfectly proper answer, but it would not provide the making of activities, because the question was a signal for making a selection – whether he wants to drink 'milk or water'. In making a selection, Russ applied the etiquette by finishing his unit with 'please'. Although, coming to closer analyse of this utterance from line 8, it is apparent that it was not just the dispreferred response, but also a backchannel behaviour that took its place. North (2012) explains this sort of response as that that is serves to encourage speakers to carry on, instead of taking a turn. Speaker 'B' offered little pause in order to respond to the interlocutors at the end of the unit of a speech, what is called by Sacks (2012 [1995]) 'a transition relevance place (frequently abbreviated to TRP)'. The occurrence of these TRPs is likely to lead into slight overlaps, or

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