The Handbook of Discourse Analysis PDF

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics This outstanding multi-volume series covers all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today and, when complete, will...

The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics This outstanding multi-volume series covers all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today and, when complete, will offer a comprehensive survey of linguistics as a whole. Published Works: The Handbook of Child Language Edited by Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney The Handbook of Phonological Theory Edited by John Goldsmith The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory Edited by Shalom Lappin The Handbook of Sociolinguistics Edited by Florian Coulmas The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences Edited by William Hardcastle and John Laver The Handbook of Morphology Edited by Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics Edited by Natsuko Tsujimura The Handbook of Linguistics Edited by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory Edited by Mark Baltin and Chris Collins The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton The Handbook of Variation and Change Edited by J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes The Handbook of Discourse Analysis Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton Copyright © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001 First published 2001 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Blackwell Publishers Inc. 350 Main Street Malden, Massachusetts 02148 USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF UK All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Handbook of discourse analysis / edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Hamilton. p. cm. — (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–631–20595–0 (alk. paper) 1. Discourse analysis—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Schiffrin, Deborah. II. Tannen, Deborah. III. Hamilton, Heidi Ehernberger. IV. Series. P302.H344 2001 401′.41—dc21 2001018139 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 9.5/12pt Palatino by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. For our parents, Marlye and Leonard Schiffrin Dorothy and Eli Tannen Claire and Gerald Ehernberger Contents Contributors x Introduction 1 I Discourse Analysis and Linguistics 11 1 Intonation and Discourse: Current Views from Within 13 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen 2 Cohesion and Texture 35 J. R. Martin 3 Discourse Markers: Language, Meaning, and Context 54 Deborah Schiffrin 4 Discourse and Semantics 76 Neal R. Norrick 5 Discourse and Relevance Theory 100 Diane Blakemore 6 Discourse and Information Structure 119 Gregory Ward and Betty J. Birner 7 Historical Discourse Analysis 138 Laurel J. Brinton 8 Typology and Discourse Analysis 161 John Myhill 9 Register Variation: A Corpus Approach 175 Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad II The Linking of Theory and Practice in Discourse Analysis 197 10 Nine Ways of Looking at Apologies: The Necessity for Interdisciplinary Theory and Method in Discourse Analysis 199 Robin Tolmach Lakoff viii Contents 11 Interactional Sociolinguistics: A Personal Perspective 215 John J. Gumperz 12 Discourse as an Interactional Achievement III: The Omnirelevance of Action 229 Emanuel A. Schegloff 13 Discourse and Interaction 250 Monica Heller 14 The Linguistic Structure of Discourse 265 Livia Polanyi 15 The Variationist Approach toward Discourse Structural Effects and Socio-interactional Dynamics 282 Sylvie Dubois and David Sankoff 16 Computer-assisted Text and Corpus Analysis: Lexical Cohesion and Communicative Competence 304 Michael Stubbs 17 The Transcription of Discourse 321 Jane A. Edwards III Discourse: Language, Context, and Interaction 349 A Political, Social, and Institutional Domains 351 18 Critical Discourse Analysis 352 Teun A. van Dijk 19 Discourse and Racism 372 Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl 20 Political Discourse 398 John Wilson 21 Discourse and Media 416 Colleen Cotter 22 Discourse Analysis in the Legal Context 437 Roger W. Shuy 23 The Discourse of Medical Encounters 453 Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn 24 Language and Medicine 470 Suzanne Fleischman 25 Discourse in Educational Settings 503 Carolyn Temple Adger 26 Narrative in Institutions 518 Charlotte Linde  Contents ix B Culture, Community, and Genre 537 27 Discourse and Intercultural Communication 538 Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon 28 Discourse and Gender 548 Shari Kendall and Deborah Tannen 29 Discourse and Aging 568 Heidi E. Hamilton 30 Child Discourse 590 Jenny Cook-Gumperz and Amy Kyratzis 31 Computer-mediated Discourse 612 Susan C. Herring 32 Discourse Analysis and Narrative 635 Barbara Johnstone 33 Discourse and Conflict 650 Christina Kakavá IV Discourse across Disciplines 671 34 The Analysis of Discourse Flow 673 Wallace Chafe 35 The Discursive Turn in Social Psychology 688 Rom Harré 36 Discourse Analysis and Language Teaching 707 Elite Olshtain and Marianne Celce-Murcia 37 Discourse Analysis in Communication 725 Karen Tracy 38 Discourse and Sociology: Sociology and Discourse 750 Allen Grimshaw 39 Imagination in Discourse 772 Herbert H. Clark and Mija M. Van Der Wege 40 Literary Pragmatics 787 Jacob L. Mey 41 Computational Perspectives on Discourse and Dialog 798 Bonnie Lynn Webber Index 817 Contributors Carolyn Temple Adger is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on language in education, especially class- room discourse and teachers’ professional talk. Recent co-authored and co-edited books include Kids Talk: Strategic Language Use in Later Childhood (Oxford University Press, 1998); Dialects in Schools and Communities (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998); and Making the Connection: Language and Academic Achievement among African American Students (Delta Systems, 1999). [email protected] Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn is on leave from Michigan State University, where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English. Her publications since the early 1990s have examined power, gender, and co-construction in the questions, stories, and topic transitions that constitute doctor–patient encounters. This work culminated in Claiming Power in Doctor–Patient Talk (Oxford University Press, 1998). [email protected] Douglas Biber is Regents’ Professor of English (Applied Linguistics) at Northern Arizona University. His research efforts have focused on corpus linguistics, English grammar, and register variation (in English and cross-linguistic; synchronic and dia- chronic). His publications include three books published by Cambridge University Press (Variation Across Speech and Writing, 1988; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross- linguistic Comparison, 1995; and Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use, 1998, with Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen) and most recently the co-authored Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999). [email protected] Betty J. Birner is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northern Illinois University. Her research interests include the discourse functions of syntactic constructions, inferential relations in discourse, and reference. She is the author of The Discourse Function of Inversion in English (Garland, 1996) and co-author, with Gregory Ward, of Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (Benjamins, 1998). [email protected] Diane Blakemore is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Salford. Her pub- lications are mainly in the area of relevance theoretic pragmatics and investigate  Contributors xi non-truth conditional meaning and the relationship between linguistic form and prag- matics interpretation. Her most recent articles include: “Indicators and procedures: ‘nevertheless’ and ‘but’ ” (2000); “Restatement and exemplification: a relevance theoretic re-assessment of elaboration” (1997); and “Non-truth conditional meaning” (1998). [email protected] Laurel J. Brinton is Professor of English Language at the University of British Columbia. Her main areas of interest include pragmatic markers, composite pre- dicates, aspect, and grammaticalization in the history of English. Her most recent books include Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Func- tions (Mouton, 1996), the co-edited volume Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Com- posite Predicates in the History of English (Benjamins, 1999), and the text and CD-ROM workbook The Structure of Modern English: A Linguistic Introduction (Benjamins, 2000). [email protected] Marianne Celce-Murcia is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications and research have dealt with English grammar and discourse, pedagogical grammar, and pronunciation instruction. Her most recent books include: Teaching Pronunciation (with Donna Brinton and Janet Goodwin; Cambridge University Press, l996); The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course (with Diane Larsen-Freeman; Heinle and Heinle, l999); and Discourse and Context in Language Teaching (with Elite Olshtain; Cambridge University Press, 2000). [email protected] Wallace Chafe is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research has focused on languages of Native North America and on discourse and its relations to human thought. His most recent major publication is Discourse, Consciousness, and Time (University of Chicago Press, 1994), an explora- tion of how the flow and displacement of consciousness are reflected in speaking and writing. He is currently investigating ways in which prosody is used to express emotions and attitudes. [email protected] Herbert H. Clark is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He has published on a range of issues in linguistics and psycholinguistics. These include: spatial lan- guage, conventional and innovative word meaning, types of listeners, definite refer- ence, the nature of common ground, interactive language in joint activities, quotations, gestures, and disfluencies. Much of this work is reviewed in two books, Arenas of Lan- guage Use (University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Using Language (Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1996). [email protected] Susan Conrad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Program in Linguistics at Iowa State University. She is co-author of Corpus Linguistics: Investigat- ing Language Structure and Use (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Pearson, 1999), and co-editor of a collec- tion of corpus-based studies of register and dialect variation, Variation in English: Multi-dimensional Studies (Pearson, 2001). Her work on register variation and corpus linguistics has appeared in Applied Linguistics, Linguistics and Education, System, and TESOL Quarterly. xii Contributors Jenny Cook-Gumperz is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A sociologist and sociolinguist, she is well known for her work on literacy theory and the social context of children’s language learning. She is the author of Social Construction of Literacy, Social Control and Socialization, and Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language (with William Corsaro and Jürgen Streeck), as well as numerous papers on literacy and language socialization. [email protected] Colleen Cotter is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, dividing her time between the Linguistics Department and the Communication, Culture and Techno- logy (CCT) master’s program. Her former career as a daily newspaper reporter and editor (as well as journalism educator) has informed the ethnographic or community- situated approach she takes in studying media discourse. She is currently completing a book on news discourse and news language, examining news texts from the vantage point of journalistic practice and process and the perspectives of journalists them- selves. It is provisionally entitled News Values, News Practice: Shaping the Language and Culture of News. She has also done research on the use of broadcast media to promote minority- or endangered-language development, focusing primarily on the case in Ireland. [email protected] Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen is Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research interests include lan- guage use in interaction, prosody and conversation, and clause combining in spoken discourse. Among her major publications are English Speech Rhythm: Form and Func- tion in Everyday Verbal Interaction (Benjamins, 1993); Language in Time: The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction (co-authored with Peter Auer and Frank Müller; Oxford University Press, 1999); Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies (co-edited with Margret Selting; Cambridge University Press, 1996); Cause, Condition, Concession, Con- trast: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives (co-edited with Bernd Kortmann; Mouton, 2000); and Studies in Interactional Linguistics (co-edited with Margret Selting; Benjamins, in press). [email protected] Sylvie Dubois is Associate Professor at the Department of French at Louisiana State University. Her publications are mainly in the areas of discourse analysis, socio- linguistic methods and fieldworks, and vernacular varieties of French and English in North America, especially Cajun and Creole dialects spoken in Louisiana. She is the author of a book on discourse analysis, L’analyse variationniste du discours en sociolinguistique (American University Studies XIII, Peter Lang, 1997). Her most recent articles have been published in Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, and Journal of Sociolinguistics. [email protected] Jane A. Edwards is a Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Studies, University of California at Berkeley. Her publications are mainly in the area of corpus linguistics, with special reference to spoken language description and robust use of electronic corpora in linguistic research. Her most recent publications include “Principles and alternative systems in the transcription, coding and mark-up of spoken discourse” (1995) and, as co-editor with Martin D. Lampert, Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993). [email protected]  Contributors xiii Suzanne Fleischman was a Professor in the Department of French at the University of California at Berkeley for twenty-five years. Her research areas included Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, tense and aspect, grammaticalization, sociolinguistics, narrative analysis, linguistics and literature, medieval studies, and language and gen- der. Her publications covered all of these areas, and included The Future in Thought and Language (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Tense and Narrativity (University of Texas Press, 1990), Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb (co-edited with Linda Waugh; Routledge 1991), and Modality in Grammar and Discourse (co-edited with Joan Bybee; Benjamins, 1995). At the time of her death from myelodysplasia in 2000, Fleischman had been working on the cross-linguistic analysis of the grammaticalization of like and on a book integrating her own experience with illness with analyses of the relationship between language and medicine. A collection of her work is currently being prepared for publication by Eve Sweetser and Dan Slobin (both at University of California at Berkeley). Allen Grimshaw is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Indiana University; he served on the faculty from 1959 to 1994. During his last decades of teaching he specialized in courses on language in use in social contexts and on social conflict and violence, including war and genocide. He has written several books and numerous articles on these topics and continues research on them. His most recent writing includes encyc- lopedia and handbook articles on genocide, language topics, and racial violence. Among his publications are: Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations (as editor; Cambridge University Press, 1990); What’s Going On Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk (as co-editor; Ablex, 1994), “Genocide and democide” (1999); and “Control” (2000). [email protected] John J. Gumperz is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. From his earlier work in the 1950s on dialect differences and social stratification in rural Michigan and as a member of an anthropological research team in a North Indian village community, he has consistently been dealing with the issue of language contact and linguistic diversity. Since the early 1970s he has turned to discourse and conversation analysis, concentrating on questions of bilingualism, bidialectalism, and intercultural communication. He is concerned with providing both the empirical evidence and the theoretical framework for investigating the varied but systematic ways in which talk both reflects and defines social and cultural boundaries. Among his best-known publications are Directions in Sociolinguistics (co-edited with Dell Hymes; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, reissued Blackwell, 1986, and to be republished in 2001); Discourse Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Lan- guage and Social Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (co-edited with Stephen Levinson; Cambridge University Press, 1996). Gumperz is currently at work on a follow-up volume to Directions in Sociolinguistics called New Ethnographies of Communication, to be co-edited with Marco Jaquemet, and on a set of theoretical essays. [email protected] Heidi E. Hamilton is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on language and Alzheimer’s disease, language and aging, medical communication, and foreign language immersion programs. She is the author of Con- versations with an Alzheimer’s Patient: An Interactional Sociolinguistic Study (Cambridge xiv Contributors University Press, 1994) and Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and editor of Language and Communication in Old Age: Multi- disciplinary Perspectives (Garland, 1999). [email protected] Rom Harré is Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at American Uni- versity, Washington, D.C. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the natural sciences such as Varieties of Realism (Blackwell, 1986) and Great Scientific Experiments (Oxford University Press, 1981). He has been among the pioneers of the “discursive” approach in the human sciences. In Social Being (Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), Personal Being (Harvard University Press, 1984), and Physical Being (Blackwell, 1991) he explored the role of rules and conventions in various aspects of human cognition, while in Pronouns and People (Blackwell, 1990), he and Peter Mühlhäusler developed the thesis that grammar and the sense of self are intimately related. [email protected] Monica Heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her publications and research are mainly in the areas of interactional sociolinguistics; code-switching; the political economy of multilingualism; and policy, ideology, and practice of French, English, and other languages in Canada. Her most recent books include Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography (Longman, 1999) and Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (co-edited with Marilyn Martin-Jones; Greenwood, 2000). Recent articles have been published in such journals as the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Estudios de Sociolinguistica, Discurso y Sociedad, and Grenzgaenge. [email protected] Susan C. Herring is Associate Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her recent publications are mainly in the area of computer-mediated communication, where she applies linguistic methods of ana- lysis to computer-mediated discourse. Her research investigates gender, politeness, interaction management, and changes over time in CMC. Her books include Computer- mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Benjamins, 1996) and Computer-mediated Conversation (forthcoming); she has also published numer- ous articles on CMC. [email protected] Barbara Johnstone is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon Uni- versity. In her book Stories, Community, and Place (Indiana University Press, 1990) she explored how shared story plots and shared conventions for storytelling help create community. She continues to explore connections between language, identity, and place. Johnstone is the author of several other books, including Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2001). [email protected] Christina Kakavá is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Mary Washington College. Her research interest is conflict management in intra- and interethnic communica- tion. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Georgetown Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and in other journals and books. [email protected] Shari Kendall is Research Associate at Georgetown University. Her publications are mainly in the areas of gender and sexuality. Her research investigates the linguistic  Contributors xv creation of gendered and other social identities in the workplace, the family, the courtroom, and the media. Her most recent articles include: “He’s calling her Da Da!: A sociolinguistic analysis of the ‘lesbianism as disease’ metaphor in child custody cases” (with Keller Magenau; 1999); “Conversational patterns across gender, class and ethnicity: implications for classroom discourse” (with Deborah Tannen and Carolyn Temple Adger; 1997); and “Gender and language in the workplace” (with Deborah Tannen; 1997). [email protected] Amy Kyratzis is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education and Development at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara. She has authored articles on children’s early pragmatic development, communicative competence, and language socialization. She is co-editor of Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp (with Dan Slobin, Julie Gerhardt, and Jiansheng Guo; Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996). [email protected] Robin Tolmach Lakoff has been a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley since 1972. Her work is mostly in the areas of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, with particular emphasis on language and gender, politics of language, and discourse analysis. Earlier works include Language and Woman’s Place (Harper & Row, 1975) and Talking Power (Basic Books, 1990). Her most recent book is The Language War (University of California Press, 2000). [email protected] Charlotte Linde is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Her publications focus on the social use of narrative, particularly in relation to individual and collective memory. Recent publications include “The Acquisition of a Speaker by a Story: How History Becomes Memory and Identity” (2000), “The Transformation of Narrative Syntax into Institutional Memory” (1999), and “Narrative: Experience, Memory, Folklore” (1997). Her book Narrative and Institutional Memory is to appear with Oxford University Press. [email protected] J. R. Martin is Professor in Linguistics (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse seman- tics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics. Publications include English Text: System and Structure (Benjamins, 1992); Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (with M. A. K. Halliday; Falmer, 1993); Working with Functional Grammar (with C. Matthiessen and C. Painter; Arnold, 1997); Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School (as co-editor with F. Christie; Cassell, 1997); and Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science (as co-editor with R. Veel; Routledge, 1998). [email protected] Jacob L. Mey is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense Main Campus. His publications are mainly in the areas of prag- matics and cognitive technology. His research investigates the use of pragmatic techniques in the production and consumption of literary texts, as well as the way the use of computers affects the way the mind organizes and uses knowledge and information. His most recent publications are Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (as editor; Elsevier Science, 1999); When Voices Clash: Studies in Literary Pragmatics (Mouton xvi Contributors de Gruyter, 2000); and Pragmatics: An Introduction (second, revised and enlarged edition; Blackwell, 2000). In addition, Mey publishes the Journal of Pragmatics and the new Journal of Cognitive Technology (with Barbara Gorayska and Jonathon Marsh). [email protected] John Myhill is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Haifa. His publications are mainly in the field of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics. His recent articles include “Towards a func- tional typology of agent defocusing” (1997); “A study of imperative usage in Biblical Hebrew and English” (1998); and “Quantitative methods of discourse analysis” (2001). [email protected] Neal R. Norrick holds the Chair of English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research specializations in linguistics include conversa- tion, verbal humor, pragmatics, semantics, and poetics. In recent years, he has focused his research on spoken language, with particular interests in the role of repetition in discourse and verbal humor. His recent publications include: Conversational Joking (Indiana University Press, 1993); “Paradox and metaphor: a discourse approach” (1999); “Retelling again” (1998); “Retelling stories in spontaneous conversation” (1998); “Twice- told tales: collaborative narration of familiar stories” (1997); “Involvement and joking in conversation” (1994); “Repetition in canned jokes and spontaneous conversa- tional joking” (1993); and Conversational Narrative (Benjamins, 2000). [email protected] saarland.de Elite Olshtain is Professor of Language Education at the School of Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Her publications are mainly in the area of curriculum design and policy making, discourse analysis and teaching, and second language acquisition research. Her research investigates cross-cultural speech act behavior, language attrition and bilingualism, and language acquisition among immigrants. Her latest publications are Discourse, Context and Language Teaching (with Marianne Celce-Murcia; Cambridge University Press, to appear) and Language Acquisition and Immigrant Patterns of Integration (with G. Horenzyk; Magness Press, to appear). [email protected] Livia Polanyi is Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratories working in the area of computational discourse understanding. Before joining FXPAL, she taught at the University of Amsterdam and Rice University and was a Research Scientist at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman in Cambridge, MA. Polanyi has published widely. Her studies on formal, computational, linguistic, and cultural aspects of discourse understanding have appeared in journal and conference papers in many fields including theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics, in addition to anthropology, literary theory, semiotics, and economics. Her book Telling the American Story: Linguistic, Social and Cultural Constraints on the Meaning and Structure of Stories in Conversation (Ablex, 1989) was reissued as a paperback by MIT Press. [email protected] Martin Reisigl is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna and is a recipient of a research award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His publications are mainly in the areas of discourse analysis, (political) rhetoric,  Contributors xvii argumentation theory, and sociolinguistics. He is co-author of The Discursive Con- struction of National Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Discourse and Discrimination: The Rhetoric of Racism and Antisemitism (Routledge, 2001), and co-editor of The Semiotics of Racism (Passagen, 2000). [email protected] David Sankoff studied at McGill University and since 1969 has been at the Math- ematics Research Centre of the University of Montreal, where he is also Professor of Mathematics and Statistics. He is a Fellow in the Evolutionary Biology Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His research involves the formulation of mathematical models and the development of analytical methods in the sciences and humanities. This includes the design of algorithms for problems in computational biology, applied probability for phylogenetic analysis of evolution, and statistical methodology for studying grammatical variation and change in speech communities. His work since the early 1990s has focused on the evolution of genomes as the result of chromosomal rearrangement processes. [email protected] Emanuel A. Schegloff holds degrees from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught at Columbia and UCLA (since 1972). He has been a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities (1978–9) and at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford (1998–9), the latter while he held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, and has published over seventy papers and chapters on a variety of topics concerning conversation and other forms of talk-in- interaction as the primordial site of human sociality. [email protected] Deborah Schiffrin is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research interests include narrative, life stories, oral histories of the Holocaust, dis- course markers, referring terms, grammar and interaction, language and identity, and language and public memorial. Major publications include Discourse Markers (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Approaches to Discourse (Blackwell, 1994; second edition forthcoming); and Language, Text and Interaction (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). [email protected] Ron Scollon is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. His publications are mainly in the areas of new literacy studies, mediated discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. His most recent books include Professional Communication in International Settings (with Yuling Pan and Suzanne Scollon) and Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction. [email protected] Suzanne Wong Scollon is Research Coordinator of Asian Sociocultural Research Pro- jects and Adjunct Research Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her publications are in the areas of critical semiotics, multi- modal discourse analysis, and comparative rhetoric and professional presentation. Recent books include Contrastive Discourse in Chinese and English: A Critical Appraisal (with Ron Scollon and Andy Kirkpatrick) and Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach (with Ron Scollon; revised edition). [email protected] Roger W. Shuy is Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, George- town University. Over the years he has published his sociolinguistic and discourse analysis research on regional, social, education, ethnic, stylistic, and gender aspects of xviii Contributors English. Since the early 1970s, his major focus has been on forensic linguistics. His most recent books include Language Crimes (Blackwell, 1993); The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception (Sage, 1998); and Bureaucratic Language in Government and Business (Georgetown University Press, 1998). [email protected] Michael Stubbs has been Professor of English Linguistics, University of Trier, Ger- many, since 1990. He was previously Professor of English, Institute of Education, University of London. His publications are mainly in educational linguistics, and in text and discourse analysis, including computer-assisted corpus linguistics. His publications include Text and Corpus Analysis (Blackwell, 1996) and Words and Phrases: Studies in Corpus Semantics (to appear). [email protected] Deborah Tannen is a University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She has published sixteen books and over eighty-five articles on such topics as spoken and written language, doctor–patient communication, cross-cultural communication, modern Greek discourse, the poetics of everyday conversation, the relationship between conversational and literary discourse, gender and language, workplace interaction, and agonism in public discourse. Among her books are Talk- ing Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Gender and Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1994), and Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends (Ablex, 1984). She has also written I Only Say This Because I Love You (Random House, 2001); You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (Ballantine, 1990); and Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men in the Workplace: Language, Sex, and Power (Avon, 1995). Her book The Argument Culture (Random House, 1998) received the Common Ground Book Award. Tannen is co-recipient with Shari Kendall of a two-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to examine the role of discourse in balancing work and family. [email protected] Karen Tracy is Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder and editor of the journal Research on Language and Social Interaction. She is a discourse analyst who studies face and identity troubles in institutional settings. Recent publications include Colloquium: Dilemmas of Academic Discourse (1997) and articles analyzing communicative trouble at emergency call centers, appearing in a variety of journals (Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication, and Discourse Studies). She is beginning to write about deliberative difficulties in American school board meetings. [email protected] Mija M. Van Der Wege is a Post-doctoral Research Assistant in the Psychology Department at Stanford University. She has published mainly in the area of lan- guage use and discourse processes. Her current research investigates issues of turn-taking, conventional and innovative word meanings, and reference processes. [email protected] Teun A. van Dijk is Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. After earlier work on text grammar and the psychology of text processing, most of his work in the 1980s and 1990s dealt with the study of the discursive reproduction of racism. His new major project is on ideology and discourse. In each of these fields he has  Contributors xix published several books. His latest are the two edited volumes Discourse Studies (Sage, 1997) and Ideology (Sage, 1998). He is founder and editor of the journals Dis- course and Society and Discourse Studies. [email protected] Gregory Ward is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at North- western University. His main research area is discourse, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, and reference/anaphora. Recent publications provide pragmatic analyses of various constructions, such as “do so” (with A. Kehler; Turner, 1999), Italian subject postposing (Kamio and Takami, 1998), and English “there”-sentences (with B. Birner; 1995). His recent book with Betty Birner, Informa- tion Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (Benjamins, 1998), explores the dis- course functions of a broad range of non-canonical syntactic constructions in English and other languages. With L. Horn, he is editor of the Handbook of Pragmatics (Blackwell, to appear). [email protected] Bonnie Lynn Webber is Professor of Intelligent Systems in the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She has published in both discourse semantics and natural language processing. Her most recent articles include “Inference through alternative- set semantics” (with Gann Bierner; 2000); “Discourse relations: a structural and pre- suppositional account using lexicalised TAG” (with Aravind Joshi, Alistair Knott, and Matthew Stone; 1999); and “Concession, implicature, and alternative sets (with Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová; 2001). [email protected] John Wilson is Professor of Communication and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Health Sciences and Education, University of Ulster. His research interests are in the areas of discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, in particular the applied use of theory in the understanding of everyday linguistic interaction. His early work concentrated on establishing a theory of conversation as a speech event. This is out- lined in On the Boundaries of Conversation (Pergamon, 1987). He then moved on to consider the application of both pragmatic and discourse theory to an understand- ing of everyday language, most significantly political language (Politically Speaking: Blackwell, 1990; Linguistic Forms of Political Life: Mouton, forthcoming). His most re- cent publications indicate the breadth of his applied approach: The Language of Peace and Conflict (with J. Rose; 1997); What Do You Have in Mind: Pragmatics and Language Impairment (2000); and Parameter Setting within a Socially Realistic Linguistics (1998). [email protected] Ruth Wodak is Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. Beside various other prizes, she was lately awarded with the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers (1996). She is Director of the Wittgenstein Research Centre Discourse, Politics, Identity (at the Austrian Academy of Sciences). Her publications are mainly in the areas of discourse and racism, discourse and discrimination, discourse analysis, gender studies, and organizational research. Her research also investigates studies in public and private discourse in Austria since 1945, with special focus on manifestations of antisemitism and racism towards foreigners. Most recently, she has focused on the deconstruction of a taboo on narrat- ives of perpetrators in the Wehrmacht in World War II. Another main aim is the investigation of political language and political discourse: the study of media (printed and electronic) in 1988 in Austria and the impact of the “Waldheim Affair”; and the xx Contributors construction of Austrian and European identity in European Union policy making. Her recent books include Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (with M. Meyer; Sage, forthcoming); Racism at the Top (with Teun A. van Dijk; Drava, 2000); Discourse and Discrimination (with Martin Reisigl; Routledge, in press); The Semiotics of Racism (with M. Reisigl; Passagen Verlag, in press); Loss of Communication in the Information Age (with R. de Cillia and H. J. Krumm; Austrian Academy of Sciences, forthcoming); and Debating Europe: Globalisation Rhetoric and European Union Employment Policies (with P. Muntigl and G. Weiss; Benjamins, forthcoming). [email protected]  Introduction 1 Introduction DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN, DEBORAH TANNEN, AND HEIDI E. HAMILTON What Is Discourse Analysis? Discourse analysis is a rapidly growing and evolving field. Current research in this field now flows from numerous academic disciplines that are very different from one another. Included, of course, are the disciplines in which models for understanding, and methods for analyzing, discourse first developed, such as linguistics, anthropo- logy, and philosophy. But also included are disciplines that have applied – and thus often extended – such models and methods to problems within their own academic domains, such as communication, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and arti- ficial intelligence. Given this disciplinary diversity, it is no surprise that the terms “discourse” and “discourse analysis” have different meanings to scholars in different fields. For many, particularly linguists, “discourse” has generally been defined as anything “beyond the sentence.” For others (for example Fasold 1990: 65), the study of discourse is the study of language use. These definitions have in common a focus on specific instances or spates of language. But critical theorists and those influenced by them can speak, for example, of “discourse of power” and “discourses of racism,” where the term “discourses” not only becomes a count noun, but further refers to a broad conglom- eration of linguistic and nonlinguistic social practices and ideological assumptions that together construct power or racism. So abundant are definitions of discourse that many linguistics books on the subject now open with a survey of definitions. In their collection of classic papers in discourse analysis, for example, Jaworski and Coupland (1999: 1–3) include ten definitions from a wide range of sources. They all, however, fall into the three main categories noted above: (1) anything beyond the sentence, (2) language use, and (3) a broader range of social practice that includes nonlinguistic and nonspecific instances of language. The definitional issues associated with discourse and discourse analysis are by no means unique. In his two-volume reference book on semantics, for example, Lyons (1997) illustrates ten different uses of the word mean, and thus an equal number of possible domains of the field of semantics. In his introductory chapter on pragmatics, 2 Introduction Levinson (1983) discusses twelve definitions of the field of pragmatics (including some which could easily cover either discourse analysis or sociolinguistics). Since semantics, pragmatics, and discourse all concern language, communication, meaning, and con- text it is perhaps not surprising that these three fields of linguistics are those whose definitions seem to be most variable. The variety of papers in this Handbook reflects the full range of variation in definitions of – and approaches to – discourse analysis. The different understandings of dis- course represented in this volume reflect the rising popularity of the field. Although it is not our intent to explain how or why discourse has gained so powerful an appeal for so wide a range of analytical imaginations (see Jaworski and Coupland 1999: 3–5; van Dijk 1997), our own intellectual/academic histories – all in linguistics – reveal some of the different paths that have led us to an interest in discourse. Since each of our paths is different, we here speak in our own voices – in the order in which we arrived at Georgetown University, where we all now teach. Deborah Tannen When I decided to pursue a PhD in linguistics, I held a BA and MA in English literature and had for several years been teaching remedial writing and freshman composition at Lehman College, the City University of New York. Restless to do something new, I attended the 1973 Linguistic Institute sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Michigan. That summer I fell in love with linguistics, unaware that “language in context,” the topic of that Institute, did not typify the field. Inspired by A. L. Becker’s introductory course and by Robin Lakoff’s course on politeness theory and communicative strategies, as well as by Emanuel Schegloff’s public lecture on the closings of telephone conversations, I headed for the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a PhD. There I discovered, along with Robin Lakoff, Charles Fillmore (then interested in frame semantics), Wallace Chafe (then interested in scripts theory and the comparison of speaking and writing), and John Gumperz (then developing his theory of conversational inference). Not for a moment did I think I was doing anything but linguistics. The word “discourse” was not a major category with which I identified. There were no journals with the word “discourse” in their titles. The only journal that specialized in language in context was Language in Society, which had a strongly anthropological orientation. I vividly recall the sense of excitement and possibility I felt when a fellow graduate student mentioned, as we stood in the halls outside the linguistics department, that another journal was about to be launched: Discourse Processes, edited by psychologist Roy Freedle at Educational Testing Service in Princeton. When I joined the faculty of the sociolinguistics program at Georgetown University in 1979, I briefly redefined myself as a sociolinguist. That year I submitted an abstract to the annual LSA meeting and checked the box “sociolinguistics” to aid the com- mittee in placing my paper on the program. But when I delivered the paper, I found myself odd man out as the lone presenter analyzing transcripts of conversation among a panel of Labovians displaying charts and graphs of phonological variation. I promptly redefined what I was doing as discourse analysis – the name I also gave to courses I  Introduction 3 developed in Georgetown. When invited to organize a Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics in 1981, I titled the meeting (and the book that resulted) “Analyzing Discourse,” and invited as speakers linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists, all of whom were examining language in context. During these early years, a number of journals appeared that reflected and con- tributed to the development of the field: Text, the first of several journals founded and edited by Teun van Dijk in Amsterdam, and Journal of Pragmatics, co-edited by Jacob Mey and Hartmut Haberland in Denmark. As the years passed, many other journals were added – too many to name them all, but including Pragmatics, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Discourse and Society, Multilingua, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Narrative Inquiry, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Discourse Studies. The pro- liferation of journals in itself testifies to the upsurge of interest in discourse analysis, and its many incarnations. The changes I have seen in the two decades since I first began defining myself as a discourse analyst reflect the tremendous growth in this area. Work in discourse analysis is now so diverse that “discourse” is almost a synonym for “language” – coming full circle to where I saw such work at the start. Deborah Schiffrin I discovered linguistics and discourse analysis in a very roundabout way. In my senior year of college at Temple University, I read Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life during a course in sociological theory (the last requirement of my major). I was so excited by his work that I went on to read everything else he had written and then decided to continue studying face-to-face interaction in a PhD program in sociology at Temple. There my studies included an eclectic blend of sociological and social theory, semiotics (which included initial forays into structural and transformational linguistics), statistics, and urban studies. While still at Temple, I wrote an article on the semiotics of the handshake, which I boldly sent to Goffman. What followed was an invitation to a personal meeting and then his permission to audit a course with him. (The course prerequisite was to read all his work before the first class!) When my advisor at Temple decided to leave for another position, I had already decided to try to work with Goffman. Ironically, it was Goffman himself who first turned my thoughts toward a PhD in linguistics: during our first meeting, he proclaimed his belief that linguistics could add rigor and respectability to the analysis of face-to-face interaction. Once I was enrolled in the PhD Program in linguistics at the University of Penn- sylvania, I quickly learned that although linguists knew that understanding social interaction was important, the study of social interaction itself had a somewhat peri- pheral role in the linguistics curriculum. What I found instead was Labov’s socio- linguistics: an energizing mix of fieldwork, urban ethnography, variation analysis, and narrative analysis. I gladly immersed myself in the life and work of the faculty and students in the sociolinguistics community: we interviewed people, measured vowels, coded narratives, and wondered (and worried) about how to measure different “styles.” Although many of my teachers published articles about discourse (Bill Labov 4 Introduction on narrative and ritual insults, Ellen Prince on syntax, presupposition, and informa- tion status, Gillian Sankoff on grammaticalization in Tok Pisin), there was little sense of collective interest or of a community of discourse analysts. As it became time for me to write my dissertation, I decided that I wanted to use what I had learned as a linguist to study social interaction. I remember my sense of confusion, though, when I tried to use what I had learned about the systematicity of language, as well as to follow the advice of both Labov and Goffman. Labov pre- sented me with one mission: solve an old problem with a new method. But Goffman presented me with another: describe something that had not yet been described. After spending some time trying to apply these directives to the study of everyday arguments, I ended up focusing on discourse markers. When I joined the faculty of Georgetown in 1982, I was immersed in the study of discourse, even though I was hired as a sociolinguist who could teach pragmatics and speech acts. Discourse analysis gradually filtered into those courses, as did face- to-face interaction, variation analysis, fieldwork, and even my old friend sociological theory. These various interests further jelled when I organized a Georgetown Uni- versity Round Table on languages and linguistics in 1984, with the title “Meaning, Form and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications.” Thanks to the interest in discourse created by Deborah Tannen, and the receptiveness of my sociolinguistics colleagues Roger Shuy and Ralph Fasold, I found – and continue to find – a community of faculty and students eager to pursue a collection of interests similar to my own under the rubric of “discourse analysis.” Heidi E. Hamilton My motivation to study discourse came from my real-life experiences with what Gumperz has called “crosstalk.” After receiving my bachelor’s degree in German language/literature and cross-cultural studies, I worked in the field of international education for four years. Day after day I witnessed misunderstandings related to (what I would later learn were called) contextualization cues, framing, and comple- mentary schismogenesis. I decided it was time to search for a graduate program to study the linguistic underpinnings of these misunderstandings. After culling through numerous graduate catalogues, I discovered that the courses that I had identified as the ones that seemed most intriguing and relevant led to a degree in linguistics at Georgetown University with a concentration on sociolinguistics. So off I went. I was fortunate to begin my studies in 1981. The Georgetown University Round Table focusing on discourse had just been organized by Deborah Tannen. The entire department – students and faculty alike – was infused with a sense of excitement and open-ended possibility regarding the future of discourse studies. It was within this context that I worked as Deborah’s research assistant and took her eye-opening courses on the analysis of conversation. In my second year of graduate study Deborah Schiffrin arrived at Georgetown as a new assistant professor, bringing with her a deep understanding of sociology and an approach to the analysis of discourse that was greatly influenced by Labov’s work on variation. We graduate students were in the enviable position of working with two of the most innovative young discourse  Introduction 5 scholars at the time – a situation which became even more apparent to us a couple of years later. In the summer of 1985, Georgetown University hosted 600 students and faculty who came from around the world to participate in the LSA Linguistic Institute organized by Deborah Tannen. Through the whirlwind of courses, lectures, and discussions, the interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis that we had been steeped in for several years was taking shape and gaining in prominence. Those of us edu- cated at Georgetown kept hearing how very lucky we were to have the opportunity to study “this kind” of linguistics year-round. In retrospect, these comments seem to foreshadow the movement of the study of discourse from the fringes to a more mainstream position within linguistics. Though my initial interest in crosstalk within international contexts never diminished (I came close to writing my dissertation on directness in German conversational style while living in Berlin for several years), I ended up shifting gears to another type of problematic talk – that of Alzheimer’s disease. Little did I know that, with that choice of dissertation topic, I was jumping headfirst into a paradigmatic maelstrom. Being trained as an interactional discourse analyst, I was attempting to study a population that was firmly entrenched in the territory of neuro- and psycholinguistics. Time after time I found myself having to justify (to linguists and to gerontologists/neurologists alike) my attempt to marry the odd couple of interactional sociolinguistics and Alzheimer’s disease. In the process, I learned quite a bit about how to talk across disciplinary boundaries, an enterprise that can be both frustrating and invigorating. In 1990, when I joined the Georgetown Linguistics Department faculty, the program in discourse analysis was already very well established. Graduate students were entering our program better prepared than ever before and were ready to take their study of discourse to a new level. The field was mature enough to be expanded to include the study of “exceptional” discourse, which in turn can illuminate the often invisible workings of more ordinary, everyday discourse. Purpose of the Handbook Our own experiences in the field have led us to the conviction that the vastness and diversity of discourse analysis is a great strength rather than a weakness. Far from its being a liability to be lamented because of the lack of a single coherent theory, we find the theoretical and methodological diversity of discourse analysis to be an asset. We thus envision this volume as fostering the cooperative use – by linguists and others interested in empirically grounded studies of language – of the many theoretical and analytical resources currently proliferating in the study of discourse. Our collection of forty-one articles suggests that the future cooperation which we hope will emerge will respect the many differences that distinguish the approaches reflected here. There are differences in the type of data drawn upon, ranging from political speeches to everyday conversation to literary texts. There are also differences in the types of context considered, including, for example, community, institutional, and ideological contexts. Finally, there is a varied range of theoretical paradigms, such as relevance theory and systemic-functional linguistics, and of methodology, including 6 Introduction interpretive, statistical, and formal methods. As a result, the articles collected here suggest a foundational paradigm for “discourse analysis” that should be broad enough to support a wide range of assumptions, approaches, methods, analyses, and even definitions, of discourse. What are the strengths and advantages of representing so wide a variety of dis- course studies? Why have we collected so broad a set of articles and assumed so wide a scope for discourse analysis? First, the scope of chapters reveals the range of problems that discourse analysis has addressed and can continue to address. These problems range from linguistic phenomena, such as preposing (Ward and Birner) and word meaning (Norrick, Schiffrin), to interdisciplinary phenomena, such as discourse flow (Chafe) and liter- ary pragmatics (Mey), to social problems such as discrimination against minorities (Wodak and Reisigl) and patient compliance with doctors’ instructions (Ainsworth- Vaughn). The problems addressed by the chapters also vary in focus, from historical discourse analysis (Brinton) to discourse and conflict (Kakavá); in analytical scope, from intonation (Couper-Kuhlen) to narrative (Johnstone); and in methodology, from case studies (Linde) to statistical surveys (Biber and Conrad). Second, the inclusion of a range of chapters will immediately highlight analyt- ical parallels among perspectives that are already substantively and methodologically aligned, such as the links among critical discourse analysis (van Dijk), the analysis of discourse and racism (Wodak and Reisigl), and political discourse (Wilson). How- ever, we also hope that readers will discover parallels among areas whose similarities have been overlooked. Included here might be methodological parallels, such as the adoption of ethnographic methods across different institutional domains, as noted in Adger’s on discourse in educational settings and Ainsworth-Vaughn’s on the discourse of medical encounters. Readers may also find that they can apply empirical findings from one area to other areas: for example, insights into information structure (Ward and Birner) may be relevant to doctor–patient communication (Ainsworth-Vaughn) as well as discourse and conflict (Kakavá) or the discursive construction of the self (Harré). Similarly, the analysis of information flow (Chafe) may inform the formal demarcation of discourse units (Polanyi). In a similar spirit, we hope that readers will find thematic parallels among chapters that approach similar domains of discourse in different ways. For example, “the computer” – so pervasive a force in linguistic and social dynamics – enters the Handbook in numerous sections and chapters. It is seen as a method in Edwards’s chapter on transcription, and as both method and resource for data in Biber and Conrad’s quantitative analyses of register variation and in Stubbs’s discussion of corpus analysis. The computer provides a source of both data and genre in Herring’s chapter on computer-mediated discourse, and as an algorithm in Webber’s discussion of computational models of discourse. It is with such patterns in mind, then, that we hope that the range of chapters – and perceived connections among them, many of which we have not described here or even foreseen – will enhance the ability of discourse analysts to deal with a variety of problems and phenomena in ways that are not only internally coherent, but also enriched by multiple connections with one another. A third benefit to the wide scope of chapters is the reinforcement of the synergy between theory and data analysis that is reflected in the pervasive understanding of  Introduction 7 discourse analysis as the examination of actual (not hypothetical) text and/or talk. Although authors have pursued a range of formats within the general topic assigned to them, we have encouraged them – in keeping with the term “discourse analysis,” as well as the strong empirical bent noted above – to illustrate and substantiate general points by drawing upon concrete analyses of real discourse data. This springs from our conviction that theory and data are inseparable and mutually enriching: theoretical insights are needed to move the analysis of discourse beyond instance- specific insights, at the same time as analysis must be grounded in actual instances of language in order to provide both realistic constraints and empirical bases for theory-building. Fourth, though we have not asked contributors to address the need for – or even the desirability of – a single discourse theory, what contributors chose to include and emphasize, the themes and problems they address from the perspective of their specific areas, and the analyses and findings that they report all reveal the richness that needs to be respected and encompassed in discourse theories. We hope that the breadth of articles collected here will provide a comprehensive view of the central issues in contemporary discourse analysis that is both accessible to students and informative to scholars. To this end, we have included articles by leading scholars in the field that provide an overview of their previous work, as well as chapters that survey the history of an area and summarize recent develop- ments. In other articles, firmly established domains are assessed in order to link past approaches and findings with future challenges; in still others, authors develop relatively new fields of inquiry. Thus, we hope that the Handbook will serve not only as an authoritative guide to the major developments of discourse analysis, but also as a significant contribution to current research. Organizational Structure The organization of the Handbook reflects and builds upon the diversity of discourse analysis. Part I, “Discourse Analysis and Linguistics,” locates the field in relation to the different aspects of, and perspectives on, language that typically constitute the field of linguistics. Of particular note is the growing interest in the influence of discourse from the traditional subfields of linguistics: phonology (Couper-Kuhlen), semantics (Martin, Norrick), syntax (Ward and Birner), and historical linguistics (Brinton). In all these chapters, we see scholars looking to naturally occurring dis- course as the site within which to analyze sound, sense, and structure, as well as to understand diachronic processes such as language change. The chapters in this part thus demonstrate how examining utterances in discourse contributes to areas of lin- guistics traditionally limited to levels of analysis lower than that of discourse. The part begins with sound (Couper-Kuhlen’s discussion of intonation) and moves on to different views and levels of meaning (Martin, Schiffrin, Norrick), utterance interpretation (Blakemore), and sentence form (Ward and Birner). It concludes with an historical perspective on discourse (Brinton), as well as two comparative perspect- ives (Myhill on typology, Biber and Conrad on register variation). Not surprisingly, some of the chapters comfortably cross the borders not only between sentence and 8 Introduction discourse, and between form and function, but also between traditionally conceived boundaries within linguistics itself: semantics and pragmatics (Norrick, Schiffrin), syntax and pragmatics (Ward and Birner), phonology and pragmatics (Couper-Kuhlen), and syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (Martin, Myhill, Brinton). In general, then, chapters in part I provide an overview of specific linguistic issues that can be addressed through discourse analysis – how these issues (and their study) can not only reveal something about discourse, but also have an impact on the tradi- tional subfields of linguistics. Such interest reflects not just a methodological shift to empirical data, but also a philosophical shift toward a humanistic linguistics in which language, theory, and practice inform and enrich one another. The interdependence of theory and practice is the theme taken up in the next two parts, part II, “The Linking of Theory and Practice in Discourse Analysis,” and part III, “Discourse: Language, Context, and Interaction.” Our understanding of the term “practice” is slightly different in each of these two parts, roughly divided by whose practices are the focus of attention. The focus in part II is upon analysts’ practices, that is, the methodology of discourse analysis, and its relationship to theory. Collectively, the chapters address such questions as the following: how do the methodological practices through which we collect, represent, and analyze discourse reflect our theoretical assumptions and constructs? How might the kind of data we analyze not only reflect our theories, but also alter them? What tools should we use to analyze specific problems and issues? Just as it is possible to find interesting questions in any discourse that comes one’s way (Chafe 1994: 12), it also behooves us to make use of any methods and theoretical insights that shed light on the discourse we have undertaken to analyze (cf. Chafe 1994: 18). In this sense, the chapter by Lakoff sets the tone for the section, as she shows how a variety of theoretical and methodological constructs can be brought to bear on a single social/linguistic action, apologies. The part ends with Edwards’s examination of an issue that must be addressed, tacitly or directly, by every discourse analyst: the development of a transcription system that is both theoretically motivated and meth- odologically justified. Included in the section are chapters that present retrospective overviews by two of the field’s pioneers (Gumperz, Schegloff), a survey of varying methods and theoretical paradigms found in the analysis of discourse in interaction (Heller), and examples of approaches as varied as Polanyi’s use of formal algorithms to represent discourse structures, Dubois and Sankoff’s use of quantitative methods to analyze discourse, and Stubbs’s examination of computer-based corpus analysis. Although we do not use the term “practice” in the title of part III, “Language, Context, and Interaction,” our focus here is on the interactive contexts in which (and through which) language is used. As a result, our attention shifts to examine the wide variety of ways that interlocutors draw upon the symbolic resources of language to accomplish the many different tasks of social life, including the presentation of self and other in a variety of institutional and interpersonal capacities. This part is further divided into two sections. First comes “Political, Social, and Institutional Domains.” Here we find a range of empirical studies and approaches showing how discourse is situated in different realms of social life and how these contextualized uses help to define interlocutors as members of specific discourse communities. The first set of chapters focuses on relatively public discourse: van Dijk on critical discourse analysis, Wodak and Reisigl on racism, Wilson on political  Introduction 9 discourse, and Cotter on the media. We then move to chapters summarizing research on discourse whose goals vary widely, from Shuy’s focus on litigation, to chapters by Ainsworth-Vaughn and by Fleischman addressing the medical context, to Adger’s chapter on education, and, finally, to Linde’s discussion of the creation of institutional memory. The second section continues to examine the nexus of discourse, context, and inter- action, but focuses on how discourse situated in “Culture, Community, and Genre” is reflected in, and enacted by, the language produced by groups of speakers in particular contexts. The section begins with Scollon and Scollon’s account of the field of intercultural communication. We then move to chapters that survey research which addresses variation by groups of speakers identified by gender (Kendall and Tannen) and age (Hamilton on the aging, Cook-Gumperz and Kyratzis on children). The last three chapters in this section consider modes of communication by discourse type: Herring on computer-mediated discourse, Johnstone on narrative, and Kakavá on conflict. Taken together, this part provides a wide range of empirical studies of discourse that will be useful not only to practitioners of discourse analysis, but also to those engaged in research on the specific domains of social life that are the focus of the analyses. To this point, then, the Handbook begins with discourse analysis within linguistics (part I), continues by examining theoretical and methodological issues of discourse analysis (part II), and presents a wide range of empirical studies of discourse as social and linguistic practice (part III). Since many of the chapters are interdisciplinary in spirit and in application, we end the Handbook by considering how disciplines other than linguistics approach the analysis of discourse. Thus, part IV, “Discourse across Disciplines,” provides an overview of how different disciplines have come to be interested in discourse. The chapters in this part reveal too not only ways that dis- course analysis can be expanded to incorporate insights from other disciplines, but also how questions asked by other disciplines (such as, “What is the ‘self’?”) can be fruitfully addressed through analyses of discourse. The last part begins with Chafe’s analysis of “discourse flow”: an approach grounded firmly in the field of linguistics but which encompasses insights into cognition that can be revealed through analysis of discourse. Next, Harré explores the turn to analysis of discourse in social psychology, followed by Olshtain and Celce-Murcia’s parallel account for language teaching, Tracy’s for the discipline of communication, and Grimshaw’s for sociology. Clark and Van Der Wege, coming from the field of psychology, introduce the notion of “imagination in discourse,” while Mey introduces his analytic method for understanding the discourse of literary fiction. The part, and the Handbook, close with Webber’s presentation of computational perspectives. Conclusion With these varied perspectives in mind, we return, in conclusion, to the question, “What is discourse?” Years ago, Charles Fillmore captured the essence of discourse by presenting the following two sentences, each of which appeared as a sign at a 10 Introduction swimming pool. One sign said, Please use the toilets, not the pool. The other sign said, Pool for members only. Read separately, each sign is reasonable enough. But when the two sentences are read as if they were part of a single discourse, the second sentence forces a reinterpretation of the first that provokes laughter (or, if taken seriously, outrage). Fillmore’s example captures what we might call the gift of discourse: new meanings are created through the relationship between sentences. But it also illustrates what we might call the curse of discourse: since more than one meaning can be created, how do we decide which meaning is intended, is justifiable, and/or makes the most sense? We hope, through this Handbook, to offer a comprehensive sense of the scope and possibilities of discourse analysis, like the gift of multiple meanings. We know that some will see areas of meaning we have omitted, pathways we could have walked down but, due to the usual vagaries of human fallibility, we either did not pursue or were not able to realize. This is the curse of discourse: the directions in which its meanings may fan out are limitless. We have tried to provide a starting point from which the major highways emanate. REFERENCES Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. and Time. Chicago: University of Cambridge: Cambridge University Chicago Press. Press. Fasold, R. (1990). Sociolinguistics of Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Cambridge University Press. Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (1999). The van Dijk, T. (1997). Discourse as Structure Discourse Reader. London and New and Process. London and Thousand York: Routledge. Oaks CA: Sage.  Intonation and Discourse 11 I Discourse Analysis and Linguistics  Intonation and Discourse 13 1 Intonation and Discourse: Current Views from Within ELIZABETH COUPER-KUHLEN 0 Introduction In a millennium year we can expect increased stock-taking of the sort: where have we come from? Where are we now? Where do we go from here? The present contribu- tion is an attempt to do this kind of stock-taking with respect to intonation and discourse. It consists of three millennialistic views organized temporally, starting with the view backwards, then the view of today, and finally a view of the future, near and far. Needless to say, all of these temporal viewings have their reference point at the moment of speaking, that is “now.” Moreover, they are the author’s views: they are anchored deictically to one researcher in the field.1 Although it is difficult to avoid this natural bias, an adjunct like “from within” can at least recognize it as such. 1 Looking Back What was the state of the art in the field of intonation and discourse a quarter of a century ago? Actually there was no such field. At that time most linguists felt that it was possible to have language without intonation and therefore to do linguistics without it. In fact, some even thought it imperative to think of intonation, like phonetics, as being outside of language. Not only do we have influential articles, like Bolinger’s entitled “Around the edge of language” (1964), to remind us of this; it was (and still is) reflected institutionally in the fact that many renowned British universities had (and have) departments of “Linguistics and Phonetics”, the latter subsuming the study of intonation. Where did this idea come from? First, it was clearly promoted by the bias toward written language which has dominated much of twentieth-century linguistics. The fact that writing works perfectly well without intonation seems to bear out the pro- position that we can do without it, and Occam’s razor suggests we should. More- over, the idea found nourishment in the competence–performance dichotomy of the generative paradigm in linguistics. Intonation was easy to relegate to the domain of 14 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen performance because it only made itself apparent when language was used orally. Finally, pace Trager and Smith (1957), intonation did not fit very well into the struc- turalist mould of thinking anyway. Despite Halliday’s (1967) efforts to adduce as much evidence as possible for its distinctive function, there were simply too many occasions when it appeared to be gradient rather than categorical. In fact, this was one of Bolinger’s main reasons for saying that it was “around the edge of language,” and it was Martinet’s (1962) justification for excluding intonation from the functional system of language altogether. So not only was intonation some thirty years ago a linguistic citizen with dubious credentials, if any at all.2 Certainly no one had ever thought of combining the notion of intonation with that of discourse. Intonation was the difference between a sentence of written prose and that sentence read aloud. It was what you had when prose was spoken (see also Abercrombie 1965). This surely had nothing to do with discourse – or if it did, the connection was trivial, since discourse was merely a concatenation of sentences and each of these could be given an intonation on independent grounds. The change has come slowly but surely. By the 1980s it was beginning to be appar- ent to some linguists that there might be a discourse function of intonation which would merit investigation (see inter alia Couper-Kuhlen 1986).3 Brazil, Coulthard, and Johns’s Discourse Intonation and Language Teaching (1980) was instrumental in bringing about this realization. Significantly the impulse to look at intonation in dis- course came from language teachers (or rather, teachers of language teachers). In fact, this was the motivation for most of the early work done on English intonation: Armstrong and Ward’s Handbook of English Intonation (1926), O’Connor and Arnold’s Intonation of Colloquial English (1961), and even Halliday’s A Course in Spoken English: Intonation (1970) are all didacticized texts intended to supplement the teaching of English pronunciation to foreign students. Small wonder then that it was language teachers who, with the turn to communicative skills in language teaching, were among the first to put intonation in this framework. 2 Looking at Now What is the state of the art today? First, there has been a major paradigm shift with respect to the role of intonation in language. Few if any linguists today would wish to deny the fact that intonation impacts with language. It is hard to identify a single catalyst in this change of paradigm. Perhaps it is best seen as resulting from a slow accumulation of evidence which at some point reached a critical mass. But among those who waxed most persuasive the names of Bolinger, Halliday, Ladd, and Chafe should not be missing. Three strands of research in the field of intonation in discourse, growing out of three different methodological approaches, may be identified today, in a state of more or less peaceful coexistence.4 First there is the school of thought which sees intonation as a part of grammar broadly speaking.5 This school actually has quite a tradition. Historically some of the earliest work on intonation tried to establish a correspond- ence between declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentence types and final falling or rising intonation (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996). And there may even  Intonation and Discourse 15 be some linguists who still think along these lines. But where speech act theory has been received, those who wish to see intonation as part of grammar will now usually assume that intonations are illocutionary-force-indicating devices and distinctive in the way they pair with different illocutions. On the American scene, Pierrehumbert’s model of intonation nominally belongs in this tradition;6 it sets up a “grammar” of intonation, with an inventory of six tones or pitch accents, two phrasal tones, and two boundary tones and claims that all well- formed tunes can be generated from this inventory (Pierrehumbert 1980). Recently the intonation-as-grammar approach has addressed the “meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse” (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). The tack taken is to see intonational contours as specifying a relationship between propositional content and the mutual beliefs of participants in the current discourse. One repres- entative study, for instance, attempts to show a context-independent correspondence between a fall–rise pitch accent (L*+H L H%) and a propositional attitude of uncertainty (Ward and Hirschberg 1985; see also Hirschberg and Ward 1992). Here – as in general in the intonation-as-grammar approach – the term “discourse” is used on the grounds that test sentences are read out “in context,” as follow-ups to prior sentences which are said to provide a “discourse context” for the interpretation in question. In a second and no less lively tradition, intonation is thought of as related not to grammar but to information flow, the movement of ideas into and out of active, semi-active and inactive states of consciousness. In Chafe’s work (1979, 1980, 1993), for instance, intonation is said to provide a window on consciousness via the estab- lishment of two different types of unit: the intonation unit and the accent unit. The intonation unit encompasses the information that is in the speaker’s focus of conscious- ness at a given moment (1993: 39); the accent units are the domains of activation for new, accessible and/or given information. Also within this tradition, Du Bois et al. (1992, 1993) have elaborated the notion of transitional continuity between one intona- tion unit and the next, marked by different sorts of terminal pitch contours. The term transitional continuity describes the extent to which “the discourse business at hand will be continued or has finished” (1993: 53). Thus, depending on whether some material is segmented into one or, say, two intonation units and on how these intonation units are linked transitionally to one another, claims can be made about its status in con- sciousness and about whether it is viewed as completed or not. In contrast to the intonation-as-grammar approach, the intonation-and-information- flow approach has paid less attention to type of pitch accent and more attention to issues of unit segmentation and inter-unit continuity. Methodologically – also in marked contrast to the intonation-as-grammar school of thought – it has developed out of close observation of real discourse rather than from introspection and constructed examples. At times, the discourse under observation in the intonation-as-information-flow tradi- tion has been prompted by an experimental set-up (for instance, the Pear Story film in Chafe 1979 or an instructional task e.g. in Swerts and Geluykens 1994). And it has tended to be primarily monologic as well as uniform in genre (e.g. oral narration, instructional monologue). In this sense the information-flow approach is different from the third school of thought, which takes a deliberately interactional approach. The third approach might be called provisionally the intonation-as-contextualization approach, to make it comparable with its contemporaries. It is complementary, rather than contrastive, to the intonation-as-information-flow approach but stands in stark 16 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen contrast to the intonation-as-grammar school of thought. The idea of contextualiza- tion goes back to seminal work by the anthropologist Bateson (1956, 1972). But it was first applied specifically to language and intonation in the second half of the 1970s (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz 1976). Contextualization refers to the fact that lin- guistic signs need embedding in a context in order to be fully interpretable. In this sense all linguistic signs are indexical, not just a small subset of them. Contexts are not given but are said to be invoked, or made relevant, by participants through so- called contextualization cues. The cues may be verbal or nonverbal in nature: they include such stylistic uses of language as code-switching as well as gestural, proxemic, paralinguistic, and prosodic phenomena which accompany linguistic forms (see also Auer and di Luzio 1992). Contextualization cues function by indexing or evoking interpretive schemas or frames within which inferential understanding can be achieved (Gumperz 1982; Tannen 1993). Intonation – by its very nature nonreferential, gradient, and evocative – is seen as a prime contextualization cue in this approach. Yet intonation – in the restricted sense of “pitch configuration” – rarely functions alone to cue an interpretive frame. The same frame may be cued by timing and volume as well. In fact, frames are cued best (most reliably) when their signals are multi- faceted and come in clusters (Auer 1992). Pitch, volume, and timing have in common that they are prosodic: syllable-based auditory effects produced by vocal-fold and air-flow manipulations orchestrated in time (Crystal 1969). This is why in the contextualization-cue approach there has been a subtle shift away from the study of “intonation” to the study of prosody and discourse. The third school of thought thus actually deserves to be called “prosody-as-contextualization cue.” In this approach contextualization cues, and consequently prosodic phenomena, are not seen as accidental or aleatory, nor as automatic reflexes of cognitive and affective states. They are thought to have their own systematicity, but a systematicity which can only be accessed in a context-sensitive fashion. This is why, methodologically, the contextualization-cue approach advocates situated empirical investigation of naturally occurring spoken data. To complement the intonation-as-information flow approach, it focuses less on monologue and more on interaction. In fact, prosodic contextualiza- tion research is grounded in verbal interaction. This has important consequences for the type of claim made and for the way in which the claims are warranted. What do prosodic contextualization cues signal in discourse? Viewed from the perspective of interaction, prosodic phenomena can be thought of as furnishing a format design for turns at talk. This format design helps interactants meet two general sorts of requirement, which Goffman (1981) has dubbed “system requirements” and “ritual requirements.” “System requirements” refer to “requirements that an interac- tion system must have, given that the participants have certain anatomical, physio- logical and information-processing capacities”; “ritual requirements” involve “rules that govern interaction, given that the participants are moral beings who are governed by reciprocally held norms of good or proper conduct” (Kendon 1988: 31f). In other words, prosodic contextualization cues help interactants make inferences about turn- taking and floor management, on the one hand, and about what actions or activities are being carried out, how they are being carried out, and how this might impinge upon participants’ face, on the other. How does one warrant claims about prosodically cued interactional meaning? Here the groundedness of the contextualization-cue approach affords a built-in methodology.  Intonation and Discourse 17 The local display which interactants provide to each other of how they have under- stood a prior turn and of what action is conditionally (or preferentially) relevant in a next turn can be exploited for warranting claims about prosodic signalling in interaction. That is, by viewing prosody as sequentially embedded in interaction, as occasioned by prior actions and occasioning subsequent actions, both embodied in turns with specific prosodic designs themselves, we can develop grounded hypotheses about what its function is from the interactional data and at the same time validate these hypotheses in the interactional data. This is the contextualization-cue paradigm for the study of prosody in discourse (see also Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996). 3 Looking Ahead As work in this paradigm is just getting under way, it is only appropriate to place the following remarks under the heading of the future, albeit it should be thought of as the near future. What substantial gains in the study of prosodic contextualization can be anticipated over the next few years? The answer to this question will be influenced by the extent to which new territory can be explored. Some of this new territory lies beyond the intonation phrase, and some lies beyond intonation altogether. In the following, single-case analyses from these new territories will be used to show what kind of discovery can be expected with more systematic investigation. 3.1 Beyond the intonation phrase As soon as one’s perspective switches from the individual intonation phrase and events within it to sequences of intonation phrases – which is what should naturally happen in the study in discourse – then the question becomes: are all intonation units alike, merely juxtaposed in time, or are there differences between them? If there are differences, what is their effect? Do they create global intonational structure? The groundwork for studying intonational structure beyond the intonation phrase has been laid by Chafe (1988), Schuetze-Coburn et al. (1991), and Du Bois et al. (1993). In particular, the notion of declination unit (’t Hart et al. 1990) – which, as Schuetze- Coburn et al. (1991) show, can be identified in naturally occurring discourse as well as in the laboratory – suggests one answer to the question of global intonational structure. Declination units create structures larger than the intonation unit. When there are several intonation units in a declination unit, they have slightly different shapes, depending on their relative position in the larger structure. The position of a single intonation unit within the larger unit is detectable in its final pitch, but also – importantly – in its initial pitch. It is the way intonation units begin which forms one of the new territiories for exploration beyond the intonation phrase. 3.1.1 Onset level The notion of structure created by intonation phrase beginnings can be operationalized with the category of onset level (Brazil’s “key”; see also Couper-Kuhlen 1986). The onset 18 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen of an intonation phrase in English is defined as the first pitch accent in the phrase. If there is only one pitch accent, the onset is identical with the so-called nucleus, usually defined as the last pitch accent of the phrase. Brazil et al. (1980) suggest that at least three different onset levels can be identified in speech: High, Mid, and Low. These are to be thought of as pitch levels relative to that of a nucleus or onset in the prior intonation phrase. In the absence of a prior intonation phrase, they are presumably related to the speaker’s default pitch range (which is itself related to that speaker’s natural voice range: see below). Brazil has argued that the three different onset levels or keys have distinctive functions in discourse. Yet this statement is based more on introspection and carefully chosen constructed examples than on the analysis of large quantities of naturally occurring data. Whether indeed three levels are relevant in everyday conversational interaction is an empirical question which is still open at this time. Should conversationalists operate with only two, the following fragments suggest that an appropriate labeling might be High and Nonhigh. In interaction there are two possible domains within which an intonational or a prosodic phenomenon may be relevant: (1) the turn or (2) a sequence of turns. In the first, a prosodic phenomenon makes itself apparent relative to surrounding prosody within a speaker’s turn; in the second, a prosodic phenomenon is apparent relative to the prosody of a prior or subsequent turn, i.e. across speaker turns. Onset level is deployed in both domains by conversationalists, as the following extract demonstrates: (1) Kilimanjaro (Ann and her boyfriend Chuck have returned for a visit to Minnesota and are having supper with Ann’s high-school friend, Janet, and her husband Steve. Prior talk has centered on nature trips in the Upper Peninsula (U. P.) of Michigan. Ann is talking here about mountain treks in Scandinavia.) 1 A: there’s some sort of rule though (there) when- when you’re in a cabin, no (gh) in Sweden when you’re in a cabin and someone comes? 5 next day you have to leave. but other- if no one comes you can stay there as long as you want to. (.) 10 so it’s just (like) to get- J: right to keep the process – 15 S: yeah (probably right) J: going so someone doesn’t have to ski for t(h)en days, heh heh heh  Intonation and Discourse 19 20 A: oh ho [ho ho ho J: [without sleep looking for the only open cabin, A: No you end up with a lot of people going camping. but uh 25 (.) J: °mhm° (.) J: {acc} yeah that sounds nice. → There is a place like that in the U. P.; 30 uhm Porcupine Mountains. but they have cabins: up the mountain and you can hike 35 from one cabin and the next and (.) S: [°yeah° J: [perhaps this fall 40 we’ll go do that S: °yeah that’d be nice° J: °yeah° A: °in the fall° °mmm° 45 J: shouldn’t be very crowded then at all {1} it wasn’t crowded when we were there A: heh heh heh J: no: A: mmm 50 J: nothing: in the U. P.; (.) → A: Jane’ll be hiking in the Kiliman↑jaro next week J: {1}wo::w (.) 55 A: mhm °poor Jane should’ve seen her when she went back° (.) °she had so: much stuff with he(h)r° 60 J: yeah, (.) this is a friend from college that was teaching in Du:sseldorf for:: how long; 65 [four years? 20 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen Focusing on Janet’s turn beginning in line 28, we notice that the first intonation phrase yeah that sounds nice has fast speech rate and begins relatively low in her pitch range. The low-pitched onset becomes particularly noticeable when it is contrasted with the next intonation phrase in line 29: There is a place like that in the U. P. Here the first pitch accent on place is noticeably higher than the first accent on yeah in the prior intonation phrase. (The high onset is indicated in transcription with a capital letter at the begin- ning of the line; a line which does not begin with a capital letter consequently lacks high onset.) Line 29 is thus a case of high onset being used within the domain of a turn. We identify the high start in relation to one or more other intonation phrases within that same speaker’s turn. In the case at hand, since there is a transition relevance point (TRP) at the end of line 28, we might wish to say that lines 28 and 29 form separate turn-constructional units (TCUs). If so, we could then state that the intonational format of the second TCU lends it a different status compared to the first one. What is the effect of high onset here? A line-by-line analysis of this fragment reveals that the TCUs in lines 28 and 29 are doing rather different things. Line 28 is respons- ive to the story Ann has just told about staying in mountain cabins in Sweden; its orientation is clearly backwards. Line 29, on the other hand, is more forward-looking. Despite its anaphoric reference with that to the place Ann was talking about, its primary business is to introduce a new topic, only tangentally related to the prior one. It puts this new topic a place in the U. P. on the floor and at the same time projects more talk about it. The intonational formatting of line 29 can thus be thought of as one of the ways this TCU is designed to do its work: it cues the introduction of a new topic. Yet, looking somewhat further in the exchange, line 52 is worth considering. Here Ann appears to be introducing a new topic – there has been no mention of either Jane or Kilimanjaro in the forty minutes of talk preceding this fragment – and yet her onset is not noticeably higher than the onset of the surrounding intonation phrases.7 Is this a counterexample to the postula