Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

This comprehensive and varied collection reviews over twenty years of research into Spoken Discourse by the Birmingham group, which allows, for the first time, a developmental perspective. It combines key papers (now unavailable) which formulated the main outlines of this approach, with new research. Bringing together recent theories of discourse structure with a new and detailed analytical framework, the book makes recent developments available in a historical context. The articles are comprehensive, ranging from the theoretical to the highly applied and the range of texts and applications reflects the wide interests of the Birmingham group. The focus of the book varies from intonation and lexis, through evaluation in the EFL classroom, to problems in disputed police records of witness statements. Examples are taken from literature and language classrooms, telephone conversations, disputed witness statements and corpuses of spoken English, demonstrating the practical applications of discourse analysis tolanguage teaching, literary stylistics and forensic linguistics.