122221 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper (2020W)

'Reading and understanding spoken language'

You may well know about differences between speech and writing, but have you ever really read transcriptions of actual spoken exchanges, let alone analyse them? In this seminar you will come to understand what is really going on in exchanges between speakers. More specifically, we will be looking at discourse-pragmatic markers – items such as 'just', 'like', 'well', 'you-know', and so on. They used to be considered meaningless fillers. Now they are regarded as complex, multi-functional items which are produced under cognitive control and which are crucial for maintaining social relationships as well as an order to the the unfolding discourse. Many are multi-functional. This seminar will unravel those complexities and functions by analysing lots of examples of a range of such items. Analysing the many discourse functions of pragmatic markers is both challenging and rewarding for it provides for you not only new insights and understandings about social interaction using language but also precise and discriminating analytic skills.

To this end, we will use the SPICE-Ireland Corpus (Kallen and Kirk, 2012), where each item functioning as a discourse-pragmatic marker is already annotated. So a further aim of this semianr is to analyse those annotated items in terms of the best prevailing theory or explanation for that item's functional behaviour. Because such markers are so universally useful, it will be expected that the behaviour in this corpus of relatively standardised Irish English will fall in line with distributional findings elsewhere, but a further goal is always to hunt out any Irishisms in the data.

The written assignment will extend the analytic skills and new-found understandings found from the regular analyses in class and apply them to new datasets or to new pragmatic markers.

Student requirements and assessments
• Students will be expected to make regular presentations in class: each dealing with analyses of annotated items such as 'well', or 'like'. These will be accompanied by a power point and/or a handout containing the examples to be discussed, for use in class by all students. Each presentation will be worth 10% of the total mark.
• Then, in discussion with the tutor, students will choose a topic for their written assignment of c. 7,500 words (excluding any data appendices). The written assessment will be worth 70% of the total mark

Learning Objectives
By the end of the module, using data for English, students will be well drilled in analysing transcribed spoken corpus data, and in analysing discourse-pragmatic items with regard to their complex multi-functionality. They will also have acquired an understanding about what a corpus is, and how it can be beneficially used, and above all a fresh (first?) real insight into the complexities of sponataneous speech where planning and production effectively occur simultaneously .