Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-oriented Dialogue in English and Spanish

Building Coherence and Cohesion by Maite Taboada presents a detailed account of selected aspects of the discourse of scheduling dialogs, which are conversations between two people trying to arrange a meeting. These dialogs, which had been recorded in a laboratory as part of the JANUS project, were held in English and in Spanish, totaling 1380 conversations (881 in English and 499 in Spanish). Of these, the author selected 60 for the investigation, 30 for each language, and carried out all analyses by hand. The general goal was to reveal some of the discourse features that interactants use to build coherence and cohesion in scheduling dialogs in English and in Spanish. In order to meet this goal, four major features (or " tools, " page 1) were chosen for analysis: theme, rhetorical structure, cohesion, and staging. The choice of these characteristics was motivated by what the author describes as a wish to " study connexity and coherence at all levels " (page 1), and it reflects the major theoretical orientation of the study, systemic functional linguistics. Chapter 1 is the introduction to the study, outlining the questions that were explored in the investigation. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the theoretical framework , drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin to lay the groundwork for a definition of genre as relatively stable speech events. The remainder of the chapter deals with the notions of register and generic structure from a systemic functional perspective. Chapter 3 presents details of the collection and handling of the data. Chapters 4 through 7 form the core of the study, each focusing on one discourse feature. The initial discourse feature covered in the book is theme (chapter 4). This refers to the Hallidayan notion of the first ideational element of a clause (Halliday 1985); ideational means an element that is part of the transitivity system (the verb and its complements). The remainder of the clause is called rheme. Theme has been studied in systemic functional linguistics as a means of describing how text and talk flow from one clause to the next. Theme can be classified in a number of ways, the main one being in relation to markedness. A marked theme occurs when an ideational element other than the subject appears in initial position in the clause (e.g., yesterday in Yesterday, he said he'd be here). The first part of the chapter is dedicated to comparing the different …