Jane Evison

A corpus linguistic analysis of turn-openings in spoken academic discourse: Understanding discursive specialisation

Recent corpus linguistic (CL) investigations of academic discourse (both written and spoken) have tended to use easily excisable lexical items and/or grammatical forms to determine what is ‘special’ about the language of academia, and to compare and contrast particular disciplines or subjects with each other. This study takes a different approach to characterising academic talk – beginning with position rather than item. It is predicated on the well-established tenet that a considerable amount of discursive activity occurs in the extremely elastic and highly charged openings of turns, a position in the discourse that is the nexus of textual and interpersonal obligation, risk and potential. It therefore presents the results of the systematic analysis of the openings of 13,337 turns taken by tutors and students in a range of common pedagogic encounters in the humanities and social sciences. A set of ‘core’ turn-openers is then identified so that further detailed contextualised analysis can be carried out, which includes comparison with a benchmark corpus of casual conversation. The results suggest that academic speakers start their turns with recognisably conversational items that show subtle, but regularised, discursive specialisations related to their reflexive relationship with the academic encounters in which they are uttered and which they help to create.

Turn openings in academic talk: where goals and roles intersect

This study uses Corpus Linguistic (CL) techniques to explore multiple turn openings in conjunction with comparative measures of turn-initial priming (the proportion of occurrences of a form that are turn-initial). Using a benchmark corpus of casual conversation as a point of comparison, six frequent items which have a particularly strong affinity with the turn-opening position – mhm, mm, yes, laughter, oh, no – are identified in a corpus of 250,000 words of spoken academic discourse as key indices of what makes this talk ‘academic’ in respect of role/goal-driven behaviour in interactionally asymmetrical encounters. The paper concludes by arguing that there should be a greater focus on tutor reflection on roles, goals and discourse as part of tutors’ professional development.