Tag Archives: preferred and dispreferred responses Mum and Ruksana. By: Dur-e-Nayab Khan. It is clear from the start of the conversation that a mother and her teenage daughter are having an open argument. When Mum introduces the topic, her agenda is to get her daughter to sympathize and apologize for her behaviour. Rukhsanaâs response to.
One of the main challenges when approaching the study of pragmatic phenomena, such as speech acts, in large corpora is that they cannot, for the most part, be identified automatically. This is due to the fact that they may, on the one hand, be expressed in a potentially infinite number of ways and, on the other hand, that the forms which are prototypically associated with a specific speech act (e.g. sorry) may also be attested with other functions (e.g. a sorry state). As a consequence, studies of speech acts using a corpus linguistic methodology have tended to be based on smaller (annotated) corpora, to resort to manual forms of analysis, or to adopt eclectic approaches, focusing for instance on specific speech act verbs. In this study, we show how collocational analysis can be used to facilitate the extraction of the speech act of apology by distinguishing forms with the illocutionary force of an apology from other uses of the same forms.
To this end, we use the Birmingham Blog Corpus (BBC 2010), a diachronically-structured corpus comprising 630 million words of both blog posts and comments from the period 2000 to 2010. This corpus is searchable through the WebCorp Linguistâs Search Engine (WebCorpLSE) software built by the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) at http://www.webcorp.org.uk/blogs. Given the nature of our data, the results, in addition to demonstrating how the speech act of apology can be identified in a corpus of this size, provide insights into the areas in which bloggers and their readers see a need for apologising as well as into the distribution and clustering of specific types of apologies in blog posts versus comments.
In the following, we will begin by discussing the nature of apologies and previous studies in the field (âThe Speech Act of Apologyâ section). We review the challenges entailed by corpus-based analyses of speech acts in the âCorpus Pragmatics and the Study of Speech Actsâ section, before presenting the data and methodology employed in the current study (âDataâ and âIFID Selectionâ sections). Starting out from a list of prototypical Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs), we will devise a collocational profile of each of the forms studied (âIFID Selectionâ section) to then move to an investigation of their shared and unique collocates (âCollocational Analysisâ section). This will allow us to determine to what extent apology IFIDs overlap in their function and tend to co-occur with a similar set of words (shared collocates). At the same time, we will consider ways in which these forms differ from each other in terms of the company they keep (unique collocates). Taken together, these different steps in our analysis will allow us to illustrate a methodological approach that can be used to narrow down attestations of linguistic forms to those performing a specific speech act, such as that of apologies, and therefore to open up new avenues for future speech act research in large corpora.
Socially, people find it difficult to say ânoâ to requests or invitations. In spoken interaction (face-to-face), we orient to this difficulty through the design of our responses. An agreement response (preferred) is characteristically said straightaway with minimal gap between request and response. A disagreement response (dispreferred) is characteristically delayed through silence and by prefacing the disagreement turn with tokens such as âwellâ, âuhmâ and âuhâ or with accounts as to why the recipient cannot accept the request or invitation. The question for this article concerns what occurs when requests or invitations are made via texting. The results from 329 texting interactions showed that if responses to a request or invitation were delayed by more than 1âminute, it was much more likely be a ânoâ rather than a âyesâ response (pâ<â0.001). In other words, preferred responses were sent quickly; dispreferred responses were delayed. Understanding texting as social interaction is increasingly important as the range of communicative options continues to widen (e.g. Facebook, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Instant Messaging (IM), email). This study shows preference organisation similarities between spoken interaction and texting with texters orienting to social norms concerning delayed responses. Further research is needed to understand in what contexts a person might choose one communicative medium over another.
Keywords Cell phones, conversation analysis, dispreferred responses, invitations, mobile phones, preference organisation, preferred responses, requests, texting, time delay
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