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

Abstract

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.

Corpus research on spoken academic discourse

“…One matter for EAP students, practitioners and researchers to consider is how taking turns is achieved in a seminar, tutorial or groupwork. Evison's (2013) corpus study of turn-openers in common academic encounters reveals a regularity of both tutor and student interaction in this regard. With turn-openers such as 'right' and 'okay' more frequent in academic discourse than conversation, Evison (2013) argues that, across considerable sized corpora, they are characteristic of academic discourse.…”

“…We also take that position in this chapter: speaking and listening go hand in hand. Research on turn-taking and collaborative features of spoken interaction increasingly point towards the understanding that talk, spoken interaction, verbal fluency, is not a solo project; it can only be jointly achieved (McCarthy, 2010;Evison, 2013).…”

“…Studies which examine turn-taking in university on a large scale are somewhat sparse (e.g. Evison, 2013). In Csomay's (2007) study, turns between students and teachers in US academic contexts are evenly distributed.…”

A Text Mining Discovery of Similarities and Dissimilarities Among Sacred Scriptures

“…Text mining is an approach that combines several fields of research and also several software tools. According to (Ignatow and Mihalcea, 2017), this is a technique that has begun to develop in social sciences such as anthropology, communication (Ezzeldin and El-Dakhakhni, 2020), economics (Levenberg, Pulman, Moilanen, Simpson and Roberts, 2014), education (Evison, 2013), and psychology (Sklad, Diekstra, Ritter, Ben and Gravesteijn, 2012). Social scientists have spent many decades studying transcribed interviews, newspaper articles, speeches, and other forms of textual data.…”

Vague category markers as turn‐final items in Irish English

“…Important in the exegesis of the cline of phenomena at the turn boundary have been corpus‐based studies of aspects of the turn, which provide an additional quantitative perspective on, for example, how often listener response at a TRP consists of a backchannel utterance, a non‐minimal response or an extended turn (Tao ; O'Keeffe & Adolphs ; McCarthy ; Iyeiri et al. ; Evison ). Access to corpora has meant that it is possible to compare aspects of the turn across varieties of English.…”