Reseña: María T. Taboada. 2004. Building Coherence and Cohesion. Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (Michael Busch)
Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg
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Reseña de María T. Taboada. 2004. Building Coherence and Cohesion.
Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
De: Michael Busch <Michael.Buschutoronto.ca>
Información distribuida por Linguist List:
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Introduction
Maria Teresa Taboada's "Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-oriented
dialogue in English and Spanish" is rare empirical study of a oral
genre. Studies of this kind, particularly within the field of systemic
functional linguistics (Butler, 2003; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004),
have been oddly missing, so much so that it has become a standard aside
for reviewers of genre to acknowledge a lack of research on oral genres
(Hyland, 2002). In practice, within SFL and in other fields, genre has
come to mean either the written mode (Bhatia, 1993; Flowerdew, 2002;
Johns, 2002) or a sociological artefact (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995;
Miller, 1994; Russell, 1997). To be sure there do exist some notable
studies of oral genres within a systemic functional tradition--Ventola
(1987), Lemke (1990), Eggins and Slade (1997), Love (2000), Nassaji and
Wells (2000), and now Taboada's work. Her book takes a significant step
forward in understanding the formal aspects of oral genres by examining
the relationship between textual features (Halliday and Hasan, 1976;
Stoddard, 1991) and the generic structure of a "task-oriented dialogue."
SUMMARY
In the first chapter, Taboada lays out five research questions:
1. How can we characterize the texture of spoken discourse?
2. Are the tools developed for the analysis of written texts suitable to
the study of spoken discourse?
3. What are the effects of staging and generic structure on texture and
cohesion?
4. Are there significant differences in the realization of texture between
English and Spanish, given a constant genre?
5. How can we best characterize the sequencing regularities found in the
dialogues?
In addition to the research questions, she states that her goal is
to "study connexity and coherence at all levels" (p. 1) by analyzing
three aspects of text: thematic progression, "logical coherence" of
propositions, and cohesion. Her basic analytical approach is driven by
Halliday's textual metafunction, although the study relies on Rhetorical
Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988) for an analysis of
relationships between propositions. In her introduction Taboada writes
that she has designed a study with a emphasis on how well the "tools" of
written text analysis--thematic progression, rhetorical structure
theory, and cohesive devices--work to identify an oral genre.
Eventually, as her second and third research question ask, she intends
to understand how coherence and cohesion shape and define an oral genre,
and this is, in fact, the major focus of the book.
In the second chapter, "A Framework for the Analysis of Speech Genres,"
she reviews the topic of speech genres, giving an obligatory nod to
Bakhtin's speech genres (1986), explaining the systemic functional
concept of register as comprised of the contextual variables of field,
tenor, and mode, and then discussing how they combine to form a genre.
She briefly reviews the literature concerning generic sequencing or
stages, citing Mitchell's seminal 1957 study of market transactions and
Hasan's generic structure potential (1978; Hasan, Cloran, Butt, and
Williams, 1996).
Structure in the form of staging is important for Taboada because she
believes it is a defining characteristic of genre. Moreover, she equates
generic structure most closely with Halliday's textual metafunction,
thus making coherence and cohesion central to her analysis. In order to
place genre in a theory of mind, Taboada quickly drops Bakhtin for
cognitive psychology to explain genre's role in discourse as similar to
frames (Minsky, 1975), scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977), and schema
(Rumelhart, 1980). Genres operate as internalized "knowledge structures"
residing in the mind, representing the external world, providing
background knowledge and serving as information storage. Throughout the
book genres are referred to as memory devices.
In chapter 3, "Data Description," the particulars of the study design
are presented. Data used for the study were taken from a computer
translation project at the University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon.
Sixty dialogues were selected from the project's corpus of 1380
dialogues. Participants consisted of English and Spanish speaking adults
assigned to work in pairs with someone of the same language background
to complete an activity in which they needed to schedule an appointment
with each other despite conflicting schedules. The procedure for data
collection consisted of participants performing the task while sitting
at a computer terminal.
They were not allowed to face their partner directly and could only be
heard by pressing a keyboard button and speaking into a microphone.
Participants were unable to use gestures or materials, such as a
calendar or other written text.
Taboada reports the first of three major analyses in Chapter 4, "The
Thematic Structure of Dialogue." The chapter begins by reviewing theme
in systemic functional linguistics (textual, interpersonal, and
ideational) and then contrasting theme with the notion of topic, going
to great lengths to explain why theme and topic are not necessarily the
same. Next, English and Spanish are compared concerning general
placement and frequency of theme. Taboada explains that English has
relatively fixed word order while in Spanish it is possible to drop the
subject (ellipsis) or use a verb-subject word order. The Spanish use of
ellipsis later becomes an issue in coding for theme when she tries to
determine marked and unmarked themes. Analysis of the data showed that
English themes tended to be participant or circumstance subjects, but
for Spanish there was a preference for processes in the subject position
followed by circumstances and participants. Taboada notes a large number
of circumstance themes in subject position due to the nature of the
task, which required extensive talk about times and dates. In the latter
sections of Chapter 4 she describes her method for determining thematic
progression and presents the results as frequency counts of various
types of progression based on a classification developed by Dubois
(1987). One unexpected finding was the use of new themes in the
dialogues. Taboada attributes this to the use of finites as themes in
Spanish and a methodological problem in the way the language "encodes
person and number" (pp. 98-99) in the finite form. Unlike English,
Spanish participants did not use a pronoun subject. In the chapter
summary she also attributes new themes to "a lack of planning inherent
to spoken language" (p. 102).
Perhaps the most significant results of her analysis of thematic
progression was not finding a relationship with genre. Applying Fries
(1995) hypotheses about the experiential content of themes, Taboada
concludes, based on her data, that because of the occurrence of new
themes, there was no correlation between generic sequencing,
experiential content, and thematic progression.
Mann and Thompson's (1988) rhetorical structure theory (RST)
(http://www.sfu.ca/rst/) forms the basis of analysis for Chapter 5, "
Rhetorical Relations in Dialogue." The focus of the chapter is on what
Taboada calls "coherence relations," defined as the "underlying
relations among the propositions in a text" (p. 106). After a literature
review of coherence relations, RST is explained in detail. For those not
familiar with RST, her treatment of it is clear enough to understand her
methodology. The originators of RST claim that it is a descriptive
theory of text organization in which propositions are classified
according to the writer or speaker's intentions to create some effect in
the reader or hearer. Analysis involves coding and grouping of
propositions according to nuclei and satellites, and then tying them
together into increasingly larger units of text span, schema, and
structures. Taboada discusses the pros and cons of using RST for spoken
discourse, such as the ability to handle both extended monologic and
dialogic text and the difficulty in applying RST categories of relations
to interpersonal forms of communication. The frequency of RST relations
for English and Spanish were roughly equal overall based on two separate
analyses at the level of individual turns (each turn coded for relation)
and the dialogues taken holistically with the coder identifying
relations (regardless of turns).
Chapter 5 ends with a listing of the discourse markers found in the
dialogues and how they interact with RST relations. The number of
discourse markers appearing within each relation is presented. Taboada
concludes from her data that no difference between languages occurred
and that relying on discourse markers to identify discourse relations
will not work because discourse markers do not always indicate a relation.
Chapter 6, "Cohesion in Dialogue" starts with an explanation of cohesion
and a brief overview of the various types. Taboada discusses grammatical
and lexical cohesion and how they form cohesive chains within text.
While she analysed the various cohesive resources for both languages,
her main focus is cohesive chains, chain interaction, and cohesive
harmony. Cohesive chains are defined as two cohesive ties mediated by a
third intervening tie. Chain interaction refers to relationships between
separate chains running through the text, usually in regard to
grammatical elements. Cohesive harmony is the result of separate
cohesive chains in a relationship of reference of some kind (e.g.,
extension) to each other.
Cohesive harmony is measured as either high or low depending on the
degree of similarity among the token elements. Results showed that the
ratio of cohesive elements to words were equal in English and Spanish.
Both languages employed similar types of cohesion with lexical cohesion
being most frequent. This is attributed to the repetition of dates and
times in the scheduling task. The average number of cohesive chains per
dialogue for both languages was about four and there was little
interaction between them. The chains seemed to appear and disappear with
new ones having little or no link to others, thus creating low cohesive
harmony.
The topics of theme, clause relations, and cohesion in Chapters 4, 5,
and 6 are the major analyses of the book, but Taboada offers one final
extensive study, which examines generic staging in the form of speech
acts. Taboada proceeds by dividing her texts into three generic stages,
opening, task performance, and closing, and the smaller sub-stages of
date proposal, place proposal, acceptance, rejection, and reason.
Analysis of the data showed a generic formula for the scheduling
dialogues as (p. 188): (Opening) ^ Proposal ^ [(Rejection ^ New
Proposal)]n ^ Acceptance ^ (Place Proposal) ^ Closing
Following the segmenting of her texts into generic stages, she
identifies 23 speech act categories based on "generalizations extracted
from the corpus" (p. 189) and then assigns one or more of these acts to
one or more utterances (defined as "semantic dialogue units) found in
the text. Frequencies of speech acts for English and Spanish are
reported along with a brief description of sequences of speech acts
occurring within each stage. Subsequent sections of the chapter discuss
the relationship between generic staging and the three pillars of the
book: thematic structure, rhetorical relations, and cohesion. Taboada
presents the types of themes occurring in each stage and explains how
thematic progression appeared only in the task-performance stage,
usually as new progression patterns.
As for rhetorical relations, there were not many to be found in the
opening stages of the dialogues. Most appeared in the task performance
stage with non-volitional causes, results, solutionhood, and evaluation
being most common. No information is given about where these fit into
the various substages (date-proposal, place proposal, acceptance, etc.).
Cohesion is analysed in terms of cohesive chains, which coincide with
staging, particularly within the substages of task performance where new
chains begin. In addition, non-interacting chains indicate a transition
between stages.
The final chapter, "Conclusions and Consequences" is a brief summary of
the work presented and discussion of possible implications for
theoretical linguistics, second language learning, and computational
linguistics. Taboada suggests that her findings may contribute to more
insight into "how people solve tasks and the linguistic structures they
use" (p. 210), help second language learners and task designers identify
register variation in learning activities in the hopes of more accurate
production, and provide support for applications in computational
linguistics concerning ambiguity resolution, text generation of genres,
and information retrieval.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
In her last chapter, Taboada actually understates the significance of
her work. It is an important addition to the study of genre, being one
of only a handful of comprehensive empirical studies that examines the
formal aspects of an oral genre. Her study fulfills a need for a closer
examination of current genre theory as it concerns assumptions about
spoken discourse and in a way that takes into account dialogic text. One
theoretical assumption challenged by Taboada, perhaps the most
significant finding of her work, is that each generic stage has its own
unique register. Taboada found "no correlation between stage of the
conversation and experiential content or thematic progression" (p. 101).
Her findings also draw attention to a method of determining generic
stages advocated by Eggins and Slade (1997) in which the analyst
identifies each stage first without any prior analyses of register
variables. Taboada found that generic stages may be predicted based on
the appearance of new cohesive chains, thus offering one potential
method for determining sequencing without resorting to simply sizing up
of the text and marking off stages based on intuition. While her method
is not yet proven, it at least offers a direction for future research.
Taboada has also incidentally stumbled into areas of weakness of genre
theory that seem to go unnoticed. One of these is her inability to
account for data involving interpersonal relationships among the
participants. Because she was intent on studying what she perceived as a
strictly instrumentalist task, any communication that was social in
nature (e.g., small talk, jokes, greetings, or what she refers to as
non-sequiturs), was, in her own words, "discarded" from analysis. RST
analysis, in particular, could not handle such talk and should have been
suspected as flawed. To her credit she does list methodological problems
with RST. It is worth keeping in mind McCarthy's (2000) criticism of
systemic functional linguistics: "Genre models based predominantly on
transactional achievements... cannot account for participants'
commitment to relational talk even when such talk may appear to be
unmotivated" (p. 84).
Another weakness in genre theory emerges in how the dialogues are
described as consisting of three stages: opening, task performance, and
closing. Taboada states "This tripartite organization has been found in
most instances of spoken interaction" (p. 181). She goes on to cite
others (e.g., Stenström, 1994; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Clark, 1996)
who have come to the same conclusion. The problem of a claim of
tripartite organization is its lack of explanatory power. To say that an
oral genre has a beginning, middle, and an end tells us nothing about
its generic structure. Consideration of her own formula for what she has
called a task-oriented dialogue should have brought her to ignore such a
simplistic scheme. Notions like tripartite organization is exactly why
there is a need for more in depth research on oral genres, particularly
those that are complex and naturally occurring.
As with any study there were limitations to Taboada's design. First,
data was collected under conditions that were experimental rather than
naturally occurring. The constraints imposed on the participants in
having them not face each other and only being able to communicate
through a keyboard button and microphone created an activity in which
interpersonal talk was discouraged. Second, participants were not
allowed to use mediating objects such as calendars, date books, or other
literature that would normally be used in a scheduling activity. Use of
a mediating object would have surely influenced the production of themes
and cohesive elements. Third, Taboada did not measure interrater
reliability of her coding for cohesion or RST categories, although she
is certainly not alone in ignoring what in educational research is
standard practice.
A final criticism of the study is Taboada perpetuates a common
perception in cognitive psychology that genres reside in the minds of
the participants rather than "out there" in the task itself and in the
social environment. As already mentioned, Taboada sees genre as a kind
of memory device that one calls upon when the situation arises. She does
not consider the possibility that genre is a tool used to mediate
cognition (Wells, 1999). If genre is seen as a tool, then it implies
that the task itself has inherent qualities influencing the outcome
(path of sequences) of the activity as well as the language produced. Is
it the participants who determine the generic stages through interaction
or are the stages inherent in the activity itself? The fact that she
found English and Spanish speakers produced nearly identical textual
features except where contrasting language differences existed show that
the task demands were stable regardless of participants or language
background. Another issue is the influence of cultural differences in
interaction, but Taboada did not entertain this potential effect on
genre production.
In closing, the value of Taboada's study can be found in its extensive
review of the literature on genre, coherence, and cohesion, its methods
of text analysis for determining thematic progression and cohesion, and
its results concerning cohesive chains and generic sequences. Her study
will no doubt influence the direction of genre research in the future
because of its methodology and findings.
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Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre: Language use in professional
settings. London: Longman.
Butler, C. S. (2003). Structure and function: A guide to three major
structural-functional theories: Part I: Approaches to the simplex clause
(Vol. 1). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Eggins, S., & Slade, D. (1997). Analyzing casual conversation. London:
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Communication, 14(4), 504-554.
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understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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99). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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