16.1688, Review: Discourse Analysis: Taboada (2004)

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Subject: 16.1688, Review: Discourse Analysis: Taboada (2004)

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1)
Date: 26-May-2005
From: Michael Busch < Michael.Busch at utoronto.ca >
Subject: Building Coherence and Cohesion 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 14:07:06
From: Michael Busch < Michael.Busch at utoronto.ca >
Subject: Building Coherence and Cohesion 
 

AUTHOR: Taboada, Maria Teresa 
TITLE: Building Coherence and Cohesion
SUBTITLE: Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish
SERIES: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 129
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-31.html


Michael Busch, Program in Second Language Education, Department of 
Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in 
Education of the University of Toronto

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.

REFERENCES

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (Eds.). (1995). Genre knowledge in 
disciplinary communication: Cognition/culture/power. Northvale, NJ: 
Erlbaum.

Bahktin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V. McGee, 
Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

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.

Dubois, B. L. (1987). A reformulation of thematic progression typology. 
Text, 7(2), 89-116.

Fries, P. H. (1995). Themes, methods of development, and texts. In R. 
Hasan & P. H. Fries (Eds.), On subject and theme: A discourse functional 
perspective (pp. 317-359). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Eggins, S., & Slade, D. (1997). Analyzing casual conversation. London: 
Cassell.

Flowerdew, J. (2002). Genre in the classroom: a linguistic approach. In A. 
M. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the classroom (pp. 91-102). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: 
Longman.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to 
functional grammar (3rd ed.). London: Arnold.

Hasan, R. (1978). Text in the systemic-functional model. In W. Dressler 
(Ed.), Current trends in textlinguistics (pp. 228-246). Berlin: Walter de 
Gruyter.

Hasan, R., Cloran, C., Butt, D., & Williams, G. (1996). Ways of saying, 
ways of meaning: Selected papers of Ruqaiya Hasan. London: Cassell.

Hyland, K. (2002). Genre: Language, context, and literacy. Annual Review 
of Applied Linguistics, 22, 113-135.

Johns, A. M. (2002). Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives. 
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking science: Language, learning, and values. 
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Love, K. (2000). Personal response or critical response in secondary 
English discussions: A linguistic analysis. Australian Review of Applied 
Linguistics, 23(1), 31-52.

Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward 
a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243-281.

McCarthy, M. (2000). Mutually captive audiences: Small talk and the genre 
of close-contact service encounters. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk (pp. 
84-109). Harlow, England: Longman.

Minsky, M. (1977). Frame-system theory. In P. N. Johnson-Laird & P. C. 
Wason (Eds.), Thinking: Readings in cognitive science (pp. 355-376). 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, C. (1994). Genre as social action. In A. Freedman & P. Medway 
(Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 23-42). London: Taylor & Francis.

Mitchell, T. R. (1957/1975). The language of buying and selling in 
Cyrenaica: A situational statement. In T. R. Mitchell (Ed.), Principles of 
Firthian linguistics (pp. 167-200). London: Longman.

Nassaji, H., & Wells, G. (2000). What's the use of triadic dialogue? An 
investigation of teacher-student interaction. Applied Linguistics, 21(3), 
376-406.

Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. 
J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce & W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading 
comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, 
artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 33-58). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society. Written 
Communication, 14(4), 504-554. 

Schank, R., & Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and 
understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1984). Opening up closings. In J. Baugh & 
J. Sherzer (Eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics (pp. 69-
99). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Stenström, A. (1994). An introduction to spoken discourse. London: Longman.

Stoddard, S. (1991). Text and texture: Patterns of cohesion. Norwood, NJ: 
Ablex.

Ventola, E. (1987). The structure of social interaction: A systemic 
approach to the semiotics of service encounters. London: Francis Pinter.

Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a sociocultural practice and 
theory of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Michael Busch is a doctoral candidate at the Ontario Institute of Studies 
in Education of the University of Toronto where he is writing a thesis on 
the role of oral genres in second language group work. His academic areas 
of interest are discourse analysis, sociocultural theory, and systemic 
functional linguistics.





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