Discourse Functions of Recurrent Multi-word Sequences in Online and Spoken Intercultural Communication
The present study investigates the discourse functions of recurrent multi-word sequences in computer-mediated communication (CMC) and face-to-face (FTF) interaction by a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents over a one-year period of intercultural ex
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Introduction
Kjellmer (1994) suggests that “[t]here is no doubt that natural language has a certain block-like character. Words tend to occur in the same clusters again and again” (p. ix). Previous research has indeed highlighted the fact that both written and spoken discourse contains a large proportion of highly recurrent sequences of words, reflecting the phrasal nature of the English language (Adolphs 2006; Biber et al. 1999; Greaves and Warren 2010; Nation and Webb 2011; Schmitt 2010; Wood 2010; Wray 2002). Biber et al. (1999), for example, illustrate that two-word (e.g., I think), three-word (e.g. a lot of) and four-word (e.g. what do you think) recurrent sequences made up nearly 45 % of the spoken conversation and approximately 21 % of the academic written discourse they studied (the cut-off was set at a frequency of 20 occurrences per million words). Erman and Warren (2000) also calculated that recurrent multi-word units constituted 58.6 % of the spoken corpus and 52.3 % of the written discourse analysed in their study. In addition, Foster (2001) analysed the transcripts of unplanned speech of English native speakers and found that 32.3 % consisted of recurrent multi-word sequences, while in Hill’s (2001) study up to 70 % of language (spoken and written discourse) comprised fixed expressions. Despite the variation in the reported percentage of multi-word sequences encountered in language in these studies, they all indicate an observable tendency for particular items to co-occur in the written and spoken discourse of both native and non-native speakers of English, and for these co-occurrences to make up an appreciable proportion of authentic language use. There has been a burgeoning field of research looking at multi-word sequences in different registers and settings, identifying different kinds of sequences and
Y.-L. Lin (*) School of English, University of Nottingham, University Park NG7 2RD, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013: New Domains and Methodologies, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_6, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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describing how they are employed in a particular context, such as academic writing (Chen and Baker 2010; Simpson-Vlach and Ellis 2010), university classroom teaching (Biber et al. 2004), small group teaching contexts such as tutorials and seminars (Walsh et al. 2011), textbook discourse (Chen 2010; Wood 2010), and spoken interview discourse (Adolphs and Durow 2004). Although multi-word sequences used in various contexts have been extensively studied, relatively few have focused on the sequences in an intercultural setting and further compared their use in two important registers, namely computer-mediated communication (CMC) and spoken interaction. The research of intercultural discourse increasingly represents a particularly important endeavour as it offers insights into language variety which reflects so
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