Cohesive chains and speakers' choice of prominence

Martin John Warren

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingChapter in an edited book (as author)Academic research

Abstract

This paper describes lexical cohesion across participants in a discourse, and across discourse events, and the additional contribution made by speakers’ choices of prominence in the cohesive chains. The choice of prominence is made to communicate what is perceived to be situationally informative in the local context of interaction (Brazil 1985 and 1997). This study describes a connection between a speaker’s choice of a lexical or non-lexical word in a cohesive chain and the speaker’s choice of prominence and, in doing so, offers a partial answer to the question Hoey (1991:17) asks of Winter (1974 and 1979): ‘under what circumstances do we use one (cohesive device) rather than the other?’. It also describes how the selection of prominence across speakers in a discourse can signal divergence and convergence between them. Lastly, the paper discusses the pedagogical implications of the study with regard to English language learning and teaching.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLexical cohesion and corpus linguistics
PublisherJohn Benjamins Pub. Co.
Pages45-63
Number of pages19
ISBN (Electronic)9789027222312, 9789027289711
ISBN (Print)9789027222473
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009

Publication series

NameBenjamins current topics
Volume17

Keywords

  • Cohesive chain
  • Discourse intonation
  • Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English
  • Prominence
  • Job placement interview
  • Lexical cohesion

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