MSc common room casual conversations : a lexico-grammatical longitudinal study of a discourse community in formation
This thesis provides a developmental description of the language used by an academic discourse community. Casual conversations of six post-graduate students, native speakers of English, were recorded in the Applied Linguistics common room in Edinburgh University throughout the 1991-92 course. The central hypothesis is that as common knowledge of the course and shared interpersonal knowledge increase over time, there is an increase in implicit language (an in-group code and other implicit reference features) heavily dependent on the context for its meaning. The lexico-grammatical analysis shows that the increase in knowledge over time is associated with an increase in implicit reference, but that topic is also a major influence on the form of reference. The language of course topics is more implicit than that of non-course topics. Course topics have a higher density of non-cohesive non-modified definite referring expressions with specific referents in the assumed background knowledge. Course topics also have more metonymical proper nouns, vague nouns and general words with particular pragmatic meaning. Vague expressions, ellipsis, incomplete sentences, and humorous utterances containing conversational implicature
Cutting, Joan
MSc common room casual conversations : a lexico-grammatical longitudinal study of a discourse community in formation. This thesis provides a developmental description of the language used by an academic discourse community. Casual conversations of six post-graduate students, native speakers of English, were recorded in the Applied Linguistics common room in Edinburgh University throughout the 1991-92 course. The central hypothesis is that as common knowledge of the course and shared interpersonal knowledge increase over time, there is an increase in implicit language (an in-group code and other implicit reference features) heavily dependent on the context for its meaning. The lexico-grammatical analysis shows that the increase in knowledge over time is associated with an increase in implicit reference, but that topic is also a major influence on the form of reference. The language of course topics is more implicit than that of non-course topics. Course topics have a higher density of non-cohesive non-modified definite referring expressions with specific referents in the assumed background knowledge. Course topics also have more metonymical proper nouns, vague nouns and general words with particular pragmatic meaning. Vague expressions, ellipsis, incomplete sentences, and humorous utterances containing conversational implicature
common room casual conversation lexico_grammatical longitudinal_study discourse community formation provide developmental description language_use academic_discourse community casual conversation post graduate student native_speaker_english record applied linguistics common room edinburgh university throughout course central_hypothesis common knowledge course share interpersonal knowledge increase time increase implicit language group code implicit reference feature heavily dependent context meaning lexico_grammatical analysis show_increase knowledge time associate increase implicit reference topic also major influence form reference language course topic implicit non course topic course topic higher density non cohesive non modified definite refer_expression specific referent assume background_knowledge course topic also metonymical proper noun vague nouns general word particular pragmatic meaning vague expression ellipsis incomplete sentence humorous utterance contain conversational implicature