Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish(129 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

The goal of this book is to examine some of the resources that speakers employ when building conversations. These resources contribute to overall coherence and cohesion, constructed interactively as speakers build on each other's contributions. The book furthers the study of coherence at all levels, from surface structure to internal organization. Typical dialogues are considered to be coherent by those participating, and often by those observing as well. However, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes a dialogue or a conversation coherent, and how that coherence is achieved dynamically. Similarly, cohesion, as an internal property of togetherness in a text, is usually considered to be present in conversation. Coherence and cohesion together give us texts and conversations that we recognize as such. In this book, I present a study of coherence and cohesion. The study is cross linguistic, based on a corpus of task-oriented conversations between dyads of two speakers each. The corpus contains conversations between two native speakers of English on the one hand, and two native speakers of Spanish on the other. The interlocutors have conflicting agendas that cover a two to four week period; their task is to agree on an appointment within that time. The conversations are viewed as collaborative efforts, yielding texts built interactively by the speakers. My analysis is concerned with the discourse characteristics that make the dialogues hold together as texts.

Table of Contents:
1. List of figures; 2. List of tables; 3. Abbreviations and Conventions; 4. Preface; 5. 1. Introduction; 6. 2. A framework for the analysis of speech genres; 7. 3. Data description; 8. 4. The thematic structure of dialogue; 9. 5. Rhetorical relations in dialogue; 10. 6. Cohesion in dialogue; 11. 7. The generic structure of scheduling dialogues; 12. 8. Conclusions and consequences; 13. Appendix A: Speech act inventory; 14. References; 15. Index

Review :
It is an important addition to the study of genre, being one of only a handful of comprehensive empirical studies that examine the formal aspects of an oral genre. [...] 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. Building Coherence and Cohesion is a rich source of information on key discourse-organization features. The book is a welcome addition to research in both systemic functional linguistics and contrastive discourse analysis. It offers valuable insights into theme identification and progression, rhetorical structure theory, Halliday and Hasan's work on cohesion, and functional discourse segmentation. The reader will find no shortage of frequency counts, examples, and extensive reviews of the literature for each main discourse feature. In conclusion, it should be of interest to readers seeking an in-depth investigation of the issues, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Taboada's book undoubtfully is a highly interesting contribution to the field of discourse analysis. Its strength, amongst other things, follows from the innovative combination in studying genre in its oral form and, in doing so, by means of a contrastive analysis between Spanish and English. I am sure that specialists in the field of genre theory will agree that her study adds quite some thought-provoking insights to the existing body of research. Indeed, the book offers a panoply of important findings which open new horizons for future research.