Nele Pöldvere
What's in a dialogue? On the dynamics of meaning-making in English conversation
2019 | 100 p. | English

ISBN: 978-91-88899-49-1, 978-91-88899-50-7

Spoken dialogue is the most common use of language, but it is also incredibly complex and dynamic. It puts on full display the intricate ways in which speakers coordinate their contributions to make sense of the world and negotiate social relations with each other. A fruitful method for studying spoken dialogue is to consult language corpora based on spoken, conversational data. However, the shortage of such corpora has long been an obstacle. This thesis provides a novel and empirically grounded account of the dynamic negotiation of meaning in spoken dialogue including the constructional properties and socio-cognitive processes that play a role. It also reports on the compilation of a new corpus of spoken English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, which together with the first London–Lund Corpus forms the basis of the investigations carried out in the thesis.