Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

Science Research Council between September 1970 and August 1972, which set out to
examine the linguistic aspects of teacher/pupil interaction’ (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975,
p. 1). This project was thought to form a useful starting point for developing a model for
the analysis of conversation which might be able to answer such questions as (ibid., p. 4):
how are successive utterances related; who controls the discourse; how
does he do it; how, if at all, do other participants take control; how do the
roles of speaker and listener pass from one participant to another; how are
new topics introduced and old ones ended; what linguistic evidence is
there for discourse units larger than the utterance?
These questions had proved difficult to answer by observing ordinary conversation, since
this is (ibid., pp. 4–5):
the most sophisticated and least overtly rulegoverned form of spoken
discourse…. In normal conversation, for example, changes of topic are
unpredictable. Participants are of equal status and have equal rights to
determine the topic…. [In addition] a speaker can always sidestep and
quarrel with a question instead of answering it, thus introducing a
digression or a complete change of direction…. Thirdly, the ambiguity
inherent in language means that people occasionally misunderstand each
other; more often, and for a wide variety of reasons, people exploit the
ambiguity and pretend to have misunderstood:
Father: Is that your coat on the floor again?
Son: Yes. (goes on reading)
A-Z 133
It is clear that in this example, the son either does not grasp that his father’s utterance is
meant to function as a command for the son to pick up his coat, or he is exploiting the
interrogative mood of his father’s utterance, pretending to believe it to be meant as a
straightforward question, to which the son provides a straightforward answer.
In a classroom with the teacher at the front of the class engaged in ‘talk and chalk’
teaching, these aspects of natural conversation would be likely to be minimized; the
speech would follow more clearly definable patterns, the teacher would be in overall
control, and attempts at communicating would be genuine, with little, and resolved,
ambiguity. It would, however, be necessary to determine which aspects of the structure of
classroom discourse were truly linguistic, and which were pedagogical (Sinclair and
Coulthard, 1975, p. 19).
The descriptive system sought was to be functional, and should be able to answer
questions about whether an utterance is intended to evoke a response, is itself a response,
marks a boundary in the discourse, and so on. It should, furthermore, fulfil Sinclair’s
(1973) four criteria (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975, pp. 15–16):
A. The descriptive apparatus should be finite, or else one is not saying anything at all,
and may be merely creating the illusion of classification….