The book is the first to apply David Brazil’s Discourse Intonation systems (prominence, tone, key and termination) to the study of a corpus of authentic, naturally-occurring spoken discourses. The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic) is made up of approximately one million words consisting… read more
The study describes a detailed and original piece of research work, investigating a very important genre of human communication, and that is conversation. It provides a definition of the genre of conversation by describing nine features of conversation, namely multiple sources, discourse coherence,… read more
This study extends the theory of local grammars by making the case that local grammars can also be employed to better and more fully describe the patterns of co-selection found in collocational frameworks (Renouf & Sinclair 1991). The term collocational framework was originally used to describe… read more
This study builds on the notion of ‘clause collocation’ (Hunston 2002: 75) and examines the use of this kind of co-selection across a variety of corpora. Hunston (2002: 75) notes that collocating clauses may begin with words and/or phrases which are co-selected. In this study, these co-selections… read more
This paper uses a new computer-mediated methodology, concgramming, to identify the aboutness of a text. Concgrams are the raw products of the concgramming process and consist of up to five co-occurring words irrespective of whether constituency variation (i.e. AB, A*B where * represents an… read more
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… read more
This study examines the relationship between the phraseological characteristics of language and the communicative role of discourse intonation (Brazil 1997). The findings are based on one of the four sub-corpora of the one-million-word Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), which has been… read more
Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the… read more
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… read more
This paper examines the use of two tones by speakers across a variety of discourse types in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE). Specifically, it focuses on the use of the rise and rise-fall tones by speakers to assert dominance and control in different discourse types. Brazil (1997)… read more
The ability to do indirectness, inexplicitness and vagueness is a key component in the repertoire of all competent discoursers and these are commonplace phenomena in written and spoken discourses, particularly in conversations. The study reported in the paper seeks to delineate and exemplify these… read more
Using a corpus of naturally occurring conversations between native and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong, we examine the use of actually in intercultural conversations. The frequencies with which the two groups of speakers use actually and the functions it performs are compared and… read more
This paper presents the findings of a study of vague language use based on a corpus of naturally-occurring conversations between native and non-native speakers of English in Hong Kong. The specific concern of the paper is to describe the use of vague language by the two sets of speakers. The forms… read more
