Cohesion as interaction in ELF spoken discourse

Abstract

Hitherto, most research into cohesion has concentrated on texts (usually written) only in standard Native Speaker English – e.g. Halliday and Hasan (1976). By contrast, following on the work in anaphora of such scholars as Reinhart (1983) and Cornish (1999), Christiansen (2011) describes cohesion as an interac­tive process focusing on the link between text cohesion and discourse coherence. Such a consideration of cohesion from the perspective of discourse (i.e. the process of which text is the product -- Widdowson 1984, p. 100) is especially relevant within a lingua franca context as the issue of different variations of ELF and inter-cultural concerns (Guido 2008) add extra dimensions to the complex multi-code interaction. In this case study, six extracts of transcripts (approximately 1000 words each), taken from the VOICE corpus (2011) of conference question and answer sessions (spoken interaction) set in multicultural university con­texts are analysed in depth by means of a qualitative method.

Keywords

• Anaphora
• Cohesion
• Discourse
• ELF
• Interaction