Spoken Discourse

This book is a full overview of current theories and methods of analyzing spoken discourse. It includes both the more traditional approaches of pragmatics, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking, and more recently developed approaches such as mediated and multimodal discourse analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis.

Rather than treating these perspectives as competitors, Rodney Jones introduces a framework based on principles from socio-cultural theory in which different approaches to spoken discourse can complement and inform one another. It regards spoken discourse as operating through a complex multimodal collection of tools that mediate all aspects of social life including social actions, social identities and social relationships. It also considers the ways in which spoken discourse is itself often mediated by various technological tools such as telephones, broadcast media, and, increasingly, digital technologies.

The book is for use as a textbook in advanced courses in discourse analysis and language in social interaction, and will also be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields including linguistics, sociology, media studies and anthropology.