| Masters Dissertation - "The
complete consort dancing together..."
'The complete consort dancing
together...': Interaction in E-mail.
This dissertation sets out to investigate the applicability of Halliday's grammar of interpersonal meaning, Mood, to functional language description. A function tagging system based on the Mood system is developed from a systemic-functional model in Eggins (1994). The system comprises three fundamental binary choices, called first-level choices and five subsequent second-level choices. The first-level choices are derived from speech roles and commodities (Halliday 1994) along with the inclusion of initiating or responding moves (Eggins 1994) . Using a corpus formed of e-mail messages extracted from Internet discussion list archives, whole messages and their constituent clause complexes are tagged by function. Results are tabulated for the number and types of functions performed by messages and speech acts. E-mail messages are analyzed in detail and tendencies in function use are described. The system's inadequacies and strong points are discussed and suggestions are offered on further improvements. Its inability to account for indirect speech acts is examined in detail and system modifications are described. The dissertation concludes with an assessment of the tagging system and suggestions for its possible application. Keywords: language description,
speech function tagging, corpus, MOOD, interpersonal meaning
TALC 98, Oxford, UK Poster Session- Paper- "Corpus Based Language Description in ESP Course Design" Poscript versions: |