Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ÁGNES DELI Interpersonality and Textuality in Discourse

106 Ágnes Deli Naturally, the discourse process involves a considerable amount of shared knowledge on the participants' part, both non-linguistic and linguistic. The shared knowledge, as a matter of fact, is a contextual factor influencing both the interpersonal and the textual levels. It pertains to some real world experiences, as well as to social conventions, a constituent of which, I assume, is cooperative behaviour (cf. Grice, 1975). Conversational data show that cooperative behaviour involves familiarity with certain rhetorical structures, i.e. conventional patterns of text, too. Writing and participating in conversation are very different activities from the point of view of the technical realisation. However, written text and conversation show a great deal of similarity in terms of the organisational perspectives of textuality. In the following I will focus on two rhetorical patterns: the General-Particular and the so-called Problem-Solution (Winter, 1986, 1992, 1994; Hoey, 1983, 1994), which are originally considered as processes of written text. In terms of its textual organisation natural spoken discourse reveals a great deal of similarity to written text. It is obvious that several textual patterns also occur in spoken discourse and these can work even across speaking turns. Assuming that behind the phenomenon there is some shared knowledge of the textual patterns we can say that these contribute not only to the coherence of the conversation but also to the interpersonal realisation of the discourse, in other words, they work at both the textual and the interpersonal levels. For illustration let us see some further conversational extracts. 15. A: I gather you had problems getting # getting back into the country last night. B: We got back fairly late 'nd got held up for an hour at Heathrow waiting for our luggage because some of the security people # [a] # thought that the Archbishop's cross # [we] was a machine gun. So that kept us waiting. 16. A: You see, [ts] a couple of callers so far used the word commitment, so women must have a real commitment to these careers which, clearly, you have. B: You have to. You have to prove it's not so much that you have to prove yourself better than the men, but you have to prove your commitments that you will stay at it, you will not run away and become pregnant, or, you know, become very emotional at every little outburst, you have to say I've got to be tough. You have to become one of the lads.