No. 13 the Shakespeare Dictionary Database

Report from ongoing work on conversationalphrases in English Karin AijmerLund University Conversational phrases can be grouped according to the specific functions they are used to perform. One group consists of social formulae.Theseare used when we perform speech acts of a social or polite na-ture such as greeting, thanking, apologiziig, requesting, offering.Social formulae are of different k ids .In the request 'can you openthe window please', please shows explicitly that the utterance is in-tended as a request What is of interest is that also the introductory canyou identifies the utterance as a request. Can you is however differentfrom other phrases because it cannot stand alone as a request. Insteadit is a part of a syntactic formula which includesan unspecified verb phrase.A formula may be more or less futed in form and occur with a highor low degree of pakteming. The degree of patterning is one way inwhich speech acts can differ from each other as can be illustrated withexamples from thanking and requesting.Acts of thanking were typically expressed by formulae and showedconsiderable patterning in the large discourse. As to requests theirformulaic character was often more hidden, and it was difficult to knowif a particular utterance (or part of an utterance) should be regarded asformulaic.In all300 examples of gratitude phrases were investigated in the Lon-don-Lund corpus of spoken English. Only a small number of patternswas represented in the material (formed on the basis of thank you and111a1ks).It is typical of formulae that they have to be performed on particu-lar social occasions and at specific points in the larger conversationalinteraction.In order to analyse thanks, the situations were classified ac-cording to the antecedent event causing gratitude and according to sit-uation. Acts of thanking were for instance analysed as the second partof compliments, well-wishes, blessings, congratulations, greetings. Thanking was especially frequent after offers (48 exx). In 33% of theexamples thank you was used indirectly at the end of the larger con-versation as a closing signal either alone or as a part of a larger formula(thank you for that most interesting contribution).Requests tumed out to be more difficult than acts of gratitude to de-scribe systematically. One reason was that they were often ambiguousbetween a more literal interpretation and the interpretation as a requestfor something. Thus out of 647 examples of requests 33% were ex-pressed indirectly. Both questions and declarative sentences could beanalysed as request patterns. 93% of the questions contained a formulawith a modal auxiliary (most frequently could or would). Phraseology in spoken English Ben@ AltenbergLund University In July 1987 a new project called 'Phraseology in Spoken English' wasstarted at the Survey of Spoken English, Lund University. The aim ofthis project is to make a detailed investigation of recurrent word com-binations in the London-Lund Corpus with special emphasis on collo-cations and prefabricated expressions that reflect the speech process andthe organization of discourse. The work will be carried out in threemain phases: Phase 1: Collection of datarehieval of recurrent word combiitions in the corpus;elimination of irrelevant (ie. phraseologically uninteresting) combinations on the basis of structural criteria;production of concordances and frequency lists: Phase 2: Lexico-gnmmatical analysisgrammatical classification of the resulting combinations in terms of word class, phrase category and clause function with the aid of automatic tagging and parsing programs;estimation of the collocabiiity and idiomaticity of the combiia-