Speech acts and Stiles: William B. Stiles. (1992). Describing Talk: A Taxonomy of Verbal Response Modes. Newberry Park, CA: Sage Publications, x + 238 pp.
✍ Scribed by Andrew J. wilson; David Zeitlyn
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1994
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 611 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-5898
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Describing Talk is the result of 20 years of research by William Stiles and his colleagues devoted to the development and implementation of a taxonomy that captures many features of verbal interaction. The book can be split into two parts. The first five chapters contain an account of the taxonomy's development, the conceptual background, and a summary of the literature it has spawned, along with a comparison with other similar approaches. The last six chapters comprise a manual and are devoted to the more practical task of applying the scheme to real corpora and the subsequent analysis of data. This section of the book is supplemented with a computer disc to assist training, and Stiles must be congratulated for providing a comprehensive and user-friendly manual that will satisfy most of the trainee-coder's practical needs.
Quantitative analysis of natural behavior cannot be achieved without some form of systematic categorization. However, each classification scheme is relative to a particular research interest and will thus only be of use to those who share that interest. Stiles' general interest is spoken discourse, but in particular, the ever-changing microrelationships between speaker and hearer that occur during verbal interaction. This book will, therefore, be of interest to those concerned with the analysis of verbal discourse and especially to those with a focus on social interaction as it occurs in discourse. The crucial question for many will be This article has been prepared as part of an ESRC funded project "Kinship and Language: A Computer-Aided Study of Social Deixis in Conversation" (Grant No. ROO0233311). David Zeitlyn is a British Academy Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. We are very grateful for all the help received from these different sources.