Discourse Approach to Turn-taking

2  LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1

What is Discourse?

A sentence cannot be fully analyzed without referring to the physical, social, and

psychological world in which it takes place. Discourse refers to the totality of all these

elements interacting (Cook 1989). Grammatical form and its function do not always

correspond, but work in harmony in discourse meaning (McCarthy 1991: 106);

therefore, discourse analysis requires a close look at language organization beyond the

sentence-level. Speech and written text are given fuller meaning and pragmatic

coherence is established when they are viewed as discourse. Additionally, in

conversation, which is an excellent example of the interactive and interpersonal nature

of communication in spoken discourse (Brown 1994), the time dimension should be

taken into account for analysis, since participants jointly contribute to the context of

interaction.