76 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH
statement about an aspect of the world (or another world): ‘That man is fat’. Of course,
sentences can appear in other forms too. Negatives deny a statement about the world:
‘That man is not fat’. Interrogatives ask a question about the world: ‘Is that man fat?’
Imperatives give a command to the interlocutor: ‘Lose weight!’ Subjunctives point
explicitly to unrealised, speculative or doubtful possibilities in the world: ‘If I were
fat, I’d be happy.’ Exclamatory sentences make an intensive expression about the state
of the world: ‘What a fat man!’
These are simple sentences rather than compound or complex sentences because
they consist of one single clause. A compound sentence consists of several clauses,
chained together with a connective of one sort or another (‘and, then, but, though, so,
because’, and so on). The clauses in a compound sentence can stand independently of
each other, even though the connective might establish a sequential, causal or blameful
relationship between the clauses. Where one clause depends grammatically on another,
the multi-clause sentence is then complex.
Sentences with subordinate clauses (‘The man, who was fat, could barely walk’)
or relative clauses (‘She told me that he was fat’) are chained together with subordi-
nating conjunctions (‘that’) or relative pronouns (‘who, which’). In complex sen-
tences, one clause is independent, and the others are dependent on that main clause.
Sentences can be multiply embedded, with an alpha (main) clause, and then beta, gamma,
delta, and further Greek-labelled clauses to the point of comedy: ‘The man who ate
the huge pie which was full of steak that had been cooked by his mother who hadn’t
realised really how huge he was already, which was quite a mistake, given the fact that
her son’s health was suffering as a result of his poor diet, was fat.’
Sentences with a great deal of embedded subordination and a great deal of syntactic
complexity are very common in legal language, where concepts need to be explicitly
connected without the possibility of ambiguous reference across sentences. Surprisingly,
complex subordination is also very common in relaxed spoken discourse, where
speakers also include lots of meta-talk in order to help the listener keep track (for
example, ‘as I was just saying’, ‘so he – that is, the one I was talking about a second ago’,
and so on). In spoken discourse, conjunctions and relative pronouns often also introduce

subordinations and then the speaker never returns to the main clause level, as the con-
versation drifts (see B5). Participants in speech tolerate such incompleteness with ease.
When we say that clauses are ‘fully realised’, this describes their prototypical form.
We often say things like ‘See you later’ (lacks subject), ‘Nice-looking boy, on your left’
(lacks predicate), ‘Faster’ (lacks subject and predicate), but the fact that we can pro-
duce and understand these utterances suggests that there is general agreement not only
that something has been omitted but also exactly what that something is.
Systemic-functional grammar
A particular approach to grammar that makes the function of the sentence the primary
concern categorises clauses on the basis of what they do. This is systemic-functional
linguistics (see, primarily, Halliday and Matthiesson 2004). For example, a clause
expresses a process (expressed in a predication) involving one or more participants,
whether human or not (carried by the subject and complement), in a circumstance
or situation or manner (in the adjunct). This approach is not a purely syntactic one,
since deciding what sort of process and what sort of participant are involved will often
SYNTAX 77
depend on the meaning of the clause in context. In functional grammar, then, semantics
and pragmatics are implicated in syntax. This marks a divergence from many other
approaches to grammar that are purely syntactic, but it brings advantages, especially
where the grammar is being used as the basis for an applied analysis.
For example, all predications are either material (they enact some concrete thing
in the world), human (they express behaviour, cognition or speech), or metaphysical
(they indicate some existential or relational process). In systemic functional grammar,
these functions of processes can be arranged in a system as shown in Figure B4.1.
Material processes express either something being done (material action) or a
happening (material event). Where there is an action, if there is a wilful conscious-
ness as the agent (such as a person), then the action can either be intentional or sim-
ply something that occurs to that consciousness (a supervention). So ‘I deliberately
broke the glass’ is a material action intention process; ‘I accidentally dropped the glass’
is a material action supervention process; ‘The glass broke’ is a material action event

process. Material processes have an essential participant role of actor involved, plus
an optional participant of goal. In the first two examples here, ‘I’ is the actor, and ‘the
glass’ is the goal. Other, less direct participants that could appear in material processes
include recipient, client, initiator, attribute or scope.
Behavioural processes express predications which involve both physical material
and mental processes, but which will not easily fit exclusively into either category alone.
For example, ‘He was breathing heavily’, ‘I dreamed a dream the other night’, ‘She
frowned’. Such processes tend to have only one participant, the behaver, though an
indirect participant in the form of the behaviour itself could also feature (‘She smiled
a crooked smile’).
Mental processes proper more usually have two participant roles attached,
making them more commonly transitive in form. The participants are the senser role,
Material action intention process
Material action supervention process
Material action event process
Behavioural process
Mental perception process
Mental affect process
Mental cognition process
Verbal process
Relational attribution process
Relational identification process
Existential process
Intention
Supervention
Behavioural
Material
Mental
Verbal
Relational

Existential
Action
Event
Intensive
Possessive
Circumstantial
Attribution
Identification
Perception
Affect
Cognition
Figure B4.1
Functional processes
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78 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH
typically in subject position, and the phenomenon that is sensed by the process. Mental
perception processes involve pure sensing (‘I saw three ships’, ‘It tasted fantastic’). Mental
affect processes involve feeling (‘She touched the rough bark’, ‘Lucy had the strangest
feeling’). Mental cognition processes involve aspects of thought and recognition (‘He
wondered about her love for him’, ‘She concluded that it was impossible’).
Verbal processes could be regarded as a sub-type of mental processes, in that
they are the externalised form of interior will, though in the most recent version of
systemic-functional grammar they are treated separately. Any speech or writing, or
any other communicative exchange (email, semaphore, telepathy) comes under this
category. The primary participant roles are thus the sayer and the target/recipient.
Of course, where the hearer or reader of the message is not the intended target of the
message, we might want to distinguish them as the receiver rather than the target –
for example in an overheard conversation, or reading someone’s diary. The material
that is expressed in a verbal process (usually in reported speech realised by a subordinate
clause rank-shifted to complement position) is a participant termed verbiage. In ‘He

told me to return the next day’, there are the participant roles of sayer (‘He’), target
(‘me’) and indirect verbiage (which directly would be ‘Come back tomorrow’). Processes
can be embedded in one another, of course. ‘She overheard him telling me to come back
tomorrow’ features a verbal process embedded in a mental perception process.
Relational processes concern attribution and identification. The former requires
the participants of carrier and attribute, where the attribute is ascribed to the
carrier: ‘The band was really good’, ‘Louise has a brand new Mini’, ‘The book is on
the third shelf up’. Each of these express slightly different aspects: the first involves an
intensive attributional mode, the second a possessive attributional mode, and the third
a circumstantial attributional mode. Similarly, relational identification processes –
where the identifier participant identifies the identified participant – can be
expressed in each of these modes: ‘Peter is the professor’ (intensive identification, with
‘Peter’ as the identified), ‘The Mini is Louise’s car’ (possessive), ‘Tomorrow is my birth-
day’ (circumstantial). A simple (though not fool-proof) test is that the participants in
identifications can be reversed without damage to the identification process, whereas
attributions cannot: ‘The professor is Peter’ (where ‘Peter’ has become the identifier),
‘Louise’s car is the Mini’, ‘My birthday is tomorrow’.
Lastly, existential processes account for all those situations in which there is an
existent participant alone: ‘It rained’, ‘There was a speech at the end’. In this second
example, the material after the existential process acts as a circumstance. In general,
circumstances are realised in adjuncts. Circumstances are a different sort of partici-
pant in the process, answering the following questions:
extent and location – where, how long?
manner – how?
cause – why?
accompaniment – with what?
matter – what about?
role – what as?
Altogether, the functional model of language provides a powerful and comprehensive
tool for the analysis of language use in the world.

CONVERSATION 79
CONVERSATION
Our development of discourse will focus upon two classic areas of conversation ana-
lysis: the turn-taking system and topic.
Turn taking
One of the most well-known frameworks within conversation analysis is the turn-
taking system. This model was originally devised by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson
(1974) and is based upon the norms of spoken American English. They argue that
speakers follow an unwritten rule that only one speaker will speak at a time. If there
is any cross-over between speakers then this will be quickly and efficiently rectified.
They detail a systematic process of how a change in speaker turn takes place:
1 The current speaker will select the next speaker
2 The next speaker will self-select
3 The current speaker will continue speaking
These options are presented in hierarchical order: the first option overrides the second,
self-selection option, and self-selection overrides the third option of the current
speaker continuing.
A basic premise behind the model is that speakers are attuned to particular places
where speaker change can be taken. They call these points transition relevance places
(TRPs). Some good examples of TRPs include pauses that occur at a clause or a sen-
tence boundary, falling intonation, or body language signals such as the relaxation of
a hand movement or sitting backwards.
Speaker change and the signalling of a transition relevance place can also be
indicated by what are known as adjacency pair sequences. These are defined as a set
of two utterances whereby uttering the first pair part sets up an expectation of a
second pair part. There are many adjacency pair sequence categories, including the
following:
q question–answer
q greeting–greeting
q invitation–acceptance

q farewell–farewell
The second parts of these pairs above can be identified as preferred responses. If we
ask a question, we expect an answer to be given. If we offer a greeting or a farewell
we expect to be offered one in return. If we give an invitation, a preferred response
would be an acceptance. However, dispreferred responses may also occur, for
instance, if someone refuses to answer a question, if you greet someone and they do
not reciprocate the greeting, if you offer an invitation but the invitee declines, or if
you say goodbye to someone and they do not reply.
The performance of dispreferred responses, such as needing to decline an invita-
tion, is heavily interlinked with politeness principles (see B3). The manner in which
speakers utter dispreferred responses often involves the use of linguistic politeness
strategies if the respondent wishes to pay attention to face and avoid being impolite.
If not, then dispreferred responses can often be perceived as impolite behaviour.
B5
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80 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH
Compare the first example below, where a dispreferred response is uttered to an
invitation with face redress, with the second example of a dispreferred response with-
out face redress:
Example 1
S1: Do you want to come to my party on Saturday?
S2: Oh (-) I’m really sorry I’d love to be there with you but erm my parents are
coming over
Example 2
S1: Do you want to come to my party on Saturday?
S2: No I don’t
Even if responses are dispreferred, adjacency pair sequences are still completed.
However, if someone refuses to respond to a question, greeting or farewell, then there
is no closure or completion of the sequence, potentially signalling impoliteness (or
possibly humour) by a refusal to participate in turn-taking norms.

The performance of adjacency pair sequences may often be more complex than
the above constructed examples show us. Speakers will frequently insert material
before completion of adjacency pairs. Such instances are known as insertion
sequences. Consider the following example taken from a recording in a telephone
sales office:
1 Receptionist: Good afternoon {company name}
2 Sales rep: Oh good afternoon (.) could I speak to Mr Jones please?
3 Receptionist: May I ask who’s calling please?
4 Sales rep: Yes certainly it’s Steve Smith from {company name}
5 Receptionist: I’m sorry (.) Steve?
6 Sales rep: Steve Smith
7 Receptionist: One moment and I’ll put you through
Whilst we have completion of the initial adjacency pair greeting sequence in a pre-
ferred, reciprocal manner in lines 1–2, the first pair part of the sales representative’s
question in line 2 is responded to not with an answer but with another question. The
role of questioner thus shifts here – until the new adjacency pair sequence has been
completed in a preferred way, the sales representative is not going to get his initial
question sequence completed. There is then a further question sequence initiated
by the receptionist, as she has not heard the caller’s surname properly. The sales
representative completes this question–answer sequence by repeating his surname.
The initial question sequence from line 2 is then finally answered at line 7 with two
embedded insertion sequences in between.
Some researchers have used the Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson model as the basis
of their own empirical studies and amended or developed it as necessary. Many have
questioned the principle of the one-at-a-time floor. For example, Zimmerman and
West (1975) produced a study which focused upon what they termed ‘irregularities’
with the model, which they classified as overlaps and interruptions. Overlaps are
occasions where there is slight over-anticipation by the next speaker, whereas inter-
ruptions represent a violation of the one-at-a-time turn-taking system. Speakers
CONVERSATION 81

can be witnessed engaging in simultaneous talk, sometimes for prolonged periods,
as they battle for the conversational floor. This is simply not accounted for by the
one-at-a-time model.
Holmes (1995: 52) aptly describes an interruption as a ‘disruptive turn’ in the
discourse. In some speech events, interruptions will occur regularly. For example,
in political broadcast interviews, where the turn-taking system is very competitive
and turns are highly valued, interruptions frequently occur.
Can you think of other contexts where interruptions frequently occur because the
turn-taking is competitive and turns are highly valued?
In addition to disruptive turns, simultaneous talk can also play a supportive
function in conversational interaction. Edelsky (1981) coined a distinction between
a single floor (the one-at-a-time model) and what she termed a collaborative floor,
where speakers talk simultaneously, though unlike interruptions the purpose of this is
to engage in the joint production of talk. She found that there were periods within
university faculty meetings where the accepted turn-taking norms shifted from the
single to the collaborative floor and then back again.
Similarly, Coates (1996) has categorised an all-together-now conversational
floor (ATN) and a one-at-a-time floor (OAT). In the all-together-now floor, Coates
argues that supportive simultaneous talk is very frequent. She characterises this as
instances where speakers talk at the same time, producing co-constructed utterances.
The voices of different speakers combine together, resulting in the joint production
of discourse. Coates has observed this as a frequently occurring feature in research
which she has carried out with all-female friendship groups.
To illustrate the all-together-now collaborative floor in action, we will examine
an extract taken from an informal conversation between Jill and Sue, two speakers
whom we have come across already in A5. On this particular occasion we have used
Coates’s convention of inserting dotted lines in the transcription (see B12) to indi-
cate simultaneous talk (these lines are analogous to a musical score in which several
instruments play at once).
Jill and Sue are drinking coffee in Jill’s living room

.
They are talking about a man who
lives by them whom they both frequently see in the neighbourhood
.
1 Sue: he spends his life in the shops=
2 Jill: =yeah (.) yeah I was gonna say whenever I go down to the

3 Jill: village [I always see you can bet your life you see him ]
4 Sue: [always in the shops there you know (xxx) ]

5 Jill: [there (.) I suppose he’s lonely isn’t he ]
6 Sue: [he’s in there then he’s in the bread shop ]

7 Jill: cos he’s on his own like=
8 Sue: =I ex-expect so yeah
Based upon the conversational structure in lines 3–4 and 5 –6 it is clear that a cat-
egorisation of the one-at-a-time turn-taking system simply does not account for what