Investigating Intimate Discourse ─ Exploring the Spoken Interaction of Families, Couples and Friends

Knowledge of intimate discourse, that is, discourse between families, couples or close friends in private, non-professional settings is an underrepresented aspect of linguistic literature and particularly the (applied) corpus linguistic literature.

In this book Brian Clancy uses a corpus linguistics approach to investigate the specific linguistic characteristics of a discourse domain – in this case intimate discourse. He aims to contextualise authentic discourse, albeit with a predominantly Western, English-speaking focus, by drawing on real contexts of use, in addition to providing the critical theoretical knowledge required to access the area. The book lays out relevant approaches used in the analysis of language variation, and then goes on to suggest a framework that may be used to study this type of discourse. The practicalities of assembling a corpus are also addressed.

Examples of real life data will be used throughout, and will be taken from the British National Corpus, the Limerick Corpus of Irish English and the International Corpus of English. Family discourse will also be studied from examples of dialogue in television shows – which be studied as a fictionalised representation of intimate discourse within the context and constraints of a dramatic form.

Investigating Intimate Discourse will primarily be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working in the area, and to those working in related areas such as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Advanced undergraduates taking modules in those subjects will also find the book useful.

Brian Clancy is a lecturer in academic writing and research methods at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He is co-author ofIntroducing Pragmatics in Use (Routledge, 2011).