124 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
precision of the original 1975 version. This chapter seeks to repair this
omission.
In particular, two radical changes to the notion of ‘exchange’ are proposed
(1981:ch. 4). Firstly, the one-to-one correspondence between move and element
of exchange structure is abandoned. The position in Sinclair and Coulthard
(1975) may be summarized thus:
In Coulthard and Montgomery (1981) this is reformulated as:
Secondly, there is discussion about the limits of the exchange: how long it
may be and what it may contain. The decision as to whether to place an
utterance in the same exchange as a preceding utterance, or whether to
interpret it as initiating a new exchange, may be made on the grounds of
intonation, or according to the type of information being sought or given
(notably whether such information is a decision between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ or
whether it is the kind of information expected in response to a wh-question).
It is apparent from these discussions that the exchange is now potentially
longer than the three moves originally envisaged. An additional element of
structure—R/I—has been incorporated, and typical exchanges range from,
for example, the IR structure to I R/I R F F. The various possibilities can
now be expressed as:
I (R/I) R (Fn)(see Coulthard and Montgomery 1981:112)
Data
The data presented and discussed in this chapter is a complete telephone
conversation between two native speakers of English (pp. 157–61 below).
The two participants are close friends and call each other frequently. This
type of discourse was chosen for two reasons: firstly because the lack of
paralinguistic features such as gestures and eye-gaze allows us to pre-empt
the possible criticism—a valid one in the case of face-to-face interaction—
that only video recording can capture all the features of conversation. Secondly,