8 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
EXPLANATION OF THE SYSTEM OF ANALYSIS
The previous section presented a downward view showing how units at each
rank had structures realized by units at the rank below. The following section
begins at the lowest rank and discusses the realization and recognition of
acts; succeeding sections then discuss the structures of moves, exchanges,
transactions and lessons.
ACTS
The units at the lowest rank of discourse are acts and correspond most
nearly to the grammatical unit clause, but when we describe an item as an
act we are doing something very different from when we describe it as a
clause. Grammar is concerned with the formal properties of an item, discourse
with the functional properties, with what the speaker is using the item for.
The four sentence types, declarative, interrogative, imperative, and moodless,
realize twenty-one discourse acts, many of them specialized and some quite
probably classroom-specific.
RANK IV: Move (Follow-up)