152 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Example 34
A: Will you hold my bag?
B: For you my love Iād hold an elephant
Such classifications reflect a concern with the relationship between the participants
in the conversation rather than with the structure of the conversation itself.
It is worth noting, however, that conversations have many dimensions, all
of which are important. Only one of these dimensions is captured in a
description of the structure of discourse.
INCOMPLETE EXCHANGES AND IMPLIED ELEMENTS
Where a predicted element of an exchange is missing, the exchange must
be classified as incomplete. Example (35) is a list of the incomplete exchanges
which occur in various places in our data:
Two types of apparent omission from this list need to be explained. Firstly
exchanges which appear incomplete but which are followed by bound exchanges,
such as exchange (27), are not coded as incomplete. The second apparent
omission is the following: