208 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
designed to train learners in how to identify increments which satisfi ed
their present communicative needs. Once learners have learnt to recognize
the workings of the simple chaining rules further exercises could be
designed to facilitate the study of the state of expectations generated by
the production of elements within increments. Such exercises might raise
awareness of which orthographic words tend to collocate and form unitary
lexical elements. Tasks illustrating how intonational selections allow
speakers to frame their increments: i.e. as unexpected or normal; as
requiring active intervention or passive reception could also be presented
to the learners to raise their awareness of how speakers achieve their
communicative goals.
The view of language as a dynamic happening has the potential to enrich
discourse analysis by explicating the communicative value generated by an
oral performance of a text. For example a clause/product analysis of
a political speech demonstrates the abstract meaning potential of the
language in enabling the speaker to realize the message. However, while
the speech was written as a product it is necessarily perceived by an
audience as a dynamic happening or process, as a series of increments
which realize target/initial states. Recognition that language may also be
mapped as a happening allows an analyst to explicate the communicative
value of the performance of a text. Skilled orators are often coached and
hence expert at using pausing, key, termination, and tone to manipulate
both their audiences’ expectations and the projected state of speaker/
hearer understanding. A process analysis which investigates their speeches
as a series of increments, i.e. modifi ed target/initial states, offers the
potential to add to the explication of how language is used to realize
contextualized meaning.
Forms of discourse such as unscripted conversation may perhaps be more
fruitfully viewed as happenings. Speakers have their own individual though
perhaps vague and unfolding goals and aims which they satisfy increment
by increment. Rather than relying solely on the imposition of a post-hoc
product analysis, analysts can also detail how speakers selected from the
abstract meaning potential found in the language system in order to achieve
their individual communicative purposes. In short, a more complete and
rounded description of the abstract meaning potential inherent in the
language system may be gleaned from viewing language events both as
product/text and as process/discourse.