Language in Society 27, 387-433.

Printed in the United States of America

REVIEWS
KARIN AIJMER,

Conversational routines in English: Convention and creativity. London & New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996. Pp. xvi, 251. Hb 40.00, pb 16.99.
Reviewed by ELIZABETH HOLT

Humanities, Huddersfield University Huddersfield HD13DH, England smusejh@pegasus.hud.ac.uk

Much of our language and interaction consists of well-used phrases and routines; for example, idiomatic expressions like kick the bucket or had a good innings are frequently used in complaints or topic termination (Drew & Holt 1988, 1998). Activities like opening or closing a telephone conversation are also highly formulaic in nature (cf. Houtkoop-Steenstra 1991). The conventional character of language has been increasingly recognized and studied by analysts of language during recent years. Thus Goffman 1971 pointed out that much of our interaction - including greetings, farewells, thanking, and apologizing - is highly ritualistic. But on the whole, linguists and psychologists have tended to concentrate their attention on idiomatic expressions. This volume, then - which focuses on commonly occurring discourse expressions concerned with thanking, apologizing, requesting, and offering, as well as on discourse markers - is a welcome addition to the field. The volume is further differentiated from much other work as regards the scope of analysis: Conversational routines are described grammatically, semantically, and pragmatically. Furthermore, unlike many authors on this subject, Aijmer does not rely on introspection and invented examples; instead, she draws on a number of corpora to explore naturally occurring instances from both spoken and written language. In Chap. 1, Aijmer lays out the theoretical foundations of the study. Here and throughout the book, conversational routines are characterized in terms of their function (social, psychological, and most importantly, pragmatic) as well as their formal features (grammatical, prosodic, and sequential). Two criteria introduced here for conversational routines are their grammar and fixedness. The routines investigated are seen as sentence "stems," consisting of a fixed or relatively fixed core plus possible expansions; thus Aijmer considers the fixedness and the different strategies used for each of the conversational routines studied. The distribution of these various strategies is considered across different text types and under a variety of circumstances. Finally, the importance of pragmatic function is introduced here, and used again in the analysis of each of the routines studied. Each is analyzed in terms of its function as a speech act (e.g. thanks/thank you is 1998 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/98 $9.50 387

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seen as a politeness marker) and for its role in discourse organization. In this first chapter, Aijmer sets out a model for the description of conversational routines which underpins the analysis of examples in the following chapters. Three kinds of conversational routines are recognized, two of which are explored in this book. First are formulaic speech acts such as thanking (Chap. 2), apologizing (Chap. 3), and indirect requests and offers (Chap. 4). Second are routines that are connected to discourse organization; and in her final chapter, Aijmer focuses on discourse markers.1 Rather disconcertingly, there is no general conclusion. The primary data for the analysis are taken from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (henceforth LLC). This includes face-to-face conversation, telephone conversation, public speeches (such as lectures and sermons), news broadcasts and sports commentaries, interviews, and public discussions. Aijmer begins her analysis in Chap. 2 by focusing on the strategies used for expressing gratitude in the LLC corpus. She outlines their relative frequencies of occurrence, discovering that thank you is the most common, followed by thank you very much, and then thanks. Aijmer notes that the expression can be fixed in terms of prosody as well as word order. By distinguishing different text types, she compares the frequency of thanking between, e.g., face-to-face vs. telephone conversations, and discussions vs. debates; she discovers that thanking is most common in informal telephone conversations. Continuing the grammatical analysis of this routine, Aijmer considers thanks/ thank you as stems, and she describes variant types of expressions that can be formed by modification, expansion, intensification, and compounds. Finally, the functions of thanking are considered, and these are seen, at least in part, as resulting from its sequential position in discourse structure. Analyzing examples from the corpus, Aijmer explores the use of thanking following adjacency pairs and in conversation closings. She accounts for the use of thanks/thank you in a variety of discourse settings, and for variants created by intensification. Examples are grouped and analyzed according to whether they are thanks for material favors such as a letter, a gift, or a visit, or for immaterial favors such as a compliment, an offer, or an expression of interest in one's health. Throughout the book, Aijmer uses the notion of frames to describe the social knowledge associated with conversational routines. A frame concerns speakers' stereotypic knowledge of a situation. Whenever they encounter an extralinguistic situation, it is matched with one of these frames from their memory. Aijmer suggests some situational parameters and their values for the use of thanks/thank you, taking into account "the 'object of gratitude' and the speaker's perception of the size of the favour" (76). Formal features such as function, intonation, and continuation patterns are included, as well as situational features such as setting, participants, and type of thanking. A frame is also suggested for intensified thanks/thank you, and Aijmer suggests that these are associated with unexpected, generous offers and major services. 388 Language in Society 27:3 (1998)

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In chaps. 3-4 apologies and requests/offers are analyzed in much the same manner: Aijmer considers the strategies used to perform these actions, their distribution, and their functions. In the final chapter, Aijmer focuses on a second category of conversational routine, that of discourse markers such as actually, in other words, now as I say, and frankly speaking. Having defined them, Aijmer distinguishes them as functioning in the local or the global context. She argues that there is a '"discourse marker slot' which is external to the proposition proper in the underlying syntactic phrase-marker" (207). Using a relevance-theoretical approach, she identifies their function as integrating utterances into the conversation and indicating how the context affects the interpretation of the utterance. Instances of local and global markers are examined to identify their function in a range of contexts; e.g., local discourse markers are analyzed as functioning in introducing old evidence, emphasizing the truth of an utterance, etc. Global markers can have such functions as producing a formulation or summing up. This book is ambitious in scope, combining consideration of naturally occurring examples with grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic analysis. It will be useful to analysts investigating formulaic language or interaction in any of these areas. From a personal viewpoint, I would have liked to see further detailed analysis of examples from the corpus, providing a fine-grained investigation of the use of conversational routines and their sequential position in interaction. A small number of the accounts given of their use in particular instances seem unconvincing. However, the study is a valuable contribution to the field, particularly as it explores conversational routines from a functional perspective and in naturally occurring data. It will appeal to a wide audience: undergraduates, teachers of language, and researchers working in linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and language acquisition.

NOTES ' Aijmer's third class of conversational routines, not considered in the current work, consists of 'attitudinal routines': those that express the speaker's attitudes or emotions.

REFERENCES Drew, Paul, & Holt, Elizabeth (1988). Complainable matters: The use of idiomatic expressions in making complaints. Social Problems 35:398-417. (1998). Figures of speech: Idiomatic expressions and the management of topic transition in conversation. Language in Society, to appear. Goffman, Erving (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. London: Penguin. Houtkoop-Steenstra, Hanneke (1991). Opening sequences in Dutch telephone conversations. In Deirdre Boden & Don H. Zimmerman (eds.), Talk and social structure, 232-50. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. (Received 22 July 1997) Language in Society 27:3 (1998) 389