Introduction

In chapters 2 and 3 we took a systematic look at the core words and chunks in English and this showed us that many of the most frequent items in the spoken corpora had pragmatic functions in the organisation and management of conversation and in the speaker-listener relationship, particularly in terms of maintaining good relations. These high frequency words and chunks illustrate the pervasiveness of interactive meaning-making in everyday conversation. They also point to the degree to which speakers constantly engage with each other on the interactive plane. Many of the items that we identified in chapters 2 and 3 fell into the broad functional categories shown in table 1 (overleaf).

In order to understand these features better, we introduce the notion of relational versus transactional language. When we talk about relational language, we are referring to language which serves to create and maintain good relations between the speaker and hearer, as opposed to transactional language, which refers to the exchange of information between speakers (i.e. the propositional content of the conversation). However, we are not saying that all language can be strictly divided into either relational or transactional types. Relational episodes can be found in what are ostensibly transactional interactions and vice versa. Iacobucci (1990), who looks at customer calls to a phone company concerning billing queries, provides interesting insights into the importance of ‘apparently relational-oriented talk’ (p. 97) integrated with the transactional tasks.