It is surprising how much of everyday conversation consists of repetitive expressions such as 'thank you', 'sorry', would you mind?' and their many variants. However commonplace they may be, they do have important functions in communication.This thorough study draws upon original data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English to provide a discoursal and pragmatic account of the more common expressions found in conversational routines, such as apologising, thanking, requesting and offering.The routines studied in this book range from conventionalized or idiomatized phrases to those which can be generated by grammar. Examples have been taken from face-to-face conversations, radio discussions and telephone conversations, and transcription has been based upon the prosodic system of Crystal (1989).An extensive introduction provides the theory and methodology for the book and discusses the criteria for fixedness, grammatical analysis, and pragmatic functions of conversational routines which are later applied to the phrases. Following chapters deal specifically with phrases for thanking, apologising, indirect requests, and discourse-organising markers for conversational routines, on the basis of empirical investigation of the data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.

Preface
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
1.1 Aim and scope of the present study
1.2 Material and method
1.3 Frequency of conversational routines in spoken language
1.4 Psychological aspects of conversational routines
1.5 Conversational routines and ritualisation
1.6 Lexicalization, grammaticalisation an idiomatisation
1.7 Conversational routines and meaning
1.8 Criteria of fixdedness
1.9. The processing of conversational routines
1.10. Routines and discourse
1.11 Conversational routines and grammatical analysis
1.12. A model for describing the strucural flexibility of conversational routines
1.13 The pragmatic function of conversational routines
1.14 The pragmatics of conversational routines
1.15 Conversational routines and language teaching
CHAPTER TWO: Thanking
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Thank you/thanks as an illolcutionary force indicating device
2.3 Thanking and politeness
2.4 Strategies of thanking
2.5 Gratitude expressions
2.6 Continuation patterns
2.7 The grammatical analysis of gratitude expressions
2.8 Prosody an fixedness
2.9 Distribution of thanking over different texts
2.10 Thank you/thanks as stems
2.11 The functions of gratitutude expressions
2.12 Thanking as a discourse marker
2.13 The pragmatics of thanking
2.14 Frames for thanking
2.15 Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE: Apologies
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Defining apologies
3.3 Apologising strategies
3.4 The form of apologising
3.5 Continuation patterns
3.6 The grammatical analysis of apology and expression
3.7 Apologies and prosody
3.8 Distribution of apologies over different texts
3.9 Collocational fixedness and flexibility
3.10 Apologies and function
3.11 Retrospective and anticipatory apologies
3.12 The structural function of apologies
3.13 The type of offence
3.14 Apologies and pragmatic frames
3.15 Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: Requests and offers
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The speech act assignment mechanism and indirect speech acts
4.3 Indirect speech acts and pragmatic principles
4.4 Indirect speech acts and implicature
4.5 Pragmatic ambiguity
4.6 Defining requests
4.7 Requestive strategies
4.8 A taxonomy of requests
4.9 Requests and politeness
4.10 Continuation patterns
4.11 The grammatical analysis of requestive routines
4.12 Describing request expressions
4.13 Indirect requests and speech act stems
4.14 Types of stem
4.15 Lexical mitigating devices
4.16 Internal and external modifiers
4.17 Referential strategies
4.18 Requests and pragmatic conventions
4.19 Imperatives
4.20 Patterns expressing offers
4.21 Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: Discourse markers as conversational routines
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Coherence and discourse markers
5.3 Discourse markers characterized
5.4 The metalinguistic function
5.5 Relevance theory and communication
5.6 The approach to discourse markers in this work
5.7 The linguistic properties of discourse markers
5.8 Contextual properties of discourse markers
5.9 Functional properties of discourse markers
5.10 Combinations in the discourse marker slot
5.11 Discourse markers and cognitive frames
5.12 Conclusion
References
Index