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...