Customer Reviews

Discourse Markers (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics)

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I had to warn everyone interested in purchasing this, because I NEVER return books I've purchased to the book store, and this one I did. I conducted extensive research on this exact linguistic phenomena, myself, and I can assure you that Schiffrin has no idea what she's doing. I actually read through some of the book in the store before taking it to the register, but it wasn't until I got about a quarter of the way in that I began to notice all the problems. Firstly, her test subjects are all from one (mostly Jewish) neighborhood, but her claim that she's interested in how members of the same community use discourse similarly to one another is IN NO WAY justified by her line of inquiry. On the contrary, it would seem more illustrative to me for her to have examined the phenomena in as WIDE a variety of subjects as possible. The book, as is, comes off as no more than an excuse for Schiffrin to sit around and gossip with a bunch of old ladies from her block. The real kicker, however, is that she uses HER OWN conversational dialogue as basis for her analysis! Even if she didn't know what aspects of discourse she'd be looking at most closely in her subsequent analysis, this is an unforgivable offense to legitimate research. Any halfway decent undergrad professor, if s/he'd seen this, would have told her to start over or write a different book.