Can you Tell a Move When you Encounter One? Identifying Clues to Communicative Functions

This paper raises the issue of the identifiability of moves in speech and writing. The question addressed is whether reliable, convergent criteria can be provided for their recognition in stretches of discourse. The discussion is motivated, on the one hand, by the variety of coding schemes presented in the literature for the description of, supposedly, the same kinds of goal-oriented discourse, and on the other, by the frequent lack of explicit motivation in the adoption of one or the other of the available coding schemes for the analysis of exemplars of given texts or tokens of given text units. While the complexity of interactional phenomena cannot be reduced to neat classification templates – with clear-cut boundaries between neighbouring categories of communicative behaviour – just for the sake of building elegant theoretical models, the various functional descriptions offered on speakers’ and writers’ rhetorical choices should be justified only by the varied manifestations of discursive behaviour themselves rather than the varied intuitions of researchers; more importantly, the suitability and accuracy of these descriptions in accounting for discursive behaviour should be explicitly verified. To this end, this paper proposes a focused reflection on the non-obviousness and degree of analytical “fitness” of a fundamental tool of the trade in text analysis – the move. This notion, which has been fruitfully applied to the examination of many types of discourse, bringing to light the rhetorical structure and strategic nuances of speech acts and genres, is however often identified intuitively, and not explicitly operationalised. A proposal is therefore made on how to systematically go about defining and recognizing moves in discourse through a staged, multi-perspective procedure, which takes multiple parameters into consideration.