ABSTRACT
A range of spoken genres frequently occurs across different workplace environments, as shown in Chapter 3, in which methods of describing and classifying such genres were proposed. While Chapter 3 focused on the overall structure and staging of such commonly occurring genres as decision-making and procedural discourse, in this chapter we turn to the investigation and comparison of selected lexico-grammatical features in different workplace genres. In order to compare discrete linguistic items across a range of workplace conversations, corpus-based methods, as described in Chapter 2, provide some extremely useful tools. The chapter thus also serves to illustrate, using the ABOT Corpus, how workplace genres can be analysed and compared using corpus linguistic methods, which have hitherto not been used extensively in studies of workplace talk.
