ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses the research in the area of intimate discourse under two broad headings, interaction analysis and corpus analysis. Intimate discourse talks between couples, family and close friends is an elemental part of peoples everyday spoken experience. The community of practice model emerged as a response to cognitive models of education. The book introduces the reader to a number of corpus tools such as word frequency lists, keyword lists, concordancing and collocation and illustrates the usefulness of these to the process of operationalising intimate communities of practice. It examines the shared repertoire of pronoun and vocative use in intimate communities of practice in order to explore the different roles that linguistic items play in the maintenance of group relationships and identity.