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Life in the Australian Outback: Lexical Phrases

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Transcript: With lexical phrases highlighted.

It's night and Boss Dylan, an owner of a big station in the Australian outback, is sitting out on the porch having a drink with his wife Mary and a local policeman named Adams. The conversation turns to the Aborigines, the local tribal people. A young Aborigine had threatened Boss Dylan a couple of days ago as he rode around the station on his horse.

Part 1: A few after-dinner drinks:

Part 2: A husband-wife talk before bed

Boss Dylan and his wife are in their bedroom lying on the bed talking.

Part 3: Boss Dylan talks with a stationhand

Mary sneaks of after Adams leaves and catches up with him. She's determined to watch the Aboriginal corroboree against the wishes of her husband. Boss Dylan sits on the porch with one of his stationhands and talks with him about his wife.

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Sentence builders: In order of occurrence.

Since the movie scene we've selected is basically a non-stop argument, words and phrases that are used to assert an opinion or to agree or disagree with an opinion dominate the conversation. This is the vocabulary we will focus on here, although some other vocabulary is thrown in for good measure.

The vocabulary here can be used to debate or argue about the issues or discussion questions included.

The emphasis here is on what Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) refer to as sentence builder lexical phrases that "provide the framework for whole sentences." These sentence builders contain a variable or slot, represented by a capital letter X, Y or Z, for the "expression of an entire idea." (42-44))

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Content words: Sorted by schema or topic

The following are some possible ways to classify the vocabulary of the movie scene. Lexical phrases are listed and grouped by the schemas or topics they might invoke in the mind of a reader.

Students should be encouraged to come up with their on original categories also. You might brainstorm with the class on words and phrases relevant to the topic of the scene. Get the class to suggest some ways to group the words and phrases in the vocabulary. You can arrange them on the board as a mind-map.