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Research on the linguistic characteristics of university classroom discourse highlights the salience, in this register, of non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse. This dimension of classroom discourse, however, has not been studied systematically. Taking a corpus-based approach, this study investigates the non-informational dimension of classroom discourse, focusing on the marking of emotions, affect, and the speaker’s ‘involvement’ (Chafe 1982) in the talk of university professors, in a large corpus of American university classroom discourse. It tracks the use of involvement markers across class sessions representing three situational factors that define the university setting: academic discipline, level of instruction, and class size. Surprisingly, these factors have relatively little influence on involvement in language, suggesting that involvement is pervasive in American classroom talk. However, involvement tends to be more common in small courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences, at the upper division and graduate level—courses that generally favor student participation, hence interactivity in discourse. Analyses of the relationship between involvement and interactivity reveal that while interactivity tends to predict involvement, involvement is not limited to interactive discourse.
