LING1901 Lecture 13: 13 ANALYSING CONVERSATION
16 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Monday, 12 September 2016
LING1901 LECTURE 13
ANALYSING CONVERSATION
-Analysing conversation
•The subfield of linguistics concerned with analysis of conversation is called Conversational Analysis (CA)
•CA allows us to discover the fixed routines that govern spoken interaction
•What are different participants doing as they speak?
•Why are they doing so?
-Holding a conversation
•Participants in a conversation need to observe a number of general conditions for communication to be
effective:
-S and H must share a joint focus and take account of common ground
-S must take account of what their H know and tailor their utterances accordingly
-S must choose speech acts appropriate for what they intend to convey
-Participants in a conversation must listen to what others say so they can each make appropriate, relevant
contributions when they take a conversational turn
-The groundwork
•Conversational exchanges between an infant and an adult are minimal at the outset, with the adult supplying all
the conversational turns (Clark 2003: 30)
•Example
-3 month old Anne and her mother
•A - smiles
•M - ‘oh, what a nice little smile. Yes, isn't that nice? There, there’s a nice little smile.’
•A - burps
•M - ‘What a nice little wind as well. Yes, that’s better isn't it? Yes, yes’
-Anne’s ‘turns’ are not linguistic; non-lexicalised
-Mother accepts infant’s non-linguistic turns as conversational turns
-Turn-taking in conversation
•Three key features of turn taking:
-One party talks at a time
!1
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Holding a conversation: participants in a conversation need to observe a number of general conditions for communication to be effective: S and h must share a joint focus and take account of common ground. S must take account of what their h know and tailor their utterances accordingly. S must choose speech acts appropriate for what they intend to convey. Participants in a conversation must listen to what others say so they can each make appropriate, relevant contributions when they take a conversational turn. The groundwork: conversational exchanges between an infant and an adult are minimal at the outset, with the adult supplying all the conversational turns (clark 2003: 30, example. 3 month old anne and her mother: a - smiles, m - oh, what a nice little smile. There, there"s a nice little smile. ": a - burps, m - what a nice little wind as well. Mother accepts infant"s non-linguistic turns as conversational turns.
