CONVERSATION

ANALYSIS
 WHAT IS CONVERSATION?

Conversation as a discourse type has been defined by

Cook (1989) in the following way:
  It is not primarily necessitated by a practical task.
  Any unequal power of participants is partially
suspended.
  The number of participants is small.
  Turns are quite short.
  Talk is primarily for the participants and not for an
outside audience.
 WHAT IS CONVERSATION
ANALYSIS?
  CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction.
  CA is only marginally interested in language as such, but first and
foremost in language as a practical social accomplishment.

  Its object of study is the interactional organization of social

activities.
  CA aims at discovering how participants understand and respond
to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how
sequences of actions are generated. Throughout the course of a
conversation or talk-in-interaction, speakers display in the ‘next’
turns an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about. That
understanding may turn out to be what the prior speaker intended,
or not. This is described as next-turn proof procedure and it is the
most basic tool used in CA to ensure that analyses explicate the
way in which the participants themselves orient to talk, not based
on the assumptions of the analyst.
 TASK
Look at the following interaction and comment on
how participants display their understanding of
what is going on.
1.Mother: Do you know who’s going to that
meeting?
2. Rus: Who?
3. Mother: I don’t know!
4. R: Oh, probably Mr. Murphy and Dad said
Mrs. Timpte an’ some of the teachers.
 Basic notions:
1. Turn-taking mechanism
The starting point is the observation that
conversation involves turn-taking and that the
end of one speaker’s turn and the beginning of
the next latch on to each other with almost
perfect precision. Overlap of turns (when two
or more participants talk at the same time)
occurs in about 5% of cases and this suggests
that speakers know how, when and where to
enter. They signal that one turn has come to
an end and another should begin.
 COMPONENTS OF TURN-
TAKING
1. turn construction units
Turns at talk can be seen as constructed out of units which
broadly correspond to linguistic categories such as
sentences, clauses, single words (e.g., ‘Hey!’, ‘What ?’) or
phrases.
  Features of turn-construction units:
A. projectability – it is possible for participants to project, in
the course of a turn-construction unit, what sort of unit it
is and at what point it is likely to end.
B. Transition relevance place – at the end of each unit there
is the possibility for legitimate transition between speakers.
 COMPONENTS OF TURN-
TAKING
2. Turn distribution
(e.g. who dominates the conversation in terms
of number of turns taken, length of turns)
  There is no strict limit to turn size, given the
extendable nature of syntactic turn-
constructional units;
  There is no exclusion of parties;
  The number of parties can change
 TURN-TAKING RULES
  a) if C (current speaker) selects N (next speaker)
in current turn, then C must stop speaking, and
N must speak next.
  b) if C does not select N, then any other party
self-selects, first speaker gaining rights to the
next turn
  C) if C has not selected N, and no other party
self-selects, then C may (but need not) continue.
 OVERLAPPING RULES
Where, despite the rules, overlapping talk occurs, studies
revealed the operation of a system:
  one speaker drops out rapidly
  as soon as one speaker thus ‘gets into the clear’, he
typically recycles precisely the part of the turn obscured
by the overlap.
  If one speaker does not immediately drop out, there is
available a competitive allocation system, whereby the
speaker who ‘upgrades’ most, wins the floor.
(uppgrading = increased amplitutde, slowing tempo,
lengthened vowels, etc.)
 TASK
How do you explain the overlap in the following example?

1. Rose: Why don’t you come and see me some/times

2. Bea: / I would like to

3. Rose: I would like you to

 BASIC TURN TYPES
  Adjacency pairs
One of the most noticeable things about
conversation is that certain classes of utterances
conventionally come in pairs.
Example:
  Question/answer
  Greeting/greeting
  Invitation/acceptance(declination)
  Offer/acceptance (refusal)
 INSERTION SEQUENCES
(Pre-sequences)
These sequences are called adjacency pairs because, ideally, the
two parts should be produced next to each other. The point is
that some classes of utterances are conventionally paired such
that, on the production of a first pair part, the second becomes
relevant and remains so, even if it is not produced in the next
turn. The next turn in an adjacency pair ‘sequence’ is a relevant
second pair part. But that need not be the next turn in the series
of turns making up some particular conversation.
  Example: (Levinson1983)
A: Can I have a bottle of Mich? Q1
B: Are you over twenty-one? Ins 1
A: No. Ins.2
B: No. A1
 SIDE SEQUENCES
  = side sequences where the topic is different from that of the
main sequence:
E.g:
Father (on the phone to university:
So i think i’ll be in tomorrow, when P is a little better. And if
you could tell the ethics committee…HEY STOP THAT
RIGHT AWAY
Secretary: You want me to stop WHAT?
F: Sorry. I was talking to the cat. Hold on
S (5)
F: The damn cat was fixing to sit on the baby’s face.
 NOTICEABLE ABSENCE
The absence of a second pair part is most often treated

participants as a noticeable absence, and the speaker of

the first part may infer a reason for the absence.

  Example in a question/answer sequence:

Child: Have to cut these Mummy.

(1.3)

Child: Won’t we Mummy.

(1.5)

Child: Won’t we.

Mother: Yes
PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION
OF ADJACENCY PAIRS
An inferential aspect of adjacency pairs stems from the fact
that certain first pair parts make alternative actions relevant
in second position. In some adjacency pairs there is a choice
of two likely responses, of which one is termed preferred
response (because it occurs more frequently), and the other
dispreferred (because it is less common).
 PREFERENCE
ORGANIZATION
1. Offer A: Like a lift?

-acceptance (preferred) B: You saved my life.

-refusal (dispreferred) B: Thanks, but I’m waiting for my friend

2. Compliment A: That’s a nice shirt.

-acceptance (preferred) B: Thanks

-rejection (dispreferred) B: Well, I think it makes me look old

-agreement (preferred) B: It’s quite nice, isn’t it?

-shift B: Judy found it for me.

-return B: Thanks, I like yours too.

3. . Blame A: You broke the glass

- denial (preferred) B: I didn’t do it.

- admission (dispref) B: Sorry, I didn’t see it.

 TASKS
1.  Can you elucidate the misunderstanding involved
in the following conversation between a Western
tourist in a museum in Japan and a Japanese
attendant? (Mey, 1993:266)
T: Is there a toilet around here?
A: You want to use?
T: Sure i do
A: Go down the steps.
 TASKS
2. Discuss the following exchange:

(Two secretaries meet in the hallway of their common office)

A: Would you like a piece of apple cake?

B: Have you got some?

 REPAIRS
Repair is a generic term used in CA to cover a wide range of
phenomena, from --- seeming errors in turn-taking, such as
overlapping talk,

- to any of the forms of what is commonly called

‘corrections’ – that is, substantive faults in the contents of
what someone has said.
 THE ORGANIZATION OF
REPAIRS
  Repair types
The repair system embodies a distinction between
1) the initiation of repair (marking something as a
source of trouble), and
2) the actual repair itself. There is also a
distinction between
1) repair initiated by self (the speaker who
produced the trouble source), and
2) repair initiated by other. Consequently, there
are four varieties of repair:
 SELF-INITIATED SELF-
REPAIR
Repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the
trouble source.

EXAMPLE

  1. I: Is it flu: you’ve got?

  2.→ N: No I don’t think- I refuse to have all

these things
 OTHER-INITIATED-SELF-
REPAIR
Repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but
initiated by the recipient.
EXAMPLE:
  1 Ken: Is Al here today?
  2 Dan: Yeah.
  3 (2.0)
  4.→Roger: he is? Hh eh heh
  5 Dan: Well he is.
Roger’s turn (4) is an example of what is called a ‘next-turn’ repair
initiator (NTRI). Other NTRIs may be words like ‘What?’, or even
non-verbal gestures, such as a quizzical look.
 SELF-INITIATED OTHER-
REPAIR
The speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient
to repair the trouble – for example if a name is proving
troublesome to remember.
EXAMPLE:
In the following example the first speaker’s reference to his
trouble remembering someone’s name initiates the second
speaker’s repair.

1 B: He had this uh Mistuh W-m whatever, I can’t think of

his first name, Watts on, the one that wrote /that piece
2 A: / Dan Watts.
 OTHER-INITIATED OTHER-
REPAIR
The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and
carries out the repair. This is closest to what is conventionally
understood by ‘correction’.

EXAMPLE:
In the following example there is an explicit correction which
is then acknowledged and accepted in the subsequent turn:

1 Milly: and then they said something about Kruschev has

leukemia so I thought oh it’s all a big put on.
2.→ Jean: Breshnev.
THE PREFERENCE FOR SELF
REPAIRS
There are several ways in which turns are designed to facilitate self-repair, or
display the speaker’s sensitivity to the appropriateness of self-repair.
Consider the following extract from a call to the British Airways flight
information service and try to analyse it:
  1 A: the time for you, /h
  2 C: /yes
  3 A: is oh one seven five night
  (.)
  5 A: /seven five ni:ne,/ ((Smiley voice))
  6 C: /seven five what. (.)/ yes
  A: one eight one eight,
 TASKS
Identify types of repairs

 N: She was givin’ me a:ll the people

that were gone this year I mean this
quarter y’ /know
 Y: / yeah
 TASK
L: an’ but all of the door ‘n things were taped up=

=I mean y’ know they put up y’know that kinda paper

stuff, the brown paper.
 TASK
A: Lissana pigeons

(0.7)

B: Quail I think

____________________________________

A: Have you ever tried a clinic?

B: What?

A: Have you ever tried a clinic?

 TASK
A: flight information can I help y/ou?

C: /yes could you give me an ETA please on

BA three six five from Bordecks?

(0.4)

A: three six five from bordoh? (.)

yeah