CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Muhammad Azam
Research Scholar

COMSATS Institute of Information

Technology Lahore, Pakistan
 Conversation Analysis (CA)
• Conversation:

• A conversation is an exchange of thoughts and ideas between

two or more people.

• A conversation occurs when people cooperate with each other

in order to introduce and sustain a single focus of attention by
taking turns with each other.
 Conversation Analysis (CA)

• It studies the methods of conversation which people use to

organize a social talk.

• It investigates rules and practices from an interactional

perspective and studies them by examining recordings of
real-life interactions.
 Conversation Analysis (CA)

• Although the foundational work in CA focuses on talk in

conversations, the framework has gradually been extended to
research of other types of talk such as medical and clinical
interaction, lessons, or news interviews. This is why the more
general characterization ‘talk in interaction’ nowadays is
often preferred over ‘conversation.’
 Studying Transcriptions of Recorded
Talk

• The recordings are transcribed according to specific

conventions.

• Transcription Notation:
It helps to retain features of prosody and turn positioning in
the transcription.
Transcription Notation
Transcription Notation
Transcription Notation
Transcription Notation
Organization of Conversation
• Two levels of Organization

1) Turn taking
The participants know where and how to change the roles of speaker and
listener

2) Sequence Organization
There is a coherent exchange of communicative actions for instance the
episode starts with a question and it ends with the answer to that
question.
 Turn Taking

• Interruption and gaps are rare

• The basic organizational problem that participants have to

solve, each turn anew, is to determine when the speaker will
complete the current turn.

• The recipient is not only figuring out what the turn is about
and what the speaker is doing with it, he also has to be alert
for the moment it might become his turn to speak.
 Turn Taking

• Interruption and gaps are rare

• The basic organizational problem that participants have to

solve, each turn anew, is to determine when the speaker will
complete the current turn.

• The recipient is not only figuring out what the turn is about
and what the speaker is doing with it, he also has to be alert
for the moment it might become his turn to speak.
 Turn Taking
• Turn constructional Units (TCUs)

Each turn is built with at least one turn constructional unit. such as the
turns with no more than the words here, yes, or no.

Other TCUs have a syntactically more elaborate design, such as the

interrogative clause ‘is she there too.?’

• The construction of a TCU, the recipient will make different

predictions as to when the ongoing turn may be complete.
Turn Taking
 Turn Taking

• TCUs help syntactically in anticipating the point of

completeness

• Prosody is the other way of knowing this point

a speaker can stretch or reduce the vocalization of the intended last
syllable of the turn, or mark it with a noticeable tone movement such as
the falling pitch movement in the last word
 Sequence Organization

• The ways conversationalists link turns to each other as a

coherent series of interrelated communicative actions is
called sequence organization.
– Question/answer
– Request/decision
– Informative/receipt
– Criticism/reply

– These two-parts sequences are called adjacency pairs

 Sequence Organization
• Adjacency Pair
• When a recipient of a turn at talk hears the speaker’s
utterance as the first part of a particular type of adjacency
pair, the appropriate thing to do next is to deliver an
utterance that may count as the second part of the same pair.

• Question; first part

• Answer to that question; second part
Sequence Organization
 Sequence Organization
• Insertion Sequence
The delay in the answer of any question do to comprehension problems.

• The problems are solved by initiating repairs and by

repairing the problem.
Sequence Organization