CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (i)
PRELIMINARY ISSUES
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 turnconstructional 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
• = insertion 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
T:
A:
T:
A:
involved in the following conversation between
a Western tourist in a museum in Japan and a
Japanese attendant? (Mey, 1993:266)
Is there a toilet around here?
You want to use?
Sure i do
Go down the steps.
TASKS
2. Discuss the following exchange:
(Two secretaries meet in the hallway of their
common office)
A:
B:
Would you like a piece of apple cake?
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 ‘nextturn’ 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:
C:
A:
flight information can I help y/ou?
/yes could you give me an ETA
please on BA three six five from
Bordecks?
(0.4)
three six five from bordoh? (.)
yeah