CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Muhammad AzamResearch 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 takingThe 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 theturns 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 pointa 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 SequenceThe 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