Conversation analysis and the structures of interaction Flashcards
How can CA be defined
A detailed form of discourse analysis that sees conversation as the basic human communicational form and seeks to explicate how people produce and reproduce social order through talk and orientation to talk and each other in social interaction.
What is classic CA?
Analysts can only analyse what speakers explicitly say
What is Critical CA?
Analysts can also analyse implicit issues (ideologies, assumptions, etc.)
What are the Analytical parameters?
Sequencing
Turn-taking practices
Topic management
Politeness
Non-verbal
Sequencing
Openings/closings, adjacency pairs
Turn-taking practices
Transition-relevance, overlaps, interruptions
Topic management
Topic initiation through announcement and elicitation, topic shifts
Politeness
Face-saving/threatening, repair, (dis)engagement
Non-verbal
Gesture and paralinguistic (e.g. coughing, laughing) cues
Information structure
Concerned with how the resources of the intonation system in English contribute to the structuring of information in discourse
Tone groups
Speech which is chunked using intonation
What are the two types of information?
New information
New information
information that the addressor believes is not known to the addressee
Given Information
information that the addressor believes is known to the addressee
Given information tends to occur earlier in an utterance/conversation
Information units
Halliday suggests that speakers chunk their speech into packages, which he calls information units
What did Halliday suggest what tone groups are used for.
Halliday proposes tone groups as a means for how given and new information is packaged in these information units
What did Halliday suggest intonation is used for?
one of the functions of intonation in English is to mark off which information the speaker is treating as new and which information the speaker is treating as given” (Brown & Yule 1983: 154)
Nucleus - Tonic symbol
It is characterised by a falling or rising tone, having the effect of making that syllable more prominent than any other in the tone group
The structure off a tone group
Proclitic segment
Tonic segment
Enclitic segment
Proclitic segment
No prominent syllable(s)
Tonic segment
Contains prominent syllable(s)
“the syllable on which there is a major pitch movement”
Enclitic segment
No prominent syllable(s)
What are the 4 sets of options associated with the tone unit?
Prominence
Tone
Key
Termination
Prominence
a linguistic choice available to the speaker independent both of the grammatical structure of his utterance and of word-accent” (Coulthard 1985: 102)
Ethnomethodology
the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction
microanalytic’ approach,
takes apparently mundane and unremarkable spoken interactions and finds intricate patterning in the way they are organizedb
talk is ‘locally managed
its patterns and structures result from what people do as they go along rather than from their being compelled to follow a course of action that has been determined in advance.
Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson’s model of conversationalists’ behaviour.
- speakers are aware that a turn consists of one or more (but not fewer) ‘turn constructional units’.
- there is an ordered set of rules for the allocation of the next turn
Projecting the end of a turn involves attending to a combination of things
the content of what is said, the prosodic and grammatical structure of the speech, and aspects of nonverbal behaviour such as the direction of the speaker’s gaze.
Edelsky’s two types do floor
F1 one speaker speaks at a time
F2 simultaneous speech
Contrapuntal conversation
At least two speakers habitually speak at a time
Adjacency pair
A pair of utterances in which the second is functional dependent on the first
Preferred System
Acceptance to a proposal. It is typically performed without hesitation or elaboration
Dispreferred Response
Refusal. Usually hesitant about coming to the point and often the refusal is elaborated (ex, giving a reason for the refusal)
Summons
First part of telephone talk
Answer
The second part of telephone talk
conducive’ syntactic form
a form which constrains the recipient to produce a particular answer
Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). rules of the turntaking system
For any turn at talk, at the first possible completion, a b c current speaker may select next, next speaker may self-select, current speaker may continue. If 1c occurs, the rules are re-applied at the next possible completion.
Cumulative Principle
The more that is known about a language the more we can find out about it.
When does methodology become a necessity?
when continued investigations produce several competing theories, and we have to find out which one is right
The fundamental methodological fact that historical linguists have to face
they have no control over their data
Reference (historical linguistics)
the act of making the original texts available for the inspection of others who may have other biases and prejudices
NEOGRAMMARIAN HYPOTHESIS:
every sound change, inasmuch as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws that admit no exception. That is, the direction of the sound shift is always the same for all the members of a linguistic community except where a split into dialects occurs; and all words in which the sound subjected to the change appears in the same relationship are affected by the change without exception. (Osthoff & Brugmann 1878)
UNIFORMITARIAN PRINCIPLE
linguistic processes taking place around us are the same as those that have operated to produce the historical record.
PRINCIPLE OF CONVERGENCE:
the value of new data for confirming and interpreting old data is directly proportional to the differences in the methods used to gather it
PRINCIPLE OF SUBORDINATE SHIFT
When speakers of a subordinate dialect are asked direct questions about their language, their answers will shift in an irregular manner toward [or away from] the superordinate dialect
PRINCIPLE OF STYLE SHIFTING
there are no single-style speakers.
PRINCIPLE OF ATTENTION
Styles can be ordered along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech.
VERNACULAR PRINCIPLE
that the style which is most regular in its structure and in its relation to the evolution of the language is the vernacular, in which the minimum attention is paid to speech.
PRINCIPLE OF THE VOCAL MAJORITY
Many speak but few elicit
PRINCIPLE OF FORMALITY
states that any systematic observation a formal context in which more than the minimum attention is paid
OBSERVER’S PARADOX
To obtain the data most important for linguistic theory, we have to observe how people speak when they are not being observed
There content themes which are good for evoking speech.
- Death and they danger of death
- Sex and all of the machinery for interaction between the sexes
- ) moral indignation
