Conversation analysis and the structures of interaction

Question 1

How can CA be defined

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

What is classic CA?

Answer 2

Analysts can only analyse what speakers explicitly say

Question 3

What is Critical CA?

Answer 3

Analysts can also analyse implicit issues (ideologies, assumptions, etc.)

Question 4

What are the Analytical parameters?

Answer 4

Sequencing

Turn-taking practices

Topic management

Politeness

Non-verbal

Question 5

Sequencing

Answer 5

Openings/closings, adjacency pairs

Question 6

Turn-taking practices

Answer 6

Transition-relevance, overlaps, interruptions

Question 7

Topic management

Answer 7

Topic initiation through announcement and elicitation, topic shifts

Question 8

Politeness

Answer 8

Face-saving/threatening, repair, (dis)engagement

Question 9

Non-verbal

Answer 9

Gesture and paralinguistic (e.g. coughing, laughing) cues

Question 10

Information structure

Answer 10

Concerned with how the resources of the intonation system in English contribute to the structuring of information in discourse

Question 11

Tone groups

Answer 11

Speech which is chunked using intonation

Question 12

What are the two types of information?

Answer 12

New information

Question 13

New information

Answer 13

information that the addressor believes is not known to the addressee

Question 14

Given Information

Answer 14

information that the addressor believes is known to the addressee

Given information tends to occur earlier in an utterance/conversation

Question 15

Information units

Answer 15

Halliday suggests that speakers chunk their speech into packages, which he calls information units

Question 16

What did Halliday suggest what tone groups are used for.

Answer 16

Halliday proposes tone groups as a means for how given and new information is packaged in these information units

Question 17

What did Halliday suggest intonation is used for?

Answer 17

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)

Question 18

Nucleus - Tonic symbol

Answer 18

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

Question 19

The structure off a tone group

Answer 19

Proclitic segment
Tonic segment
Enclitic segment

Question 20

Proclitic segment

Answer 20

No prominent syllable(s)

Question 21

Tonic segment

Answer 21

Contains prominent syllable(s)

“the syllable on which there is a major pitch movement”

Question 22

Enclitic segment

Answer 22

No prominent syllable(s)

Question 23

What are the 4 sets of options associated with the tone unit?

Answer 23

Prominence
Tone
Key
Termination

Question 24

Prominence

Answer 24

a linguistic choice available to the speaker independent both of the grammatical structure of his utterance and of word-accent” (Coulthard 1985: 102)

Question 25

Ethnomethodology

Answer 25

the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction

Question 26

microanalytic’ approach,

Answer 26

takes apparently mundane and unremarkable spoken interactions and finds intricate patterning in the way they are organizedb

Question 27

talk is ‘locally managed

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson’s model of conversationalists’ behaviour.

Answer 28

1. speakers are aware that a turn consists of one or more (but not fewer) ‘turn constructional units’.
2. there is an ordered set of rules for the allocation of the next turn

Question 29

Projecting the end of a turn involves attending to a combination of things

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

Edelsky’s two types do floor

Answer 30

F1 one speaker speaks at a time

F2 simultaneous speech

Question 31

Contrapuntal conversation

Answer 31

At least two speakers habitually speak at a time

Question 32

Adjacency pair

Answer 32

A pair of utterances in which the second is functional dependent on the first

Question 33

Preferred System

Answer 33

Acceptance to a proposal. It is typically performed without hesitation or elaboration

Question 34

Dispreferred Response

Answer 34

Refusal. Usually hesitant about coming to the point and often the refusal is elaborated (ex, giving a reason for the refusal)

Question 35

Summons

Answer 35

First part of telephone talk

Question 36

Answer

Answer 36

The second part of telephone talk

Question 37

conducive’ syntactic form

Answer 37

a form which constrains the recipient to produce a particular answer

Question 38

Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). rules of the turntaking system

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

Cumulative Principle

Answer 39

The more that is known about a language the more we can find out about it.

Question 40

When does methodology become a necessity?

Answer 40

when continued investigations produce several competing theories, and we have to find out which one is right

Question 41

The fundamental methodological fact that historical linguists have to face

Answer 41

they have no control over their data

Question 42

Reference (historical linguistics)

Answer 42

the act of making the original texts available for the inspection of others who may have other biases and prejudices

Question 43

NEOGRAMMARIAN HYPOTHESIS:

Answer 43

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)

Question 44

UNIFORMITARIAN PRINCIPLE

Answer 44

linguistic processes taking place around us are the same as those that have operated to produce the historical record.

Question 45

PRINCIPLE OF CONVERGENCE:

Answer 45

the value of new data for confirming and interpreting old data is directly proportional to the differences in the methods used to gather it

Question 46

PRINCIPLE OF SUBORDINATE SHIFT

Answer 46

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

Question 47

PRINCIPLE OF STYLE SHIFTING

Answer 47

there are no single-style speakers.

Question 48

PRINCIPLE OF ATTENTION

Answer 48

Styles can be ordered along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech.

Question 49

VERNACULAR PRINCIPLE

Answer 49

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.

Question 50

PRINCIPLE OF THE VOCAL MAJORITY

Answer 50

Many speak but few elicit

Question 51

PRINCIPLE OF FORMALITY

Answer 51

states that any systematic observation a formal context in which more than the minimum attention is paid

Question 52

OBSERVER’S PARADOX

Answer 52

To obtain the data most important for linguistic theory, we have to observe how people speak when they are not being observed

Question 53

There content themes which are good for evoking speech.

Answer 53

1. Death and they danger of death
2. Sex and all of the machinery for interaction between the sexes
3. ) moral indignation