UNIT 2. CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS Flashcards
How did CA originated?
It originated as an approach to the study of social organization of everyday conduct and it started with Garfinkel’s Ethnomedological approach.
What is Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological approach?
This approach suggests that:
1) Knowledge is not autonomous or decontextualized
2) People’s actions generate and reproduce the knowledge through which individual conduct and social circumstances are intelligible.
3) What speakers produce are typifications
How is Conversation Analysis different from other approaches?
1) It has a particular way of analyzing discourse.
2) It rejects the use of too many idealizations
3) It focuses on talk-interaction, and uses tape-recorded conversations as source data since they consider it to be objective infromation whose analysis can be replicated.
So it is centered exclusively in the act of conversation, not other aspects of context.
What does Schlegoff mean when he refers to talk-in-interaction as the focus of conversational analysis?
That conversation analysts don’t focus on context and setting due to the fact that they’re interested on finding sequential and recurrent structures of social action in the conversation itself and due tot he fact that context and it’s relevance are already grounded in the text from which the conversation is being studied.
What is Turn-Taking?
Is a form of social action used for talking in different speech-exchange systems such as interviews, meetings, debates or ceremonies.
So a set of conventions for getting turns, keeping them, or giving them away.
What are vocal indications such as uh-uh, yeah, mmm, etc. used in an extended turn?
They’re called back-channels and they’re important because they provide feedback to the speaker regarding the positive reaction of their message and their absence can very frequently be interpreted negatively.
What is a TRP?
A “Transition Relevance Place”, refering to any possible change of turn.
What is Variation Analysis?
That there are patterns of language which vary according to the social environment and such patterns can only be identified by studying a given speech community.
Who’s the prominent figure of Variation Analysis? Why?
William Labov, because he argues in favor of the importance of the vernacular language, and see language as a property of the speech community, an instrument of social communication.
What is a Vernacular Language?
Is the variety of language first acquired and perfectly learned used among speakers of the same community when they pay minimum attention to speech.
What is the concept of Adjacency pair wihtin the context of conversation analysis?
An adjacency pair is a sequence of two utterances which are adjacent and produced by different speakers.
How are Adjacency pairs ordered?
As a first part and a second part and they’re generally typed, so that a first part normally expects and requires a given second part or range of second parts.
What are some prototypical examples of adjacency pairs?
Greeting-Greeting: A: Hi! B: Hi!
Offer-acceptance A: Want more tea? B: yeah
Apology-minimization A: I’m sorry/ B: Oh, don’t worry
What is an insertion sequence?
When a question-answer pair is embedded within another
eg. A: Mom, can I play Nintendo now?
B: Have you cleaned up the playroom?
A: No
B: Then, NO!
