WEEK 6: conversation

Question 1

What is a conversation?

Answer 1

= flexible text negotiated btw various participants

Question 2

What are some characteristics of a conversation?

Answer 2

Social turn-taking activity
Form of linguistic communication
Developing/maintaining relationships
Variability of time/place/speakers/discourse organization
Dependent on social rules - depending on cultural background

Question 3

What is adjacency pair?

Answer 3

Pair of utterance in conversation of which the second is a conventional response to the first

e.g. question/answer

Question 4

What is turn construction unit?

Answer 4

= potentionally complete turn-taking during a conversation

• conversations often include shorter units of language rather than complete sentences, they are made up of:
  1) clause-length TCUs
• you want a book?
  2) phrase-length TCUs
• the older edition?
  3) word-length TCUs
• sure

Question 5

What is transition-relevance place (TRP)?

Answer 5

= a point in which it is obviously possible for another speaker to begim speaking

Question 6

What are genres and types of a conversation?

Answer 6

Genre:
1) Face-to-face exchanges
2) Not face-to-face exchanges
3) Broadcast materials

Types:
1. Formal e.g. conversation at work
2. Informal e.g mother and son
3. Semi-formal e.g. teacher and students

Question 7

What are phonetic features of a conversation?

Answer 7

1) Intonation
2) Speed
3) Stress
4) Volune
5) Silence
6) Laughter

Question 8

What are morphological and syntactic features of a conversation?

Answer 8

• Heavy use of conjunction “and”
• Repetition
• Ellipsis
• Tense change
• Tag questions
• Deictics (that tree, this cup)
• Politeness markers

Question 9

What are lexical features of a conversation?

Answer 9

Interactional language:
- Discourse markers
- Use of dialect
- Vague language
- Fillers
- Coloquial language and vulgarisms
- Speaker support
- Emotive vocab
- Exaggeration
- Use of similar vocab

Question 10

Is a conversation interactional or transactional?

Answer 10

Interactional (language used for socialising)

Question 11

What happens when you break adjacency?

Answer 11

If the rules are ignored (question answeres, statement acknowledged) and these patterns are broken, this immediately creates a response

Why are you asking?
Why do you think?

Question 12

What is an insertion sequence?

Answer 12

= a sequence of turns that intervenes btw the first and second parts of an adjacency pair
Intervenes utterances that makes adjacency pairs harder to spot

e.g.
Shall I wear the blue shoes?
Youve got the black ones.
They are not comfortable
Yeah, they are the best then, wear the blue ones.

Question 13

What are discourse markers?

Answer 13

= utterance indicator, makes discourse structuring more coherent and interactive