Conversation Analysis
Conversation Analysis
Conversation Analysis
Language is a wonderful thing. It is essentially what separates human beings from the world's plethora of
cohabiting species. We, as humans, have the ability to communicate with one another using any of the
world's languages; assuming that your communicator is a speaker of the same language.
Conversation then is massively important to us as human beings. We can convey our thoughts and
desires to others, influence and entertain through speech. Without it, we certainly wouldn't be the evolved
species we are today, and you probably wouldn't be reading this right now!
As linguistics has evolved and become an entirely independent social science, so too has our interest into
just how humans interact and what the implications of the types of conversation we use are.
Conversation Analysis arose as a discipline that helps us to delve deeper into the intricacies of
conversation. It looks at the structural organization of spoken interaction, how people manage such basic -
but complex - tasks as taking turns, resolving problems like when one person talks at the same time as
another, or misunderstands, and how they perform social actions e.g. offering, requesting, telling stories
etc.
In this section we will aim to explain Conversation Analysis in relation to...
How it is studied - how does one go about analyzing a conversation? What techniques are used?
What actually is Conversation Analysis - don't have a clue what it is? Start here.
When is Conversation Analysis studied - our interactive timeline will be able to summaries key
dates in the history of the discipline?
Where is Conversation Analysis studied - every idea has an origin. Find out where Conversation
Analysis was born.
Who are the key researchers/figures in the discipline - find out who made the biggest
contributions?
Why it is studied - what's the point? What can we learn?
Conversation Analysis is basically what linguists use to look at conversations and analyses what was said,
why it was said and how it was said. You might think that this a pointless endeavor, but have you ever
stopped to think about just how complex speech becomes when you factor in social contexts and just
generally the pragmatics in situations?
Conversation Analysis then becomes a discipline that aims to explain the many intricacies and tacit
knowledge (meaning everyone understands what occurs during conversation, but couldn’t implicitly state
why) of social interaction.
Hopefully there shouldn't be anything too difficult to grasp about this transcription. Brackets denote
pauses, numbers within a bracket denoting how long the pauses was in seconds, with full stops within a
bracket generally meaning the pause was less than a second in length but still significant enough to
warrant noting. The numbers down the side simply add line numbers for referencing! Importantly though,
we can still see conversational features such as turn-taking, and points where laughing occurs. These
might be important features to help analyses a conversation.
2) Phonetic Transcription
The transcription below is a phonetic transcription of the conversation using the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA). This sort of transcription might be helpful if one wanted to look at how accentual or
phonetic features might affect conversation. For example, if you look at line 12 and see [fɪləm], this is a
Newcastle variant on the pronunciation of the word 'film' - pronounced with an extra syllable in the coda
of the word. Transcribing a conversation in this way then can help linguists research different varieties of
a language and how they might affect conversation.
Phonetic Transcription
1 F: sə haʊw wʊz yə deɪ
2 M: yeə ɪtz biːn ʊəlraɪʔ hæd ə kʊpəl lektʃəs θə wə ə bɪʔ bʊəriŋ (.) ɪ
dɪd ə bɪʔ əv wɜːk ɪnbətwiːn but æv stɪl gɒt ləʊds tə duː (1.0) laɪk æm
gʊnnə æv tə spend ʊəl wiːkend duːɪn mæ eseɪ ænd rəpʊəʔ
6 F: rɪəliː aɪ dəʊnt hæv mʊtʃ æt æl
7 M: (1.0) yeə wel (.) ə heɪt yuː
8 F: uhuhhuhuh
9 M: huhh
10 F: ðænks ɜːm (.) səʊ wɒt wə gʊna duː tənaɪʔ
11 M: (1.0) aɪ dʊnəʊ aɪ niːd duː mæ wɜːk ænd aɪ maɪt gəʊ siː æ fɪləm
13 F: (1.0) əʊ əʊkeɪ
If you have never seen or studied the IPA before, this might all look very confusing. Don't worry though,
the IPA just takes some getting used to and once you've learned the basic vowels and consonants, you'd
be able to read this without any hesitation. But as previously stated, this sort of transcription can be very
useful for people who want to analyses conversation at a phonetic level.
Speech Acts and Conversation
The notion of speech act is first introduced by Austin (1962), and then developed by Austin’s student,
Searle (1969). In his book, How to Do Things with Words, Austin (1962) proposes that when articulating
certain utterances speakers perform certain actions. According to Austin, there are three types of act that
an utterance performs: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. However, he confines
his use of the term speech act to refer exclusively to the second type of act, i. e illocutionary act
(Levinson, 1983: 236)
According to Moeschiler (1998: 2), there exists an argument among philosophers and linguists
concerning the stretching of speech act theory to discourse analysis. The essence of this argument is the
idea that conversation consists of a series of speech acts. This argument is as follows:
“Speech acts are not isolated moves in communication: they appear in more global units of
communication, defined as conversations or discourses.”
In this regard, Van Dijk (1977: 213) states that speech acts usually occur in sequences such as an
assertion followed by an explanation or addition, an assertion followed by a correction or alternative, or
an assertion followed by a denial or contradiction. For example:
I need money. Can you lend me a thousand dollars?
In the example above, the first speech act is executed to establish conditions for the following speech act.
It can be said that the former provides a reason for the latter. Hence, it may alter the context of
communication in a way that the speech act of request becomes not only appropriate but also a normal
act.
Similarly, Ferrara (1980: 234) says that speech acts customarily occur in series where they are issued via
speakers who are involved in rule-governed acts like debating, making conversation, proposing bills in
parliament and the like. For instance:
There are thirty people in here. Could you open the window?
The utterance above is possible to be delivered in a stuffy classroom via someone near enough to
someone else sitting by the window. Here, the speaker’s principal goal is to get the window open whereas
his subsidiary goal is to supply a good justification for the request.
It is worth emphasizing that the speech act sequences cited above are produced by solitary speakers, but it
is possible for sequences of speech acts to be issued by different speakers as in conversation. In this case,
such sequences are referred to as adjacency pairs.
The notion of ‘adjacency pairs’ is originally introduced by Schegloff and Sacks (1973:73-74). They
propose that there exists a category of strictly interconnected sequences of turns that they call adjacency
pairs. Examples are question-answer, greeting-greeting, request-acceptance, etc. According to Coulthard
(1985: 70), adjacency pairs are fundamental structural ingredients in exchanges because they can be
employed for initiating and concluding a conversation.
It is worth emphasizing that adjacency pairs are a notion which reflects how much pragmatics and
discourse analysis are interrelated. This is due to the fact that they are composed of basic pragmatic
ingredients (sequences of speech acts) occurring in the course of a conversation, an area which falls
within the domain of discourse analysis.
Politeness:
According to Paltridge (2006: 72), politeness is an area of pragmatics that is of concern to people
interested in looking at language from a discourse perspective. It is proposed that politeness and face are
important for understanding why people decide to say things in a certain way in spoken and written
discourse.
The most influential work in politeness theory is Brown and Levinson’s (1987). They assert that their
notion of face is based on that of Goffman’s (1967) and the English folk notion of face, which ties up
with notions of being embarrassed, humiliated or losing face. Face refers to the public self-image that
every individual wish to maintain for himself. Their concept of face is broken down into positive and
negative face.
For Brown and Levinson, politeness is the reflection of respect of the interlocutor’s face. In interpersonal
communication, participants wish to sustain each other’s face, and want to defend it whenever it is
threatened.
The underlying assumption is that face is vulnerable. That is, some acts are threatening social harmony
and therefore involving softening or mitigation by means of a wide spectrum of linguistic strategies.
Previously, Lakoff (1973) proposes a conversational-maxim approach to politeness. As a conversational
maxim, politeness can be considered as an extension of the cooperative principle, where Grice’s maxims
are complemented by other rules or principles. That is, in this model, the interpersonal rule be polite
supplements the cooperative principle which she rephrases as the rule be clear.
Similarly, Leech (1983) suggests additional interactive maxims completing Grice’s cooperative principle.
He places politeness within the domain of interpersonal rhetoric, which is associated with social goals
rather than illocutionary aims.
For him, some verbal acts are inherently impolite, while others are inherently polite. Consequently,
politeness involves reducing the influence of impolite acts and enhancing that of polite ones. It is asserted
that the shortcoming of these pragmatic models is their extreme dependence on utterance-level.
That is, politeness is presumed to be predicated by the speaker and not the outcome of the hearer’s
valuation of the speaker’s behavior, and mitigation is considered to be intended for certain discourse
fragments. Therefore, several modern studies have stressed the need to go beyond the analyst’s
interpretation and to take into account interlocutors’ own perception of politeness as they surface in
continuing conversation through their reactions and responses.
This requires adopting a discourse approach so as to scrutinize how persons convey their social identities
and maintain their relations through their verbal actions and their reactions to these, and how they
negotiate the impact of their acts in longer stretches that go beyond the utterance-level.