CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (i)

1. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (i) PRELIMINARY ISSUES

2. WHAT IS CONVERSATION? Conversation as a discourse type has been defined by Cook (1989) in the following way: • It is not primarily necessitated by a practical task. • Any unequal power of participants is partially suspended. • The number of participants is small. • Turns are quite short. • Talk is primarily for the participants and not for an outside audience.

3. WHAT IS CONVERSATION ANALYSIS? • CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. • CA is only marginally interested in language as such, but first and foremost in language as a practical social accomplishment. • Its object of study is the interactional organization of social activities. • CA aims at discovering how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how sequences of actions are generated. Throughout the course of a conversation or talk-in-interaction, speakers display in the ‘next’ turns an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about. That understanding may turn out to be what the prior speaker intended, or not. This is described as next-turn proof procedure and it is the most basic tool used in CA to ensure that analyses explicate the way in which the participants themselves orient to talk, not based on the assumptions of the analyst.

4. TASK Look at the following interaction and comment on how participants display their understanding of what is going on. 1.Mother: Do you know who’s going to that meeting? 2. Rus: Who? 3. Mother: I don’t know! 4. R: Oh, probably Mr. Murphy and Dad said Mrs. Timpte an’ some of the teachers.

5. Basic notions:1. Turn-taking mechanism The starting point is the observation that conversation involves turn-taking and that the end of one speaker’s turn and the beginning of the next latch on to each other with almost perfect precision. Overlap of turns (when two or more participants talk at the same time) occurs in about 5% of cases and this suggests that speakers know how, when and where to enter. They signal that one turn has come to an end and another should begin.

6. COMPONENTS OF TURN-TAKING 1. turn construction units Turns at talk can be seen as constructed out of units which broadly correspond to linguistic categories such as sentences, clauses, single words (e.g., ‘Hey!’, ‘What ?’) or phrases. • Features of turn-construction units: A. projectability – it is possible for participants to project, in the course of a turn-construction unit, what sort of unit it is and at what point it is likely to end. B. Transition relevance place – at the end of each unit there is the possibility for legitimate transition between speakers.

7. COMPONENTS OF TURN-TAKING 2. Turn distribution (e.g. who dominates the conversation in terms of number of turns taken, length of turns) • There is no strict limit to turn size, given the extendable nature of syntactic turn-constructional units; • There is no exclusion of parties; • The number of parties can change

8. TURN-TAKING RULES • a) if C (current speaker) selects N (next speaker) in current turn, then C must stop speaking, and N must speak next. • b) if C does not select N, then any other party self-selects, first speaker gaining rights to the next turn • C) if C has not selected N, and no other party self-selects, then C may (but need not) continue.

9. OVERLAPPING RULES Where, despite the rules, overlapping talk occurs, studies revealed the operation of a system: • one speaker drops out rapidly • as soon as one speaker thus ‘gets into the clear’, he typically recycles precisely the part of the turn obscured by the overlap. • If one speaker does not immediately drop out, there is available a competitive allocation system, whereby the speaker who ‘upgrades’ most, wins the floor. (uppgrading = increased amplitutde, slowing tempo, lengthened vowels, etc.)

10. TASK How do you explain the overlap in the following example? 1. Rose: Why don’t you come and see me some/times 2. Bea: / I would like to 3. Rose: I would like you to

11. BASIC TURN TYPES • Adjacency pairs One of the most noticeable things about conversation is that certain classes of utterances conventionally come in pairs. Example: • Question/answer • Greeting/greeting • Invitation/acceptance(declination) • Offer/acceptance (refusal)

12. INSERTION SEQUENCES(Pre-sequences) These sequences are called adjacency pairs because, ideally, the two parts should be produced next to each other. The point is that some classes of utterances are conventionally paired such that, on the production of a first pair part, the second becomes relevant and remains so, even if it is not produced in the next turn. The next turn in an adjacency pair ‘sequence’ is a relevant second pair part. But that need not be the next turn in the series of turns making up some particular conversation. • Example: (Levinson1983) A: Can I have a bottle of Mich? Q1 B: Are you over twenty-one? Ins 1 A: No. Ins.2 B: No. A1

13. SIDE SEQUENCES • = insertion sequences where the topic is different from that of the main sequence: E.g: Father (on the phone to university: So i think i’ll be in tomorrow, when P is a little better. And if you could tell the ethics committee…HEY STOP THAT RIGHT AWAY Secretary: You want me to stop WHAT? F: Sorry. I was talking to the cat. Hold on S (5) F: The damn cat was fixing to sit on the baby’s face.

14. NOTICEABLE ABSENCE The absence of a second pair part is most often treated participants as a noticeable absence, and the speaker of the first part may infer a reason for the absence. • Example in a question/answer sequence: Child: Have to cut these Mummy. (1.3) Child: Won’t we Mummy. (1.5) Child: Won’t we. Mother: Yes

15. PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION OF ADJACENCY PAIRS An inferential aspect of adjacency pairs stems from the fact that certain first pair parts make alternative actions relevant in second position. In some adjacency pairs there is a choice of two likely responses, of which one is termed preferred response (because it occurs more frequently), and the other dispreferred (because it is less common).

16. PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION 1. Offer A: Like a lift? -acceptance (preferred) B: You saved my life. -refusal (dispreferred) B: Thanks, but I’m waiting for my friend 2. Compliment A: That’s a nice shirt. -acceptance (preferred) B: Thanks -rejection (dispreferred) B: Well, I think it makes me look old -agreement (preferred) B: It’s quite nice, isn’t it? -shift B: Judy found it for me. -return B: Thanks, I like yours too. 3. . Blame A: You broke the glass - denial (preferred) B: I didn’t do it. - admission (dispref) B: Sorry, I didn’t see it.

17. TASKS • Can you elucidate the misunderstanding involved in the following conversation between a Western tourist in a museum in Japan and a Japanese attendant? (Mey, 1993:266) T: Is there a toilet around here? A: You want to use? T: Sure i do A: Go down the steps.

18. TASKS 2. Discuss the following exchange: (Two secretaries meet in the hallway of their common office) A: Would you like a piece of apple cake? B: Have you got some?

19. REPAIRS Repair is a generic term used in CA to cover a wide range of phenomena, from --- seeming errors in turn-taking, such as overlapping talk, - to any of the forms of what is commonly called ‘corrections’ – that is, substantive faults in the contents of what someone has said.

20. THE ORGANIZATION OF REPAIRS • Repair types The repair system embodies a distinction between 1) the initiation of repair (marking something as a source of trouble), and 2) the actual repair itself. There is also a distinction between 1) repair initiated by self (the speaker who produced the trouble source), and 2) repair initiated by other. Consequently, there are four varieties of repair:

21. SELF-INITIATED SELF-REPAIR Repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source. EXAMPLE • 1. I: Is it flu: you’ve got? • 2.→ N: No I don’t think- I refuse to have all these things

22. OTHER-INITIATED-SELF-REPAIR Repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient. EXAMPLE: • 1 Ken: Is Al here today? • 2 Dan: Yeah. • 3 (2.0) • 4.→Roger: he is? Hh eh heh • 5 Dan: Well he is. Roger’s turn (4) is an example of what is called a ‘next-turn’ repair initiator (NTRI). Other NTRIs may be words like ‘What?’, or even non-verbal gestures, such as a quizzical look.

23. SELF-INITIATED OTHER-REPAIR The speaker of a trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble – for example if a name is proving troublesome to remember. EXAMPLE: In the following example the first speaker’s reference to his trouble remembering someone’s name initiates the second speaker’s repair. 1 B: He had this uh Mistuh W-m whatever, I can’t think of his first name, Watts on, the one that wrote /that piece 2 A: / Dan Watts.

24. OTHER-INITIATED OTHER-REPAIR The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and carries out the repair. This is closest to what is conventionally understood by ‘correction’. EXAMPLE: In the following example there is an explicit correction which is then acknowledged and accepted in the subsequent turn: 1 Milly: and then they said something about Kruschev has leukemia so I thought oh it’s all a big put on. 2.→ Jean: Breshnev.

25. THE PREFERENCE FOR SELF REPAIRS There are several ways in which turns are designed to facilitate self-repair, or display the speaker’s sensitivity to the appropriateness of self-repair. Consider the following extract from a call to the British Airways flight information service and try to analyse it: • 1 A: the time for you, /h • 2 C: /yes • 3 A: is oh one seven five night • (.) • 5 A: /seven five ni:ne,/ ((Smiley voice)) • 6 C: /seven five what. (.)/ yes • A: one eight one eight,

26. TASKSIdentify types of repairs • N: She was givin’ me a:ll the people that were gone this year I mean this quarter y’ /know • Y: / yeah

27. TASK L: an’ but all of the door ‘n things were taped up= =I mean y’ know they put up y’know that kinda paper stuff, the brown paper.

28. TASK A: Lissana pigeons (0.7) B: Quail I think ____________________________________ A: Have you ever tried a clinic? B: What? A: Have you ever tried a clinic?

29. TASK A: flight information can I help y/ou? C: /yes could you give me an ETA please on BA three six five from Bordecks? (0.4) A: three six five from bordoh? (.) yeah