Conversation Analysis

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This post includes a detailed description of Conversation Analysis, an important feature of spoken discourse.

Conversation analysis is an approach to the analysis of spoken discourse that looks at the way in which people manage their everyday conversational interactions.

Moreover, It examines how spoken discourse is organized and develops as speakers carry out these interactions.

In fact, conversation analysis works with recordings of spoken data and carries out careful and fine-grained analyses of this data.

Aspects of Spoken Discourse:

Conversation analysis has examined aspects of spoken discourse such as:

1. Sequences of related utterances ( adjacency pairs)
2. Preferences for particular combinations of utterances ( preference organization)
3. Turn-taking
4. Feedback
5. Repair
6. Conversational openings and closings
7. Discourse markers
8. Response tokens

These aspects are discussed in detail here:

Sequence and Structure in Conversation

A particular interest of conversation analysis is the sequence and structure of spoken discourse. Aspects of conversational interactions that have been examined from this perspective include conversational openings and closings, turn-taking, sequences of related utterances (‘adjacency pairs’), preferences for particular combinations of utterances (‘preference organization’), feedback, and conversational ‘repair’.

Opening conversations

One area where conversational openings have been examined in detail is the area of telephone conversations. Schegloff analyzed a large data set of telephone openings to come up with the following ‘canonical opening’ for American private telephone conversations:

For instance:

((ring)) summons/ answer sequence

Recipient: Hello

Caller: Hi Ida?                                             identification/recognition sequence

Recipient: Yeah

Caller: Hi, this is Carla=                               greeting sequence

Recipient: =Hi Carla.

Caller: How are you?                                    how are you sequence

Recipient: Okay:.

Caller: Good.=

Recipient: =How about you?

Caller: Fine. Don wants to know ..                reason for the call sequence (Source: Schegloff 1986: 115)

A study carried out by O’Loughlin (1989) in Australia found a similar pattern for opening telephone conversations, except that in the Australian data, the caller most frequently self-identified in their first turn after they had recognized their recipient rather than in the second turn, as in the American data.

Closing conversations

Schegloff and Sacks (1973) have also looked at conversational closings. This work has since been continued by Button (1987) who in his discussion of telephone closings points out that telephone closings usually go over four turns of talk, made up of pre-closing and closing moves.

Pre-closing

The pre-closing is often made up of two turn units consisting of items such as ‘OK’ and ‘all right’ with falling intonation.

Closing

The closing is made up of two further units, such as ‘bye bye’ and ‘goodbye.’

In this closing, both speakers mutually negotiate the end of the conversation. The closing may also be preceded by a number of pre-sequences, For instance:

• the making of an arrangement,
• referring back to something previously said in the conversation,
• the initiation of a new topic (which may not be responded to),
• good wishes (such as ‘Give my love to Jane’),
• a restatement of the reason for calling
• thanks for calling.

Sometimes, however, the closing may be foreshortened when the archetype closing is skipped over and a foreshortened closing takes place. Equally, the closing may be extended by continued repetition of pre-closing and closing items (such as ‘bye’, ‘bye’, ‘love you’, ‘love you’, ‘sleep well’, ‘you too’, etc.). Closings are, thus, complex interactional units which are sensitive to the speaker’s orientation to continuing, closing (or not wanting to close) the conversation (Button 1987, Thornborrow 2001).

Turn-taking

Conversation analysis has also examined how people take and manage turns in spoken interactions.

The basic rule in English conversation is that one person speaks at a time, after which they may nominate another speaker, or another speaker may take up the turn without being nominated (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974, Sacks 2004).

There are a number of ways in which we can signal that we have come to the end of a turn.

• This may be through the completion of a syntactic unit, or it may be through the use of falling intonation, then pausing.
• We may also end a unit with a signal such as ‘mmm’ or ‘anyway’, etc. which signals the end of the turn.

The end of a turn may also be signaled through eye contact, body position and movement, and voice pitch.

Adjacency pairs

Adjacency pairs are a fundamental unit of conversational organization and a key way in which meanings are communicated and interpreted in conversations. Moreover, these are utterances produced by two successive speakers in a way that the second utterance is identified as related to the first one as an expected follow-up to that utterance. The following example, again from a radio call-in program, illustrates speakers using adjacency pairs in a typical and expected way. In each of the pairs of utterances in this interaction, the first speaker stops and allows the second speaker to produce the expected second part of the pair of utterances:

For instance:

Announcer: Sharon Stone is on the phone. (.) how are yo:::u?

Caller: very good.

Announcer: I bet you get hassled about your surname.

Caller: yes I do::

Announcer: and what do you want to tell Patrick?

Caller: umm that I love him very much (0.5) and I (0.5) and I wish him a very happy birthday for today.

Preference Organization

The basic rule for adjacency pairs, then, is that when a speaker produces a first pair part they should stop talking and allow the other speaker to produce a second pair part. There is, however, a certain amount of freedom in responding to some first-pair parts.

For example, a compliment can be followed by an ‘accept’ or a ‘reject’. Thus, some second pair parts may be preferred and others may be dispreferred.

For example, a question may be followed by an expected answer (the preferred second pair part) or an ‘unexpected or non-answer (the dispreferred second pair part).

When this happens, the dispreferred second pair part is often preceded by a ‘delay’, a ‘preface’, and/or an ‘account’.

For instance:

The following example illustrates this:

 A: Are you going out with anyone at the moment? (Question)

B: Uhhh . . . (Delay) Well, kind of . . . (Preface)

There is someone I met a while back . . . (Account)

Actually, I’m getting married at the end of the year (Unexpected answer)

Table 5.1 is a summary of some common adjacency pairs, together with typical preferred and dispreferred second pair parts.

Table 5.1 Common adjacency pairs and typical preferred and dispreferred second pair parts (Levinson 1983).

	First Pair Parts (Preferred)	Second Pair Parts (Dispreferred)
Request	Acceptance	Refusal
Offer/Invite	Acceptance	Refusal
Assessment	Agreement	Disagreement
Question	Expected answer	Unexpected answer or non-answer
Blame	Denial	Admission

Insertion sequences

Sometimes speakers use an insertion sequence; that is, where one adjacency pair comes between the first pair and the second pair part of another adjacency pair. In the following example, Ryan asks his mother, Marie, if he can have a DJ for his party. She doesn’t reply but, by means of an insertion sequence, passes the question on to her husband, John:

For instance:

Ryan: and (0.2) can I have a DJ too (0.1) is that OK (0.2)

Marie: John

John: what

Marie: can he have a DJ (.) DJ=

Ryan: =cause you won’t be spending much on foo:d so I thought (0.2)

John: well, how much does a DJ cost

Ryan: yeah, I’ve got to find out

Feedback

Another aspect of spoken interactions that has been examined by conversation analysts is the ways speakers provide each other with feedback; that is, the ways in which listeners show they are attending to what is being said. This can be done, for example,

• by the use of ‘response tokens’ such as ‘mmm’ and ‘yeah’,
• by paraphrasing what the other person has just said or
• through body position
• and the use of eye contact.

In the following example from the tutorial discussion, the students, Tadashi and Kylie, provide feedback to each other by use of the token ‘yeah’, the repetition of keywords, falling intonation, and latched utterances:

For instance:

Lecturer: And the middle one (.) i:s:

Tadashi: Co[mmunity ?] community.

Kylie: [community]?

Kylie: Community, I think it is?

Tadashi: o Yeah o.=

Kylie: =Yeah,=

Tadashi: = o Oh y e a h, o (0.4)

Kylie: Communi – self community. [y e ah].=

Tadashi: o [yeah]. o = =Community French community

(Source: Nakane 2007: 183)

Repair

An important strategy speakers use in spoken discourse is what is termed repair; that is, the way speakers correct things they or someone else has said, and check what they have understood in a conversation.

For instance:

As a matter of fact, repair is often done through self-repair and other repairs.

The following example from O’Shannessy’s study of barrister–client interactions shows an instance of self-repair.

In this case, there was no apparent error to the other speaker that needed to be corrected in what had been said:

Client: because (1.0) he’s got a girlfriend – oh (0.5) a woman and ah (0.5)

Other repair occurs where the error is apparent to the other speaker. The following example from the same data set shows this:

Barrister: Michael is employed as an apprentice butcher.=

Client: =oh not MIChael, ALLan

(Source: O’Shannessy 1995: 14)

Conclusion

Lastly, this blog post has described the conversation analysis in discourse and the detailed aspects of spoken discourse have been discussed in the article. So, you can have a great deal of knowledge from this post regarding the different topics of discourse.