Conversation Analysis: Principles and Methodologies

Conversation Analysis

Conversation as a discourse type has been defined by Cook (1989) in the followin 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.
Conversation analysis 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 organisation 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.
Drew and Heritage formulated some characteristics of conversation analysis (CA): 1. CA begins from a consideration that certain social activities are achieved through interactions. 2. They investigate how people engage in social interactions, and how people follow social and interactive rules when they participate in dialogues. 3. Utterances are treated as doubly contextual. First, utterances are shaped by context... Second, utterances construct context for further interaction. 4. Conversation is the predominant medium of interaction in the social world.
Two schools: American or Birmingham school.




PROBLEMS:
1. Our wordy descriptions of body movements (including the movements of eyes, hands, face, arms...) is not very accurate. Our spoken language doesn’t find it easy to equivalently encode fine distinctions of bodily movement. 2. When we describe bodily movement, we often use a word that makes a guess at what the person is thinking or feeling, or what they want to achieve. The problem is that each is a guess at what the person is ‘communicating’, either intentionally or unintentionally. 3. We might think we have a complete account of all the relevant body movements, and proceed with the analysis as if that was all there was that was relevant.
CONSEQUENTLY...: The practice of most CA people is to stick with writing down what was said. They tend to keep descriptions to the minimum that the reader needs to make sense of who is addressing whom.
BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL
1. Micro-sociolinguistics interested in the analysis of verbal interaction in small-sized recorded data 2. Also interested in “the functional role” of utterances 3. They distinguish several “ingredients” which influence any conversation: Situation: All relevant factors in the environment, social conventions and the shaped experience of the participants. Tactics: The intentions or goals underlying the production of a specific utterance within a conversation.