Following an overlap Another point worth considering is in relation to our earlier comment that overlapping talk potentially cannot be heard properly. We are aware that a characteristic of collaborative conversation is that the current speaker strives to ensure that he or she is being attended…
Silences – just what are they? Before taking a look at silences in conversation, let us first recap what we have covered so far. We have seen that conversations appear to be made up of paired utterances of the type, greeting – greeting, question…
Delay in applying turn-taking rules Silence in conversation is differentially assigned according to the application or non-application of the turn allocation rules outlined above. So, for example, gaps in conversations occur prior to the application of either Rule 2 (next speaker self-selects)…
Non-application of turn-taking rules Whereas gaps can be seen to be delays in the application of turn allocation rules (Rule 2 and Rule 3), lapses in conversations result from the non-application of the rules. Consider the following conversation involving three people.
Attributable silence – whose silence is it? The third type of silence we will identify is the selected next speaker’s attributable silence subsequent to the application of Rule 1. Consider the following. 1 Tony: so what do you think then John?…
An example CA analysis We will now work through an example analysis of naturally occurring conversation. The aim is to demonstrate how to conduct CA analyses of conversation data by walking through the appropriate methodological steps which would be taken by any conversation analyst. We will…
Naturalistic data Let us begin by assuming that you have audio-recorded a conversation. Naturalistic data is the bedrock of conversation analysis, so we will use a short extract from a real world, 10-minute conversation that I recorded several years ago in order to exemplify the procedure.
Determine the overarching structure Having made a transcription of the conversation to be analyzed (Step 1), it is then necessary to read through the transcript several times. The initial purpose is simply to identify some of the overarching structural features (e.g. exchange structure, turn-taking system)…
