Conversation and Discourse Analysis Lecture Notes

Conversation Analysis (CA)

  • Conversation Analysis (CA) is a specific method/approach to analyzing interactions.
  • It seeks to address the general sociological question of how social order is (re)produced.
  • It's an approach to analyzing the sequential organization of conversation (succession of speakers), particularly the turn-taking system.
  • It aims to explain how everyday talk makes sense by focusing on the micro-interactional features of conversation.
  • The goal is to discover, describe, and understand the "produced orderliness," identifying the shared procedures participants use to achieve orderly social interaction.

Data in CA

  • CA uses naturally-occurring talk, that is, actual talk occurring in actual contexts.
  • This includes real-world, situated, and contextualized talk.
  • Data is often collected through recordings (video, audio) which allows for multiple examinations, later analyses, and more accurate transcription.
  • CA avoids using introspection, note-taking or recall (due to loss of detail), and starting from predefined notions and categories.
  • Utterances are treated as social objects.

Core Assumptions of CA

  • Interaction is organized and produces orderliness; order does not pre-exist but is actively and jointly created by participants.
  • Talk is produced, situated, and occasioned meaning that participants actively create order through their behavior.
  • Patterns in talk are repeatable and recurrent across groups of speakers.
  • In CA, talk equals action.
  • Context is dynamic and invoked in interaction, not impacting from outside.
  • Action is meaningful only in context.

Key Concepts in CA

  • Speech situations
  • Speech events
  • Speech acts
  • Communicative competence
  • Scripts
  • Codes
  • Adjacency pairs
  • Openings
  • Closings
  • Turn-taking
  • 'Having the floor'
  • Discourse marker
  • High involvement style

Key Terms in Conversation Analysis

  • Turn-taking system
  • Turn-constructional component
  • Transition-relevant point (TRP)
  • Turn allocation
  • Other-selection vs. Self-selection
  • Adjacency pairs
  • Openings and Closings
  • Preferred and dispreferred response
  • Gaps
  • Overlaps
  • Interruptions

Turn-Taking

  • Speaker change is a recurrent part of interaction, with one person typically talking at a time.
  • More than one speaker at a time is common but brief.
  • Transitions with no gap and no overlap are also common.
  • There is no pre-definite set of rules, fixed turn length, content, or equal distribution of turns.
  • Turn-taking is locally managed for each conversation, not a specified number of participants.
  • Talk can be continuous or discontinuous.

Management of Turn-Taking

  • Turn-taking is managed internally by the participants, locally organized, and managed interactionally.
  • It operates at the level of each next bit, not at the level of the whole conversation, as speakers only have access to the conversation as it unfolds.

Turn Make-Up

  • Turn Constructional Units (TCU) or Components:
    • Building blocks or units completing a communicative act.
    • Context-dependent, not structurally defined units like words, clauses, or sentences.
    • Involves the notion of projectability: anticipating when a TCU will end.
  • Transition Relevance Places (TRP) or Points:
    • TCUs end at places of possible completion, which are transition relevance places (TRP).
    • TRPs are places where speaker change could occur.

TCU Possible Completion

  • Grammatically: Syntactically complete.
  • Intonationally: Intonation contour signals completion (e.g., a complete question).
  • As an Action: TCU needs to be complete as an action (e.g., ask a question, provide an answer).

Turn-Allocation Component

  • Other-selection: Current speaker selects the next speaker.
  • Self-selection: Next speaker selects themself.

Adjacency Pair

  • Sequence of 2 utterances/turns.
  • Adjacently placed turns.
  • Produced by different speakers.
  • Relatively ordered (First Pair Part (FPP) – Second Pair Part (SPP)).
  • Pair-type related.
  • Provides a frame for interpretation.

Preference

  • Culturally preferred courses of action: what is normal/expected/unmarked in any given situation.
  • Speakers can resist or violate preferred responses, but this usually requires extra work and has consequences.
  • Preferred vs. dispreferred second pair parts.
  • Looking at preference structure reveals the powerful cultural influence on language.

Repair

  • Related to the sequential nature of conversational interaction.
  • Need to maintain continuity in the interaction and take care of problems that might arise during conversation.
  • Repair involves fixing what is being said or done.
  • Repair initiators:
    • Same speaker.
    • Another speaker: other-initiated repair (e.g., Who? Huh?).

Transcription in CA

  • Transcription is utilized to make a record, providing a better resource than just audio or video recording.
  • It helps in not missing out on details and allows for attention to detail.
  • There are Jefferson Transcription conventions.

Discourse Analysis

  • Analytical approach that supersedes disciplines (i.e. linguistics, psychology, politics, etc.) and consists of various methods.
  • Social characteristics are revealed or performed in extended interaction (discourse).
  • Involves “small d discourse” vs. “big D discourse”.
  • Interpretative approach.
  • Discourse Analysis (DA) is interested in unpacking how talk/writing/images structure and create our perception of reality.
  • Societies have conventions or norms about discourse.

Heuristic for Discourse Analysis

  • Discourse is shaped by the world, and it shapes the world.
  • Discourse is shaped by people’s purposes, and it shapes possible purposes.
  • Discourse is shaped by linguistic structure, and it shapes linguistic structure.
  • Discourse is shaped by participants, and it shapes participants.
  • Discourse is shaped by prior discourse, and it shapes the possibilities for future discourse.
  • Discourse is shaped by its media, and it shapes the possibilities of its media.

Discourse Analysis vs. Conversation Analysis

  • Conversation/Interaction: a (linguistic) relationship between two or more people.
  • Discourse: An extended language interaction.
  • Conversation Analysis: focuses on the sequential organization of conversation and how participants manage the conversation using strategies like turn-taking.
  • Discourse Analysis: examines the structure of a conversation, interested in linguistic regularities.

Discourse

  • Language use above the level of the sentence.
  • Supra-sentential language use.
  • Explores how the meaning and interpretation of a text/spoken words may be negotiated around the selection and use of particular syntactic and lexical forms or even aspects of pronunciation.

Discourse Analysis

  • Can be about language change, meaning, acquisition.
  • Can be interdisciplinary, examining social roles and relations, power and inequality, communication and identity construction.
  • Might look at changes in patterns of language use based on economic change, power relations, and relationship between interlocutors.
  • Studies varying contexts like narratives, speeches, and blog posts.

Ways of Analyzing Discourse

  • Focus on how a group of people does things with language in specific ways.
  • Look at types of activities or genres.
  • Examine how language in one particular situation is interpreted according to underlying expectations.
  • Consider the roles of participants in a speech event, such as using Goffman’s Participation Framework.

Types of Discourse Analysis

  • Structure (broader):
    • Genres
    • Discursive moves (coding)
    • Narratives
  • Interpretation (more local):
    • Framing

Classic Approaches in Discourse Studies

  • Narratives: Narrative Structure, Narrative Inquiry, Small Stories, etc.
  • Genre-Analysis
  • Analysis of specific discourse features: Pronouns, hedges, mitigations, activity words, descriptors, metaphors, etc.
  • Data coding of previously established features of interest.

Discourse as a Whole

  • Constructivity: How parts of a discourse can be elements of a larger whole, such as a hierarchical relationship between them.
  • Coherence: How the parts fit the whole, how the discourse as presented is plausible or unconvincing.

Text Types and Genres

  • Genre is “a class of communicative events” with:
    • A shared set of communicative purposes recognized by the discourse community.
    • Established constraints on contributions in terms of their content.
    • Nomenclature of genres that is determined by the discourse community.

Discursive Moves

  • Each genre is characterized by predictable moves.
  • Each move represents a stretch of text serving a particular communicative function.

Coding

  • Applying condensed topics to textual units and later analyzing these topics for larger patterns,
  • Coding for content, for discursive strategies, for shared lexis

Discourse Move Analysis

  • Advice giving in a health online forum took different structures depending on the concerns people raised.
  • In all topic areas, health experts dispensed explicit advice as a first move.
  • The second move depended on the topic:
    • Drugs, fitness, general health, and sexual health: general information as a second move.
    • Emotional health, relationships & sexuality: Assessment as a second move.

Narratives

  • Narrative is “a method for recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred".

Elements of an Oral Personal Narrative

  • ABSTRACT: What was this about?
  • ORIENTATION: Who, when, what, where?
  • COMPLICATING ACTION: Then what happened?
  • EVALUATION: So what?
  • RESULT or RESOLUTION: What finally happened?
  • CODA: Serves to put off any further questions.

Narrative Inquiry

  • Looks at a lot more than just structure.
  • Addresses questions such as:
    • Which identities do tellers claim in storytelling – how do they position the audience?
    • Function of storytelling (e.g., in a workplace, family, politics, in leadership, etc.).
    • How do stories change over time? Stories & memory etc.
    • Cultural differences in storytelling

Frame

  • A process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner.

Framing in Texts

  • Refers to the way information is presented to us.
  • Most contexts are too complex to convey all information available, so we need to make a choice.
    • Which information is provided and highlighted, and which is omitted.
    • Which terminology is established.
    • In which context facts are being presented.
  • Establishing of dominant interpretative frames in discourse: Discursive battle about what gets taken as true, and how new information is read.

Analyzing Frames

  • Contextualization of information.
  • Omission of information.
  • Images.
  • Metaphors & Metonyms.
  • Identity construction.
  • Positioning.
  • Storytelling.

Interpersonal Communication

  • Every communication has a content (informational) and a relationship (interpersonal) aspect.
  • Transactional discourse  interactional discourse

Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) principles

  • Emergence principle: Identity construction is emergent and relational – it is a product of interaction.
  • Positionality principle: Identity is the product of a combination of different dimensions (age, gender, your role within the interaction).
  • Indexicality principle: The linguistic aspect of identity construction. Identities are indexed in different ways through language (use of labels/orientation in talk/style used).
  • Relationality principle: Similarities with or differences from other perceived groups are constructed/guided by ideologies (genuineness/artifice, sameness/difference, authority/delegitimacy).
  • Partialness principle: Construction of identity can be:
    • Partially deliberate and intentional.
    • Partially habitual and therefore not always a fully conscious decision/process.
    • Partially a result of the interactional negotiation happening.
    • Partially a result of others’ perceptions.
    • Part of a larger overarching ideological process that is relevant to that interaction.

Politeness

  • Face: “a mask, an image a person gives him- or herself during a particular interaction . . . Face depends on the acceptance of others”.
  • Positive face: the want of every member that their wants be desirable to at least some; also called the involvement aspect of face.
  • Negative face: the want of every member that their actions be unimpeded by others; also called the independence aspect of face.
  • Face-threatening act: acts which challenge the face wants of an interlocutor; any act of communication is a risk to face.

Strategies For Realising FTAs

  • Depending on your linguistic choice you construct the relationship as:
    • More or less hierarchical.
    • Closer or more distant.
    • Featuring more or less affect