Analysing Conversation

This is the book for introducing and getting to grips with conversation analysis. Accessible, comprehensive and very applied. - Steven Wright, Lancaster University "A clearly written book. It puts CA into perspective by presenting exemplary studies and differentiating CA from other approaches to discourse. It is full of advice concerning the technicalities of recording, transcription and analysis. It will be most useful to my students." - Spiros Moschonas, University of Athens The Second Edition of Paul ten Have′s classic text Doing Conversation Analysis has been substantially revised to bring the book up-to-date with the many changes that have occurred in conversation analysis over recent years. The book has a dual purpose: to introduce the reader to conversation analysis (CA) as a specific research approach in the human sciences, and to provide students and novice researchers with methodological and practical suggestions for actually doing CA research. The first part of the book sets out the core theoretical concepts that underpin CA and relates these to other approaches to qualitative analysis. The second and third parts detail the specifics of CA in its production of data, recordings and transcripts, and its analytic strategies. The final part discusses ways in which CA can be ′applied′ in the study of specific institutional settings and for practical or critical purposes.

This book develops a systematic model for the analysis and description of casual conversation in English, based on a large body of authentic data.

Presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field, The Handbook of Conversation Analysis brings together contributions by leading international experts to provide an invaluable information resource and reference for scholars of social interaction across the areas of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, interpersonal communication, discursive psychology and sociolinguistics. Ideal as an introduction to the field for upper level undergraduates and as an in-depth review of the latest developments for graduate level students and established scholars Five sections outline the history and theory, methods, fundamental concepts, and core contexts in the study of conversation, as well as topics central to conversation analysis Written by international conversation analysis experts, the book covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, from reviewing underlying structures of conversation, to describing conversation analysis' relationship to anthropology, communication, linguistics, psychology, and sociology

Spoken interaction is impossible without prosody. Intonation, pitch register, tempo, rhythm, pausing, loudness and voice quality all contribute to the spontaneous negotiation process that is everyday talk. This highly accessible introduction to the prosody and analysis of everyday conversation explains basic concepts and methods of interpretation using a wealth of examples from real-life conversations. Readers are introduced to the many conversational practices prosody plays a part in through sample analyses, all of which are available to listen to as downloadable audio files on the accompanying companion website: www.palgrave.com/analysingconversation Packed with authentic examples, practical suggestions for analysis, suggestions for further reading and a helpful glossary, this clear and comprehensive guide is essential reading for students and researchers alike.

In the last fifteen years the analysis of conversation has become one of the most active and fastest developing fields in the study of language and communication but so far there has been no comprehensive critical account of its overall strengths and weaknesses. The authors of this volume have broken the pattern with their critical survey of the concepts and methods of conversation analysis. They examine various approaches to the study of conversation, demonstrating that they share implicit assumptions carried over from the tradition of modern descriptive linguistics. They consider - in relation to literature from philosophy, psychology, sociology and linguistics - whether current models of conversation illumine the phenomena of talk and suggest some new directions for our thinking about these phenomena.

Much of everyday work is done through talk between practitioner and client. Conversation Analysis is the close inspection of people's use of language in interaction. The work reported in this collection shows how CA can be used to identify, and improve, communicative practices at work.

Demonstrating how the methods and findings of conversation and discourse analysis may inform the development of empirical research questions, this text offers clear comparisons between the two approaches, as well as offering a positioned argument.

This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.