Everyday Talk

The most important conversations you will have with your kids will be in the context of everyday life. In 'Everyday Talk, ' author John Younts explains how to use ordinary conversations to talk to your kids about God and his world. You?ll be delighted by his clear, practical insight and biblical wisdom. Buy this book and read it. But don't stop there?put it into practice. Your children will thank you!

This engaging text explores how everyday talk--the ordinary kinds of communicating that people do in schools, workplaces, and among family and friends--expresses who we are and who we want to be. The authors interweave rhetorical and cultural perspectives on the "little stuff" of conversation: what we say and how we say it, the terms used to refer to others, the content and style of stories we tell, and more. Numerous detailed examples show how talk is the vehicle through which people build relationships. Students gain skills for thinking more deeply about their own and others' communicative practices, and for understanding and managing interactional difficulties. New to This Edition *Updated throughout to incorporate the latest discourse analysis research. *Chapter on six specific speech genres (for example, organizational meetings and personal conversation). *Two extended case studies with transcripts and discussion questions. *Coverage of digital communication, texting, and social media. *Additional cross-cultural examples. Pedagogical Features *A preview and summary in every chapter. *Accessible explanations of core concepts. *End-of-book glossary. *Endnotes that identify key authors and suggest further reading.

Learning how to listen to and analyze talk is fundamental to understanding human communication. This engaging text examines how the "little stuff" of everyday conversation--what we say and how we say it, the terms we use to refer to others, the content and style of stories we tell, and myriad other factors--expresses both who we are and who we want to be. The book draws on discourse analytic research and applies it to a wide range of real-life situations and examples, including private conversations among friends and family as well as interchanges in the classroom, workplace, and public settings. Interweaving rhetorical and cultural perspectives, the author gives particular attention to the ways talk reflects communicators' cultural and social background, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and gender, as well as the dynamics between particular conversational partners. Illuminated is the complex role that talking plays in building relationships and creating--and hopefully, resolving--relational problems.

Atypical Interaction presents a state-of-the-art overview of research which uses conversation analysis to explore how communicative impairments impact on conversation and other forms of talk and social interaction. Although the majority of people use spoken language unproblematically in social interaction, many individuals have an atypical capacity for communication. The first collection of its kind, this book examines a wide range of conditions where the communication of children or adults is atypical, including autism spectrum disorder, dementia, stammering, hearing impairment, schizophrenia, dysarthria and aphasia. By analyzing recordings of real-life interactions, the collection highlights not only the communication difficulties and challenges faced by atypical communicators and their interlocutors in everyday life, but also the competences and often novel forms of communication displayed. With fourteen empirical chapters from leading scholars in the field and an introductory chapter which provides a background to conversation analysis and its application to the study of atypical interactions, the collection will be an invaluable resource for students, practitioners such as speech and language therapists, and researchers with an interest in human communication, communication diversity and disorder.

Drawing on everyday telephone and video interactions, this book surveys how English speakers use grammar to formulate responses in ordinary conversation. The authors show that speakers build their responses in a variety of ways: the responses can be longer or shorter, repetitive or not, and can be uttered with different intonational 'melodies'. Focusing on four sequence types: responses to questions ('What time are we leaving?' - 'Seven'), responses to informings ('The May Company are sure having a big sale' - 'Are they?'), responses to assessments ('Track walking is so boring. Even with headphones' - 'It is'), and responses to requests ('Please don't tell Adeline' - 'Oh no I won't say anything'), they argue that an interactional approach holds the key to explaining why some types of utterances in English conversation seem to have something 'missing' and others seem overly wordy.

Bringing together a selection of some of the author's key papers on language and gender, this book provides an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on conversational data and on single sex friendship groups.

The ageing of the world’s populations, particularly in Western developed countries, is a well-documented phenomenon; and despite many positive images of later life, in the media and public discourse later life is frequently depicted as a time of inevitable physical and cognitive decline. Against this background, Heinrichsmeier presents the results of her two-year sociolinguistic study examining how a group of older women of different ages negotiated their way through their own and others’ expectations of ageing and constructed different kinds of older – and other – identities for themselves. Through vivid and nuanced analysis of their chat and practices in a small village hair salon, Heinrichsmeier reveals these women’s subtle and skilful manipulation of stereotypes of ageing and the impact of the evolving talk on their identity constructions. Her study, which provides numerous short extracts of talk in both the hair salon and interview along with more detailed case studies, highlights the importance of such apparently ‘trivial’ sites – for both studying older people’s identity work and as loci for positive identity constructions and well-being in later life. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and scholars working in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and gerontological studies, as well as those interested in approaches integrating ethnography and language.

This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversational storytelling and to test the analytical techniques proposed.Using transcriptions of stories from everyday talk, Norrick explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama, namely Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" and Beckett's "Endgame."