Doing Conversation Analysis

Alena Iriskulova ELT 608

OUTLINE

1. SUMMARY:

1. THE BEGINNING OF CA

2. THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF CA

3. CA AND OTHER FIELDS

4. THE DEFINITION OF PRAGMATICS

5. DEIXIS, IMPLICATURE,

PRESUPPOSITION et al.

2. A CASE STUDY

CA: THE BEGINNING

Harvey Sacks Emanuel Schegloff

Gail Jefferson

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES

CA is an unmotivated inquiry

Language use & social interaction are orderly

Goals and analyses are structural

Data are spontaneously recorded in naturally

occurring social interaction

Data for analysis are transcribed sufficiently in

detailCA seeks to describe and explain the structures of social interaction

through a reliance on case-by-case analysis leading to generalizations across cases

…but without allowing them to congeal into an aggregate

CASOCIOLO

GY

Linguistics

Anthropology

Education

Psychology

Political Science

Mass Media

Healthand

Communication

Philosophy

Sacks’s

vision of CA

Garfinkel• sequential

organization of conversational interaction

Goffman• theoretical

understandings of the interaction order

Greek Oral Culture• freely seeing

what the data present

• modes of talk

INFLUENCE ON SACKS’S THEORY

PRAGMATICS: THE BEGINNING

The most promising are the definitions that equate pragmatics with 'meaning minus semantics', or with a theory of language understanding that takes context into account, in order to

complement the contribution that semantics makes to meaning. They are not, however, without their difficulties…

Morris

• the study of the range of psychological and sociological phenomena involved in sign systems

Carnap

• the study of certain abstract concepts that make reference to agent

Montague

• the study of indexicals or deictic terms

Anglo-American

linguists and philosophy

• the study of language usage

• HANDOUT 2

DEICTIC EXPRESSIONS

(i) S1: This one?

(ii) S2: It's very good.

(iii) S1: Alright! And this one?

(iv) S2: Very good.

(v) S1: OK! And this one?

(vi) S3: How much is this cow bell?

(vii) S2: Fifteen francs...

(viii) S1: Excuse me, excuse me! I

came here first

Indexicals

Egocentric

particulars

Token-reflexivi

ty

Pragmatic

indices

Reference

points

Speaker referenc

es

Co-ordinate

s

(i) W: Mathew Cuthbert, who is that?

(ii) M: It’s a girl

(iii) W: I can see that. Where’s the boy?

(iv) M: There weren’t any. Just her. I figure we just couldn’t leave her there no matter what the mistake was.

1. Could you put these together? We are six people.

2. How much is this book?

3. Just nevermind, that’s not gonna work.

4. No, see, this window is open, you should first close it, and then

open the file.

5. Nothing, just wandering here and there.

6. Now imagine, I ask this seller about the price, and he’s winking at

me!

7. Oh, that’s so cruel!

8. OMG, this dress is perfect! Where did you get it from?

9. This film is just hilarious!

10.Yeah, this type of people always makes me mad.

a. Gestural

b. Symbolic

c. Non-deictic

a. Non-

anaphoric

b. anaphoric

SOME MORE DEICTIC EXPRESSIONS

[previously talking on my moving to another house]

FR: yeeeey! It’s just perfect! See, you managed it yourself in a perfect way. I told you! but u didn’t listen to me

ME: thanks, honey… how about you? What’s new?

FR: I'm fine, the department in Germany told me to apply for DAAD scholarship within a week. As usual letters of recommendation were not ready in a week so I was so stressed to prepare them before the deadline

ME: So could you manage that with the professors on time?

FR: I could get one of them, but the second one promised me to submit it until last night, I don’t know whether he did it or not…

ME: I see, hope he did

FR: so I'm doing these paper works for my application, hoping one day I get my scholarship and start my PhD

ME: I’m sure you will, I can see that day coming

IMPLICATURES

Maybe Jeremy supposes that his mother is expecting the answer “Yes” — her

question is rhetorical; she assumes that Jeremy does know something about the

situation — so that he provides the contrary answer, signalling the contrast with

apparently. But that’s just a stab.

(retrieved from http://arnoldzwicky.org/2011/09/08/actually/)

IMPLICATURES

Flouting Quantity. Dilbert has the devious Wally flouting Grice’s maxim of

Quantity:

Saying “not two” implicates — conversationally implicates — not two or more, but Wally disregards this

in favor of treating not two as ‘not exactly two’. But the pointy-headed boss has enough experience with

Wally to suspect his deviousness.

GRICE’S MAXIMES

What maximes are

flouted?

Implicatures?

Metaphors?

Deductive

argument?

A: There is a fly on your.B: Not on your but on you…A: What? A fly on my?B: Not on my but on me?A: Huh? Again on your? What a fast fly!

[previously talking on my moving to another house]

FR: yeeeey! It’s just perfect! See, you managed it yourself in a perfect way. I told you! but u didn’t listen to me

ME: thanks, honey… how about you? What’s new?

FR: I'm fine, the department in Germany told me to apply for DAAD scholarship within a week. As usual letters of recommendation were not ready in a week so I was so stressed to prepare them before the deadline

ME: So could you manage that with the professors on time?

FR: I could get one of them, but the second one promised me to submit it until last night, I don’t know whether he did it or not…

ME: I see, hope he did

FR: so I'm doing these paper works for my application, hoping one day I get my scholarship and start my PhD

ME: I’m sure you will, I can see that day coming