A Conversation Analysis
ENGLISH IN CONTEXT
ANALYSIS OF SPEECH
People spend a significant part of their lives listening and talking, that is the main reason why conversation is regarded to be the most generalised form of talk that concerns both speakers and listeners and it is contemplated to be the essential ingredient in co-operative undertaking (Wardhaugh, 1985). Conversation is informal talk involving two or more people and interviews are a particular type of conversation. Interviews are regarded as meetings at which a journalist asks questions in order to find out the interviewee’s opinion. This is an assignment that analyses a telephone interview, so there is an absence of eye contact, body language or facial expressions that are attributes of a ‘live’ studio interview. The radio journalist interviews an authority from the mercantile branding on pertinent issues incorporating the commercial branding on local and global scale. In my opinion this interview is an interesting sample of conversation that is why it was chosen for this analysis of speech. In this essay, the analysis of structural features promotes a closer understanding of how speech develops through themes that contribute to its structure. Subjects analysed are: topic and context; speech acts and conditional relevance; politeness; adjacency pairs and insertion sequence; turn construction and transition relevance places; turn taking and overlap; pause and repairs.
The essential comprehension of a conversation is connected with its contribution towards a topic. As Wardhaugh (1985:139) states: ‘A topic is something talked about, but it is very unusual in conversation ever to talk on a well-defined topic in a highly systematic way’. The type of a conversation that is titled as interview can drift at all different tensions and it is either directed by the journalist who reflects back to the main topic or let it go down various routes. The shifting from one topic to the other but still maintaining the maxim of relevance is
ANALYSIS OF SPEECH
People spend a significant part of their lives listening and talking, that is the main reason why conversation is regarded to be the most generalised form of talk that concerns both speakers and listeners and it is contemplated to be the essential ingredient in co-operative undertaking (Wardhaugh, 1985). Conversation is informal talk involving two or more people and interviews are a particular type of conversation. Interviews are regarded as meetings at which a journalist asks questions in order to find out the interviewee’s opinion. This is an assignment that analyses a telephone interview, so there is an absence of eye contact, body language or facial expressions that are attributes of a ‘live’ studio interview. The radio journalist interviews an authority from the mercantile branding on pertinent issues incorporating the commercial branding on local and global scale. In my opinion this interview is an interesting sample of conversation that is why it was chosen for this analysis of speech. In this essay, the analysis of structural features promotes a closer understanding of how speech develops through themes that contribute to its structure. Subjects analysed are: topic and context; speech acts and conditional relevance; politeness; adjacency pairs and insertion sequence; turn construction and transition relevance places; turn taking and overlap; pause and repairs.
The essential comprehension of a conversation is connected with its contribution towards a topic. As Wardhaugh (1985:139) states: ‘A topic is something talked about, but it is very unusual in conversation ever to talk on a well-defined topic in a highly systematic way’. The type of a conversation that is titled as interview can drift at all different tensions and it is either directed by the journalist who reflects back to the main topic or let it go down various routes. The shifting from one topic to the other but still maintaining the maxim of relevance is
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