When Conversation Lapses

Reviews / Votes

This is a long-awaited and much-needed study, one that provides a 'natural history' of lapses, those extended, often 'awkward' periods of silence in conversation when no one is talking although talk is expected. We are all familiar with lapses, but who would have thought they are so highly organized? Here we learn that they are not inadvertent but are instead achieved and that they serve a clear purpose in the overall structure of ordinary conversation. Hoey's approach, grounded in Conversation Analysis, is compelling in its observational richness. He has given us a book that is eminently readable and deserves a prominent place on the desk of all students of talk-in-interaction. * Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki * What happens when people don't talk? It might seem counterintuitive for linguists to think about how longer silences - lapses - arise in talk, what sort of shapes they can take, or how people start talking again after a period of not talking. By looking at the lifespan of lapses, Elliott Hoey's book insightfully shows that lapses are a joint accomplishment of the parties involved, and that they have very particular social functions in conversation.A He shows how talk is entwined with other activities of human social life, like drinking or watching TV, or taking leave; and he argues that lapses have much to tell us about how larger courses of social action are organised. Linguists, interactionalists, and anyone who is interested in the study of language as an embodied and social phenomenon will learn much from this book about language, interaction and social life.-Richard Ogden, University of York