Features of Naturalness in Conversation
1st Edition
Published on 14. December 2006
X, 272 pages
978-90-272-9285-8 (ISBN)
Description
The study describes a detailed and original piece of research work, investigating a very important genre of human communication, and that is conversation. It provides a definition of the genre of conversation by describing nine features of conversation, namely multiple sources, discourse coherence, language as doing, co-operation, unfolding, open-endedness, artifacts, inexplicitness and shared responsibility. These nine features of naturalness in conversation serve to distinguish conversation from specialized discourse types. The study illustrates the nine defining features of conversation with authentic conversational data collected surreptitiously in England. While this study is of native speakers of English, the nine defining features of naturalness of English conversation are applicable to conversations conducted in other languages.
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Martin Warren
Features of Naturalness in Conversation
Book
12/2006
John Benjamins Publishing Co
€121.90
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Content
- Features of Naturalness in Conversation
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Why study conversation?
- Specialised discourse types
- Approaches to the study of spoken discourse
- Defining conversation
- Naturalness
- Nine features of naturalness in conversation
- Chapter 2: Data
- Introduction
- Naturally occurring conversation
- Data size
- Surreptitious data
- The data collected for this study
- Conclusions
- Chapter 3: Multiple sources
- Introduction
- Turn-taking
- Definition of a turn
- Turn-taking "rules"
- Self-selection of turns in conversation
- Turn-taking in other types of spoken discourse
- Maintenance of face and status
- Conclusions
- Chapter 4: Determination of discourse coherence
- Introduction
- Elements of discourse coherence
- Alignment
- Intonation
- Prominence
- Tone
- Key and termination
- Language about language
- Feedback
- Conclusions
- Chapter 5: Language as doing
- Introduction
- Speech acts
- Transactional and interactional language
- Ranking discourse types
- Phatic communion
- Language as doing
- Conclusions
- Chapter 6: Co-operation
- Introduction
- Grice's co-operative principle
- Criticisms and limitations of Grice's co-operative principle
- The spirit of co-operation in conversation
- Solicited assistance
- Unsolicited assistance - utterance completion
- Interruptions
- Co-operative interruptions
- Assertive interruptions
- Appropriacy
- Skip-connecting
- Topic as a product of co-operative effort
- Conclusions
- Chapter 7: Unfolding
- Introduction
- Adjacency pairs
- Exchange structure
- Prospection
- Pitch concord
- Conclusions
- Chapter 8: Open-endedness
- Introduction
- Open-endedness versus unpredictability
- Topic and topic framework
- Topic drift
- Challenge moves
- Topic shift
- Conclusions
- Chapter 9: Artefacts
- Introduction
- Artefacts
- Openings and closings
- Beginnings and endings
- Conclusions
- Chapter 10: Inexplicitness
- Introduction
- Context
- Inexplicitness
- Forms of inexplicitness
- Ellipsis and Substitution
- Deixis and reference
- Inexplicitness and lexical density
- Impacting levels of inexplicitness
- Strict linguistic inference
- Interpreting inexplicitness in conversation
- Conclusions
- Chapter 11: Shared responsibility
- Introduction
- Shared responsibility
- Topic control
- Speaker overlap and turn-taking
- Initiating moves
- Responsibility for determination
- Responsibility and co-operation
- Implications for data collection
- Conclusions
- Chapter 12: Conclusions
- Introduction
- The nine features of naturalness in conversation
- A model of naturalness of conversation
- References
- Transcription notation
- Name index
- Subject index
- The Pragmatics & Beyond New Series
