What are the 3 broad approaches taken to study language, cognition
and communication?
Individual
Social
What is conversation analysis?
Robust, structured way of studying social action/talk-in-interaction
Why are we interested in talk-in interaction?
Think about what & how can we apply from the study of everyday talk-in interaction to the study of atypical communication
How can we go about investigating real-life social interactions between
people?
Naturalistic observations (happen anyway)
BUT have to ask
What is the shortest length of noticeable silence in conversation?
0.2 seconds
What length of silences are extremely noticeable?
0.7-1 second
What does the lack of delay here show?
PWA understands + answers question
What is PWA doing here?
Describing something daughter understands
What does : show in CA?
Stretched sound
What is PWA doing here?
Confirming daughter’s understanding
What is happening here?
Gestures matching words
How is talk-in-interaction organised?
Systematically organised + deeply
ordered (order at all points)
What does the analysis of talk-in-interaction depend on?
Participants’ own displayed understandings
Our job = analyse what they are doing by saying it THAT way, THERE, THEN
What are the 4 ways we interact with each other to recognise + understand + assign meaning to talk?
- Actions + sequences of actions
- Epistemics (knowledge in interaction)
- Turns + turn-taking
- Repair
What is action ascription?
Working out what action is being done in a turn at talk as it has implications for how to respond
What is most important in talk?
What it is doing- action
What is action formation?
Constructing turns in a way that others ‘get’ the action it’s doing (use of agreed upon phrases)
What are adjacency pairs?
Composed of two turns
By different speakers
Adjacently placed (one after the other)
Ordered relative to each other
As a a FPP makes production of a SPP conditionally relevant, what can this lead to?
Noticeable absences
- lack of response has meaning
- delay + accounting for often in dispreferred responses eg: disagreement, rejection
Working hard to understand whatever is produced after a question as an answer
What does it mean that actions are ordered relative to each other?
First and second pair parts (FPPs and SPPs)
- only certain types of SPP are relevant after a given FPP
What are 3 examples of adjecancy pairs?
Greeting sequence
Question answer sequence
Request granting sequence
What is epistemic status?
What participants assume each other knows
- who is more knowledgeable (K+)
- who is less knowledgeable (K-)
What is epistemics?
Claims to knowledge participants assert, contest, and defend
What is epistemic stance?
Expressing K+ or K- through talk, e.g:
- ‘are you married?’
- ‘you’re married, aren’t you?’
- ‘you’re married’
