CONVERSATION & ITS STRUCTURE (pragmatics study)

CONVERSATION & ITS STRUCTURE

·         Conversation Analysis

There is a scarce commodity called the floor which can be defined as the right to speak. Having control of this scarce commodity at any time is called a turn. In any situation where control is not fixed in advance, anyone can attempt to get control. This is called turn taking. Because it is a form of social action, turn taking operates in accordance with a local management system that is conventionally known by members of a social group. Any possible change of turn point is called a Transition Relevance Place (TRP). This type of analytic metaphor provides us with a basic perspective in which speakers having a conversation are viewed as taking turns at holding the floor.

·         Pauses, overlaps, and backchannels

Transitions with a long silence between turns or with substantial overlap (both speakers trying to speak at the same time) are felt to be awkward. When two people attempt to have a conversation and discover that there is no flow, or smooth rhythm to their transitions, much more is being communicated than is said. If one speaker actually turns over the floor to another and the other does not speak, then the silence is attributed to the second speaker and becomes significant. It’s an attributable silence. There are many different ways of expecting the conversational partners to indicate that they are listening such as head nods, smiles, and other facial expressions and gestures, but the most common vocal indications are called backchannels signals, or simply backchannels.

·         Conversational style

Some individuals expect that participations in a conversation will be very active, that speaking rate will relatively fast, with almost no pausing between turns, and with some overlap or even completion of the other’s turn. This one is conversational style. It has been called a high involvement style. The non-interrupting, non-imposing style has been called a high considerateness style. Instead, the more rapid-fire speaker may think the slower-paced speaker just doesn’t have much to say, is shy, and perhaps boring or even stupid. In return, he or she is likely to be viewed as noisy, pushy, domineering, selfish, and even tiresome. Features of conversational style will often be interpreted as personality traits.

·         Adjacency pairs

Despite differences in style, most speakers seem to find a way to cope with the everyday business of social interaction. The automatic sequences are called adjacency pairs. They always consist of a first part and second part. For example: 1^st part is Hello and 2^nd part is Hi. And not all first parts immediately receive their second part, however. For example:

A: do you want the early flight? (Q1)

B: what time does it arrive? (Q2)

A: Nine forty-five (A2)

B: Yeah, That’s great (A1)

It often happens that a question answer sequence will be delayed while another question answer sequence intervenes. The sequence will then take the form of Q1-Q2-A2-A1 with the middle pair (Q2-A2) being called an insertion sequence. Delay in response symbolically marks potential unavailability of the immediate expected answer. Delay represents distance between what is expected and what is provided.

·         Preference structure

Basically, a first part of that contains a request or an offer is typically made in the expectation that the second part will be an acceptance. An acceptance is structurally more likely than a refusal. This structural likelihood is called preference. The term is used to indicate a socially determined structural pattern and does not refer to any individual’s mental or emotional desires. Preference structure divides second parts into preferred (the structurally expected next act) and dispreferred (the structurally an expected next act) social acts. We might say that in any adjacency pair, silent in the second part is always an indication of a dispreferred response. Indeed, silence often leads the first speaker to revise the first part in order to get a second part that is not silence to the other speaker. It must follow that, then, that conversations between those who are close familiars will have to tend fewer elaborate dispreferreds that conversations between those who are still working out their social relationship.