What is it? “The most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind is conversation” Michel de Montaigne.CONVERSATION ~ the most pervasive form ofhuman communication. A form of oral discourse that is distinguished by the absence of explicit rules. Varies according to social settings that shapes the conversational processes.
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Conversation requires at least two parties – twoindividuals to select meanings, form syntacticoutlines and so on.
Conversation can be, among friends, a nearly effortless flow of topics, thoughts, and events that isattractive precisely because it does not appear tohave any rules.
However, it is not entirely correct to say that
conversation operates without rules, rather, they have been internalized to the point that they are notthought of in order to have a conversation.
The most fundamental rule to describe a conversation inthat of a joint action.
Herbert Clark (1996, 2002) describes it as one that iscarried out by an ensemble of people acting incoordination with one another.
Example: think of two people waltzing, paddling a canoeor playing a piano duet ~ when Fred Astaire and GingerRogers waltz, they each move around the ballroom in aspecial way individually in coordination.
Waltzing is the joint account of them doing theirindividual steps in coordination, together.
While theoretically the number of possibilities foropening conversations is infinite, in practice we do so ina limited number of ways.
Most commonly ~
We address another person ( Hey, Carl ) Request information ( Do you know what time it is? ) Offer information ( Are you looking for someone? ) Or, use some form of stereotyped expression ( Hello) or
topic ( Strange weather today, eh? ) These serve to get the listener’s attention and
often lead to stock replies, which quickly establishes the alternation of turns that is centralto conversation.
Schegloff and Sacks (1973) suggest that one way toend a conversation is to present a preclosingstatement like we-ll , so-o-o, or OK, which signalsreadiness to end the conversation.
The listener may accept the statement with anutterance such as yeah or OK .
Alternatively, he might bring up another topic and
the conversation would continue. Albert and Kessler (1978) list several ways in which
Conversation become more complicated when there aremore than two people are present.
Sacks and colleagues (1974) – turn taking duringconversation operates by three implicit rules.
1. The current speaker is allowed to select the next speaker,often done by directing a question to another person.2. Self-selection; if the first rule is not used another person
may speak up.3. The current speaker can continue, although he is not
obligated to do so. These rules are ordered; the first one takes
priority over the second, which takes priority over the third.
An implication of this definition of topic is that only conversations, not individual sentences or evenspeaker turns, have topics.
Example:
Speaker A says John bought a red car in Baltimoreyesterday, numerous propositions are beingadvanced John bought a car, the car is red, Johnbought it in Baltimore, John bought it yesterday.
If speaker B says I think a red car would be ugly, theintersection of these two sentences is the propositionthe car is red .