к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Чучуладзе М.И.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Principles of conversation analysis

Among many social activities that human beings conduct every day, conversation is the one with highest significance. Through conversation, or more generally in talk-in- interaction, we as human beings are involved in an exchange of thoughts, ideas and emotions. When we talk, we travel in a world beyond language where we tend to be cognitively and socially connected with other human beings. Conversation, thus, has unique complexities governed by a set of rules and practices bound with our linguistics, cognitive and social competencies. Attractive enough, many researchers from different disciplines have tried to tackle the complexities of conversation. Among many other perspectives on this matter, conversation analysis (CA) emerged to do the analysis of the conversation, which dates back almost half a century ago.

“Study of talk” is probably the simplest way of defining the CA (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008: 1). However, the study of “a bit of a world” is not an easy task. According to Sidnell (2010) every bit of talk has a unique character since it is “a product of several organizations which operate concurrently and intersect in the utterance” (ibid. 2). By “organization”, Sidnell (2010: 2) means “a set of practices” that every bit of talk deals with them to a certain extent. Including topics such as turn taking, preference, sequence organization, repair etc., these sets of practices usually operate simultaneously for the appearance of the end product i.e. talk. Therefore, CA is the study of talk by a systemically reflecting on the practices that are responsible for any talk to happen: “An analysis of some fragment of talk may require attention to turn- construction and design, the orientation an organization of the participant’s bodies and movements, the sequential location in which the talk occurs, the deployment of practices of repair and directed gaze, and so on.” (Sidnell, 2010: 267)

Among the fundamental ‘organizations’ of the conversation, the sequentiality will be stressed more than the others in this study. The nature of news interview context is the reason for this inclination. To start with, the sequentiality in a general sense means how utterances are considered organized and interconnected. The basic unit of talk is called Turn Constructional Unit (TCU). It refers to the stretch of talk-in-interaction where and when it is pragmatically, syntactically and prosodically considered complete by co-interactants. Once established complete, there comes a potential slot for the next TCU to start. The interval between the two TCU is called Transition Relevance Place (TRP). The meaning of the stretch of talk crucially relies on the sequential positioning of the bits of talk together i.e. TCUs and TRPs. They gave the possibility of projection to the interactants.

Back to the context in focus, it has been discussed that the modal of the news Interview is based on certain type of adjacency pairs i.e. questions and answers (Clayman and Heritage, 2010). The reason is that central to sequentiality in particular and crucial to CA in general, next-turn proof procedure is will be employed in this paper. This procedure in essence highlights the “recipient’s response” and serves as a “source of evidence for an analysis of the immediately prior turn” (Sidnell, 2013: 79). As such, although by the help of the syntax or prosody we could track down questions, this essentially still depends on the next turn i.e. how the recipient responds to the utterance.

The following example illustrates this basic tool in CA:

(2) L: Isn’t he nice?

G: yup, isn’t he a gentleman?

L: oh my god, I like him.

The next turn proof procedure helps us to analyze the L’s turn by the help of G’s turn and so on. To state an obvious, the line 2 answers to the line 1 and the line 3 answers to the line 2. But both answers are specially designed to meet the pragmatic values of the situation. To start with, G answers to the assessment with ‘yup’. But she goes on to contribute her own assessment too. By doing such action, we notice that he treats his ‘yup’ as an insufficient response to the assessment. Another observation is that the G does not agree with the level of assessment provided with L in the first line. G, obviously, upgrades the assessment by uttering ‘a gentleman’ in the second line. Also, note that the response of the G is not a statement, it is a question. What happens next is even more significant. In the line 3, L projects the TRP and starts his own turn; however, it doesn’t seem that he treats the G contribution as a question. L designs her turn in line 3 unrelated to the grammatical format of G’s TCU.

In this example, both question in the lines 2 and 3 are in a yes/no format but are not treated as ordinary yes/no question. Despite the grammatical structure, the first question does more than an inquiry; it invites an assessment. The resource for such conclusion is the way that G designs her turn. Thus, the G’s turn serves as an analytical resource to understand how L’s question actually works. Moreover, in the third line, L doesn’t treat G’s TCU as an ordinary question let alone yes/no question. Whether L dismisses or ignores the question depends on the existence of the extended stretch of talk. But so far, we get to know that the turns are related to each other reflexively and can be exploited to analyze the prior turn.

Among certain differences that the CA employs to study spoken language, its methodology to collect data is remarkable. The methodology has “remained remarkably consistent over the last forty years” in its core perspective though different projects or analysts might impose certain “methodological requirements” on it (Sidnell, 2010: 22). One unique characteristic of the CA’s methodology is that it acts as an “aide-memoire” and provides us with the recorded data of the interaction (ibid. 35). Its data initially consist of the spoken utterances extracted from situations like telephone conversations. In recent years, it includes high quality video recordings of as well as audio recordings of an interaction of wide verity of contexts. In the current study, all the data have been transcribed in accordance with transcription convention that has been promoted by Gail Jefferson (2004) and had developed since.

The transcription aims to note every nuance in talk or somehow related to talk. It may accompanied by a pattern of intonation The process of transcribing might seem a complicated task but once done it provide us with wealthy amount of details and makes the conversation-analytic work more accessible.

For this means, I have used the software CLAN -Computerized Language ANalysis- for providing systematic representation of speech practices (Bernstein Ratner and Brundage, 2013). The CLAN has the simple and reliable user interface and the ability to integrate to the second software that I used for tracking the intonation contour i.e. PRAAT. The PRAAT is handy tool for speech analysis with the ability to construct the acoustic values of speech signals (Lieshout, 2003). However, the transcription, no matter how meticulously completed, should be viewed as a “representation” of the data (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008: 70). Making use of computer software here and in general is for handling the data easily and shouldn’t be solely relied on and totally substituted for the actual video recording.

As its core principle, CA methodology entails that analysis should be inductive and not based on any theoretical framework (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008). This means that the analysis of the transcription of the data that will follow in the next chapter does not depend on any theoretical framework. Instead, the analysis will proceed in a bottom-up fashion relying on the participants’ own understanding and perspective of the situation. However, some scholars like Seedhouse (2004) take a further step and claim that the CA is not allowed to take the contextual details into account. This indicates that the description of the mechanisms that participants make use of during talk should be free from the contextual properties. Nonetheless this is not the case in what follows in the analysis section of this paper. Rather, the analysis in connected to the tenets of contextual properties of news interview. The contextual properties of this kind have been discussed by (Clayman and Heritage, 2002) in detail. They have argued in length how participants manage the inferential and sequential properties of interaction in the news interview context. Thus, while this paper remains faithful to the emic perspective of CA, the interpretation of the selected pieces of the interaction will be influenced or even supported by the properties of the news interview context.

During interaction turns are organized into sequences. Every social action comprises of unit of sequence organization that are called ‘adjacency pairs’ (Schegloff, 2007). The social actions happen orderly and the position of any sequence is a fundamental resource for understanding talk-in-interaction. This means that once one part of an action is performed, the other part is expected to take place in an orderly way. In the news interview, the IR performs (almost always) the questioning while expecting the IE’s response in return. Thus the IE is under the “normative obligation” by the constraint that question brings about (Stivers, 2013: 191). This kind of exchange i.e. questioning and answering is the prominent social action in the news interview context.

Literature:

1. Hutchby, I., & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.

2. Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis : an introduction. Oxford : Wiley - Blackwell.

3. Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2010). Talk in Action : interactions, identities, and institutions. Malaysia: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication.

4. Sidnell, J. (2013). Basic Conversation Analytic Methods. In J. Sidnell, & T. Stivers Sidnell J. And Stivers T. (Eds). (2013). The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (2nd ed) Oxford: Wiley - Blackwell.

5. Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an Introduction. In G. Lerner, Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first generation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

6. Bernstein Ratner, N., & Brundage, S. B. (2013-24-September). A Clinician’s Complete Guide to CLAN and PRAAT. Washington D.C. Retrieved 2013 uun 4-December from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/clan/Clinician-CLAN.pdf

7. Lieshout, P. Praat Short Tutorial. Toronto. Retrieved 2- 2013-December from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/linguistics/corpora/material/PRAAT_workshop_manual_v42 1.pdf

8. Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2002). The News Interview; Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9. Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10. Stivers, T. (2013). Sequence Organization. In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis J.Sidnell, & T. Stivers (Eds)(2nd ed.), 191-209, Oxford: Wiley - Blackwell.