Spoken Interaction: a sample of conversation analysis

Abstract

In this paper an approach to the Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology is proposed. This methodology was used to collect and analyze a spontaneously and naturally spoken interaction. In this case, a conversation between four friends was taken in a context of familiarity. The 5 minute conversation was transcribed following the conventions of Van Lier (1988) and Johnson (1995). Turn taking, overlaps, adjacency pairs, silences and pauses were considered as units of analysis. The paper concludes that the conversation is not merely a chain of ordered shifts with a given duration.

Keywords

• conversation analysis
• spontaneous and natural conversation
• spoken interaction
• adjacency pair
• overlap
• turn