Telephone Conversations From A Conversation Analysis Perspective

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7 (B-), University of Bayreuth (Language and Literature Sciences), language: English, abstract: Although we converse almost every day, we never have exactly thesame conversation twice. Nevertheless, certain parts ofconversations occur in forms which are very alike. They seem to beconstructed according to sets of rules. These rules were examined inthe 1970s for the first time.The mechanisms which govern our conversations are especiallyobservable in telephone conversations. But since the 1970s, newtechnologies have come up and society changed.The aim of this paper is to examine the mechanisms of telephoneconversation and how the systems working in telephone conversationshave changed since the establishment of the mobile telephone.For this, the focus on Conversation Analysis as research methodologyis explained, before coming to the basic features of everyconversation. Following this, telephone conversations are examinedaccording to their structure of opening, topic-talk and closing.Finally, the changes of this structure for mobile telephoneconversations are pointed out.The basis for the observations on mobile telephone conversation is asurvey carried out among 20 Canadian citizens and material providedby the participants of the survey. Two different main methodologies exist for analysing and examiningconversation conversation in general, or telephone conversation inspecial from a linguistic perspective: Conversation Analysis andDiscourse Analysis. To understand my decision to focus on thediscipline of Conversation Analysis, I will shortly point out themain differences and parallels of these methodologies.Of course, both disciplines examine conversation. But the methodsused for this, the thereby resulting findings and the mainunderstanding of conversation differ immensely. A common aim of Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis is tobe able to give an account of how coherence and sequentialorganization is produced and understood (Levinson 1983: 286).Discourse Analysis uses primitive and basic concepts of linguisticsfor this. It attempts to extend the rules applying to sentences overthe boundaries of sentences. The main method of the discipline isthe isolation of sets of units of discourse, followed by aformulation of rules according to these units and finally thedivision of units into well-formed and ill-formed sequences. [...]

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