This chapter is meant as an overview of the fundamental concepts of conversational analysis which will be put to work in Chapter 3. It is by no means a complete guide to this approach; I have included only those notions which will be applied in the analyses in Chapter 3. For a more complete introduction to CA, see Levinson 1983 or Atkinson and Drew 1979. Readers already familiar with CA can skip to Chapter 3.

Notation conventions

Before we examine some of the substantive findings of conversational analysis, I would like to present and discuss some of the notational conventions used in CA-style transcripts. Many of these conventions may be unfamiliar to linguists, but they are all in fact fairly straightforward. (The sources of the transcripts reproduced in this book are given in abbreviated form – AD: 14, SN-4:30, etc. – at the end of the extracts. Further details of these sources are given in section 3.2.)

All talk is transcribed in a pseudo-phonetic system, using the basic orthographic symbols of written English; that is, if the speaker pronounces a word in a way that is not the only possible pronunciation for that word, then special care is taken to transcribe that particular pronunciation (but without using a special alphabet). This practice makes the transcripts somewhat difficult to read (especially for the non-native speaker), but since it brings out useful information I have not normalized the transcripts (except for crucial pronouns, which have been normalized for ease of reading and exposition).