Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Transcription conventions
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Culture, communication and interaction
- Chapter 2 Direct and indirect messages: The role of social context identified by Grice and Searle
- Chapter 3 Politeness and face
- Chapter 4 Speech acts and politeness across cultures
- Chapter 5 The analysis of conversation
- Chapter 6 Power relations and stereotyping
- Chapter 7 Naming and addressing: Expressing deference, respect, and solidarity
- Chapter 8 Cultural differences in writing
- Chapter 9 Interpreting and translating
- Chapter 10 Intercultural communication issues in professional and workplace contexts
- Chapter 11 Towards successful intercultural communication
- References
- Index
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Chapter 5 - The analysis of conversation
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Transcription conventions
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Culture, communication and interaction
- Chapter 2 Direct and indirect messages: The role of social context identified by Grice and Searle
- Chapter 3 Politeness and face
- Chapter 4 Speech acts and politeness across cultures
- Chapter 5 The analysis of conversation
- Chapter 6 Power relations and stereotyping
- Chapter 7 Naming and addressing: Expressing deference, respect, and solidarity
- Chapter 8 Cultural differences in writing
- Chapter 9 Interpreting and translating
- Chapter 10 Intercultural communication issues in professional and workplace contexts
- Chapter 11 Towards successful intercultural communication
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
Greetings and leave-takings are aspects of conversation that we may never think about because they are such an integral part of our everyday lives, yet they can be quite complex. In this chapter we will look at some of the complexity inherent in greetings and leave-takings, and examine some cultural variation.
Humour and laughter are widely used to establish and maintain rapport, yet these are also aspects of communication which are often not contemplated. Some of the similarities and differences between cultures in the way they incorporate humour and laughter will be discussed in this chapter.
We will begin by examining some of the features of turn-taking in conversation, drawing on the field of research known as Conversational Analysis and provide some examples of how turn-taking can be managed by speakers from different cultures.
TURN-TAKING IN CONVERSATION
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), in their seminal work on turn-taking, observed the following three key features in the organisation of turn-taking in conversation:
one party talks at a time
transitions are finely coordinated for speaker change
utterances are constructed in such a way as to show coordination of turn transfer and speakership.
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson identified adjacency pairs as a key feature of conversation. They pointed out that most conversation is composed of pairs of utterances, with the prototypical example being a question–answer sequence. There is a sense in which the question ‘requires’ the answer as the second part of the adjacency pair.
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- Communication Across CulturesMutual Understanding in a Global World, pp. 61 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
References
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1992 ‘Interviewing in intercultural situations’. In Drew P. & Heritage J. (eds) Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 302–27.Google Scholar
, & 1974 ‘A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking in conversations’. Language, vol. 59, pp. 941–2.Google Scholar
1968 ‘Sequencing in conversational openings’. In Gumperz J. & Hymes D. (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 346–80.Google Scholar
1989 ‘On the telephone again! Differences in telephone behaviour: England versus Greece’. Language in Society, vol. 18, pp. 527–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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