Chapter Five.doc

Lecture Five. Conversation Analysis (Machael McCarthy 118)
Conversation is a discourse term is vague. Some seem to use the term to describe any kind of oral interaction.
Conversation analysis attempt to describe and explain the ways in which conversations work.
It belongs to spoken language. Their central question is:How is that conversational participants are able to produce intelligible utterances, and how are they able to interpret the utterances of others?" This type of analysis is quite different from analysis of written language. It is often associated with a group of scholars in the USA known as thnomethodologists.:because they(--ists) set out to discover what mewthod ( --methodolog--)people(ethno--)use to participate in and make sense of interaction.
Their starting point is the very basic observation that conversation involves turn-taking. Conversation analysists tries to describe how people takes turns, and under what circumstances they overlap turns or pause between them.
The significance of this approach for the language learners is great.
A turn is everything the current speaker says before the next speaker takes over.
Turn-taking mechanisms, the way in which speakers hold or pass the floor(抓住发言权让出发言权),vary between cultures and between languages. There are particular signals, which enable speakers to get into-- and to get out of--conversations, to p