| Casual conversation cannot be described by the static codal consistency characteristic of such discourse focused registers as service encounters and literary genres. The reasons for this are two-fold. For one, it lacks experiential and functional consistency. And for another, it is a message focused register. This implies that what is actually verbalized of the intentionally communicative behaviour manifested does not account for the complete interpretation of the intended message. Situational and gnostological exophora place contextual and cognitive demands on the interlocutors involved that make the register more of an active experience than ritualized and formulaic discourse focused registers which are relatively complete in themselves, and predictable to the decoder.;Communication Linguistics has proved an effective frame-work with which to describe the metafunctional dynamism inherent in casual conversation and the interplanal interrelations between the discourse and its situation, in light of the interlocutors' gnostology. It differentiates between the instantial planes of experience: situation, discourse, and manifestation, and the non-instantial realizatory codal strata: semology, morphosyntax and phonology. It also recognizes the gnostological interface, where the encoder/decoder's linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is stored. Phase, the dynamic instantiation of registerial consistency, has been a particularly useful concept in describing how interpersonal and experiential message components are 'packaged' in a way that simplifies decoding. And phasal strings capture how registers such as casual conversation, which have only a minimally predictable discoursal schema, are organized in a discontinuous or continuous fashion to facilitate decoding.;In this dissertation eight conversations have been analyzed: four by six and seven year old children, two by adult 'strangers' and two by adult 'friends'. Phasal analysis has allowed a preliminary characterization of casual conversation to be reached by describing the effects of varying interpersonal relationships and different temporal provenances on casual conversation. Contrastive descriptions of experientially and functionally specified discourse have also shed light on the unique character of casual conversation. |
