An Analysis Of Conversation From Sociolinguistic Perspectives

Conversation analysis (CA) originated in the mid 1960's within sociology in the work of Harvey Sacks and his colleagues, as an approach to the study of the social organization of everyday conduct. During the ensuing thirty years, CA has produced a substantial body of rigorous and informative analysis of human action and interaction. In this thesis, the author studies conversation from sociolinguistic perspectives, mainly concentrating on two aspects: one is how social variables affect conversation and the other is how speakers, through the proper management of their speech, achieve the appropriate institutional identities in different context.This thesis consists of six parts, including the introduction and the conclusion.The first chapter is the introduction, which discusses about the scope and history of CA and the author's starting point.Chapter Two introduces the three aspects of conversation, namely conversation structure, conversation strategy, and conversational style. Conversation structure is the natural structure that language follows, such as turn-taking and adjacency pairs. Conversational style is the speaker's natural way of speaking and conversation strategy is the speaker's conscious management of their style to achieve certain communicative goals. These three aspects can not represent all the attributes of conversation, but they are the main aspects the author discusses.Chapter Three is the main part of the thesis, which examines conversation in society. The author mainly studies conversations between parties of different statuses, different gender, different age, and differentVethnicity. The first three studies are carried out from the three aspects that the author has presented in Chapter Two. Generally speaking, one party tends to dominate the conversation structure, and the both parties tend to use different strategies and different styles. The study of conversation between parties of different ethnicity is mainly discussed from style perspective. At last, the author points out that these differences may differ according to different speech communities.Chapter Four explores conversation in institutional contexts, which is more specific and task-orienting compared with conversation in society. Speakers can achieve their goals through the management of personal reference, lexical choice, grammatical forms, and turn-taking. Some conversations in specific contexts are also discussed in this chapter.The final part is the conclusion. It is the retrospect and prospect of the whole thesis, in which the author summarizes the thesis, addresses the limitations, and points out the unsolved problems. Conversation is a social phenomenon which needs taking of several factors into consideration, much more studies should be carried out to get more accurate data...