CONTOH MAKALAH CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS

Introduction

1.    Introduction

Conversation is one of the most prevalent uses of human language. All human beings engage in conversational interaction and human society depends on conversation in order to function:

Social interaction is the primordial means through which the business of the social world is transacted, the identities of its participants are affirmed or denied, and its cultures are transmitted, renewed and modified.

(C. Goodwin and Heritage, 1990: 283).

Conversation is the way in which people socialize and develop and sustain their relationships with each other. When people converse they engage in a form of linguistic communication, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the use of a linguistic code. Much that is important in conversation is carried out by things other than language, including eye gaze and body posture, silences and the realworld context in which the talk is produced.

Conversation has received a great deal of attention from writers over a very long period of time; however, much of what has been written about conversation is prescriptive in nature and deals with the idea of what makes a 'good conversationalist' (see Burke, 1993). Such approaches to conversation take the form of a set of prescriptive rules which describe what a conversation should be. They present sets of social rules which indicate which topics are appropriate or how language is to be used for maximum effect. These principles of what constitutes good or appropriate conversation vary from culture to culture and change over time (Burke, 1993). Such approaches to conversation show little about conversation as a normal everyday human activity, but frame conversation as an elite activity governed by the conventions of 'polite society'. However, conversation is not solely an elite activity, but rather an everyday one, and it is important to understand how it is that people engage in this everyday activity as a structured social event.

The everyday nature of talk has often been denigrated as a subject for study, with linguists such as Chomsky (1965) seeing language used in actual instances of spontaneous communication as being in some way defective and negatively influenced by non-linguistic factors. Such views of language, however, divorce the linguistic system from its primary use in human communication. Given the fundamental role of conversation in human social life, it is ihmportant to understand conversation as a linguistic activity, and since the 1960s increasing importance has been given to the analysis of conversation as a field of study (dayman and Maynard, 1995; C. Goodwin and Heritage, 1990; Heritage, 1989). (Liddicoat, 2007).

2.    Formulation of Problem

There are some problems that will be answered in these papers :

a.       What is conversation analysis?

b.      What is turn taking? What are the examples?

c.       What is adjacency pair? What are the examples?

d.      What is psychological or statistical in conversation analysis? What are the example?

e.       What are insertion and side sequences? What are the examples?

f.       What is topic change? What are the examples?

Discussion

Definition of Conversational Analysis

In pragmatics, the term, conversational analysis is used to mean the investigation into and analysis of natural conversation so as to reveal what the linguistic features of conversation is and how conversation is used in ordinary life. That is, conversational analysis studies three things. Those are:

1.     Firstly, the techniques that the speaker employs in deciding when to speak during a conversation, such as rules of turn-taking,

2.     Secondly, the ways in which the utterances of more than one speaker are related, for instance, conversational maxims, adjacency pair, inserted sequence, etc, and

3.     Thirdly, the different functions that conversation is used for, for example, establishing roles, communicating politeness, etc.

Turn Taking

     In conversation analysis, turn-taking is a term for the manner in which orderlyconversation normally takes place. turn-taking in an exchange in conversation is very important. The transition talk is an important requirement conversation (Howe, 1983), because the transition talk will lead to change of the role of participants in the conversation. This is in accordance with the opinion of sack (under Hawe, 1983: 3-12), which states that the conversation can occur if there are several people take turns speaking. Conversation involving several people, but not too many people involved..

     In a conversation of adults, in general, the participants already know about the convention who should speak, when to speak, and how much time spent talking (Richards and schmidt, 1983). In the natural conversations of daily, talk transitional arrangements were never found. According to Richards and Schmidt (1983: 141-142), the transition of talk in the community there are several variations. Said transition said depending on the culture of the language user. Exemplified, expert speakers difference that occurs in children from America and the children of Fijian Indian descent. Instead of talk that occurs in the conversation is determined by the willingness and responsibility to develop conversation conversation participants

According to Sack, the transition speech follows a basic rule. The basic rule is formulated as follows. First, if the turn of speech that has been determined by designating the next speaker, participant designated that the right to speak on the next turn. Second, if the change of speech is not predetermined, the participants of the conversations that will decide who should speak on the next turn, after the previous speaker provides an opportunity for other participants. Third, if the change of speech is not predetermined and the other participants do not take the initiative to become speaker, former speaker can continue the conversation.

There are some process of turn taking, such as :

1.      ACQUIRE is how to take a turn to talk given by previous speakers. Previous speakers provide opportunities for partners to speak he said. Previous speakers provide the opportunity fully to the next speaker marked by the silence of the previous speaker.

Example :

A : What do you think about the result of Final Exam in Tangerang?

B : I think, the result of Final Exam in Tangerang is not really good.

2.      CHANGING is turn taking to speak by replacing or continue partner's talking because his/ her partners of turn taking are not able to continue the conversation. This method is usually performed to maintain a conversation.

Example :

A : Have you ever seen this thing?

B : Yes, I think I’ve ever seen it.... Uhmm.. What is it??

A : it’s a spoon.

B : Yes it’s a spoon.

3.      SEIZING is taking a turn to speak during the previous speaker was talking, and he still wants to continue talks.

Example :

A : What are we doing in holiday?

B : Picnic.

C : Sleep

4.      STEALING is taking a turn to speak is granted by the previous speaker. Previous speakers provide opportunities for partners to speak he said. Previous speakers provide the opportunity fully to the next speaker marked with the previous speaker's silence.

Example :

A : Last night....

B : earthquake, right?

Adjacency Pairs

An adjacency pair is a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one trun each by two speakers,the turn are functionally related to each other in such a fashion that the first turn requires type or range of types of second turn. Once the first utterance is spoken, the second is required. A few of the many adjacency pairs that have been identified are shown. In pragmatics, a branch of linguistics, an adjacency pair is an example of conversational turn-taking. An adjacency pair is composed of two utterances by two speakers, one after the other. The speaking of the first utterance (the first-pair part, or the first turn) provokes a responding utterance (the second-pair part, or the second turn). Together the two turns constitute an adjacency pair. For example, a question such as "What's your name?" requires the addressee to provide an answer in the following turn, thus completing the adjacency pair. A satisfactory response could be "I'm James".

Cook (1989:156) holds: “two types of conversation which typically occur together form an adjacency pair”. Sacks (1967) also observe that, a conversation is a string of two turns. Some turns are more closely related than others, and isolates a class of sequences of turns called adjacency pair.   However, Sacks proposes a number of features of ‘Adjacency pair’, which has been given below:   

1. They are two utterances long,
2. The utterances are produced successively produced by different speakers;
3. The utterances are ordered- the first must belong to the class of first ‘pair parts’, the second to the class of ‘second pair parts’;
4. The utterances are related, not any second pair can follow any first pair part, but only an appropriate one;
5. The first pair part often selects next action- it thus sets up’ transition relevance’ and expectation which the next speaker fulfils; in other words, the first part of a pair predicts the occurrence of the second: given a question, regularly enough an answer will follow.  
6. There is a class of first pair parts which include questions, greetings, challenges, acknowledgements, requests, offers, complaints, invitations, announcements etc; for some first pair parts the second pair part is reciprocal (greeting-greeting), for some only there is only one appropriate second (question-answer), for some more than one (complain-apology/justification).

    For example:          

1.      greeting → greeting

2.     "Heya!" → "Oh, hi!"

3.     offer → acceptance/rejection

     "Would you like to visit the museum with me this evening?" → "I'd love to!"

• request → acceptance/rejection

   "Is it OK if I borrow this book?" → "I'd rather you didn't, it's due back at the        library tomorrow"

• question → answer

   "What does this big red button do?" → "It causes two-thirds of the universe to implode"

• complaint → excuse/remedy

    "It's awfully cold in here" → "Oh, sorry, I'll close the window"

• degreeting → degreeting

    "See you!" → "Yeah, see you later!"

But looking at conversations we often find that a first pair part (eg a question) is sometimes followed by something that is clearly not an 'answer' in the required sense - it might be a refusal to answer, a redirection to somebody else, a challenge to the questioner's right or competence to ask that question, and so on.  If we look at a collection of 'unexpected' responses we'll find that they are done differently from 'expected' ones. They are not so prompt, and will have a hedge, or a request for clarification, or an account, or something that alludes to a difficulty or an excuse.

A: “why don’t come to our party on Sunday?”
(Pause)
B: "Well I'd like to but it's Hannah's birthday" [marked rejection]

This latter is an example of what is called a 'dispreferred' response. The rejection is (it is empirically found) marked by hesitation and hedging and an account of why the preferred response wasn't given. The mark is so powerful that it alone will suffice as a rejection:

A: “why don’t come to our party Sunday?”
(pause)
B: "Well ..."

And A knows that B is declining the invitation.

 But what will happen if it gave the dispreferred reply without marking it:

A:"why don't you come to our party on Sunday?" 

B: "No"

That would look strange and rude. We would infer something about what B was saying (e.g. that they were sulking). The in formativeness of such deviation shows us that the substance of the dispreferred SPP (e.g. that it is a rejection) and its markers (e.g. a pause, a hedge) normally go together.  So there are four possibilities: (commonly) expected and unexpected answer which can be either marked or unmarked. Commonly expected answers tend strongly to be unmarked.

Psychological or statistical:

It is important to appreciate that 'dispreferredness' is not a psychological evaluation of the response. It's purely a frequency judgment. The more frequent response to a greeting inquiry about your health is 'fine, thanks, and you?'. But it's not meant to be an accurate report. It's just a feature of the system that it has 'standard' responses. It's useful because if someone wants to communicate that he is not fine, then all he need to do is hesitate and delay. The listener will work out that he is giving the 'non-standard' response (and, in this case, are therefore not well).

In this example we can see a speaker calculating what her or his listener's silence means:

A: So I was wondering would you be in your office in Monday by any chance
(2.0)

B: Probably not

A is explicitly recognizing that the other speaker has not done the proper thing (replied quickly), but A does not simply pass over it; s/he assumes that B has some reason not to respond quickly, that not-responding-quickly means something. Given (as we noted in the last lecture) that preliminary pauses are generally used as markers of dispreferred responses. A infers that what is coming is a rejection and moves to deal with it. 

Moreover, adjacency pairs are in the basic structural units in conversation. They are employed for closing and opening conversations, and are very important in conversations both for operating and turn taking system by enabling a speaker to select the next action, and next speaker, and for enabling the next speaker to avoid both gap and overlap. In fine, adjacency pairs of the structure of conversation and are studied in conversational analysis.

Insertion Sequence

An insertion sequence is a sequence of turns that intervenes between the first and second parts of an adjacency pair. The person towards whom the first part of an adjacency pair has been directed may want to undertake some preliminary action before responding with the second part. A request for clarification by the recipient will take place after the first pair part but before the second pair part. This is an insertion sequence. Here turn 1 and 4 make up one adjacency pair inserted between the two parts of the first pair.

P: Martin would you like to dance ?

M: Is the floor is slippery?

P: No its fine.

M: Then I’d be happy to dance.

Moreover, it can be defined as, the phenomenon of embedding; of one pair occurring inside another is noticeable in conversations. Schegloff (1972) terms this type of embedded pairs Inserted sequence. Cook (1989:156) holds: insertion sequence: one set of related conversational turns occurring within, and helping the bracketed part of the following conversation;

A: Did you enjoy the meal?

B: Did you?

A: Yes.

B: so did I.

Furthermore, during the inserted sequence, the original question retains its transition relevance, and if the second speaker does not then produce an answer it is noticeably absent in exactly the same way as it would be if there were no intervening sequence, and the questioner can complain about the lack of answer in exactly the same way. Adjacency pairs are normative structures, the second part ought to occur, and thus the other sequences are inserted between the first pair part that has occurred and the second pair part that is anticipated.

It is, finally, interesting that an inserted sequence can itself contain inserted sequences:

A: Are you coming tonight?

B: Can I bring a guest?

A: Male or female?

B: What difference does that make?

A: An issue of balance.

B: Female.

A: Sure.

B: I’ll be there.

Side Sequence

In the case of side sequence, Jefferson (1972) observes that the general drift of conversation is sometimes halted at an unpredictable point a request for clarification and then the conversation picks again where it left off. She, from this observation, proposes type of embedded sequence different form Schegloff’s insertion sequence and labels 'side sequence', for example, italic part of the following conversation:

A : One, two, three, (pause), four, five, six, (pause) seven, eight, nine, ten.

B : Eleven?- eight, nine, ten.

A : Eleven, eight, nine, ten.

B : Eleven?

A : Seven, eight, nine, ten.

B : That's better.

Jefferson initially suggests that the 'misapprehension sequence', a well-known type of 'side sequence' has a three-part structure consisting of :

1.      a statement of sorts,

2.      a misapprehension of sorts, and

3.      a clarification of sorts, for example:

Statement:                   A: If Percy goes with - Nixon I'd sure like that.

Misapprehension:        B: Who?

Clarification:               A: Tessy. That young fella that uh- his daughter was murdered.

Terminator:                  B: Oh Yeah. Yeah.

Topic change:

Topic change is a technical way to avoid the topic which one no longer wants to talk on a same topic for a long time. It is a natural phenomenon occurring in conversation. Sacks(1971) observes that in a conversation which is progressing well talk grits from one topic to another, and suggests that the relative frequency of marked topic introduction is some measure of the quality of a conversation. Since people do not talk on the same topic for long, ’topic change’ takes place.

As Sacks (1968) stresses, talking topically and talking about some topic chosen by another speaker is not the same thing at all.  One can perfectly well have a sequence in which successive speakers talk in a way topically coherent with the last utterance, but in which each speaker talks on a different topic. Speakers are aware of this as a problem and have ways of formulating a topic to make it more likely that other speakers will talk to it. Sacks exemplifies with a hypothetical speaker who wants to talk about surfing:

                                A: I was at Malibu yesterday.

                                B: Yeah? I was at County Line.

                                A: How was it?

                                B: Too low tide.

Conclusion

In pragmatics, the term, conversational analysis is used to mean the investigation into and analysis of natural conversation so as to reveal what the linguistic features of conversation is and how conversation is used in ordinary life.