An Introduction to Discourse Analysis - Book Review [1]

Book Title                              : The Language of Conversation

Author                                    : Francesca Pridham

Year of Publication               : 2001

Publisher                                : Routledge

Pages                                      : 96

Description of the Book        :

This book is offering students hands-on practical experience of textual analysis focused on conversation. It combines practical activities with texts, followed by commentaries and suggestions for further study, and also written in a clear, user-friendly style by an experienced teacher. This book, The Language of Conversation, aims to:

a.       analyse exactly what happens during conversation and why

b.      discuss the structure, purpose and features of conversation

c.       explore the relationship between speaker and listener

d.    examine different kinds of conversation, including television chat shows, door-to-door sales pitch,   classroom interaction, teenagers’ chat, mother and child communication

e.       explain the theory in a simple, practical way – without jargon

f.        provide a clear introduction to technical terms

In addition, there are six units in this book. The first unit is about the introduction. The next unit is features of spoken language and oral narratives. The third unit is talking about structure in conversation. The forth unit covers materials about negotiation and interaction. Following that, it is about conversational genres. Finally, the last unit is about spoken language in written texts.

Summary of the Book           :

The first unit talks about the introduction part. It covers the aims of the book, the notion of conversation, the part of conversation, activities, comments, and guidelines for taping spoken language. The aim of this book is to explore the complexity of conversation in an attempt to understand and appreciate it more. Cook (1989) declares that discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users. This book deals with discourse analysis, but chooses to focus on naturally occurring spoken language or conversation rather than written texts and looks, therefore, at spoken language in use between speakers and listeners in a variety of social contexts.

In addition, conversation is obviously far more than words. Communication can take place through body language, through prosodic features such as intonation, speed, stress and volume and even through silence or laughter. It is worth exploring, the specific features of spoken language used as the building blocks of conversation. There are some important points when you have a conversation with others. The first one is turn taking, structure, politeness, negotiation, content, and conditioning.

Following that, the second unit covers about the features of spoken language and oral narratives. The aims of this unit are to explore the features of spoken language, to compare spoken and written forms of the same story, and to examine the use and structure of oral storytelling in two different contexts: a live TV show and a personal conversation. There are some features of spoken language that distinguish spoken language from written language. These include: pauses, voiced phrases (er, um), fillers (you know), repetition, rephrasing, vague language (sort of, kind of), colloquial vocabulary, discourse markers (right, well), ellipses, context dependent language (this, these), frequent use of and.

A spoken story has the following features: characters, action, a resolution at the end, and setting in time and place. The story can be brought alive by: dialogue, changes in tense, descriptive detail, exaggeration, suspense, details of character’s feelings. Throughout the story, evaluation can explain how the speakers feel the story should be interpreted.

Then, the third unit is about structure in conversation. This unit looks at the various structuring mechanisms available in conversation. Therefore, conversation is a flexible text negotiated between the various participants in a conversation. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) pioneered conversation analysis, an approach to analysis derived from sociology and known as ethnomethodology. It argues that conversation has its own dynamic structure and rules, and looks at the methods used by speakers to structure conversation efficiently.

Moreover, in a conversation, the speakers and listeners support and evaluate each other using the known building blocks of adjacency pairs and exchanges and operating with the knowledge of Grice’s Maxims. The Grice’s Maxims are also called the co-operative principle. It consists of four maxims that are the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner. Non-fluency features help signpost the structure of the conversation as do openers, discourse markers and closures. This signposting causes the participants to be aware of the conversation’s structure, enabling a smooth progression from topic to topic and from speaker to speaker. Finally, the context and underlying purposes of a conversation make its meaning clear to all participants.

The next unit is about negotiation and interaction. This unit discusses the various methods used by speakers to support each other in conversation, discusses why speakers feel this need for politeness and what exactly the principles of politeness are, and explores why speakers choose not to operate politely and what happens to the conversation when they don’t. In a co-operative conversation the speakers work together to reassure and help each other. There are many techniques used to show agreement with a speaker, with the desire to encourage further speaking. Speakers can also check that they have been understood properly and can change and modify what they have said so that it can be understood better.

In addition, in order to consider properly whether someone is being co-operative or not, it is necessary to consider the role and status of the speakers. A teacher who directs a lesson, for example, is not necessarily being aggressive or unco-operative with students because he or she chooses to lead them – that is part and parcel of the job. It is not easy to state unequivocally that any one technique is always used, either uncooperatively or co-operatively. Politeness techniques used persistently can, for example, be almost as intrusive as more aggressive techniques; it depends on what purpose they are used for. The context of the conversation needs to be considered carefully in analysing who is co-operative or unco-operative.

The fifth unit talks about conversational genres. Therefore, the aim of this unit is to explore features of some of the possible conversational genres such as comment and elaboration which usually found in informal conversation, between speakers who know each other well.

Moreover, we can summarize this unit to four points. The first point is people using language in action frequently do not mention what is directly in front of them. They have no need to because they share the same context. The second point is people refer to what they can see with words such as ‘that’, ‘there’, ‘it’ and ‘here’ which is called deictic reference. The next point is there can be much ellipsis in a conversation. Finally, the last point is there can be more silence than normal while activities take place while people have a conversation.

The last unit covers spoken language in written texts. The aim of this unit is to
explore how this knowledge has been applied by writers and has become part of the construction of written texts. Those written texts are in the kind of poetry, novels, and drama.

In the last, this unit can be summarized to be following points. Spoken language in literature is a stylised, constructed version of real spoken language. Next, the features of spoken language used in literature create a variety of voices that develop character. Following that, the use of voices exploits and explores society’s attitudes to class, region, occupation and gender. Moreover, features of conversation can be used to show relationships between characters and to explore conflict. The next point is the audience is involved in creating the context for spoken language and in interpreting its meaning. Then, the use of spoken language can make the texts more informal and demystify them. The last point is an unexpected use of spoken language can challenge an audience to rethink attitudes and preconceived ideas.

Critical Evaluation                :

            For me, the author arranged this book perfectly. It applies the appropriate font such the font size and the font types. Other than that, she implicitly provides the parts’ name in each unit of this book. I think it will help readers who just learn about discourse analysis easy to understand the materials inside. Moreover, the author writes the aims of each chapter to build up the readers’ thought about what will going to be discussed in each unit. This book also provides activities and commentary in each unit to build up the contexts talked in that unit to make sure readers have same perceptions with the author. In addition, the summary provided in each chapter is fruitful to hand the readers know the important points in units they have learned. It also has eye-catching template for this book.

            The one that I noticed was each unit has the topic to be discussed which just in the first letter written capitalized. I think it will be more persuasive if the author write the topic which in every first letter in the word appears written capitalized.