Conversation Analysis

Catalog description

How do people use language to communicate and accomplish social action? This course will introduce students to the field of conversation analysis, a branch of discourse analysis that focuses on the structural organization of naturally occurring talk. Though initially developed as a sociological framework for examining the production of social order in everyday life, conversation analysis is a widely used research methodology in linguistics, communication studies, social psychology, and other allied fields, and its development over the past fifty years reflects the interdisciplinary coalitions of scholars that have adopted it as a research methodology. Students in this course will learn to look beyond the commonsense or stereotypical answers to questions about how and why we behave as we do, and will learn specific details of ways in which speakers use language to accomplish mundane activities of everyday life and institutional tasks. This class will also introduce the role of some nonverbal behavior and ecology--including gesture, eye gaze, head nods and shakes, and features of the surrounding environment--in accomplishing mutual understanding and negotiating relationships.