Analysing Talk - LING2510

Explores conversation and other forms of talk from an ethnomethodological perspective, with the main focus on how participants in conversation structure and organise their contributions and interactively construct meanings and activities in their talk. Special attention will be paid to methods speakers employ to distribute turns at talk, the ways in which the actions performed in these turns are coherently sequenced, how speakers and listeners deal with disagreements and disaligning talk (preference organisation) and with troubles in hearing, speaking and understanding (repair). Students will be required to transcribe a short conversation, and then analyse it in terms of one or more features of the talk that have been discussed in the class.