Pragmatics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2000

Linguistic assumptions of an individual speaker-hearer are subtly reflected in analyses of code switching that assign switches to “conversational strategies,” categories that are treated as if they existed prior to, and independent of, actual interactions. While such categories provide convenient rubrics for many common and significant social functions of code switching, they fail to capture the interactionally emergent functions of many switches. In this article I highlight such locally emergent functions of code switching among Dominican American high school students by examining several transcripts of intra-group, peer interaction from a conversation analytic perspective. Many switches in such peer interaction are better explained in terms of the sequential, conversational management activities achieved by interlocutors than by pre-defined categories of switches.

Media discourse, and in particular programmes such as talkshows, are certainly practices that have extended, enriched, and often taken to the limits, conversation as a speech event. The number of possibilities arising from conversational practice have certainly found a new dimension in the context of the mass media, and on TV in particular (cf. Vande Berg et al. 1991 and 1998). In this article I describe tabloid talkshows as one type of speech event. I focus on the description of the turn-taking organisation in tabloid talkshows by comparing their characteristics to those outlined by Sacks et al. (1974) for conversation. In order to carry out such comparison, I first propose a review and, consequently, a reform of the 14 features listed by Sacks et al. in their article ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation’. The results show that there are differences between both types of interaction.

This article reports on the findings of a discourse analysis study whose purpose was to provide answers to the following research question: What kind of speech event is the OPI? Is it more like an everyday, friendly conversation, an interview, or something else?

According to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Blakemore 1991) some cases of communication depend on the hearer recognising that a particular speech act, for example admitting, betting or promising, is being performed. These are ‘communicated’ acts. Other cases of communication do not depend on the hearer recognising that a particular speech act, for example predicting, warning or permitting, is being performed. These are ‘non-communicated’ acts. In the case of non-communicated acts communication is successful so long as the hearer recovers adequate contextual effects without having to recognise the speaker’s intentions. Against this view, I will argue that each of the speech acts considered to be non-communicated in the relevance theory literature fall into one of two categories. The speech acts in one category contribute to the strength of associated assumptions, and those in the other convey socially relevant information. I will argue that according to relevance theory both types of speech act must be recognised and that they are in fact communicated. If relevance theory is to be internally consistent, therefore, the distinction between communicated and non-communicated speech acts must be abandoned.

The research reported here is part of a larger psycholinguistic project on transcribing and the use of transcripts. It is hypothesized that reproducing transcripts originally prepared on the basis of current transcription systems overloads the capability of those who carry out transcript reproduction and therefore occasions an excessive error rate. Ten reproduced transcripts were taken from (a) three current textbooks (Duranti 1997; Garman 1990; Whitney 1998), and from (b) an earlier textbook (Levinson 1983); and (c) six versions were taken from a German transcript (Keppler 1987). Additions, deletions, substitutions, and relocations of notations were identified according to five categories: Verbal, prosodie, paralinguistic, extralinguistic, and format components. The hypothesis is supported: The overall rate of change is 6.6 syllables per change (2032/308) across all 41 comparisons. Factors underlying this excessive amount of change are discussed. The proposal is made that only those notations be made which are to be used for analyses in keeping with the purposes of the research in question.