PAPER
Final Exam
By
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Background
Conversation is a central activity in social life. (Hutchby &
Wooffitt,2008) said conversation is not seen simply as the product of two
speaker-hearers who attempt no exchange information or convey messages to
each other.Based on ( Conklin, 1912) conversation is a form of interactive,
spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following
rules of etiquette. It is polite give and take of subjects thought of by people
talking with each other for company.
Participations in conversational are seen as mutually orienting to, and
collaborating in order to achieve, orderly and meaningful communication.
Conversation also can not be separated from it context and circumstance when it
was uttered, somehow it is like a unity among the meaning, context and lately
conversation is connected with social.
According to (Sidnell, 2010) conversation analysis ( CA) is an approach
within the social sciences that aims to describe, analyze and understand talk as a
basic and constitutive feature of human social life. (Hutcby and Wooffitt,2008)
states that conversation analysis is charactherized by the view that how talk is
produced and how the meanings of that talk are determined are the practical,
social and interactional accomplishments of members of a culture. According to
(Siobhan Chapman & Routledge, 2009) the more important CA investigates the
sequential nature of conversation; analysis have studied the systematically
recurring linguistic units that open these conversations.
In this paper, we will discuss more about the conversational preference
structure.
1.2. Formulation of Problems
There are six problems that we are going to discuss in this paper:
1. What is the definition of conversation?
2. What is the definition of conversational analysis?
3. What kinds of features are existed in a conversation?
4. What kinds of conversational style do people have?
5. What is adjacency pair?
6. Explain about preference structure?
CHAPTER 2
DISCUSSION
a. Floor
According to (Yule, 1996a) Floor is the current right to speak in a
conversation.
b. Turn taking
The definition of turn taking based on (Yule, 1996a) is the change of speaker
during conversation. Whereas on his other book he said (Yule, 2014) the way in
which each speaker takes a turn in conversation. According to (Stephen C
Levinson, 1983) we may start with the obvious observation that conversation is
characterized by turn taking: one participant, A, talks, stops;another, b, starts,
talks) stops: and so we obtain an A-B-A-B-A-B distribution of talk across two
participants.
c. Transition relevance place (TRP)
(Cutting, 2005) state that transition relevance place is a point in a conversation
where a change of turn is possible. According to (Stephen C Levinson, 1983)
the end of such a unit constitutes a point at which speakers may change; it is a
transition relevance place, or TRP. Next spekaers cannot be sure that the current
speakers turn is complete, but they will usually take the end of a sentence to
indicate that the turn is possibly complete. For the most part, participants wait
until one speaker indicates that he or she has finished, usually by signaling a
completion point. Speakers can mark their turns as complete in a number of
ways: by asking a question, for example, or by pusing at the end of completed
syntactic structure like a phrase or sentence. Other participants can indicate that
they want to take the speaking turn, also in a number of ways. They can start to
make short sounds, usually repeated, while the speaker is talking, and often use
body shifts or facial expressions to signal that they have something to say.
The other thing that can be used as an indicator of transition is the turn
allocation procedures. The turn allocation procedures for conversation are
distributed into two groups: those in which the current speaker selects the next
speaker, and those in which the next speaker is self selected. So, at the initial
transition relevance place of a turn, the following options are relevant.
d. Overlap
Based on (Yule, 1996a) overlap is a condition when more than one
speaker talking at the same time in conversation. Typically, only one person
speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speakng
turns. If more than one participant tries to talk at the same time, one of them
usually stops, as in the following example, where A stps until B has finished.
Overlapped speech may be the result of a participants misreading of a
pause as the end of the speakers turn and sign of forfeiting the floor. When that
happens, the overlap may persist for some time before one of the participants
discontinues. Another possible reason for overlaps in conversation is when, at
the end of a speakers turn, two interlocutors take the floor at the same time. If
an overlap occurs at a point that is not a potential juncture for speaker change, it
is considered an interruption.
e. Pause
(Yule, 1996a) states that pause is silence between turn. If the normal
expectation is that completion points are marked by the end of a sentence and a
pause, the one way to keep the turn is to avoid having those two markers occur
together. That is, dont pause at the end of sentences; make your sentences run
on by using connectors like and, and then, so, but: place your pauses at points
where the message is clearly incomplete; and preferably fill the pause with
hesitation marker suchas er, em, uh, ah (Yule, 2014).
f. Attribut Silence
Attribute silence is the absence of talk when a speaker is given the right to
speak in conversation (Yule, 1996a). Each culture seems to have an unwritten
agreement about the acceptable lenght of a pause between two turns. In any
culture, if the pause is intended to carry meaning, analysis call it an attribute
silence.
A ; Did you have a good time last night?
B ; (3) Yeah
A: So he asked you out then?
B : He did
B pauses for three seconds before her Yeah and A attributes to this silence an
affirmative answer and very positive sentiments. In the cultures in which there
is a low level of tolerance of silence between turns, if there is a lull in the
conversation extending past about ten second, speakers tend to utter something
like um or so there you go, in order to break the silence. For those who do
not know each other well, a long non attributable silence can feel awkward.
g. Backchannels
Backchannels is indication that listener pay attention to speaker.
According to (Yule, 1996a) within an extended turn, however, speakers still
expect their conversational partners to indicate that they are lsitening. There are
many different ways of doing this, including head nods, smiles, and other facial
expressions and gestures, but the most common vocal indications are called
backchannel signals, or simply backchannels.
According to (Yule, 2014) in same gender conversations, women produce
more backchannels as indicators of listening and paying attention. The term
backchannels describes the use of words (yeah, really?) or sounds (hmm, oh) by
listeners while someone else is speaking. Men not only produce fewer
backchannels, nut appear to treat them, when produced by others, as indications
of agreement. In cross gender interaction, the absence of backchannels from
men tends to make women think the men are not paying attention to them. The
more frequent production of backchannels by women leads men to think that the
women are agreeing with what theyre saying.
Example : (Yule, 1996a)
Caller : If you use your long distance service a lot then youll
Mary : uh-uh
Caller : be interested in the discount Im talking about because
Mary : yeah
Caller : It can only save you money to switch to cheaper service
Mary : mmm
What is also worth noting is that there are a variety of potential seconds
to a first part. Adjacency pairs represent social actions, and the social actions
that appera in the second parts are not of equal position. There will be
structurally expected next act called the preferred response and a structurally
unexpected act referred to as the unexpected (Yule, 1996: 79).
A: Hello B: Hello
Schegloff and Sacks (1973) noticed that there is a class sequences which is
widely operative. It consist of the following features:
e. Preference Structure
Adjacency pairs represent social actions, and not all social actions are
equal when they occur as second parts of some pairs, e.g., a first part request
expects an acceptance. Alternative second parts to first parts of adjacency pairs
are not generally of equal status;rather some second turn are preferred and
others dispreferred is the structurally unexpected next act.
First Part Second Part
Prefered Disprefered
After a preface (Oh) and hesitation (eh) , the second speaker produce
kind of token acceptance (Id love to) to show appreciation of the invitation.
Then, the others understandingis invoked (you see) and an account is presented
( Im supposed to get this finished) to explain what prevents the speaker from
accepting the invitation. This patterns associated with dispreferred second in
English are presented as a series of optional elements.