English Face-to-Face
Conversation in Contemporary Anglophone Culture

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

Conversation as a discourse-type has been the object of intensive scientific investigation in the past twenty years. Despite its spontaneous quality, conversation has been demonstrated to be a highly structured form of oral discourse. This volume gives an overview of some basic theoretical perspectives guiding the linguistic analysis of conversation. It attempts to demonstrate the validity of the methods and procedures commonly used in conversation analysis by means of applications mainly to recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction among English language speakers from a wide variety of contemporary situations. It also attempts to relate the question of dialogue structure to functional and contextual considerations by exploring the culture-specific nature of conversations as real-world communicative events.

SINTESI