Talk: The Science of Conversation

- Blurb -

We live our lives by talking to others, and yet scientists have often shied away from studying real talk, preferring to ask people to report on their communicative lives in interviews or questionnaires or to simulate them in laboratories. They have argued that people's talk is too idiosyncratic or too messy to capture and study systematically . . . so, how does 'talk' work?Drawing on 50 years' of research from an approach called Conversation Analysis (CA), Elizabeth Stokoe will show that talk can and should be studied scientifically and change how we think about conversations.After having collected tens to thousands of audio or video recordings of actual 'talk in the wild', these recordings are then transcribed and analysed using a technical system that permits a forensic analysis of the constituent activities that comprise complete interactions. Collectively, conversation analysts have investigated all aspects of social life from first dates to medical consultations; from family mealtimes to cockpit interaction; from service encounters to police interrogation.