{"id":1501,"date":"2011-04-16T10:00:56","date_gmt":"2011-04-16T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1501"},"modified":"2011-03-30T13:40:19","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T11:40:19","slug":"conversation-analysis-comparative-perspectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1501","title":{"rendered":"Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"
Conversation analysis:<\/strong> <\/em>Comparative perspectives. Ed. by Jack Sidnell<\/strong>. (Studies in interactional sociolinguistics 27.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 441. ISBN 9780521883719<\/a>. $118 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Angela Tan<\/strong><\/a>, University of California, Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n

Traditional conversational analysis (CA) largely focused on English. Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives<\/em> brings together analyses from a variety of contexts, settings, and languages. While still very much situated in the framework of CA, this volume suggests that variations and similarities across languages are due not only to differences in language structures but also in cultures.<\/p>\n

The book is divided into five sections. The first section consists of the editor\u2019s introduction, including transcription conventions. The second section deals with repair and issues beyond repair. In Ch. 2, Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu<\/strong> demonstrates that two Mandarin repair initiations resemble English repair initiations. They also serve to display stances, particularly of affiliation or disaffiliation, with question-intoned repeats intensifying nonalignment between speakers.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 3, Barbara Fox<\/strong>, Fay Wouk<\/strong>, Makoto Hayashi<\/strong>, Steven Fincke<\/strong>, Liang Tao<\/strong>, Marja-Leena Sorjonen<\/strong>, Minna Laakso<\/strong>, and Wilfrido Flores Hernandez<\/strong> look at initiation repair in the same turn from a crosslinguistic perspective involving Bikol, Sochiapam Chinantec, Finnish, Indonesian, and Mandarin. \u00a0They find not only substantial variations but also universals: e.g. monosyllabic words are recycled to achieve a beat of delay and multisyllabic words afford speakers opportunities to initiate repair before completing the word. In Ch. 4, Maria Egbert<\/strong>, Andrea Golato<\/strong>, and Jeffrey D. Robinson<\/strong> use data from English and German to suggest that repair initiations are produced with final-falling or slightly rising intonation by hearers.<\/p>\n

The third section looks at various aspects of response in conversation. In Ch. 5, Anna Lindstrom<\/strong> examines the projection of nonalignment in Swedish conversations, e.g. use of \u2018curled ja<\/em>\u2019. This projection allows recipients to recast their utterances to attain alignment. In Ch. 6, Trine Heinemann<\/strong> looks at how Danish speakers orient to knowledge in conversations, particularly two practices where recipients treat a question as inapposite since the questioner has failed to consider prior knowledge. In Ch.7, Federico Rossano<\/strong>, Penelope Brown<\/strong>, and Stephen C. Levinson<\/strong> investigate gaze behavior in conversation and demonstrate that it is contingent on culture. Additionally, it is found that the questioner does more gazing than the recipient, which departs from previous analyses that take recipient gazing as a display of attentiveness. In Ch. 8, Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-eun Yoon<\/strong> show how response tokens in Japanese are primarily speakers\u2019 activities and not recipient activities.<\/p>\n

Section 4 deals with action formation and sequencing. In Ch. 9, Marja-Leena Sorjonen and Auli Hakulinen<\/strong> discuss alternative ways of constructing agreement to an assessment in Finnish, such as subject-initial responses and responses containing a subject pronoun. In Ch. 10, Jack Sidnell looks at the employment of if<\/em> by speakers of Caribbean English as a preface to next-turn repeats and how it gives speakers opportunities to negotiate ensuing conversation. In Ch. 11, Galina B. Bolden<\/strong> examines the use of the Russian discourse particle –to<\/em> to manage contiguity breaks, where an utterance advancing a delayed course of action is not contiguous with the immediately-preceding one.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 12, Emanuel A. Schegloff<\/strong> concludes the book by giving insight into the prospects, potential problems, and possibility of comparative analysis in CA. This volume stands at the forefront of CA research and is highly recommended for scholars of this and related disciplines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives. Ed. by Jack Sidnell. (Studies in interactional sociolinguistics 27.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 441. ISBN 9780521883719. $118 (Hb). Reviewed by Angela Tan, University of California, Los Angeles Traditional conversational analysis (CA) largely focused on English. Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives brings together analyses from a variety of contexts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}