A socio-pragmatic comparative study of

2. 12. Approaches to the Study of Conversation 
The familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate 
in speaking, which occurs outside specific institutional settings like religious services, 
law courts, classrooms, and the like, has been roughly referred to as conversation. 
Native languages are almost always acquired in the matrix of conversation.
Conversation has been surveyed through different approaches. The most significant of 
these approaches are conversation(al) analysis and discourse analysis. The focus of 
these two approaches is coherence (i.e. the underlying functional connectedness of a 
piece of language). These approaches also involve the sequential organization of 

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CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE 
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discourse, and how this organization is produced and understood. The two approaches, 
however, have their own distinct features.
2. 12. 1. Discourse Analysis 
Crystal (1992: 106) defines discourse analysis as the "study of continuous stretches of 
language longer than a single sentence." Discourse analysis (also referred to as 
discourse linguistics) investigates the organization of such general notions as 
conversations, arguments, narratives, jokes, and speeches. Discourse analysis looks out 
in particular for linguistic features which identify the structure of the discourse.
Discourse analysis draws on the methodology, the theoretical principles, and the 
primitive concepts typical to linguistics. It extends the methodology and techniques of 
linguistics beyond the unit of the sentence. The practitioners of discourse analysis 
usually 
a) isolate a set of basic categories or units of discourse, and 
b) formulate a set of linked rules stated over those categories delimiting well-
formed sequences of categories from ill-formed segments. 
In the practice of discourse analysis, the analyst focuses on a number of other features 
as well. According to Van Dijk (1972: chaper 6), the discourse analyst usually appeals 
to intuitions for evaluating what is and what is not a coherent or well-formed discourse. 
The analyst also tends to take one or a few texts (often constructed by the analyst) and 
to attempt to give an analysis in depth of all the important features of this limited 
domain to find out what is really going on.