A socio-pragmatic comparative study of

2. 12. 2. Conversation(al) Analysis 
Conversation(al) analysis aims at the analysis of natural conversation in order to 
discover what the linguistic characteristics of conversations are, and how conversation 
is used in ordinary life. In other words, it is the analysis of the methods people use to 
engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving speech. As such, 
the central concern of conversational analysis is to determine how individuals 
experience, make sense of, and report their actions. Conversation(al) analysis includes 

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CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE 
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the study of: 
(a) how speakers decide when to speak during a conversation (i.e. rules of turn-
taking); 
(b) how the sentences of two or more speakers are related (i.e. adjacency pairs, 
conversational maxims, etc.); and 
(c) the different functions that a given conversation is used to perform (i.e. to 
establish roles, and to communicate politeness or intimacy).
Unlike discourse analysis, conversation(al) analysis is a rigorously empirical approach 
which avoids premature theory making. Its methods are inductive in nature. In other 
words, the analyst seeks to find the recurring patterns across a good number of
naturally occurring conversations. He, however, does not immediately categorize 
restricted data (which is the typical first step in discourse analysis). Furthermore, 
instead of a theoretical ontology of rules (as used in syntactic descriptions), 
conversation(al) analysis focuses on the interactional and inferential consequences of 
the choice between alternative utterances.
In contrast to discourse analysis, conversation(al) analysis has little appeal to intuitive 
judgments as well. There is always a tendency to avoid analyses based on single texts. 
As many instances as possible of some particular phenomenon are examined across 
texts to discover the syntactic properties of the sequential organization of talk, and the 
way in which utterances are designed to manage such sequences.
The methodology of conversation(al) analysis, according to Crystal (1992: 84), is as 
follows: "Tape recordings are made of natural conversations, and the associated 
transcriptions are analyzed to determine the properties that govern the way a 
conversation proceeds."