Talk at Work is a major collection of studies of language and interaction in a wide variety of institutional and workplace settings, including doctor-patient consultations, legal hearings, mass media, job interviews, visits by health visitors, psychiatric interviews, and calls to emergency services. A theoretical overview of the distinctive contribution made by conversation analysis to our understanding of talk in institutional contexts is followed by reports of the contributors' original empirical research.

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross-purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by tracing the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers' distinctive ways of communicating and relating, thus highlighting the pitfalls of hidden assumptions underlying talk.

The essays in this volume are all analyses of prosody--primarily intonation and rhythm--and the role it plays in everyday conversation. Prosody emerges as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences. The material studied is taken not from constructed laboratory data but from genuine English, German and Italian conversations.

Deborah Schiffrin looks at two important tasks of language--presenting 'who' we are talking about (the referent) and 'what happened' to them (their actions and attributes) in a narrative--and explores how this presentation alters in relation to emergent forms and meanings. Drawing on examples from both face-to-face talk and public discourse, she analyzes a variety of repairs, reformulations of referents, and retellings of narratives, ranging from word-level repairs within a single turn-at-talk, to life story narratives told years apart.

Providing a comprehensive discussion of communication between doctors and patients in primary care consultations, this volume brings together a team of leading contributors from the fields of linguistics, sociology and medicine to describe each phase of the primary care consultation. The authors use conversation analysis techniques to analyze the sequential unfolding of a visit and describe the dilemmas and conflicts faced by physicians and patients as they work through the visit. The result is a view of the medical encounter that reveals the perspective of both physicians and patients...

Written in readable, vivid, non-technical prose, this book, first published in 2007, presents the highly respected scholarly research that forms the foundation for Deborah Tannen's best-selling books about the role of language in human relationships. It provides a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation works to create meaning and establish relationships. A significant theoretical and methodological contribution to both linguistic and literary analysis, it uses transcripts of tape-recorded conversation to demonstrate that everyday conversation is made of features that are...

The news interview has become a major vehicle for presenting broadcast news and political commentary. This book examines the place of the news interview in Anglo-American broadcasting as well as its historical development in the United States and Britain. It discusses the fundamental norms and conventions that shape conduct in the modern interview, including the linguistic and interactional practices of journalists. Through analyses of well-known interviews, the book explores the relationship between journalists and public figures, and reveals the tensions lying beneath the surface of the...

The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are traditional authority relationships in schools being undermined? How is this affected by popular media culture? His study, which provides numerous...

This book makes available five classic studies of the organisation of behaviour in face-to-face interaction.