To browse Academia. Discourse and Behavior and of articles on various subjects, including microanalysis of verbal interaction, narrative, formulation, public policy, social theory, and Thai interaction and social organization.
Transcript materials from a Northern Thai negotiation are used to illustrate the problems and possibilities involved in doing microanalysis of verbal interaction for readers who are unfamiliar with the language being analyzed. Two central questions are 1 can conversation analytic techniques be usefully applied to exotic languages, and can the results of such analysis be presented in an unbiased and comprehensible manner?
It is found that it is possible to do reasonably fine-grained and revealing analyses using conversation analytic techniques. However, the problems of presentation are significant in principle and practice.
The Northern Thai materials are used to clarify certain issues of context that have arisen in the conversation analytic literature. This textbook is a comprehensive guide for mainly, but not only linguistics, sociology, communication and even business students on the theories and research methodologies of conversation analysis.
Based on ethnomethodology, a theoretical perspective of sociology which appeared in the s and which explored how people create social order, social structure and situated action Garfinkel through the direct observation of human behaviour, conversation analysis emerged in the s as an approach to the study of talk in interaction. Sacks , a graduate student who worked with Garfinkel, thought of talk as the ideal source of data to study human action, as it could be tape-recorded and carefully and repeatedly examined.
