Characteristics Of Conversation

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Conversation is an informal talk in which two or more people participate and news and ideas are exchanged. It is an unorganized, spontaneous, and interactive form of communication in which two or more people follow rules of etiquette. Conversations might have poor grammar, slangs, and may wander from one subject to another. The first characteristic of conversation is that it takes place between more than two people because a single individual cannot exchange ideas with himself, there must be a person at the receiving and the sending end of the information. It is managed locally, during the course of interaction the participants themselves decide which person gets to speak, for how long, and in what order, it is all worked out as the conversation progresses. It cannot be carried out in the absence of exchange of information. There must be mutual understanding between the participants, the information must be received with the same spirit by the receiver with which it is given. It is not necessary that the participants should be face-to-face during the conversation, it can be direct i.e. face-to-face conversation or …show more content…

One of which is turn-taking. An order is produced while communicating, it doesn’t pre-exist rather it is achieved by the participants. This order is recurrent and repeatable. According to Jefferson, spoken discourse can be convened using transcription symbols e.g. (.) it represents a pause of less than two-tenths of a second, (//) represent overlapping, CAPITALS represent words spoken loudly, (:) indicates lengthened sounds, and etc. Harvey Sacks, along with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson studied the structure of conversation which can be summarized as opening conversation, closing conversation, turn-taking, overlaps, adjacency pairs, feedback, and repair. An example of opening is summoning in a telephone conversation, ringing of the telephone acts as the

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