Conversational Analysis

The interaction between people

in different stadiums of their relationship

in

The Big Bang Theory

Student’s name: Mathias Archan / 1014506

Teacher’s name: Pia Resnik

Table of contents

1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….3

2. Conversation Analysis…………………………………………………………………4

3.1. Turn-taking………………………………………………………………….…......5

3.2. Adjacency pairs…………………………………………………………………....5

3.3. Sequences………………………………………………………………………….6

3. Text Analysis……………………………………………………………………...…...7

4. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………11

5. References…………………………………………………………………………….11

1. Introduction

This paper examines the interaction between people in different stages of their personal relationship, using Conversation Analysis. It discusses precisely the prime features of Conversation Analysis and provides an accurate text analysis, based on dialogues from the TV series The Big Bang Theory. In addition to that, the last section of the paper is dedicated to a final conclusion, which summarizes the entire content and revises the main ideas. The following two paragraphs highlight general background information about Conversation Analysis and a summary of the TV series The Big Bang Theory.

Linguists have developed various theories to analyse conversations between humans, for example, Discourse Analysis, which collects theories of linguists and analyses a text with their ideas. Conversation Analysis, uses an inductive approach to conversations, which means, that the data itself is investigated and theories are constructed by examining the text. Conversation is usually an interaction between two or more speakers. According to Cutting (2008: 22) “each speaker is affected by what the previous speaker said.” The following example illustrates a possibility of an interaction. Two strangers talk to each other for the first time, both want to find out more about the other. To make this possible the answering of questions is...