Theoretical Framework

Abstract

The theoretical approach of this book is mainly drawn from conversation analysis (CA) and the more recent explorations of this framework within linguistics, such as the research on grammar in interaction. This chapter reviews the main concepts of this theoretical approach, beginning with the turn-taking system and adjacency pairs. Studies on the grammatical constituency of turns and turn expansions are also reviewed. The description of these concepts is useful to set the conversational features found in the data in their wider context and application to a specific conversational setting, i.e. of service encounters. In this way it will then be possible to describe which features common to all talk-in-interaction and inherent to it also belong to the talk in service encounters, and which are the specific characteristics of these encounters. This chapter examines firstly one of the core concepts in CA, the turn-taking system.