English Face-to-face. Conversation In Contemporary Anglophone Culture

Conversation as a discourse-type has been the object of intensive scientific investigation in the past twenty years. Despite its spontaneous quality, conversation has been demonstrated to be a highly structured form of oral discourse. This volume gives an overview of some basic theoretical perspectives guiding the linguistic analysis of conversation. It attempts to demonstrate the validity of the methods and procedures commonly used in conversation analysis by means of applications mainly to recordings of spontaneous verbal interaction among English language speakers from a wide variety of contemporary situations. It also attempts to relate the question of dialogue structure to functional and contextual considerations by exploring the culture-specific nature of conversations as real-world communicative events.Diane Ponterotto is professor of English and English Linguistics at the University of L’Aquila, Italy, where she is also Director of the University Language Center. She is at present Vice-President of the International Society of Applied Psycholinguistics. Her research interests focus on contemporary issues in English linguistics and related disciplines. She has contributed to national and international scientific jouranls in the areas of applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and gender studies