Defining Conversation
Note: This extended excerpt is taken from
Nofsinger, R. E. (1991). Everyday conversation. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE.
One primary characteristic
of conversation is that it is fully interactive. At least two people
must participate in it, and they exchange messages on a real-time basis.
Participants take turns in exchanging these messages, so conversation is
fundamentally a sequential activity. Talk is designed to reflect back on
prior turns and project ahead to future ones, and we interpret talk as
if it is tied in some way to prior and future turns. Furthermore, all participants
are eligible to take turns as speaker and to make substantive contributions
to the conversation -- whether they actually do so or not. Thus a professor
meeting with a group of students to confirm that preparations for a class
project have been made is engaging in a conversation with them, but during
a class lecture, those same people are not having a conversation
because the students have more restricted rights to speak in that situation.
The talk is not as fully and immediately interactive. And participants
in conversation routinely monitor each other and often respond to each
other in delicately coordinated ways.
A second primary characteristic
of conversation is that it is locally managed. The participants
themselves, during the course of their interaction, determine which people
get to speak, in what order they speak, and for how long. The things people
are expected to talk about, what they actually say, and how they say it
are also worked out among the participants as the conversation progresses.
This contrasts with other such forms of talk as formal debate, in which
the order and length of speaking turns are decided upon before the event
even begins, and drama, in which the actual words people speak may be scripted
(written down). The organization and content of a conversation are not
predetermined or planned in any specific way (although, as we shall see
later, participants do orient toward certain rules of conversational conduct).
(Nofsinger,
1991, p. 3-4)