FACTORS AFFECTING THE FLOW OF CONVERSATION

Abstract

Conversation is the way in which people socialize, develop and maintain their relationships with each other. When people converse they engage in a form of linguistic communication, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the use of a linguistic code. Much that is important in conversation is carried out by things other than language, including eye gaze and body postures, silences and the real world context in which the talk is produced. Conversation has received a great deal of attention from writers over a very long period of time; much of that attention has been paid to the idea of what makes a good conversationalist (Burke,1993). Conversation is not solely an elite activity, but rather an everyday one, and it is important to understand how is it that people engage in everyday activity as a structured social event. Conversation can be held if “there is at least, and not more than one party talks at a time” (Sacks, 1974). In other words, conversation can occur if it fulfills the aspects that are needed in conversation such as: participants, topics, and setting. Participants are commonly divided into speaker and listener or first speaker and second speaker. They usually share information or exchange ideas and these activities cause conversation. Participants take turn at the floor and, while small gaps and overlaps between participants’ speech are frequent they rarely last more than a few hundred milliseconds.