Introducing Greek Conversation Analysis

Abstract

AbstractAlthough conversation analysis (CA) has been widely employed in different languages, its application to Greek talk-in-interaction is still quite limited. For this reason, in our introduction we summarise briefly the foundations of CA and present international and Greek CA bibliography on different areas of analysis in a manner that will be accessible to conversation analysts of various interests but also to researchers who are new to the field. We begin by outlining the foundations of CA and then offer a brief background to its development and its relationship to other disciplines. The empirical basis of CA is stressed by focussing on the process of collecting and transcribing data for CA and the method and units of analysis. We also give background information on the main CA areas of analysis (grammar-and-interaction, prosody, narrative analysis, institutional interaction, feminist CA, membership categorisation analysis, multimodal interaction). Finally, we present a brief overview of past studies of Greek talk-in-interaction and conclude with a summary of the articles of the Special Issue. By placing the emphasis on the fine-grained, turn-by-turn analysis, its ethnomethodological underpinnings and the understanding of social action, our aim is to set the tone for this Special Issue and to encourage future study of Greek conversational data and cross-cultural comparisons.