Abstract
Conversational interaction is a complex, interactive, dynamic and multimodal activity, allowing us to transmit and receive information, to form and maintain social ties, and also perform many other cultural and ritualistic functions. Methodologies for studying conversation, and human discourse in general, vary across many levels of abstraction, with everything from the qualitative manual coding methods of Conversation Analysis, through to the quantitative processing and analysis of vocal qualities based on frequency spectra. In this review we focus on how the paired techniques of recurrence plotting and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) have been utilised in the study of human discourse. We focus on recurrence analyses that have examined communication behaviours and activities in various institutional and social settings. Our review focusses along several key dimensions: discourse type, the role of time in the encoding of input data, and the challenges that multi-modality place on recurrence-based discourse analysis methods. We argue that recurrence analysis holds much promise for the ongoing study of discourse, and that its full potential has yet to be realised within this domain of application.
Highlights
Conversational interaction is an incredible human joint accomplishment, requiring us to make use of our own semantic resources, and the resources of our conversational partners
Recurrence plots tend to be rendered as dot-plots, where recurrences are expressed in a Boolean fashion, often using a threshold to determine if two points in the underlying time series are sufficiently close to indicate a match, some applications use gray or color shading to indicate the strength of recurrence
The creators of the technique made their intention clear that as a technique it does not replace the need for human analysts, “rather they are tools to help analysts perform and draw greater insight from their data” [14]. This responds to a key point of methodological friction, as one of the more active disciplines that is involved in the study of discourse, Conversation Analysis (CA) [1], is fiercely defensive of the use of qualitative close reading of conversation as a foundation of any analysis
Summary
Conversational interaction is an incredible human joint accomplishment, requiring us to make use of our own semantic resources, and the resources of our conversational partners. Methodologies for studying conversation, and language in general, vary across these levels of abstraction, with everything from the qualitative manual coding methods of Conversation Analysis [1], through to the quantitative processing and analysis of vocal qualities based on frequency spectra. Each perspective offers different insights, but each brings specific assumptions about the forms and functions of discourse. The focus of this position piece is on how the paired techniques of recurrence plotting and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) [2,3,4,5] have been utilized in the study of human discourse, framed from a Communication Studies perspective.
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