Talking Voices
Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse

This book, first published in 2007, provides a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation creates meaning and establishes relationships.

Deborah Tannen (Author)

9780521868907, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 October 2007

244 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'Work like Tannen's reminds us how complex conversational interactions are.' Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Written in readable, vivid, non-technical prose, this book, first published in 2007, presents the highly respected scholarly research that forms the foundation for Deborah Tannen's best-selling books about the role of language in human relationships. It provides a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation works to create meaning and establish relationships. A significant theoretical and methodological contribution to both linguistic and literary analysis, it uses transcripts of tape-recorded conversation to demonstrate that everyday conversation is made of features that are associated with literary discourse: repetition, dialogue, and details that create imagery. This second edition features a new introduction in which the author shows the relationship between this groundbreaking work and the research that has appeared since its original publication in 1989. In particular, she shows its relevance to the contemporary topic 'intertextuality', and provides a useful summary of research on that topic.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Overview of chapters
Discourse analysis
2. Involvement in discourse
Involvement
Sound and sense in discourse
Involvement strategies
Scenes and music in creating involvement
3. Repetition in conversation: toward a poetics of talk
Theoretical implications of repetition
Repetition in discourse
Functions of repetition in conversation
Repetition and variation in conversation
Examples of functions of repetition
The range of repetition in a segment of conversation
Individual and cultural differences
Other genres
The automaticity of repetition
The drive to imitate
Conclusion
4. 'Oh talking voice that is so sweet': constructing dialogue in conversation
Reported speech and dialogue
Dialogue in storytelling
Reported criticism in conversation
Reported speech is constructed dialogue
Constructed dialogue in a conversational narrative
Modern Greek stories
Brazilian narrative
Dialogue in writers' conversation
Conclusion
5. Imagining worlds: imagery and detail in conversation and other genres
The role of details and images in creating involvement
Details in conversation
Images and details in narrative
Nonnarrative or quasinarrative conversational discourse
Rapport through telling details
The intimacy of details
Spoken literary discourse
Written discourse
High-involvement writing
When details don't work or work for ill
Conclusion
6. Involvement strategies in consort: literary non-fiction and political oratory
Thinking with feeling
Literary non-fiction
Speaking and writing with involvement
Involvement in political oratory
Conclusion
7. Afterword: toward a humanistic linguistics
Appendix I. Sources of examples
Appendix II. Transcription conventions
Notes
List of references
Author index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Linguistics [CF]