Hawa Rohany
Coordinator
Unit Penyelidikan & Perundingan
Pusat Bahasa
Universiti Teknologi MARA

Date: 26 October 2001
Time: 10.30-11.00

This paper is a discussion on the dynamics of casual conversations in 3 parts:-

a. the complex hierarchical embeddings of discourse units in casual conversations.
b. the availability of an internal recursive mechanism which allows multiple embeddings of discourse units in ongoing conversation.
c. the limitation of the recursive mechanism, constraining the degree of embeddings into 3 levels: primary, secondary and tertiary.

This discussion is based on one main finding of a Ph.D research, which investigated opinion-giving strategies, employed by British native speakers and Malaysian non-native speakers of English. The discovery of the hierarchical embeddings of discourse structures was the result of analyzing 20 hours of audio-recorded conversations qualitatively and quantitatively.
The analysis began with identifying “discourse topics” (Bublitz, 1998), the building blocks of coherence in conversations. These topics focus the participants’ attention and establish links between their contributions to the conversation. The conversations were then synthetically described and visually represented. The structural complexity of these conversations was then measured quantitatively. A embeddedness index was created to compare the average number of embeddings for the 3 levels identified in the hierarchy.
The two approaches employed in this study confirmed the fact that multi-embeddings are common in casual conversations and that the syntactic structure of the ongoing discourse becomes more complex with the greater degree of re embedding of talk.