Small Talk Interaction: the Socio-linguistic Implications of Turn-taking in Conversation Analysis

In outlining the socio-linguistic implications of turn-taking in conversation analysis, this thesis covers the basic terminology and includes some of the more recent research in the field of applied conversational linguistics. The findings lead to the social implications to be drawn from this schematic for analysis and introduce turn-taking as part of the social language games that form our communication behaviour in our environment. It shows how certain turn-taking strategies are a crucial social lubricant in our day-to-day life, in part because they are so embedded in the way we understand our position within the rules and confines of this social game, how these work and what exactly they achieve.