CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS TOWARD MIX GENDER

(AN ANALYSIS OF CONVERSATION BETWEEN SOPHIE AND

CHARLIE IN A LETTER TO JULIET MOVIE)
by:
Ni Luh Gede Dian Pondika Cahyaningsih
A. INTRODUCTION TO CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Before starting to explain further information concern with conversational
analysis, we are trying to examine how discourse and conversation analysis are
bonded and also in this paper we are trying to highlight the historical background
of conversational analysis, definition of conversation and conversational analysis,
element of discourse analysis or talk in interaction and parts of conversation
analysis such as opening and closing, topic rising, turn taking, dominance and
interruption of conversation and the last is analyzing a video by using those parts
of conversation analysis to know how discourse takes part as social interaction.
Discourse analysis necessarily includes the notion of discourse as
interaction and action. The concept of language as action, it means that the move
from linguistic forms to linguistic action was first defined by John Austen (1962),
a philosopher of language who articulated speech act theory. The central tenet of
speech act theory is that speech is action. Prior to Austens assertions, speech was
virtually unconsidered as part of communication because it was considered a
passive and fixed phenomenon that was analyzed as texts and discourses in
the static not the dynamic sense that has come to be a more common parlance
today. Speech act theory defines specific speech acts as its basic units of analysis.
For example, locutionary acts are those that produce utterances in some language.
Semantic or prepositional acts are used to convey meaning in language use. When
people use language, they are doing something. It means that they are acting
through words. Utterances are produced, these utterances have meaning, and
utterances have a socio cultural dimension. Speech acts do not occur as individual
utterance in isolation. People talk to each other, they write texts for readers, they
interact. Interaction takes many forms: turn-taking in conversation, agreeing and
disagreeing, questioning and answering, opening and closing conversation,

preparing to engage in and enter conversation, developing persona in

conversation, saving face, attacking or defending, and persuading or explaining.
These interactions in their social context are the subject of conversation analysis, a
subset of discourse studies of interaction.
B. THE NATURE OF CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS
Conversational analysis (CA) originated in the mid 1960s, within
sociology in the work of Harey Sacks and his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and
David Sudnow among others. This conversation analysis was done as an approach
to the study of the social organization of everyday conduct.

Harey Sacks,

Schegloff and David Sudnow were students of Erving Goffman at Barkeley. Sack
had met Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethno methodology at Harvard in 1959.
And then Sacks continued to meet with Garfinkle to read his published and
unpublished manuscripts. Sacks found that resonances between his questions
about what provides or certain social form for example law and Garfinkles
foundational explorations of the basis of social order in the detail of every
conduct. He began to probe the possibility of an empirically based study of human
conduct. In 1963 sack became a fellow at Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center.
There they made audio recordings and transcription of telephone calls to the
clinic.
There are many scholars have attempted to define what CA is, according
to With Goffman (1955), Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction
(both verbal and non-verbal in situations of everyday life). CA generally attempts
to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction,
whether institutional (in school, a doctor's surgery, court or elsewhere) or in
casual conversation. With Garfinkel (1967) conversation analysts recognize that
analyzing the institution of conversation in terms of rules and practices that
impose moral obligations. The organization of talk or conversation whether
formal or informal was never the central in defining the Ca, but it is organization
of the meaningful conduct of people in society how people in society produce
their activities and make sense of the world about them. According to Harvey
Sacks the core objective is to illuminate how action, events, and object are

produced and understood rather than how language and talk are organized as
phenomena.
Conversationpeople talking with each otheris one of the most
commonplaces of all human activities. Despite its prevalence in human
interaction, the study of conversation as a serious disciplinary endeavor only
began in the 1960s based on the concepts and principles of speech act theory.
Prior to that time, the discourse on conversation was primarily written texts that
described how one should speak rather than how they actually did speak.
Conversation occurs when any people talk with each other and can be used to
indicate any activity of interactive talk, regardless of its purpose (ten Have, 1999,
p. 4). The term conversation analysis can be construed in a broad sense to mean
any study of people talking together in oral communication or language use.
The central purpose of CA is to investigate the norms and conventions that
speakers use in interaction to establish communicative understandings. Traditional
CA was concerned only with the speech of the conversant as an observable,
external event. The seminal CA work by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974)
articulated three basic facts about conversation: (a) turn-taking occurs, (b) one
speaker tends to speak at a time, and (c) turns are taken with as little overlap
between them as possible (the speakers coordinate their interactions as much as
possible to avoid overlap). These basic tenets presume a continuity of time and
space in face-to-face conversations and are called into question later in the
examination of virtual conversations. However, for purposes of describing
foundational elements of CA, they will stand, as will the presumption of shared
time and space. Although the following descriptions are highly detailed, it is
important to remember that the conversation analyst is not working from an
abstract prescriptive definition of what constitutes a turn construction, for
example, in the manner in which a linguist may define a sentence. Rather, what
the turn construction consists of in an situated segment of conversation is a
concern for the speakers themselves. This tension between the technical methods
of analyzing conversation and its socially constituted nature is a continual
challenge to researchers working with CA to maintain perspective on this
problematic.

In conversation analysis any short of interaction may be studied for

example chats among acquaintance, consultation, job interviews, and political
speech. In each case the interest is in explicating the methods or producer people
employ to make sense and be understood by others. In observing conduct may or
may not be a participant or observer in the scene. Why so? If participants know
that they are being recorded or observe during their conversation they will alter
some of their conduct. Conversational analysis prefers to work from recording of
conduct. First, certain features of the details of action in interaction are not
recoverable in any other way. Second, a recording makes it possible to play and
reply the interaction which is important both for transcribing and developing and
analysis. Third, a recording makes it possible to check a particular analysis against
the materials in all their detail that were used to produce the analysis.
According to Sacks a great deal of CA works with recording of telephone
calls not because of any special interest in phone calls but because audio recording
could be easily and inexpensively produced. In this discussion we have tried to
analysis a video by using parts of conversation such as opening closing, topic
rising, turn taking, dominance and interruption of conversation.
C. THE ORGANIZATION OF CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS
The organization of conversational analysis that we will analyze here are:
a. Opening closing
- Opening
Conversations do not simply begin and end. The opening and closing of
conversation are organized. Speakers use adjacency pairs to open a
conversation, such as:
opening

examples

Greeting greeting

Hello!

Summons answer

Hi
Jimmy!

Complaint denial

Yes, I am here!
The room is a mess

I was out

Complaint apology

Its ten minutes past the hour

Request - grant

I am sorry, my car broke down

can I have some sugar?

sure

Offer accept

Do you need help with that?

Offer reject

definitely
Chocolate?

I am on a diet, thanks

Closing
Conversations do not jus end; rather they must be closed, through an
elaborate ritual. Moving to end a conversation may be interpreted to
mean that one does not wish for the conversation to continue. This in
turn risks the implication that the company of the other is not being
enjoyed, which then could imply that the interlocutor is boring or
annoying.
For example:
Pre closing: referring back to something previously said and good
wishes
Closing: may be foreshortened when the archetype closing is skipped
(i.e. I have to go now!)

b. Topic raising
According to Hornby (1995), topic rising is a subject of a discussion or a
talk lift in conversation. And he divides the topic rising in conversational
analysis into four. Those are:
a. Topic coherence

Relates to how conversational participants infer certain linking

strategies to account for the relevance of utterances
b. Topic drift
Deals with how conversation shifts from one topic to another topics
c. Topic conflict
Deals with how speakers promote their own topics and skip connecting
in conversation
d. Topic holding
Deals with how the participants in the conversation hold the topic.

c. Turn taking
The basic rule in English conversation is that one person speaks at a time,
after which they may nominate another speaker, or another speaker may
take up the turn without being nominated (Sack, 1974). Turn taking in
conversation can be seen from the signals how the participants will end
their turn and how they hold their turn.
End of Turn
- Use of falling intonation
- Pausing
- Fillers (mm) (anyway)
- Eye contact, body
language & movements

Holding on to a turn
- Not pausing too long at the end of an
utterances & starting straight way
- \pausing during an utterances not at the
end
- Speaks over someone elses attempt to
take our turn
- They make their sentences run on by
using connectors (and, then, but, so, )

Hornby also further explains about the rules of turn taking:

1. If the current speaker selects another speaker, that speaker must speak next
2. If the current speaker does not select another speaker, someone may self
select as next speaker
3. If nobody self selects, the current speaker may continue.

d. Interruption
Interruption can be seen as a situations in which one person intends to
continue speaking, but is forced by other person to stop speaking.
Interruptions as consisting of three essential points:
-

Intention of the main speaker to continue

Entrance of the other person into the conversation

Disruption or stopping of the main speaker at least temporarily

Interruption can be divided into two:

1. Competitive interruption
Occurs when one speaker attempts to take the floor by making his/her
own remarks a higher priority over the main speakers speech when
the main speaker intends to continue
2. Cooperative interruption
Occurs when one speaker wants to support or reinforce the main
speakers point without disrupting the main speaker continuation
e. Dominance
Dominance is the state that exists when one person or group has power
over another. Dominance as a behavioral expression of power is a
fundamental mechanism of social interaction, expressed and perceived in

conversation through spoken words. Certain people are consistently

successful at dominating conversation and their result.

D. THE ANALYSIS OF A CONVERSATION

In this paper, the authors want to analyze a video which consists of
conversation between male and female that is existed in a scene of a movie
entitled Letters to Juliet. There is no specific reason of why the scene is chosen
to be analyzed, but it has proper information regarding to a conversation between
genders and its following parts.
The conversation that is existed in the video can be transcribed as follows:
Participants

: Sophie and Charlie

Setting

: at the front of the house and the balcony

(Sophie runs from the party at the backyard to the front of the house. Charlie
looks at Sophie and runs after her. But, he does not find Sophie, and then he calls
her.)
01) CHARLIE : Sophie?
(He runs to the front of the house)
02) CHARLIE : Sophie?
(He looks around)
03) CHARLIE : Sophie?
(he still moves forward without any result until he turns back and finds Sophie at
the balcony)
04) CHARLIE : (looking at Sophie) Of course! A balcony!
05) SOPHIA : (looking at Charlie) Well
06) CHARLIE :
What are doing up there?
07) SOPHIA : (expressing sadness) Im gonna go
08) CHARLIE : (surprised) Why??
SOPHIE : (talking sadly with tears almost falling down on her face)
09)
Because this is so painful.
10)
I..I...should realize it soon but I didnt.
11)
Oh, I guess may be I couldnt.
12)
But..emm.. Victor and I are not together anymore...
(Charlie is smiling, seems that he is happy to hear that news)
13)
and I guess I came back hoping that
14) CHARLIE :
Wait! Wait! Youre not
engaged.
15) SOPHIE : (shaking her head) No butits too late.
16)
Its clearly too late.

17)

And it really doesnt matter anymore because, honestly, I love

you.
(Charlie is smiling).
18)
I cant believe I just said that.
(Sophie is trying hardly to smile, but it doesnt work, she keeps crying)
19)
But I do, I love you.
20)
It doesntI mean itIt shouldnt be a matter to you because
youre
21)
youre here with Patricia
22) CHARLIE : (upset)
Patricia?!
23) SOPHIE : And you should be back with her right now.
24) CHARLIE : Patricia is my cousin. Shes my cousin!
25) SOPHIE : (being upset) How is that legal?
26) CHARLIE : (being awkward)
No oohh! Sophie, no
ooh no..nonolet me explain!
27)
Sophie, Im so stupid.
28)
Therere two Patricias.
29)
Theres my cousin who is in here, and the one that I completely
forgot about.
30)
More importantly, theres only one Sophie.
31)
Now, would you please come down?
(Charlie takes off his suit and quickly climbs the tree to get closer with Sophie.)
SOPHIE
: (being upset with what Charlies been doing)
32)
Wait..Charlie..Charlie stop. Whatre you doing?
(Charlie is still climbing the tree)
33)
Charlie, whatre you doing?
34) CHARLIE :Listen to me! Listen to me!
35)
Very very carefully.
36)
I live in London, a gorgeous, vibrantly, historic city that Id love
to living in.
37)
And you live in New York
which is highly overrated.
38) SOPHIE :
Pardon me?
39) CHARLIE :
Listen..I..I
40)
..because the Atlantic ocean is a bit wide to be crosses everyday,
swimming, boating, or flying, I suggest we flip for it.
41) SOPHIE : (smiling) What do you saying?
42) CHARLIE : If the follows terms are not acceptable, leaving London would
be a pleasure, as long as youll be waiting for me on the other
side.
43) SOPHIE : yeah (smiling)
44) CHARLIE : The truth is, Sophie, Im madly, deeply, truly, passionately in
love with you.
45) SOPHIE : (smiling) You are?
46) CHARLIE : (nodding and smiling) I am
(Both are silence for a while and smiling)
47) SOPHIE : Are you going to kiss me?
48) CHARLIE : Yeah

(Charlie climbs the tree further, until he cannot handle the tree and falls down
from the balcony)
Later, the conversation between Charlie and Sophie will be analyzed in
terms of the opening closing conversation, dominance, interruption, turn taking,
and topic raising.

a. Opening-closing conversation
Firstly, the term that is going to be analyzed is the process of opening and
closing of the conversation. To open the conversation, Sacks and Schegloff (1973)
stated that people use adjacency pair where it is a unit of conversation that
contains an exchange of one turn each by two speakers. The turns are functionally
related to each other in such a fashion that the first turn requires a certain type or
range of types of second turn. .In the video, the conversation is begun by the
opening strategy which is known as summon-answer which is shown by the
utterances as follow:
summon

03) CHARLIE : Sophie?

(he still moves forward without any result until he turns back and finds Sophie at
the balcony)
04) CHARLIE : (looking at Sophie) Of course! A balcony!
05) SOPHIA : (looking at Charlie) Well
answer

Based on the conversation above, the man calls the woman by shouting her name
while looking for the woman. Beside that, he also emphasizes the place where the
woman appears. The woman then responses the mans summon to indicate that
she is at the balcony and the man has found her. After that, the conversation is
begun.
After the conversation is begun, the man and woman continue to talk
about some topics regarding to their feeling to each other. The conversation runs
smoothly and it also followed by some acts to support their intended utterances.
And then, the conversation will be closed after they finish utter their intention.

The conversation is going to be closed when, according to Schegloff and

Sacks (1973), the people feel that they have to terminate the conversation.
Moreover, Sacks and Schegloff (1973) also implicitly categorized the steps of
closing a conversation, they are: (1) pre-closing which takes a role as indicator
that the conversation is ready to be ended but is offering an opportunity to open
another topic of conversation, (2) recapitulation which involves a brief
summarizing or it can be said as the further implication of the topics discussed
and/or arrangements made, and (3) final closing is the actual ending of the
conversation.
According to the video, the closing of the conversation can be analyzed as
follows:
(1) pre-closing
The pre-closing can be seen on this part of the conversation:
44) CHARLIE
45) SOPHIE
46) CHARLIE

: The truth is, Sophie, Im madly,

deeply, truly, passionately in love
with you.
: (smiling) You are?
: (nodding and smiling) I am

The utterance 44 which is uttered by Charlie is actually a

conclusion of the topics discussed by him and Sophie. Since it is a
conclusion, it indicates that the conversation can be terminated. Then it is
followed by Sophies utterance number 45 which shows that she wants to
make sure Charlies previous utterance and it also opens opportunity to
make another topic aroused. However, in this conversation, theres no new
topic aroused after the utterance number 45 but Charlie only responds to
Sophies by doing certain expressions and saying the utterance number 46
to convince Sophie that he tells the truth.
(2) recapitulation
This part of the conversation can be considered as the
recapitulation of the conversation:
47) SOPHIE : Are you going to kiss me?
48) CHARLIE: Yeah

The utterance 47 shows the effect of the topics that are aroused in the
conversation. Since the topics in the conversation are related to the
feelings of the man and woman who are in love, so influenced by romantic
situation the woman asks the man to kiss her. It also may caused by the
effect of the prior knowledge of the speakers about the romantic scene of a
well-known drama Romeo and Juliet which took place at the balcony as
what they do when they are speaking.
(3) final closing
The final closing of this conversation is not uttered. It is done by actions
where Charlie climbs the tree further to get closer with Sophie in order to
kiss her. However, he finally falls down from the tree as one of the funny
actions in this movie.
b. Interruption
Interruption can be seen as situations in which one person intends to
continue speaking, but is forced by the other person to stop speaking, at least
temporarily, or the continuity or regularity of that persons speech is disrupted.
Interruptions, therefore, can be seen as consisting of three essential ingredients:
intention of the main speaker to continue, entrance of the other person into the
conversation, and disruption or stopping of the main speaker, at least temporarily.
According to the transcription of conversation in the video, the
interruption is represented by a symbol . The frequency of interruptions which
are done by the man and the woman in the conversation can be seen in the table as
follows:
Gender
(participants)
Male (Charlie)
Female (Sophie)

Freq. of
interruption
5 times
2 times

Table 1. The frequency of interruption between Charlie (male) and Sophie (female)

From the table 1, it can be obviously seen that male in the conversation interrupts
more than female. Then, the next analysis is on the types of interruption that
showed by the speakers in the video which is shown in the table as follows:

Gender
(participants)
Male (Charlie)

Female (Sophie)

Utterances of
interruption
utterance number 6
utterance number 14
utterance number 22
utterance number 26
utterance number 39
utterance number 38
utterance number 43

Types
-

competitive
competitive
competitive
competitive
competitive
competitive
cooperative

table 2. The types of interruption between Charlie (male) and Sophie (female)

Yang (2005) argues that competitive interruptions are often closely tied to
relevance, urgency, degree of importance, and interest in the current topic. In
conversation, speakers often feel the need to express something which is
emotionally significant to them. It is showed by Charlie in his utterances number
6, 14, 22, 26, and 39. In the utterance number 6, Charlie feels that it is important
to know what is Sophie doing at the balcony. The utterance number 14 shows
Charlies interest in the previous statement uttered by Sophie. It supported by the
way he utters the statement in which it is uttered vibrantly. The utterance number
22 Charlie asks for more explanation related to the previous utterances stated by
Sophie. He feels that he needs to know the relevancy between him and the woman
named Patricia, as what is mentioned by Sophie. The utterance number 26 is
included in competitive type of interruption because Charlie needs to explain
something significant about the truth between him and Patricia. And the last
interruption is showed in utterance 39 where Charlie wants to handle the
conversation by asking Sophie to listen to his further explanation. So, by noticing
the interruptions made by Charlie, it can be concluded that men often do
competitive interruption in conversation.
Unlike Charlie, Sophie interrupts less than Charlie and use cooperative
interruption in one of her interruptions. Yang (2005) defines cooperative

interruption as a type of interruption which is more supportive of the main

speakers floor rights, and the intention is usually to keep the attention on the
main speakers point. The cooperative interruption is showed by her utterance
number 43. She agrees with Charlies previous utterance (42) and supports it with
positive answer. Beside that, the utterance occurs at lower or medium pitch levels
than competitive interruption. However, she uses competitive interruption in the
conversation on the utterance number 38. It happens because she feels
inconvenience with Charlies utterance number 37 who compares London better
than America. But, it still can be seen that female has fewer interruptions and has
less power than men in handling a conversation.
c. Dominance
The participants in a conversation use a number of strategies to achieve
their conversational goals. The goal may be to dominate other participants of the
speech situation. Kunsmann (2001) points out that one of the obvious strategies
for achieving this goal, as we have seen, is the use of interruptions.
In the conversation between Charlie and Sophie, it is clearly seen that
Charlie (male) interrupts more than Sophie (female). Beside that he also often
uses competitive interruption which is more powerful and highly influence in the
conversation to stop his partners speaking. In contrary, Sophie (female) has fewer
interruptions than Charlie (male) and uses cooperative interruption which has
lower intonation and less affects to the conversation. Thus, male has greater
dominance than female in a conversation.
References:
Sacks, H. and Schegloff, E. 1973. Opening and Closing in Semiotica, Vol. 8,
pp. 289-327.
Yang, Li Chiung. 2005. Interruptions and Intonation. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University. http://www.asel.udel.edu/icslp/cdrom/vol3/685/a685.pdf
retrieved on November, 28, 2011.
Kunsmann, Peter. 2001. Gender, Status, and Power in Discourse Behavior of
Men and Women. http://www.linguistik-online.de/1_00/KUNSMANN.HTM.
retrieved on November, 28, 2011.