"Conversation in Context" examines real-life speech data from the British National Corpus to show how language is used in natural conversation. The monograph describes the composition, annotation and transcription of the corpus, as well as providing a discussion of the methodology used in corpus analysis. The book uses a situational framework for conversation and argues that conversation is adapted to constraints set by the situation and to speaker needs arising from these constraints. Such a contextual view reveals a greater complexity to conversation construction than could have been anticipated without the use of corpus-based methods. This book will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
Author Biography
Dr Christoph Ruhlemann has a PhD in English Linguistics from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich and is an English and German teacher Michael McCarthy is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.
