A Dinner Conversation. Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Conversation

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Leipzig, language: English, abstract: In this paper, a transcript has been taken out of a dinner conversation found on the video platform ¿youtube¿. The objectives are to analyse the data linguistically with methods that were introduced by conversational analysis, to interpret findings from a pragmatic point of view, thus employing an approach that is close to interactional sociolinguistics. This paper is divided into three parts: The first one is a theoretical approach where several topics will be explained. The second one is a presentation of an authentic dinner conversation of three people which is transcribed. The last part is the text analysis. It includes proving the different linguistic topics by means of the theoretical approach. The defined notions of conversational analysis will be applied, while the pragmatic point of view will be taken into consideration for the interpretation. Moreover, each of the transcripts will be analysed individually and the discourses that they feature will be examined.