Kim, Ki-tae. 2012 . Analytic Conversational Style in Family Conversation. Language Information . Volume 14. 5-29.
This paper explores analytic conversational style that the members of a Korean family adopt in spontaneous conversations. By applying the notion of conversational style to that of analysis in a variety of disciplines, it proposes the notion of analytic conversational style applicable to units larger than a proposition. Subsequently, it identifies and explores four forms of such style that emerge and are practiced in spontaneous family discourse. Analytic conversationalists in the data pose persistently repeated questions about the same issue and the gradually unfolding “nuclear-reactor” questions across a long stretch of talk as well as the rapidly-firing “machine-gun” questions. They also make meta-textual comments about a break in topical coherence or about conversational turns out of sequentiality. In addition, they negotiate the causality of an event under discussion and search for reasons. The style leads them to deconstruct the elements in an unfolding conversation, focusing on their intra-relationship rather than on their inter-relationship or associations. In so doing, they as a family attempt to create shared logic as a form of conversational style that is negotiated and practiced in their conversational interactions. (Keimyung University)
Key words: analytic conversational style, conversational style, informal logic, family conversation, family discourse, interactional sociolinguistics