Telephone Conversation

Front Cover
Indiana University Press, 1992 - Business & Economics - 247 pages

"... Hopper's aim is to begin to reveal to us the complex world of telephone conversation, and that is what he succeeds marvellously in doing." --Discourse & Society

"A guided tour through the interior world of phone interactions, Telephone Conversation is a playful, often poetic excursion into the dance-like qualities of language as and in technology." --Wayne A. Beach

" Telephone Conversation is an engagingly written book, peppered with snippets of telephone chat that enable readers to see the extraordinariness of ordinary talk." --Quarterly Journal of Speech

"... the first comprehensive work on telephone interaction... Written in a lucid, often poetic manner, it keeps the reader's interest to the end." --Anthropological Linguistics

Voice mail, answering machines, car phones, call-waiting, call-forwarding--it seems the telephone at times controls our lives. Here Robert Hopper eavesdrops on the sounds of telephone conversation, the most important yet least examined province of contemporary communication and an important aspect of contemporary life.

 

Contents

Speech Acts as Sequences
13
OPENINGS
27
Circumstances Relationships Cultures
71
Acquaintances Initial Inquiries
77
Telephone Openings and Relationship States
83
Timing of 100 Turn Beginnings
107
Distribution of Pauses by Transition Relevance
109
Percentage of Pauses by Speaker Change and Transition Relevance
110
Maze of Open Wires 4
127
TRAJECTORIES
130
Eschers Drawing Hands
167
The Honest Answering Machine
200
The Interaction Order
217
Transcribing Conventions
223
References
235
Index
245

Floor Access as Power
120

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About the author (1992)

ROBERT HOPPER is Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Children Learning Language: Between You and Me and Human Message Systems.