Conversation in Context

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.

• 1. Background: Conversation, grammar and corpora; 2. Data and methods; 3. A situational framework for conversation; 4. Shared-context phenomena; 5. Co-construction phenomena; 6. Discourse management phenomena; 7. Real-time processing phenomena; 8. Relation management phenomena; 9. Conclusions and implications.

"This interesting and readable book offers both detailed, focused investigations of very specific conversation phenomena (as you would expect from a revised PhD dissertation), and a comprehensive literature overview, and the beginnings of a general framework for studying conversation phenomena in general. As the subtitle "A Corpus-driven Approach" indicates, the book comes from the tradition of and is mainly aimed at corpus linguistics, but it should be of interest to anyone who studies conversation, including computational linguists, philosophers of language, sociologists, and cognitive scientists...this book offers a wealth of interesting and useful observations, analyses, references, and methodological inspirations and is to be recommended to everyone interested in (data-oriented) analysis of conversation." - David Schlangen, Linguist List, October 6, 2008