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.