Contents

Patterns – Field – CA

For pragmaticists transcribed conversational data is ideal. It is untampered by the researcher, and it is language that was used in real communicative situations. Pomerantz (1978) used a conversation analytical approach to investigate compliments and compliment responses. She quotes an impressive collection of compliment sequences from actual conversations but she does not offer any statistics on the frequencies of the different sequences and she does not classify any syntactic patterns in her data (Response – Field – CA).

Golato (2005) also uses a conversation analytical approach to investigate her data of German compliments. Her work is based on “30 hours of non-elicited videotaped face-to-face conversations and 6 hours of audiotaped telephone conversation between close friends and family members” (Golato 2005: 24). She discusses both syntactic and semantic features of compliment turns (2005: 73-82).