Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends

This revised edition of Deborah Tannen’s first discourse analysis book, Conversational Style –first published in 1984–presents an approach to analyzing conversation that later became the hallmark and foundation of her extensive body of work in discourse analysis, including the monograph Talking Voices, as well as her well-known popular books You Just Don’t Understand, That’s Not What I Meant!, and Talking from 9 to 5, among others.

Carefully examining the discourse of six speakers over the course of a two-and-a-half hour Thanksgiving dinner conversation, Tannen analyzes the features that make up the speakers’ conversational styles, and in particular how aspects of what she calls a ‘high-involvement style’ have a positive effect when used with others who share the style, but a negative effect with those whose styles differ. This revised edition includes a new preface and an afterword in which Tannen discusses the book’s place in the evolution of her work.

Conversational Style is written in an accessible and non-technical style that should appeal to scholars and students of discourse analysis (in fields like linguistics, anthropology, communication, sociology, and psychology) as well as general readers fascinated by Tannen’s popular work. This book is an ideal text for use in introductory classes in linguistics and discourse analysis.