Lexical and grammatical analysis

Lexical analysis

   Looking at adjacency pairs in the conversation between the teenagers there is a lack of turn taking in the conversation, this could be for many reasons such as the fact that the conversational participants are comfortable talking to each other or the fact that when Frazer, the only male participant, is taking part in the conversation he tends to break the adjacency pairs by using a string of declarative utterances. This could possibly be because h is male and partaking in conversation with two females and therefore might feel the need to assert his masculinity by saying what he thinks should be the topic of conversation. The string of declaratives he uses is as follows: "but it actually makes sense", "I'm kinda hungry", "it's a good job we're here", I probably missed breakfast (.) oh (.) I did miss breakfast" and the list continues until he leaves the conversation. He doesn't reply directly to either of the other's responses to his declaratives, this could be said to be because of the colloquial nature of the conversation or it could be directly relating to his relationship with the female participants. The misuse of the adjacency pairs could link to Zimmerman and West's theory that in mixed sex conversations men tend to interrupt more than women do, or to Fishman's theory that mixed sex conversation doesn't seem to work as well as single sex conversations because of how men respond or don't respond, and in this case it would be the not responding that is most important to my analysis.
  The second transcript that I've got is of myself, my dad and my grandparents; my dad and grandma are the two main conversational participants in the transcript and because the context is that they were looking at photos from a cycling trip, my dad is the one who speaks the most. My grandma uses quite a lot of back channel agreement to indicate to him that she is paying attention while he is talking, though without the context it could be seen as that she wasn't interested in what he was talking about. In total my dad's word count was two hundred and thirty two words and my grandma's was only seventy two; this is a clear indication that, again, if the context wasn't clear originally you would be able to tell that he is the main participant holding the most conversational power - which in a sense goes against the assumption that because it is a mother and her child conversing that she would have more conversational power. The topic that is being spoken about is something that my dad is more of an expert on, so those power roles are reversed.

Grammatical analysis

   Again relating back to language and gender, Frazer as the only male conversational participant, uses emphasis on his words to try and further explain them without talking more than necessary. His play on words "conversation hay" is meant to be a pun, but as the other two participants do not understand or find this funny, he uses emphasis on the word "hay" i hi third repetition of the utterance. This could be said to be typically male of him to assume that the other two female participants do not understand or are intellectually inept, which is untrue, as after he has left the conversation Laura and Robyn have a more in-depth conversation. When the topic changes after Frazer leaves the conversation, there is a high frequency of personal pronouns used by Laura and Robyn; because Laura is holding the conversation more than Robyn she uses about a third more personal pronouns than Robyn does. This is because she is talking about something that she had done as well as the fact that she was talking about another person using 'she' and 'her' a few times, though the most frequent one used by both of the participants is 'I' because they are talking to each other about past experiences that they themselves have had. Another thing to point out is that use of pauses rises after Frazer leaves the conversation, possibly because Laura and Robyn are comfortable with each other and don't feel the need to fill in the gaps, or it could even be a small case of the observer's paradox, where for instance Laura changes the  subject after a two second pause nearer to the end of the conversation, because she is aware that she is being recorded and might think that she needs to keep the conversation going for it to seem natural.