Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Edition 2

Deborah Tannen

Oct 2007 · Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics Book 26 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Written in readable, vivid, non-technical prose, this book, first published in 2007, presents the highly respected scholarly research that forms the foundation for Deborah Tannen's best-selling books about the role of language in human relationships. It provides a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation works to create meaning and establish relationships. A significant theoretical and methodological contribution to both linguistic and literary analysis, it uses transcripts of tape-recorded conversation to demonstrate that everyday conversation is made of features that are associated with literary discourse: repetition, dialogue, and details that create imagery. This second edition features a new introduction in which the author shows the relationship between this groundbreaking work and the research that has appeared since its original publication in 1989. In particular, she shows its relevance to the contemporary topic 'intertextuality', and provides a useful summary of research on that topic.

About the author

Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She has published twenty books and over 100 articles on such topics as family discourse, spoken and written language, cross-cultural communication, modern Greek discourse, the poetics of everyday conversation, the relationship between conversational and literary discourse, gender and language, workplace interaction, agonism in public discourse, and doctor-patient communication.