ABSTRACT
Samuel Vuchinich investigated the way participants in a conversation react to irrelevant utterances introduced into conversation. In everyday speech, many concepts are understood and interpreted in terms of other concepts – this is the essence of metaphor. He points to the Russian author Tolstoy as someone who understood that abbreviated speech is the rule rather than the exception when shared understanding and knowledge is high. But conversation is more than a cooperative form of verbal interaction rooted in a huge reservoir of background knowledge and assumptions, it is also the context in which the multifarious channels of human communication operate and interact. This chapter considers some of the central aspects of conversation that it is an essentially cooperative activity and that it is a type of activity which relies on a huge fund of background knowledge. In the past it has been suggested that verbal language transmits semantic information while nonverbal communication is responsible for the social aspects of conversation.
