ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how linguists approach an answer to this in discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Discourse analysis is concerned with uncovering regularities in chunks of language larger than individual sentences or utterances. The word 'discourse' features nowadays in many discussions about language, and has come to cover a wide range of meanings. It focuses on how language users connect the sentences they produce to form stretches of French which hang together as texts, i.e. discourse which is both cohesive and coherent. Everyday conversation is all too easily dismissed by lay-persons as insignificant chit-chat, or de la parlotte. From the linguist's viewpoint too, conversation is a rich and exciting area of investigation. The chapter explores insights from the fields of anthropology and sociology for they have contributed very significantly to linguists' understanding of how conversations work. It examines speech events, and the general issues of who can say what, when and how.
