Justine Coupland
Special Issue Editor's Introduction: "Small talk: Social functions
Small talk has conventionally been taken, from both lay and academic perspectives, as a formulaic and superficial mode of talk. But more recently, research on social interaction has engaged in a debate about the more positive, pro-social functioning of small talk. This special issue continues the exploration of a wide range of social settings, genres and topics of small talk, but in addition it looks to a richer and more diverse appreciation of the social functioning of small talk. For example Joanna Thornborrow shows the role small talk plays in children’s peer-group talk in the early years’ school setting, in reinforcing status differences and negotiating moral issues. Janet Holmes uses the workplace to demonstrate the interactional consequences of a marked failure to engage in small talk in its function of ‘doing collegiality’. Michael McCarthy looks at how listeners signal their involvement in ‘social chat’, by using an extensive corpus of informal speech to retrieve productive patterns of response tokens. Finally, Coupland and Jaworski examine taboo-breaking stories shared in recreational talk among young friends, which display shared alignments to transgression and establish and confirm group norms. Each of the papers demonstrates how people actively recreate the bonding and respecting behaviours, in local conversational routines, that are the social fabric of their communities.
Justine Coupland is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication at Cardiff University.
