We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
“There is nothing so brutally shocking, nor so little forgiven, as seeming inattention to the person who is speaking to you […] I have seen many people who, when you are speaking to them, instead of looking at, and attending you, fix their eyes upon the ceiling or some other part of the room […] Nothing discovers a little, futile, frivolous mind more than this, and nothing is so offensively ill-bred.”
Lord Chesterfield 1752 (Letters to his son, Letter CCLXXVIII)Introduction
This chapter is about gaze behavior in conversation. Using data from three unrelated cultures (or more properly, speech communities), we ask whether there are, on the basis of these three cultures, plausible candidates for universal patterns of gazing during interaction, and where, on the contrary, we may expect to find culturally specific patterns. This focus is already rather different than the tenor of most of the other papers in this volume. Moreover, because of this focus, a central part is played by basic descriptive statistics, rather than the qualitative analysis of specific episodes.
Despite these foci and the methods adopted, we see this paper as addressing some central issues posed by conversation analysis (CA). We are interested in a pervasive conversational practice, namely when participants gaze at one another during conversation. There has been relatively little published work in CA on the systematics of gaze, and what there has been (e.g., by Goodwin 1981) will be shown by our data not to provide a possible general analysis of the phenomena.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
