“Okay … so … nice to meet you? {smiles}”

Abstract

The chapter examines discourse strategies used in conversation openings in CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2018), containing English as a Lingua Franca conversations via Skype. Although there are similarities to telephone conversation openings, openings in CASE show differences in content and structure, accommodating the particular setup of Skype conversations and the computer-mediated discourse environment. The different sequences in Skype conversation openings are organized and negotiated cooperatively by participants. They are signalled by significant overuse of the following transition markers (TMs) between sequences: discourse markers, pauses and hesitation markers, laughter, repetitions, and lengthening. The quantitative analysis confirms that TMs occur significantly more often in transition zones between opening sequences than in both non-transition zones and openings as a whole.

Keywords: conversation organization, conversation sequence transitions, conversation openings, Skype, transition markers, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)