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as face and politeness. Although topic is widely recognised as a central
organising feature in conversational interaction (Brown and Yule 1983), several
scholars have noted that defining, identifying, and labelling topic(s) in naturally
occurring conversation is far from clear cut. (Atkinson and Heritage 1984) In
fact, several scholars have come to regard attempts to formally'pin down' topic
as perhaps an impossible task (Brown and Yule 1983).
There is a considerable body of work which goes some way to aiding an
identification of topic in discourse, focusing on things such as topic initiators or
elicitors (e. g. Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Wilson 1989), topic transitions such as
switching, drifting, or shading from one topic to another (e. g. Drew and Holt
1998; Jefferson 1993; Crow 1983), and techniques for topic closings (e. g.
Schegloff and Sacks 1973). In terms of what the 'content' of the topic actually is,
a range of work has attempted to identify the linguistic basis for deriving topic,
ranging from studies of the grammatical constituents of noun phrases, through
propositional content of contiguous utterances, to more global notions of
'aboutness'(e. g. Brown and Yule 1983, Bublitz 1988; Maynard 1980, Tannen
1984). 1 will not attempt to enter into the debate about what topic is, or should
be as a discourse notion here, but rather should mention briefly how the notion
of topic afforded me some analytical purchase for my initial analysis of sociable
episodes.
First, there were practical considerations. The total corpus of
conversational data on which this study is based exceeds 70 hours (see table
4.2). It would not have been possible for me as a single researcher to transcribe
all this data. Even with the memo-scriber (see table 4.1), the sample I selected
from this total data for closer analysis required many hours to transcribe'. More
generally, I would have found it impossible to maintain an overview of all the
data, or make sense of it in any systematic 'sociological' way. I thus thought it
more prudent to concentrate on one aspect of discourse, rather than spread
myself thin as it were, over the whole data set'. Second, there were empirical
considerations. As I noted earlier (see Chapter 2) topic talk had been
demonstrated to be one of the salient ways in which German and English
conversational style differed, in terms of both the general orientation to topic
development, and the positive social values oriented to and images of selfhood
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