Informal Conversations and Power Play: A Case Study of Kashmiri Speech Community

Conversation forms an important part of human social life. People spend most of their time interacting with one another. Through conversation people command, argue, complain, etc. In any conversation, a speaker might tend to dominate the other speaker(s) by controlling their interactional behaviour, also known as “conversational dominance”. Various studies have been conducted wherein different conversational strategies like interruptions, turn taking, amount of talk, topic control, etc. have been considered as a measure of conversational power and dominance (Lakoff, 1975; Zimmerman and West, 1975; Ferguson, 1977; Tannen, 1993). The present paper is aimed at studying conversational dominance in informal settings of Kashmiri speech community. It will study the amount and distribution of interactional features like interruptions, turn taking, amount of talk and topic control in same-gender as well as mixed-gender multiparty conversations. This paper will attempt to relate these tools of conversational dominance with the socio-psychological factors of the participants. It will use Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to linguistic research.