Casual conversation is a fundamental human activity, and one in which most of us engage many times a day. It may take the form of small talk about the weather at the supermarket check-out, or gossip about colleagues around the office coffee machine, or an extended phone conversation with a close friend about the meaning of life. Before getting down to the business at hand, sales reps chat with their clients, doctors chat with their patients, waiters with diners, and teachers with their students. Strangers at a bus stop will start up a conversation to vent their frustration about the service. Taxi drivers famously air their opinions, seldom solicited. Your dentist will chat away even when your responses are reduced to grunts. Fellow passengers on a long-haul flight will exchange pleasantries before settling in to watch the movie. Listeners will phone a radio talk show to sound off about local crime, and teenagers will talk for hours on their cell phones about matters of apparently enormous consequence. Even very young children chat away with their parents, and by the age of three are able to have fairly sustained conversations with their playmates.

Conversational talk crosses age groups, gender, class, culture and ethnicity. Levelt (1989) calls it ‘the canonical setting for speech in all human societies’. Indeed, the stylistic features of conversation have extended beyond spoken talk itself and ‘crossed over’ into other modes and media, such as the popular press and advertising, a process called conversationalization by Fairclough (1992).