Joye Kiester, Department of Linguistics, University of California Santa Barbara

"'What Does a Sorry Card Do'?: Board Game Discourse as a Genre"

This talk will focus on an analysis of the characteristics of the genre of
Board Game Discourse through a discourse-functional approach based on a
case study of a recording of four participants playing the board game
Sorry. As a genre, Board Game Discourse exhibits complexity within the
participants? talk, as well as the added complexity of simultaneous
participation in a board game. The strategy of combining these two layers
of complexity is skillfully deployed by speakers both to manage their
social interaction through talk and to deal with the concurrent activity
around which the talk is organized. The multi-layered complexity within
this genre is reflected in three functions of talk: (a) board game
management, (b) game narrative, and (c) social interaction.
Through this analysis, we will see the relationship between form and
function in the genre of Board Game Discourse. Speakers structure the
organization of their conversational turn-taking within Board Game
Discourse depending upon the function of their talk. In addition to this,
speakers transition between functions of talk in different ways. This will
be demonstrated through a variety of examples from this case study, with
special focus on the way in which speakers utilize the creation of
resonance with prior utterances in order to transition from board game
management and game narrative talk to social interaction talk.