"... Hopper's aim is to begin to reveal to us the complex world of telephone conversation, and that is what he succeeds marvellously in doing." --Discourse & Society "A guided tour through the interior world of phone interactions, Telephone Conversation is a playful, often poetic excursion into the dance-like qualities of language as and in technology." --Wayne A. Beach " Telephone Conversation is an engagingly written book, peppered with snippets of telephone chat that enable readers to see the extraordinariness of ordinary talk." --Quarterly Journal of Speech "... the first comprehensive work on telephone interaction... Written in a lucid, often poetic manner, it keeps the reader's interest to the end." --Anthropological Linguistics Voice mail, answering machines, car phones, call-waiting, call-forwarding--it seems the telephone at times controls our lives. Here Robert Hopper eavesdrops on the sounds of telephone conversation, the most important yet least examined province of contemporary communication and an important aspect of contemporary life.

The aim of this book is to bring together research on telephone conversations in different languages, to compare and contrast people's methods of handling telephone conversational tasks indifferent communities, and to explore the relationship between telephone conversational practice and cultural settings.

This book considers the sequential deployment of the receiver's response to the caller's request in telephone service encounters between native speakers in the U.K, Germany and Italy analysing the different response formats and their grammatical configuration.