Constituting relationships in talk: A taxonomy of speech events in social and personal relationships

Abstract

In a series of four studies, a descriptive taxonomy of dyadic speech events in everyday relating was developed and employed to explore the constitutive functions of interpersonal communication. Twenty-nine speech events were identified and replicated through a variety of multimethod procedures, including unstructured and structured diary records, judgment sorting tasks, and semantic-differential rating scales. Everyday relating appears to be dominated by six kinds of talk events: gossip, making plans, joking around, catching up, small talk, and recapping the day's events. The taxonomy of speech events appears to be organized along three dimensions: formal/goal-directed, important/deep/involving, and positive valence. Preliminary evidence suggests how different types of personal relationships are constituted in different speech events.