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Investigating Indonesian Conversation; Approach And Rationale, Michael C. Ewing

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Colloquial Indonesian has often been described in terms of its differences from standard Indonesian, but with such an approach, aspects of informal language usage will go unexplored. This article proposes using the theoretical approach of Interactional Linguistics to more adequately describe the dynamic nature of Indonesian as actually used by its speakers. Interactional Linguistics emphasizes usage-based analysis of natural language data, especially conversation, in order to understand relationships between social actions and language structure. This article gives an overview of Interactional Linguistics, illustrated by two short English examples taken form the literature. It then presents an analysis of two aspects …