Just Talking – Casual Talk among Humans and Machines Workshop Programme

This study investigates the occurrence and role of small talk in a number of different social activities, based on video-recorded corpus data from the GSLC (The Gothenburg Spoken Language Corpus) which represents a broad range of different social activities. The study builds on findings from studying communication in different social activity types and compares them with respect to the occurrence, content and role of small talk. The purpose is (i) to describe the characteristics of small talk in general and (ii) to investigate whether and, in that case, in what respects the nature of small talk varies depending on the social activity where it occurs. General types of small talk are found, which can occur in most activity types, for example talk about the weather, the family or the activity at hand. Other types of small talk depend on activity specific factors, such as how formal or informal the activity is, the background and activity roles of the participants, factors in the environment and typical interaction patterns for the activity.