Text types in Casual Conversation Exploring a Phone Call by Two English Native Speakers

This paper explores, analyses, and describes, from a functional perspective, how patterns of meaning are organized in a casual phone conversation between two native speakers of English. The main framework pursued in this research comes from Eggins and Slade’s (1997) explanations of genre in casual conversations. The data employed in this research were taken from TalkBank online corpus. After exploring the text, a clear sample of the recount text type was detected. The text type was later described considering each of its stages: abstract, orientation, record of events, and coda. The analysis of the semantic and lexico-grammatical realizations of the casual conversation is summarized in a chart by stages, moves and language features. After the analysis, the findings show how genre analysis can give account of the interpersonal choices in meaning and the degree of familiarity between the two speakers. It also proves that storytelling texts between friends tend to follow a pattern of meaning that corresponds with anecdotes and recount text types as Eggins and Slade (1997) argued. Keywords: genre, text type, schematic structure, recounts.