From a sociolinguistic perspective, greetings and farewells are part of what Goffman (1963) calls the ethnography of encounter. These encounters are not randomly made. They are governed by a set of strategies which enable participants to enter and exit conversations in a socially accepted manner. Such strategies are tackled within the scope of conversation analysis, henceforth CA, which is an approach that studies talk in interaction. It grew out of the ethnomethodological tradition in sociology, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct. This approach is initiated during the late 1950s of the last century by the works of Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, then, developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Today CA is an established method used in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology.
This study is going to detect entry and exit strategies in English and Arabic by analyzing two episodes of ‘The Doctors’ show in its American and Arabic versions. The study conveys this topic on two interrelated scales as it employs sociolinguistic and discourse perspectives altogether, discussing how the two approaches cooperate to give a comprehensible view of the nature of entering and exiting conversation. Meanwhile, the data to be analyzed does not convey an ordinary type of conversation but a special kind of conversation, that is called institutional talk. This involves some specialization and re-specification of the interactional relevance. It refers to conversations that take place under focused and specialized conditions like media, courts, educational institutions and health establishments (Gumperz, 2001: 218). For the most of our knowledge, such type of conversation is not expected to show everything about talk in interaction, yet, it shows a big deal of conformity to the premises of conversation analysis, and it appears to have a good amount of flexibility.
Entry and Exit Strategies in English and Arabic