Scholars in a number of fields have in recent years turned to everyday talk as the principal source from which to gain insights into both linguistic and social processes. The move is motivated by issues rooted in specific academic traditions and each group or school tends to focus on different aspects of verbal signs. Sociologists, for example, look to the sequential organization of conversational exchanges to learn how conversational involvements are created and sustained: ultimately to deepen their understanding of participant alignments that constitute social relationships and reflect social order. Linguists on the other hand, mindful of the empirical findings indicating that understanding rests on contextbound inferences, and that grammar and semantics cannot alone account for situated meaning, look to everyday talk for evidence of how such inferencing works.

Regardless of these differences in approach, however, it is generally agreed that discourse and conversation have structural characteristics or forms of organization of their own, independent of sentence-level grammar. Moreover, it is evident that prosody plays a key role in discourse-level interpretation: in fact without it there can be no conversing. It is prosody that animates talk and in large part determines its situated characteristics. Only through prosody do sentences become turns at speaking and come to be seen as actions performed by living actors. For example when a reviewer writes about an author's work using the expression, ‘You can hear her subjects’ intonations. And sometimes you can hear her own–', we know that she is referring to the author's skill in depicting living human beings, not her own or her subject's use of pitch or tone of voice.