Text as conversation: An interpretive investigation of utterances in a women's magazine

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of utterances containing 'yes', 'okay', 'so', the structure 'may [infinitive] but' and interrogatives such as 'Good?' in texts of women's magazines. The hypothesis to be investigated is that utterances containing these expressions may be read as the writer's responses to readers' potential, and implicit, comments or questions. In addition, this paper has a second, methodological aim. The view of reading as a writer-reader interaction through written text encounters the limitations inherent to speech-act-based analyses of interaction. For this reason, the examination of written text is carried out from the interpretive standpoint associated with conversation analysis, and takes into consideration the receivers' interpretation of the utterances under investigation.