Becoming friends

Abstract This conversation analytic study draws on a longitudinal corpus of landline phone calls. The material under examination comprises seven calls in English made between 1987 and 1991 between J (English L2 speaker), a European spare part provider, and T, a representative of a British company. Over the years in the course of these conversations, the character of the calls changes: J and T not only conduct business but also build a strong personal relationship. Through changing practices for (1) opening the calls and transitioning to the reason for the calls, (2) producing and responding to laughter tokens, and (3) using personal address terms to accomplish closings, the calls become more personal, knowledge is shared, and the two participants maintain conversational topics other than routine business. Unlike in other recent studies in the field, the changes cannot be traced back to trouble in the talk and its solutions but emerge in the slow building of shared experiences and personal knowledge over time.