Conversation Analysis

Definition

The detailed study of the methods used by participants to achieve social practices such as greetings, giving directions and telling stories in a variety of contexts (formal, informal). The term ‘conversation’ does not refer so much to a given type of speech (a genre) as to the idea of ‘talk-in-interaction’ as a social activity.

Distinctive Features

As a field of research, conversation analysis emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and evolved from the work of a group of sociologists drawing inspiration from ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel.

Conversation analysts use audio and/or video recordings of carefully transcribed talkin-interaction. Recording and transcribing data drawn from ‘natural’ situations (that is, without intervention by the researcher) is a methodological advantage for social studies. It guarantees a more reliable corpus than note taking, enables the analyst to study the same fragment over and over and makes it easier to share interpretations with other researchers. There are no a priori categories or hypotheses involved in the process of analysing the conversational data since they are themselves ‘research-generating’. Contrary to other social sciences with an exogenous approach of context, conversation analysis uses an endogenous approach. In this respect, it is not because an interaction takes place in a hospital or a tribunal that it should be interpreted as necessarily ‘formal’. Rather, it is the participants’ behaviours (and not the decision of the analysts) within this specific interaction that will set off particular elements of the context. This only becomes relevant for its interpretation if some of its features have a bearing on the structure of the interaction (size and ordering of turns, type of sequence …).

Analytical inquiry of corpora tries to account for what has occurred in a conversation by reconstructing the members’ perspectives in terms of questions such as ‘What's going on?’ and ‘Why that now?’. Then, after locating a structurally recurring phenomenon in the conversation, the analyst will collect the same phenomenon in the whole corpus and possibly also in other contexts.

Harvey Sacks (who died prematurely in 1975) is considered the founding father of this field. In his lectures at Irvine and UCLA (1964-1972) and his collaborative research with Goffman, then Garfinkel, Schlegoff and Jefferson, he developed a radically empirical approach to the study of social behaviour in context, which had relevance to the whole field of sociology.

In the field of conversation analysis, conversation is a way of approaching social order. Conversation is far from the apparently unorganized and random object it might seem at first. It is a locus for social interaction where speaker-change recurs (or occurs), parties talk at a time; transitions with no gap and no overlap are common. This orderliness is exhibited by speakers according to what has been described by Sacks, Schlegoff and Jefferson (1974) as turn-taking organization.Turn is the fundamental unit of description in conversation analysis. It can be defined as the length of time a speaker holds the floor. Length and turn constructional units are constantly negotiated by speakers as they interact. A turn can be anything from any audible sound, to a single word, a clause, a sentence, a narrative. Another feature of this type of organization is projectability. Through the turn-taking system, hearers can detect first possible completion of the current speaker's turn. This point is called transition relevant place, that is the moment at which change of speaker may take place. Turn-allocational techniques centre around three

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