Conversation Analysis

When people talk with one another, they are not merely communicating thoughts, information, or knowledge: In conversation, as in all forms of interaction, people are doing things in talk. They are engaged in social activities with one another, such as blaming, complaining, inviting, instructing, telling their troubles, and so on. Conversation analysis (CA) is the study of how participants in talk-in-interaction organize their verbal and nonverbal behavior so as to conduct such social actions and, more broadly, their social affairs. It is therefore primarily an approach to social action (Schegloff, 1996). Methodologically, it seeks to uncover the practices, patterns, and generally the methods through which participants perform and interpret social action.

CA originated with the work that Harvey Sacks (1935–1975) undertook at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, in Los Angeles, 1963–1964. Drawn by his interests both in the ethnomethodological concern with members' methods of practical reasoning (arising from his association with Harold Garfinkel) and in the study of interaction (stimulated by his having been taught as a graduate student at Berkeley by Erving Goffman), Sacks began to analyze telephone calls made to the Suicide Prevention Center (SPC). Without any diminished sensitivity to the plight of persons calling the SPC, Sacks investigated how callers' accounts of their troubles were produced in [Page 198]the course of their conversations over the telephone with SPC counselors. This led him to explore the more generic “machineries” of conversational turn taking, along with the sequential patterns or structures associated with the management of activities in conversation. Through the collection of a broader corpus of interactions, including group therapy sessions and mundane telephone conversations, and in collaboration with Gail Jefferson (1938−) and Emanuel Schegloff (1937−), Sacks began to lay out a quite comprehensive picture of the conversational organization of turn taking; overlapping talk; repair; topic initiation and closing; greetings, questions, invitations, requests, and so forth and their associated sequences (adjacency pairs); agreement and disagreement; storytelling; and integration of speech with nonvocal activities (Sacks, 1992; for a comprehensive review of CA's topics and methodology, see ten Have, 1999). Subsequent research in CA over the past 30 years has shown how these and other technical aspects of talk-in-interaction are structured, socially organized resources—or methods—whereby participants perform and coordinate activities through talking together. Thus, they are the technical bedrock on which people build their social lives or, in other words, construct their sense of sociality with one another.

In many respects, CA lies at the intersection between sociology and other cognate disciplines, especially linguistics and social psychology. Certainly, research in CA has paralleled developments within sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and so forth toward a naturalistic, observation-based science of actual verbal behavior, which uses recordings of naturally occurring interactions as the basic form of data (Heritage, 1984). Despite the connections between CA and other disciplines, CA is distinctively sociological in its approach in the following kinds of ways. First, in its focus on how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, CA explores the social and interactional underpinnings of intersubjectivity—the maintenance of common, shared, and even “collective” understandings between social actors. Second, CA develops empirically Goffman's (1983) insight that social interaction embodies a distinct moral and institutional order that can be treated like other social institutions, such as the family, economy, religion, and so on. By the “interaction order,” Goffman meant the institutional order of interaction, and CA studies the practices that make up this institution as a topic in its own right. Third, all levels of linguistic production (including syntactic, prosodic, and phonetic) can be related to the actions (such as greetings, invitations, requests) or activities (instructing, cross-examining, performing a medical examination and diagnosing, etc.) in which people are engaged when interacting with one another. In this way, conversational organizations underlie social action (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984); hence, CA offers a methodology, based on analyzing sequences in which actions are produced and embedded, for investigating how we accomplish social actions. This is applicable equally to both verbal and nonverbal conduct, as well as the integration between them, in face-to-face interaction (e.g., Goodwin, 1981). Fourth, it is evident that the performance by one participant of certain kinds of actions (e.g., a greeting, question, invitation, etc.) sets up certain expectations concerning what the other, the recipient, should do in response; that is, he or she may be expected to return a greeting, answer the question, accept or decline the invitation, and so on. Thus, such pairs of actions, called adjacency pairs in CA, are normative frameworks within which certain actions should properly or accountably be done: The normative character of action and the associated accountability of acting in accordance with normative expectations are vitally germane to sociology's sense of the moral order of social life, including ascriptions of deviance. Fifth, CA relates talk to social context. CA's approach to context is distinctive, partly because the most proximate context for any turn at talk is regarded as being the (action) sequence of which it is a part, particularly the immediatelypriorturn. Also, CA takes the position that the “context” of an interaction cannot be exhaustively defined by the analyst a priori; rather, participants display their sense of relevant context (mutual knowledge, including what each knows about the other; the setting; relevant biographical information; their relevant identities or relationship, etc.) in the particular ways in which they design their talk—that is, in the recipient design of their talk.

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