Proof Procedure

The proof procedure is a central feature of conversation analysis (CA), in which the analysis of what a turn at talk is doing is based on, or referred to, how it is responded to in the next speaker's turn. Thus, a “request” may be identifiable as such, not simply on the basis of its content and grammar or on what an analyst may intuitively interpret it to be, but on the basis that it is treated as such in next turn. It may be constituted interactionally as a request, for example, by being complied with, or by noncompliance being accounted for, or by questioning its propriety, or by some other relevant orientation.

The proof procedure is not merely a method for checking the validity of an analysis that has already been produced. Rather, it is a basic principle of how CA proceeds in the first place. It is available as part of CA's methodology because it is, in the first instance, a participants' procedure, integral to how conversational participants themselves accomplish and check their own understandings of what they are saying and doing. Insofar as participants produce next turns on [Page 875]the basis of what they take prior turns to be doing, analysts are able to use next turns for analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). The proof procedure is therefore linked to the basic phenomena of conversational turn taking, including “conditional relevance” and “repair” (Schegloff, 1992); see entry on conversation analysis.

An important point to note here is that the proof procedure is not a way of establishing or proving what speakers may have “actually intended” to say. Next turns can be understood as displaying or implying participants' hearings of prior turns, but such hearings may transform or subvert any such intentions rather than stand merely as hearers' best efforts to understand them (cf. Schegloff, 1989, p. 200, on how “a next action can recast what has preceded”). But this is not a failure of the next-turn proof procedure because CA's analytic goal is not speakers' intentions, understood psychologically, but rather the methods (in the sense of ethnomethodology) by which conversational interaction is made to work. Again, it is a participants' option, having heard how a first turn has been responded to, to “repair” that displayed understanding in a subsequent “third turn.” What we then have is CA's object of study—not speakers' intentional meanings, but their interactional procedures for achieving orderly talk. Meaning is taken to be an interactional accomplishment, and the proof procedure takes us directly to the interactionally contingent character of meaning for participants, as well as the basis on which it can be studied in the empirically available details of recorded talk.