Comparative Conversation Analysis

Cross-cultural pragmatics often relies on elicited data (discourse completion tasks, questionnaires) and focuses on norms or politeness strategies as reported or rated by participants. Comparative CA works exclusively with recordings of naturally occurring interaction and analyses the sequential organisation of actual talk, turn by turn. It describes what participants demonstrably do rather than what they say they would do.

Strict numerical balance is not required, but analysts should be transparent about collection sizes at each site. Marked asymmetries — for example, 40 instances from Site A and 3 from Site B — undermine the comparative claims. The goal is to have sufficient instances at each site to identify the structural pattern within that corpus before comparing.

Yes. CA has been extended to computer-mediated communication, and comparative CA can compare interaction across platforms (e.g., video calls vs. in-person meetings) or across online communities in different languages. The analytic logic — building collections of structurally comparable instances and comparing their sequential organisation — remains the same, though the notation may need to be adapted for text-based turn-taking.

It is compatible and often enhanced by ethnographic observation. Field notes and contextual knowledge help the researcher understand what activities are underway in each setting and how participants categorise their own actions. However, the primary analytic object remains the recordings and transcripts; ethnographic context informs interpretation but does not substitute for sequential evidence.

There is no fixed minimum, but the corpus at each site should be large enough to find multiple instances of the target practice and to judge whether variants are systematic or idiosyncratic. In practice, comparative CA studies often draw on corpora of several hours of recording per site. Small pilot corpora are useful for refining the research question before larger data collection.