Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis studies the orderly, systematic organization of talk-in-interaction, revealing how turn-taking, sequencing, and repair structure ordinary conversation.
Definition
Conversation analysis is the systematic study of the structures and practices of talk-in-interaction, examining how participants organize turns, sequences, and repair to accomplish social actions.
Scope
This topic covers conversation analysis (CA), the study of the structure of naturally occurring talk that grew out of ethnomethodology. It treats turn-taking and the turn-construction system, sequence organization including adjacency pairs and preference, repair, and the methodological commitment to detailed transcription of recorded interaction. Its application to institutional and clinical talk is included.
Core questions
- How do speakers manage the orderly exchange of turns at talk?
- How are actions like requests and answers organized into sequences?
- How do participants detect and repair troubles in interaction?
- What can naturally occurring talk reveal that intuition cannot?
Key concepts
- turn-taking
- adjacency pairs
- preference organization
- repair
- transition-relevance place
- transcription conventions
Key theories
- Turn-taking systematics
- Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson describe a context-free yet context-sensitive system of turn-allocation rules that explains how participants take turns with minimal gap and overlap.
- Sequence organization
- Schegloff shows that talk is built from sequences of actions, organized around adjacency pairs and preference structures, through which participants jointly accomplish social activities.
History
Conversation analysis was founded in the 1960s and early 1970s by Harvey Sacks, working with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, out of Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's study of interaction. The 1974 turn-taking paper became its charter. CA developed rigorous transcription and recording practices and extended from ordinary conversation to institutional, medical, and legal interaction.
Debates
- Relevance of social context
- CA's insistence on grounding claims in participants' demonstrable orientations has been contrasted with critical and ethnographic approaches that import macro-social context, raising the question of how much external context analysis may invoke.
Key figures
- Harvey Sacks
- Emanuel Schegloff
- Gail Jefferson
- Jack Sidnell
Related topics
Seminal works
- sacks1974
- schegloff2007
Frequently asked questions
- How does conversation analysis differ from critical discourse analysis?
- CA closely examines the moment-by-moment structure of recorded talk and grounds claims in what participants themselves display, whereas CDA interprets discourse in terms of broader power and ideology. The two have different data, methods, and aims.