Conversation Analysis

Since the early 1960s, beginning with the work of Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff, conversation analysis (CA) has grown into an international interdisciplinary enterprise. The approach was inspired by both Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, largely through their mutual connection with Harvey Sacks, who with Emmanuel Schegloff was a student of Goffman at Berkeley. Goffman and Garfinkel exchanged work in the early 1950s, and the three, Sacks, Goffman, and Garfinkel, met in the late 1950s. From then on, Sacks continued to meet with Garfinkel, and his first studies in the detailed analysis of conversation emerged from the convergence of his Goffman-inspired interest in the moral commitment involved in interaction and Garfinkel's insistence on an ethnomethodological (EM) study of the details involved in the production of that moral commitment, and the fragility of intelligibility that required it.

Since those early days, CA and EM have increasingly staked out separate intellectual ground. CA, largely because it was identified as a rigorous methodology, was taken up into many disciplines, while EM, insisting that it remain a total approach, remained more difficult. The reputation of CA as a rigorous new approach to the study of both language and social order was established in particular through the foundational paper on turntaking, first published in 1977, “The Simplest Systematics for Turntaking in Conversation.” Written by Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson (a student and associate of Sacks at the time), the paper established an “economy of turns,” and preferences related to turntaking orders, as the basic organizing feature of all social orders. This article was augmented by important work on assessments by Anita Pomerantz and on presequences by Alene Terasaki, both students of Sacks. Work by Schegloff on repair and conversational sequencing and his sophisticated critiques of established linguistic and philosophical approaches to language was essential to establishing the CA enterprise. Finally, the lectures of Harvey Sacks, given between 1964 and his death in 1975 (carefully transcribed by Gail Jefferson), circulated widely in Xerox form among students the world over for more than 20 years (before finally being published in their entirety by Cambridge University Press, edited and introduced by Schegloff), made a huge impact on thinking about not only conversational orders, but orders of practice in all disciplines.

The basic idea advanced by Sacks was that conversation is orderly in its details and that those details manifest themselves in the form of turn types, turn transitions, membership categorization devices, and many forms of indexicality (words and sentence fragments with multiple possible meanings) designed to guarantee that participants fulfill hearing and listening requirements. According to Sacks, these requirements must be displayed by all participants at most points in any interaction if conversation and interaction are to succeed. This solves the problem posed by ordinary language philosophers as to how persons can know whether or not the other has understood what was said (see Paul Grice for a classic discussion of this problem) and also introduces an inevitable moral dimension to interaction.

According to Sacks, the ability of a speaker to take a recognizably intelligible turn next, after a prior turn (given a sufficient degree of indexicality in the talk), guarantees they have understood. Thus, Sacks argued that speaking in indexical fragments, which linguistically would appear to be a problem, is a highly efficient device for ensuring mutual intelligibility. It ensures that all participants who take turns are fulfilling their listening and hearing requirements and either understand what has been said or display their lack of understanding in their next turn. That is why, according to Sacks, the person who fails to speak at all is so suspicious. Even speaking last demonstrates attention to a long sequence of turns. But not speaking at all or speaking to a different topic (as those we refer to as “mentally ill” often do) demonstrates nothing about one's attention and trustworthiness.

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