Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis – the study of talk-in-interaction – is a theoretically and methodologically distinctive approach to understanding social life. It is an interdisciplinary approach spanning, in particular, the disciplines of psychology, sociology, linguistics and communication studies. The methodology of conversation analysis – involving detailed empirical studies of specific, observable, interactional phenomena – rests on three fundamental theoretical assumptions: (i) that talk is a form of action; (ii) that action is structurally organized; and (iii) that talk creates and maintains intersubjectivity (Heritage, 1984a; Peräkylä, 2004).

The first assumption of conversation analysis (henceforth CA) is that talk is understood, first and foremost, as a form of action: the focus is on what people do with talk, rather than just on what they say. Conversation analysts study ordinary, everyday conversational actions, such as complaining (Drew and Holt, 1988), complimenting (Pomerantz, 1978) or telling news (Maynard, 1997); and also actions that constitute particular institutional contexts, such as advice-giving in healthcare interactions (Heritage and Sefi, 1992) or cross-examination in court (Drew, 1992). Conversation analysts also study the fundamental structures of talk-in-interaction upon which all actions depend, such as turn-taking (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974), and the organization of actions into sequences (Schegloff, 2007).

CA's second assumption – that action is structurally organized – underpins this latter kind of work, which establishes technical specifications of the rules and practices that structure talk-in-interaction, and considers how these constrain and enable particular actions. These technical specifications constitute a cumulative, empirically-derived body of knowledge, which describes the basic characteristics of talk-in-interaction.

CA's final assumption – that talk creates and maintains intersubjectivity – locates it firmly within the domain of psychology. For conversation analysts, however, intersubjectivity is not an intra-psychic phenomenon: rather, it depends upon displayed understandings of prior talk. Through producing a turn hearable as an answer, for example, a speaker shows that she has heard the prior turn as a question; or through producing (appropriately timed) laughter, a speaker claims to have recognized – and [Page 55]appreciated – the punchline of a joke. Similarly, institutional contexts – classrooms, consulting rooms, courts – are (in part) ‘talked into being’ (Heritage, 1984a) by the details of participants' actions: the way in which they give and receive information, ask and answer questions, present arguments, and so on (see Drew (2003) for a comparison of four different institutional contexts).

Conversation analysis was first developed in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Harvey Sacks, in collaboration with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Tragically, Sacks was killed in a car crash in 1975, leaving much of the subsequent development of the approach to his collaborators, colleagues and students. His foundational legacy, however, remains – largely in the form of lectures to his undergraduate students at the University of California, transcribed from the original tapes by Jefferson, and published with an extensive introduction by Schegloff (Sacks, 1995).

The intellectual roots of CA lie in the sociological tradition of ethnomethodology, an approach primarily concerned with social members' ways of making sense of the everyday social world (Garfinkel, 1967). Like other broadly constructionist and interpretive theoretical frameworks, ethnomethodology offers a model of people as agents, and of a social order grounded in contingent, ongoing interpretive work – an interest in how people do social order, rather than in how they are animated by it. For Sacks, talk-in-interaction was simply one site of human interaction that could be studied for what it revealed about the production of social order: talk (as such) was not given any principled primacy (Heritage, 1984a). What was crucial, however, was the availability of tape-recorded conversations, allowing for repeated inspection, and subsequent transcription, of the data. Jefferson and – particularly – Schegloff have remained key figures within CA, where their work centrally defines the field. For more on the early history of CA, see Psathas (1979), Turner (1974); for classic papers by the ‘first generation’ of conversation analysts, see Lerner (2004).

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