Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction (both verbal and non-verbal in situations of everyday life). CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional (in school

School

A school is an institution designed for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is commonly compulsory. In these systems, students progress through a series of schools...

, a doctor's surgery

Surgery (disambiguation)

Surgery is a medical specialty that uses operative treatment. It also refers to the place where surgery is performed, or the offices of the practitioner, the surgeon.Surgery may also mean:In medicine:...

, court

Court

A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...

 or elsewhere) or in casual conversation

Conversation

Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...

.

Inspired by ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is an ethnographic approach to sociological inquiry introduced by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel . Ethnomethodology's research interest is the study of the everyday methods people use for the production of social order...

 (e.g. Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.-Biography:...

) and Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born sociologist and writer.The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective that began with his 1959 book The Presentation of Self...

, CA was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks

Harvey Sacks

Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of...

 and his close associates Emanuel Schegloff

Emanuel Schegloff

Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born in 1937 in New York. With Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff was one of the principal creators of the field of Conversation Analysis...

 and Gail Jefferson

Gail Jefferson

Gail Jefferson was, along with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the area of research known as Conversation Analysis . She is particularly remembered today for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing talk...

. Today CA is an established method used in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz...

, discourse analysis

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

 and discursive psychology

Discursive psychology

For other uses of the word, see discursive.Discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes....

, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis

Sequential analysis

In statistics, sequential analysis or sequential hypothesis testing is statistical analysis where the sample size is not fixed in advance. Instead data are evaluated as they are collected, and further sampling is stopped in accordance with a pre-defined stopping rule as soon as significant results...

 have been employed for instance by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic detail of speech (Kelly and Local 1989). http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~lang4/icphs.pdf

The use of the term “conversation” to label this disciplinary movement is sometimes considered to be misleading. For instance, one of CA’s principal practitioners, Emanuel Schegloff, has more recently identified “talk-in-interaction” as CA’s topic. Perhaps for this same reason, others (e.g., Jonathan Potter

Jonathan Potter

Jonathan Potter is Professor of Discourse Analysis and, from February 2010, Head of the Department of Social Sciences, at Loughborough University and one of the originators of discursive psychology.-Life:...

) who use CA methods identify themselves as discourse analysts

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

 (DA), though that term was first used to identify researchers using methods different from CA (cf., Levinson, 1983), and still identifies a group of scholars larger than those who use only CA methods.

CA analysis

As in all research, conversational analysis begins by setting up a research problem. The data collected for CA is in the form of video or audio recorded conversations. The data is collected without researchers' involvement, often simply by adding a video camera to the room where the conversation takes place (e.g. medical doctors consultation with a patient). From the audio or video recording the researchers construct a detailed transcription (ideally with no details left out). After transcription, the researchers perform inductive data-driven analysis aiming to find recurring patterns of interaction. Based on the analysis, the researchers develop a rule or model to explain the occurrence of the patterns.

Turn-taking organization

The set of practices by which a conversation is done in and through turns. Turn-taking is one of the fundamental organizations of conversation. According to CA, the turn-taking system consists of two components: the turn constructional component and the turn allocational component.

CA does not explicitly claim that turn-taking is universal. However, as research is conducted on more languages, if there were any basis for a claim to universality in language, turn-taking would be a good candidate. The turn-taking model for conversation was arrived at inductively through empirical investigation of field recordings of conversation and fitted to such observationally arrived at facts as that in conversation, participants are constrained to issue their utterances in allocated turns, and enlist various mechanisms to obtain turns.

Turn constructional component

The turn constructional component describes basic units out of which turns are fashioned. These basic units are known as turn constructional units or TCUs. Unit types include: lexical, clausal, phrasal, and sentential.

Turn allocational component

The turn allocational component describes how participants organize their interaction by selecting speakers in a conversation. The three ordered options are: Current Speaker selects Next Speaker; Next Speaker Self-selects as Next; or Current Speaker Continues.

Adjacency pairs

Talk tends to occur in responsive pairs; however, the pairs may be split over a sequence of turns.

Pre-sequences

A pair of turns may be understood as preliminary to the main course of action. For example, "Guess what!"/"What?" as preliminary to an announcement of some sort, or "What are you doing?"/"Nothing" as preliminary to an invitation or a request.

Preference organization

CA may reveal structural (i.e. practice-underwritten) preferences in conversation for some types of actions (within sequences of action) over other actions. For example, responsive actions which agree with, or accept, positions taken by a first action tend to be performed more straightforwardly and faster than actions that disagree with, or decline, those positions (Pomerantz 1984; Davidson 1984). One consequence of this is that agreement and acceptance are promoted over their alternatives, and are more likely to be the outcome of the sequence. Pre-sequences are also a component of preference organization and contribute to this outcome (Schegloff 2007).

Repair

Repair organization describes how parties in conversation deal with problems in speaking, hearing, or understanding. Repair segments are classified by who initiates repair (self or other), by who resolves the problem (self or other), and by how it unfolds within a turn or a sequence of turns. The organisation of repair is also a self righting mechanism in social interaction (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Participants in conversation seek to correct the trouble source by initiating self repair and a preference for self repair, the speaker of the trouble source, over other repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Self repair initiations can be placed in three locations in relation to the trouble source, in a first turn, a transition space or in a third turn (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Self initiators of repair in the same turn use different non-lexical speech perturbations, including: cut-offs, sound stretches and "uh's" (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977).

Action formation

This focuses on the description of the practices by which turns at talk are composed and positioned so as to realize one or another actions.

Contrasts to other theories

In contrast to the research inspired by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

, which is based on a distinction between competence and performance and dismisses the particulars of actual speech as a degraded form of idealized competence, Conversation Analysis studies naturally-occurring talk on the assumption that spoken interaction is systematically orderly in all its facets (cf. Sacks in Atkinson and Heritage 1984: 21-27). In contrast to the theory developed by John Gumperz

John J. Gumperz

John Joseph Gumperz is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara...

, CA maintains it is possible to analyze talk-in-interaction by examining its recordings alone (audio for telephone, video for copresent interaction). CA researchers do not believe that the researcher needs to consult with the talk participants or members of their speech community

Speech community

Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language. Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans , or even tight-knit groups like families and...

.

Application in other fields

In recent years, CA has been employed by researchers in other fields, such as feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 and feminist linguistics, or used in complement with other theories, such as Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). Elizabeth Stokoe argues that ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is an ethnographic approach to sociological inquiry introduced by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel . Ethnomethodology's research interest is the study of the everyday methods people use for the production of social order...

's egalitarian creed reflects the egalitarian ethos in feminism. Traditional feminist concerns can be explored from an ethnomethodological standpoint, since oppression is not a once and for all phenomenon but the processes involved in defining social reality produces and reproduces oppression daily. Thus, the gendered properties of social life, routinely taken-for-granted as natural and trans-situational, are best understood as situated accomplishments of local interactions. MCA was influenced by the work on Harvey Sacks and his work on Membership Categorization Device (MCD). Sacks argues that 'members’ categories comprise part of the central machinery of organization and developed the notion of MCD to explain how categories can be hearably linked together by native speakers of a culture. His example that is taken from a children's storybook (The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.) shows how "mommy" is interpreted as the mother of the baby by speakers of the same culture. In light of this, categories are inference rich – a great deal of knowledge members of a society have about the society is stored in terms of these categories. Stokoe further contends that members’ practical categorizations form part of ethnomethodology's description of the ongoing production and realization of ‘facts’ about social life and including members’ gendered reality analysis, thus making CA compatible with feminist studies.

Subject index of conversation analysis literature

The following is a list of important phenomena identified in the conversation analysis literature, followed by a brief definition and citations to articles that examine the named phenomenon either empirically or theoretically. Articles in which the term for the phenomenon is coined or which present the canonical treatment of the phenomenon are in bold, those that are otherwise centrally concerned with the phenomenon are in italics, and the rest are articles that otherwise aim to make a significant contribution to an understanding of the phenomenon.
TURN-TAKING : A process by which interactants allocate the right or obligation to participate in an interactional activity. (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974)
REPAIR : The mechanisms through which certain "troubles" in interaction are dealt with. (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks 1977)
PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION : The ways through which different types of social actions ('preferred' vs. 'dispreferred') are carried out sequentially. (Pomerantz 1978, Pomerantz 1984)

External links

• An Introduction to Conversation Analysis (by Discourse and Rhetoric Group, Loughborough University)
• Online bibliography of pre-1990 CA literature
• Online bibliography of post-1989 CA literature
• Online clearinghouse for the CA community