An Introduction to Conversation Analysis

Anthony J. Liddicoat

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350090651
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Semántica lingüística

Conversation is one of the most widespread uses of human language, but what is actually happening when we interact this way? How is conversation structured? How does it function? Answering these questions and more, An Introduction to Conversation Analysis is an essential overview of this topic for students in a wide range of disciplines including sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and sociology. This is the only book you need to learn how to do conversation analysis. Beginning by positioning conversation analysis amongst other methodologies, this book explains the advantages before guiding you step-by-step through how to do conversation analysis and what it reveals about the ways language works in communication. Chapters introduce every aspect of conversation analysis logically and clearly, covering topics such as transcription, turn-taking, sequence organisation, repair, and storytelling. Now fully revised and expanded to take account of recent developments, this third edition includes: - 3 new chapters, covering action formation and epistemics, multimodality and spoken interaction, and written conversation
- New topics including online and mobile technology, cross-cultural conversation and medical discourse
- A glossary of key terms, brand new exercises and updated lists of further reading
- A fully updated companion website, featuring tutorials, audio and video files, and a range of different exercises covering turn taking, organisation and repair

1

Conversation and Conversation Analysis

Chapter outline

Focus

Introduction

The development of Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis as an approach to studying interaction

Conversation Analysis and some other ways of studying language in use

About this book

Further reading

Focus

• The origins of Conversation Analysis as a research approach

• Conversation Analysis as a way of understanding social interaction

Introduction

Conversation is one of the most prevalent uses of human language. All human beings engage in conversational interaction, and human society depends on conversation in order to function:

Social interaction is the primordial means through which the business of the social world is transacted, the identities of its participants are affirmed or denied, and its cultures are transmitted, renewed and modified. (Goodwin and Heritage, 1990, p. 283)

Conversation is the way in which people socialize and develop and sustain their relationships with each other. When people converse, they engage in a form of linguistic communication, but there is much more going on in a conversation than just the use of a linguistic code. Much that is important in conversation is carried out by things other than language, including eye gaze and body posture, silences and the real-world context in which the talk is produced.

Conversation has received a great deal of attention from writers over a very long period of time; however, much of what has been written about conversation is prescriptive in nature and deals with the idea of what makes a ‘good conversationalist’ (see Burke, 1993). Such approaches to conversation take the form of a set of prescriptive rules which describe what a conversation should be. They present sets of social rules which indicate which topics are appropriate or how language is to be used for maximum effect. These principles of what constitutes good or appropriate conversation vary from culture to culture and change over time (Burke, 1993). Such approaches to conversation show little about conversation as a normal everyday human activity but frame conversation as an elite activity governed by the conventions of ‘polite society’. However, conversation is not solely an elite activity but rather an everyday one, and it is important to understand how it is that people engage in this everyday activity as a structured social event.

The everyday nature of talk has often been denigrated as a subject for study, with linguists such as Chomsky (1965) seeing language used in actual instances of spontaneous communication as being in some way defective and negatively influenced by non-linguistic factors. Such views of language, however, divorce the linguistic system from its primary use in human communication. Given the fundamental role of conversation in human social life, it is important to understand conversation as a linguistic activity, and since the 1960s increasing importance has been given to the analysis of conversation as a field of study (Clayman and Maynard, 1995; Goodwin and Heritage, 1990; Heritage, 1989).

The development of Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis is an approach to the study of talk in interaction which grew out of the ethnomethodological tradition in sociology developed by Harold Garfinkel (1964, 1967, 1988). Ethnomethodology, as a field of sociology, studies the common-sense resources, practices and procedures through which members of a society produce and recognize mutually intelligible objects, events and courses of action. These main ideas for the approach were established in Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). The core focus of ethnomethodology is small-scale social order seen through the common social knowledge of members of society of the forces that influence how individuals interpret the situations and messages they encounter in their social world. Garfinkel sought to study the social structure of everyday lived experience and develop an understanding of ‘how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained’ (Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 35–6). Ethnomethodology also gave increased prominence to participants’ understandings of social action and viewed the participants themselves as knowledgeable agents who attribute meaning to their social actions in ways which were central to the unfolding of those actions (Meyer and Endreß, 2019; ten Have, 2016).

Ethnomethodology proceeds from an assumption that social order appears to be orderly but is in reality potentially chaotic. For ethnomethodologists, the social order is not a pre-existing framework, but rather it is constructed in the minds of social actors as they engage with society. As members of a society encounter sense impressions and experiences, they must somehow organize into a coherent pattern. Garfinkel (1967) suggests that the way individuals bring order to, or make sense of, their social world is through a psychological process, which he calls ‘the documentary method’. This method first consists of selecting certain facts from a social situation that seem to conform to a pattern and then making sense of these facts in terms of the pattern. Once the pattern has been established, it can be used as a framework for interpreting new facts which arise within the situation. In the documentary method, context plays a vital role as people make sense of occurrences in the social world by reference to the context in which the occurrence appears: participants index an occurrence to its particular circumstances. Garfinkel argued that people constantly make use of the documentary method in their daily lives to create a ‘taken-for-granted’ understandin g of the social world which they feel they ‘know’ and in which they can be ‘at home’. They perceive the social world through a series of patterns they have built up for making sense of and coping with the variety of situations that they encounter in their lives.

This taken-for-granted nature of understandings of the social world implies that social knowledge is implicit, and for this reason, understandings of social knowledge cannot be elicited (Duranti, 1997). Instead, social organization can only be understood by examining actual instances of social interaction. In each instance of social interaction, members need to make available to others their understanding of the activities in which they are engaged, and participants routinely monitor each other to confirm and test shared understandings of the activity as it unfolds. For this reason, in studying social interaction, ethnomethodology tends to ignore the information actually transmitted during interaction, concentrating more on how the interaction was performed. This is because the stance of ethnomethodology suggests that all meanings are, and can only ever be, subjective and that the only objective social reality, and therefore the only thing worth studying, is the reality of commonly understood methods of communication.

The emphasis on studying actual instances of social interaction is further developed in the work of Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1959, 1963, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1981, 1983), who asserted that the ordinary activities of daily life were an important subject for study. Goffman’s work demonstrated that it was possible to study everyday events and situations and to discover from these non-trivial information how human beings engage in sociality. He was able to show how matters of great social significance could be found in everyday activities. Goffman’s approach to research was a qualitative one in which description and analysis were the primary tools for developing an understanding of social processes, and this contrasted with much of the prevailing work in sociology and social psychology which favoured more quantitative approaches based on hypothesis testing. Goffman (1964) in particular drew attention to the need to study ordinary instances of speaking, which had in his view been neglected. He argued:

Talk is socially organized, not merely in terms of who speaks to whom in what language, but as a little system of mutually ratified and ritually governed face-to-face action, a social encounter. (Goffman, 1964: 65)

He argued that the study of speaking was not simply a matter of narrowly focused linguistic descriptions of language, but rather that interaction had its own system of rules and structures which were not intrinsically linguistic in nature. This means that the study of language in purely linguistic terms could not adequately account for the nature of language in use.

The work of Garfinkel and Goffman provided an impetus for the development of Conversation Analysis by establishing a concern for investigating the orderliness of everyday life, and these were taken up by Harvey Sacks in his lectures on conversation from the early 1960s (Sacks, 1992). In these lectures, Sacks developed an approach to the study of social action which sought to investigate social order as it was produced through the practices of everyday talk. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the work of Harvey Sacks, and his colleagues Emmanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, Conversation Analysis began to emerge from sociology as an independent area of enquiry oriented towards understanding the organizational structure of talk which has influenced a number of the social science disciplines concerned with human communication (Lerner, 2004). Conversation Analysis drew from ethnomethodology a concern for understanding how order was achieved in social interaction, and empirically based methodology based on microanalytic studies (Clayman and Maynard, 1995).

Sacks’s approach to the study of conversation is characterized by a view of talk as an activity through which speakers accomplish things in interaction. Talk can, therefore, be strategically employed to achieve communicative goals. For Sacks, this strategic use of talk is not a set of rules or recipes by which actions are accomplished but rather the production of interactional effects which are achieved through the use of talk in a particular context (Schegloff, 1992a). For Sacks, conversation was orderly and this order was manifested at all points (Sacks, 1992). The orderly nature of talk results from the recognizable achievement of the same outcome through similar methods in similar contexts. Conversation then is realized through sets of practices which speakers can deploy in order to undertake particular actions in particular contexts and which will be recognized as achieving the appropriate action by other participants.

The core assumptions of Conversation Analysis are listed (see Psathas, 1995):

1. Order is produced orderliness. That is, order does not occur of its own accord nor does it pre-exist the interaction but is rather the result of the co-ordinate practices of the participants who achieve orderliness and the interact.

2. Order is produced, situated and occasioned. That is, order is produced by the participants themselves for the conversation in which it occurs. The participants themselves orient to the order being produced and their behaviour reflects and indexes that order. This means that in analysing conversation as an academic activity, orderliness being documented is not externally imposed by the analyst but internally accomplished by the participants. This observed order is not the result of a pre-formed conceptions of what should happen, nor is it a probabilistic generalization about frequencies.

3. Order is repeatable and recurrent. The patterns of orderliness found in conversation are repeated, not only in the talk of an individual speaker but across groups of speakers. The achieved order is therefore the result of a shared understanding of the methods by which order is achievable.

These three formulations make it clear that Conversation Analysis assumes that there is overwhelming order in conversation. Conversation is neither random nor unstructured; however, the order observable in conversation does not imply an overarching uniformity in conversational structure which is generalizable across conversations (Wooffitt, 2005). Instead, the participants t hemselves construct conversations in orderly ways.

A key idea in Conversation Analysis is the notion of recipient design, which Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) characterize as the most general principle of conversational interaction. Recipient design refers to the idea that participants in talk design their talk in such a way as to be understood by an interlocutor, in terms of the knowledge that participants assume they share (Sacks and Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1972). This means that conversational contributions are designed with a recipient in mind and are designed as appropriate for that recipient. Recipient design is not simply a resource which speakers use to design talk; it is also a resource listeners can use in interpreting talk, as listeners are motivated to hear a turn that is designed for them, and participants track the trajectory of the talk to hear turn if a turn is designed for them (Boden, 1994). This means that recipient design is a highly salient feature of talk and the organization of talk, and therefore one aspect of the produced orderliness of conversation. The task of the analyst is to discover and describe the produced orderliness which is created by conversationalists during conversation. Such an analysis allows the machinery of conversation to become visible, and it is the purpose of this book to describe this machinery of conversation – the sets of procedures which participants in conversation deploy in order to achieve orderly and ordered social interaction.

Conversation Analysis, as the name of an approach to studying talk in interaction, is in some ways a misnomer for the approach as the focus of Conversation Analysis is actually much large...