Week 10: Conversational Analysis

At its core, conversation analysis is a set of methods for working with audio and video recordings of talk and social interaction. These methods were worked out in some of the earliest conversation-analytic studies and have remained remarkably consistent over the last 40 years. Their continued use has resulted in a large body of strongly interlocking and mutually supportive findings.

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that emerged through the collaborative research of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, and their students in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson published a landmark paper in Language titled, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Not only did this paper lay out an account of turn-taking in conversation and provide a detailed exemplification of the conversation analytic method, it also articulated with concerns in linguistics and brought CA to the attention of linguists and others engaged in the scientific study of language.

 

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