Conversation Analysis

What kinds of social organizations are used as resources when people communicate through talk in interaction? It is this question that conversation analysis attempts to answer. Conversation analysis (CA) studies the methods participants orient to when they organize social action through talk. It investigates rules and practices from an interactional perspective and studies them by examining recordings of real-life interactions. Although conversation analytic research may be subsumed in typically linguistic disciplines such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, or (interactional) sociolinguistics, it started in American sociology. In particular, the sociologists Erving Goffman (see Goffman, Erving (1922–1982)) and Harold Garfinkel prepared the ground in which CA arose – Goffman with his study of cultural rules and rituals in face-toface interaction (Drew and Wootton, 1988), and Garfinkel with his investigations into the situated and normative character of shared understanding in everyday courses of action (Heritage, 1984). Enabled by the spread of recording techniques that opened new ways of inspecting interactional data, Harvey Sacks (y1975) and Emanuel Schegloff established a novel paradigm for researching the organization of human action in and through talk in interaction (Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Sacks, 1992) (see Telephone Talk; Sacks, Harvey (1935–1975)). Although the foundational work in CA focuses on talk in conversations, the framework has gradually been extended to research of other types of talk such as medical and clinical interaction, lessons, or news interviews. This is why the more general characterization ‘talk in interaction’ nowadays is often preferred over ‘conversation.’