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What is Conversation Analysis?

We begin this book with a question: ‘What is conversation analysis?’ In a sense, the book in its entirety represents our answer to that question, because conversation analysis is best defined in terms of what it does, how it enables us to view the social world and to analyse social interaction, and that is what our subsequent chapters focus upon. But it is useful to begin with a brief definition, an overview, of what CA is. We start out in this chapter with such a definition, which then leads us into a discussion of the fundamental assumptions informing CA. The most central of these assumptions is that ordinary talk is a highly organized, socially ordered phenomenon. We trace this claim as it emerged in the early researches of CA’s founder, Harvey Sacks. We then discuss the distinctively sociological background to the conversation analytic approach, before providing an initial illustration of the specific interests and concerns that motivate conversation analytic observations on empirical data.

A definition of conversation analysis

At the most basic level, conversation analysis is the study of talk. To put it in slightly more complex terms, it is the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction: talk-in-interaction. Throughout this book, we will refer to talk-in-interaction, rather than conversation, as the object of study for conversation analysts. The reason for this is simple. Although the field has adopted the name ‘conversation analysis’, practitioners do not engage solely in the analysis of ordinary conversation. As we will demonstrate in later chapters, the range of forms of talk-in-interaction that have been subject to study within CA is far larger than the term ‘conversation’ alone would imply (Schegloff, 2007: xiii).

Perhaps the most suitable way of approaching the definition of CA is to look at what CA does. If CA is the study of talk-in-interaction, how do its practitioners go about that study? Perhaps the most distinctive methodological trait of CA, and certainly a policy that underpins all its analytic findings, is that research is based on transcribed tape-recordings of actual interactions. Moreover, what is recorded is ‘naturally occurring’ interaction; in other words, the activities which are recorded are situated as far as possible in the ordinary unfolding of people’s lives, as opposed to being prearranged, set up in laboratories, or otherwise experimentally designed. Researchers make extensive use of transcripts of these naturally occurring events, both in generating analyses and in presenting those analyses in published form. The issue of transcription is the subject of Chapter 3.

Overall, then, CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. But what is the aim of studying these interactions? Principally, it is to discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how sequences of actions are generated. To put it another way, the objective of CA is to uncover the often tacit reasoning procedures and sociolinguistic competencies underlying the production and interpretation of talk in organized sequences of interaction.

In relation to this, there is a further significance in saying that CA is the study not just of talk, but of talk-in-interaction. On one level, talk involves language. In fact, it might be said that talk is the verbal instantiation of language. But CA is only marginally interested in language as such; its actual object of study is the interactional organization of social activities. CA is a radical departure from other forms of linguistically oriented analysis in that the production of utterances, and more particularly the sense they obtain, is seen not in terms of the structure of language, but first and foremost as a practical social accomplishment. That is, words used in talk are not studied as semantic units, but as products or objects which are designed and used in terms of the activities being negotiated in the talk: as requests, proposals, accusations, complaints, and so on. Moreover, the accomplishment of order, and of sense, or coherence, in talk-in-interaction is seen as inextricably tied to the local circumstances in which utterances are produced.

The upshot of all this is that CA’s aim is to focus on the production and interpretation of talk-in-interaction as an orderly accomplishment that is oriented to by the participants themselves. CA seeks to uncover the organization of talk not from any extraneous viewpoint, but from the perspective of how the participants display for one another their understanding of ‘what is going on’. As Schegloff and Sacks put it in an early summary:

We have proceeded under the assumption (an assumption borne out by our research) that in so far as the materials we worked with exhibited orderliness, they did so not only to us, indeed not in the first place for us, but for the co-participants who had produced them. If the materials . . . were orderly, they were so because they had been methodically produced by members of society for one another, and it was a feature of the conversations we treated as data that they were produced so as to allow the display by the co-participants to each other of their orderliness, and to allow the participants to display to one another their analysis, appreciation and use of that orderliness. (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973: 290)

This is what underlies the focus on sequences: throughout the course of a conversation or other bout of talk-in-interaction, speakers display in their sequentially ‘next’ turns an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about. That understanding may turn out to be what the prior speaker intended, or it may not; whichever is the case, that itself is something which gets displayed in the next turn in the sequence. We describe this as a next-turn proof procedure, and it is the most basic tool used in CA to ensure that analyses explicate the orderly properties of talk as oriented to accomplishments of participants, rather than being based merely on the assumptions of the analyst.

As an illustration of this, consider the following utterance, which is from an exchange between a mother and her son about a forthcoming Parent-Teachers’ Association meeting (Schegloff, 1988a: 57–8):

(1) [KR:2]

Mother’s question here can be interpreted as doing one of two types of action. It could represent a genuine request for information about who is attending the meeting; or she could be using it as a ‘pre-announcement’ (Terasaki, 2005), that is, as a preliminary to some information she wishes to announce about who is going. In the first case, the required response would be an answer to the question; whereas in the second case, the response would be something like, ‘No, who?’, which would provide the opportunity for the news to be announced.

Thus, taken in the abstract, Mother’s utterance is ambiguous, and on a purely analytical level it would be problematic assigning a meaning to it. However, for CA, the issue is how the participants understand, or make sense of, any given utterance. Conversation analysts pay serious respect to the fact that their raw data were not produced in the first place for the purposes of social scientific analysis, or under the aegis of any special research project. Rather, they were produced for the specific people present at the time, whether face-to-face or on the other end of a telephone line. Therefore, what we have to do is look to see how the recipient(s) of such utterances interpreted them.

When we do that, this is what we find:

[KR:2]

Russ’s first response, ‘Who’ (line 2), clearly shows that he initially interprets Mother’s utterance as a pre-announcement. However, Mother’s next turn, ‘I don’t know!’, displays that Russ’s inference was in fact incorrect: she was actually asking an information-seeking question. Following this turn, Russ backtracks and re-interprets the first turn as a genuine request for information, and produces (in lines 4–5) the small amount of information that he has available.

This sequence demonstrates a number of things. First, that people’s understandings of one another’s actions can actually unfold as sequences themselves unfold. This is what makes it possible to analyse the co-production of mutual understanding using the next turn proof procedure: any ‘next’ turn in a sequence displays its producer’s understanding of the ‘prior’ turn, and if that understanding happens to be incorrect, that in itself can be displayed in the following turn in the sequence. The sequence above also demonstrates that people’s utterances in conversation are not necessarily determined by their individual beliefs, preferences or mental states...