Conversation analysis

 

  • Generalizations are built up through close examination and interpretation of specific encounters with an eye towards trying to uncover the methods the member are using,[5] often from different interactions with different people, but some studies also focus on a single-case analysis.

  • [33] While CA has worked with language in its data since the beginning,[7] the interest in the structure of it, and possible relations to grammatical theory, was sometimes secondary to sociological (or ethnomethodological) research questions.

  • It also establishes some questions for other disciplines: for example, the split second timing of turn-transition sets up a cognitive ‘bottle neck’ in which potential speakers must attend to incoming speech while also preparing their own contribution – something which imposes a heavy load of human processing capacity, and which may impact the structure of languages.

  • [17]
    Sequence expansion
    Sequence expansion allows talk which is made up of more than a single adjacency pair to be constructed and understood as performing the same basic action and the various additional elements are as doing interactional work related to the basic action underway.

  • A key part of the method are deviant cases in collections, as they show that when a participant does not follow a norm, the interaction is affected in a way that reveals the existence of the norm in focus.

  • A turn is created through certain forms or units that listeners can recognize and count on, called turn construction units (TCUs), and speakers and listeners will know that such forms can be a word or a clause, and use that knowledge to predict when a speaker is finished so that others can speak, to avoid or minimize both overlap and silence.

  • [40]
    Relations to other fields
    Contrasts to other theories about language
    In contrast to the use of introspection in linguistics, conversation analysis studies naturally-occurring talk in a strongly empirical fashion through the use of recordings[41] Unlike ethnographers, Conversation Analysts tend to focus on transcribing recordings, and usually do not question the people doing the talk nor members of their speech community to ask for their interpretations.

  • [25]
    Action formation
    Turns in interaction implement actions, and a specific turn may perform one (or more) specific actions.

  • [17]

    The model also leaves puzzles to be solved, for example concerning how turn boundaries are identified and projected, and the role played by gaze and body orientation in the management of turn-taking.

  • Speakers wanting a long turn, for example to tell a story or describe important news, must first establish that others will not intervene during the course of the telling through some form of preface and approval by the listener (a so-called go-ahead).

  • [44] A focus on interaction in professional contexts was established by the 1992 book Talk at Work by Paul Drew and John Heritage,[45] but earlier studies had also focused on specific institutional contexts, mostly one at a time.

  • While this kind of inductive analysis based on collections of data exhibits is basic to fundamental work in CA, it has been more common in recent years to also use statistical analysis in applications of CA to solve problems in medicine and elsewhere.

  • [12]
    Basic structures
    Conversation analysis provides a model that can be used to understand interactions, and offers a number of concepts to describe them.

  • The transcription conventions take into account overlapping speech, delays between speech, pitch, volume and speed based on research showing that these features matter for the conversation in terms of action, turn-taking and more.

  • As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions.

  • how one turn by a specific participant displays an understanding of the previous turn by another participant (or other earlier interaction).

  • 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.

  • CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors’ offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture.

  • [6] Crucially, the method uses the fact that interaction consists of multiple participants and that they make sense of each other, so the method proceeds by considering e.g.

  • The concept of action within CA resembles, but is different from the concept of speech act in other fields of pragmatics.

  • [26] The study of action focuses on the description of how turns at talk are composed and positioned so as to realize one or more actions.

  • Gap: A period of silence between turns, for example after a question has been asked and not yet answered
    Lapse: A period of silence when no sequence or other structured activity is in progress: the current speaker stops talking, does not select a next speaker, and no one self selects.

  • Applied conversation analysis
    Conversation analysis is used in various contexts leading to a number of different fields benefitting from conversation analytic findings.

  • [8][9]

    The transcription often contains additional information about nonverbal communication and the way people say things.

  • Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that investigates the methods members use to achieve mutual understanding through the transcription of naturally occurring conversations from audio or video.

  • Research questions revolve around participants’ orientation, that is, what features (linguistic or other) that cues people to respond in certain ways and influence the trajectory of an interaction.

  • Minimal expansion is also termed sequence closing thirds, because it is a single turn after the base SPP (hence third) that does not project any further talk beyond their turn (hence closing).

  • Method
    Conversation analysts typically start by gathering audio or video recordings of real life encounters, which they transcribe using a detailed system pioneered by Gail Jefferson.

  • In light of this, categories are inference rich – a great deal of knowledge that members of a society have about the society is stored in terms of these categories.

  • A listener will look for the places where they can start speaking – so-called transition relevant places (TRPs) – based on how the units appear over time.

  • An example of this would be a typical conversation between a customer and a shopkeeper:
    Customer: I would like a turkey sandwich, please.

  • Some types of turns may require extra work before they can successfully take place.

  • The data used in CA is in the form of video- or audio-recorded conversations, collected with or without researchers’ involvement, typically from a video camera or other recording device in the space where the conversation takes place (e.g.

  • The following section contains important concepts and phenomena identified in the conversation analytical literature, and will refer to articles that are centrally concerned with the phenomenon.

  • [3]: xxiv  Today CA is an established method used in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology, and works alongside related approaches such as interactional sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology.

  • The field developed during the 90’s and got its name with the publication of the 2001 Studies in Interactional Linguistics[34] and is inspired by West Coast functional grammar which is sometimes considered to have effectively merged with IL since then,[33] but has also gained inspiration from British phoneticians doing prosodic analysis.

  • 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.

  • CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.

  • [18]

    However, the original formulation in Sacks et al.1974 is designed to model turn-taking only in ordinary and informal conversation, and not interaction in more specialized, institutional environments such as meetings, courts, news interviews, mediation hearings, which have distinctive turn-taking organizations that depart in various ways from ordinary conversation.

  • Visual methods: Gesture, gaze and body movement is also used to indicate that a turn is over.

  • Based on the turn-taking system, three types of silence may be distinguished:

    Pause: A period of silence within a speaker’s TCU, i.e.

  • Conversation Analysts look for clues to these methods in the actions of the interlocutors themselves rather than trying to impose some outside analytical framework onto them.

  • Its method, following Garfinkel and Goffman’s initiatives, is aimed at uncovering the methods that the interacting members rely on to make sense of each other.

  • Turn-taking organization
    The analysis of turn-taking started with the description in a model in the paper known as the Simplest Systematics,[7] which was very programmatic for the field of Conversation analysis and one of the most cited papers published in the journal Language.

  • [21] Insert expansion allows a possibility for a second speaker, the speaker who must produce the SPP, to do interactional work relevant to the projected SPP.

  • [47]
    Criticism
    Conversation analysis has been criticized for not being able to address issues of power and inequality in society at large.

  • Preference organization
    CA may reveal structural (i.e.

 

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