Aspects of conversation analysis

Conversation analysis emerged as a distinctive aspect of ethnomethodology (Heritage

1987: 256). Generally, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are similar in three

ways: (i) the focus on how participants themselves produce and interpret each other’s actions;

(ii) the desire to treat ordinary events as worthy of serious analytic attention; and (iii) the

preference for analysing naturally occurring interactions (Pomerantz 1988: 360-361).

Over the past forty years, conversation analysis has been employed as an important

approach to studying the intersection between social interaction and language use. Sacks

(1992) pioneered conversation analysis and made a great contribution to its development. In

his view, conversation or talk-in-interaction can be treated as an object of analysis in its own

right. Utterances may be considered as objects that speakers use to accomplish particular

conversational actions within local contexts in interaction. For instance, Sacks was interested

in how phone callers managed not to give their names at the help-line desk in the Suicide

Prevention Center.

Goodwin and Heritage (1990: 287) describe conversation analysis as “an approach to the

analysis of the practices of reasoning and inference that inform the production and recognition

of intelligible courses of action from its inception.” According to Maynard and Clayman

(2003: 181), conversation analysis is a “data-driven methodology and focuses on individual

interested in the production and interpretation of a linguistic practice by participants themselves,

and they investigate the audio and video recordings of naturally occurring data.

With respect to basic theoretical assumptions of conversation analysis, Psathas (1995:

2-3) outlines the following points, which are essential in understanding conversation analysis:

(i) Order is a produced orderliness.

(ii) Order is produced by the parties in situ; that is, it is situated and occasioned.

(iii) The parties orient to that order themselves; that is, this order is not an analyst’s

perception, not the result of the use of some preformed or preformulated theoretical

conceptions concerning what action should/must/ought to be, or based on

generalizing or summarizing statements about what action

generally/frequently/often is.

(iv) Order is repeatable and recurrent.

(v) The discovery, description, and analysis of that produced orderliness is the task of

the analyst.

(vi) Issues of how frequently, how widely, or how often particular phenomena occur are

to be set aside in the interest of discovering, describing, and analyzing the structures,

the machinery, the organized practices, the formal procedures, the ways in which

order is produced.

(vii) Structures of social action, once so discerned, can be described and analysed in

formal, that is, structural, organizational, logical, atopically contentless, consistent

The upshot of the basic theoretical assumptions is that social actions can be examined as

ongoing practical accomplishments, which are locally produced, in situ, in the “there and

then” (Schegloff 1996b), or the “here and now” (Goodwin and Heritage 1990).

In addition, Seedhouse (2005: 252) notes that the aim of conversation analysis is to

“portray social action in interaction from an emic perspective”. The emic viewpoint results

from studying behaviour as from within the system (Pike 1967). As this implies, it is not

merely the participant’s perspective, but the perspective from within the sequential

environment in which the social actions are performed. In conversation analysis,

participants share the generic features of conversation, but they implement their

conversational actions through a variety of linguistic practices in context-sensitive ways. To

illustrate, displaying overt recipiency through variation and selection of reactive tokens in this

project can be seen as universal in longer sequences. However, the way in which native and

non-native speakers select reactive tokens to deal with conflicts is context-sensitive in

disagreement-relevant environments (see Chapter 6).

In exploring the connection between applied linguistics and conversation analysis,

Richards (2005: 1) notes that one of the strengths of conversation analysis as a research

discipline is “its capacity to direct researchers’ attention to apparently tiny features of

interaction and explode their dimensions beyond all expectations, revealing delicacies of

design and management that resist the assaults of clumsier instruments”. He further points

out that conversation analysis can deepen our understanding of social and professional life by

guide to actions, but it is different from “laying down laws of behaviour” (ibid.: 4).

In terms of reliability of the sequential analysis, three key elements are “the selection of

what is recorded, the technical quality of recordings and the adequacy of transcripts” (Peräkylä

1997: 206). From an alternative perspective, Bryman (2001: 29) states that the issue of

whether the results of a study are replicable or not can be seen as one aspect of reliability.

Thus, it is important to include the transcription of the primary data in conjunction with data

analysis in the researchers’ reports and publications. In so doing, readers can judge the

description and analysis of the phenomenon in talk-in-interaction themselves.

Broadly speaking, conversation analysts employ three devices to establish the pattern of

an interactional phenomenon: single case analysis, deviant case analysis and quantification of

an interactional event. Above all, single case analysis is a very important strategy.

Conversation analysts frequently employ it to reveal participants’ orientations to a linguistic

practice for a social action accomplished, as Schegloff observes:

There is a constitutive order to singular occasions of interaction and to the organization of

action within them. This is the bedrock of social life—what I called earlier the primordial

site of sociality. And social science theorizing, both sociological and linguistic, must be

answerable to it. Whatever concerns for macro-social issues we entertain, our ways of

dealing with them will in the end have to be compatible with a capacity to address the

details of single episodes of action through talking in interaction (Schegloff 1988: 137).

conversation analysis will be discussed in greater detail.