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. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. 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 to focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. 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. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.
Conversation analysis should not be confused with other methods of analyzing conversation or interaction, such as other areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis.Liddicoat, Anthony J. (2022) An Introduction to Conversation Analysis, 3. ed. Bloomsbury Academic.
History Conversation analysis was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks was inspired by Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's conception of what came to be known as the interaction order, but also a number of minor sources of contemporary influences such as the generativism of Noam Chomsky and its focus on building an apparatus. The speech act theory of John Searle was a parallel development rather than influencing or being influenced by CA. 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.
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. Generalizations are built up through close examination and interpretation of specific encounters with an eye towards trying to uncover the methods the members are using, often from different interactions with different people, but some studies also focus on a single-case analysis. 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. how one turn by a specific participant displays an understanding of the previous turn by another participant (or other earlier interaction). This is commonly referred to as the next-turn proof procedure even though proof is not to be taken literally. 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. 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. Sacks spoke of 'noticeable absences' in his lectures.
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. a living room, picnic, or doctor's office). The researchers construct detailed transcriptions from the recordings, containing as much detail as is possible.
The transcription often contains additional information about nonverbal communication and the way people say things. Jeffersonian transcription is a commonly used method of transcription and nonverbal details are often transcribed according to Mondadan conventions by Lorenza Mondada.
After transcription, the researchers perform inductive data-driven analysis aiming to find recurring patterns of interaction. Based on the analysis, the researchers identify regularities, rules or models to describe these patterns, enhancing, modifying or replacing initial hypotheses. 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.
While conversation analysis provides a method of analysing conversation, this method is informed by an underlying theory of what features of conversation are meaningful and the meanings that are likely implied by these features. Additionally there is a body of theory about how to interpret conversation.
Basic structures Conversation analysis provides a model that can be used to understand interactions, and it offers a number of concepts to describe them. The following section contains important concepts and phenomena identified in the conversation analytical literature, and it will refer to articles that are centrally concerned with the phenomenon. A conversation is viewed as a collection of turns of speaking; errors or misunderstandings in speech are addressed with repairs, and turns may be marked by the delay between them or other linguistic features.
Turn-taking organization
The analysis of turn-taking started with the description in a model in the paper known as the Simplest Systematics, which was very programmatic for the field of Conversation analysis and one of the most cited papers published in the journal Language.
The model is designed to explain that when people talk in conversation, they do not always talk all at the same time, but generally, one person speaks at a time, and then another person can follow. Such a contribution to a conversation by one speaker is then a turn. 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. 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. Turn construction units can be created or recognized via four methods, i.e. types of unit design: Grammatical methods, i.e. morphosyntactic structures. Prosodic methods, e.g. pitch, speed and changes in pronunciation. Pragmatic methods: turns perform actions, and at the point where listeners have heard enough and know enough, a turn can be pragmatically complete. Visual methods: gesture, gaze and body movement is also used to indicate that a turn is over. For example, a person speaking looks at the next speaker when their turn is about to end.
Each time a turn is over, speakers also have to decide who can talk next, and this is called turn allocation. The rules for turn allocation are commonly formulated in the same way as in the original Simplest Systematics paper, with 2 parts, whereby the first consists of 3 elements:
a. If the current speaker selects a next one to speak at the end of current TCU (by name, gaze or contextual aspects of what is said), the selected speaker has the right and obligation to speak next. b. If the current speaker does not select a next speaker, other potential speakers have the right to self-select (the first starter gets the turn) c. If options 1a and 1b have not been implemented, the current speaker may continue with another TCU. At the end of that TCU, the option system applies again.
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. during a speaker's turn when a sentence is not finished. 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. Lapses are commonly associated with visual or other forms of disengagement between speakers, even if these periods are brief.
Some types of turns may require extra work before they can successfully take place. 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). The preface and its associated go-ahead comprise a pre-sequence. Conversations cannot be appropriately ended by 'just stopping', but require a special closing sequence.
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. 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.
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. Later studies have looked at institutional interaction and turn-taking in institutional contexts. Interruptions have also been examined and analyzed.
Recipient Design In his lectures, Harvey Sacks posited that speakers try to judge what referents their recipients will understand, and design their speech with that in mind, so they will be understood. He called this 'recipient design.' The psychologist Herbert H. Clark called the same concept 'audience design,' while psychologist Howard Giles wrote of 'accommodation.'
Sequence organization
Adjacency pairs
Talk tends to occur in responsive pairs; however, the pairs may be split over a sequence of turns. Adjacency pairs divide utterance types into first pair parts and second pair parts to form a pair type. There are many examples of adjacency pairs including Questions-Answers, Offer-Acceptance/Refusal and Compliment-Response.
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.Sequence expansion is constructed in relation to a base sequence of a first pair part (FPP) and a second pair part (SPP) in which the core action underway is achieved. It can occur prior to the base FPP, between the base FPP and SPP, and following the base SPP.