1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias 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.
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.
[2]: 9 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.
[3]: ix–lxii Sacks was inspired by Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's conception of what came to be known as the interaction order,[4] but also a number of minor sources of contemporary influences such as the generativism of Noam Chomsky and its focus on building an apparatus.
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.
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.
[11] 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.
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.
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.
The rules for turn allocation is commonly formulated in the same way as in the original Simplest Systematics paper, with 2 parts where the first consists of 3 elements: Based on the turn-taking system, three types of silence may be distinguished: Some types of turns may require extra work before they can successfully take place.
[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.
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.
[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.
[19] 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.
[15] Repair organization describes how parties in conversation deal with problems in speaking, hearing, or understanding, and there are various mechanisms through which certain "troubles" in interaction are dealt with.
[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.
[35] Levinson's former department on Language and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has been important in connecting CA and IL with linguistic typology.
The subfield formed through studies by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, most notably their 1987 book Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour.
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.
[40] 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.
Unlike discourse analysis, Conversation Analysts focus on interaction at a micro level, and usually do not look at written texts nor overarching sociocultural concepts (for example, 'discourses' in the Foucauldian sense).