CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Conversation analysis offers an approach to discourse that has been derived from
ethnomethodology, a sociological perspective pioneered by Garfinkel and applied to
conversation most notably by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. The data consists of taperecordings and transcripts of naturally occurring conversations, i.e. analysts record
conversations that occur without researchers prompting. The transcripts attempt to
reproduce what is said, both linguistic and non-linguistic details.
Researchers working within the framework of conversation analysis pay little
attention to the social context as it is conceived by sociolinguists, for instance whether
participants are friends or distant acquaintances, or belong to a certain social group, or
whether the context is formal or informal, i.e. their social identity. The CA treatment of
context is ethnomethodologically based: each utterance in a sequence is shaped by a prior
context (most typically, the immediately prior utterance) and, at the same time, provides a
context for a next utterance. Thus any speakers communication activity is contextshaped and context-renewing.
Conversation analysis views the empirical conduct of participants conduct itself that
must provide for the presence of units, existence of patterns and formulation of rules.
Thus CA searches for recurrent patterns, distribution and forms of organization in large
corpora of talk. The main point that researchers working within CA framework wanted to
make was that contrary to the received bias of official linguistics conversational talk was
not in the least incoherent or irregular; the absence of a formal set of rules for generating
the set of all and only correct conversational utterances was not tantamount to
conversation being un-ruled or even un-ruly. Thus, from the very beginning, the focus of
attention for conversation analysts became the organization and structuring of
conversation and not so much its correctness. Heritage (199.) mentions three
assumptions of CA:
1. interaction is structurally organized
2. contributions to interaction are contextually oriented

3.

these two properties inhere in the details of interaction so that no order of details
can be dismissed as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant.

The main point of conversational structure is to keep the flow of conversation going,
by avoiding clashes (when two or more people are speaking at the same time), or
instances when participants feel trapped in sterile verbal exercise, or by helping along a
conversation that has halted or has trouble in maintaining its proper speed. As far as
conversational structure is concerned, Sacks (1995:32-42) mentions the following
features:
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in a single conversation people talk one at a time,

speaker change recurs, i.e. conversation is characterized by turn-taking,

while speaker change recurs, one-party-at-a-time is preserved.

To take the example of two-party conversations, turn-taking means that one party, A,
talks, stops; another party, B, starts, talks, stops; thus we obtain an A-B-A-B-A-B
distribution of talk across two participants; moreover the rule one party talks at a time is
preserved. On closer examination, how such a distribution is achieved becomes anything
but obvious. First, empirical research has shown that less that 5 per cent of speech stream
is delivered in overlap (two speakers speaking simultaneously) and gaps between one
person speaking and another starting are frequently measurable in just a few microseconds (cf. Ervin-Tripp 19). Second, whatever the mechanism responsible, it must be
capable of operating in quite different circumstances:
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the number of parties engaged in conversation may vary (from 2 to 10 or

even more),

turns at speaking can vary from minimal utterances to many minutes of

continuous talk,

if there are more than 2 parties then provision is made for all parties to
speak without there being any specified order or queue,

the same system seems to operate equally well both in face-to-face

interaction and in the absence of visual monitoring, as on the telephone,

the same system holds across various types of conversations (argument,

business talk, etc.); it also holds across things like gender, occupation,

social class, political persuasion, etc. (e.g. the fact that one party talks at a
time and speaker change recurs is not a feature of , say male conversation
or female conversation, or of middle-class conversation)
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) suggest that the mechanism that govern turn-taking
and accounts for the features mentioned above (one party talks at a time and speaker
change recurs) is a set of rules with ordered options which operates on a turn-by-turn
basis and is therefore termed
THE LOCAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.
The local management system is a set of rules that govern turn-taking, provide for
the allocation of a next turn to one party and coordinate transfer so as to minimize gap
and overlap. The rules are locally managed in that they apply to all possible points of turn
exchange. Such locations where these rules may apply are called TRANSITIONRELEVANCE PLACES (TRP). These places reflect the existence of various unit types
through which a speaker may construct a turn. Features of linguistic surface structure
determine these units which are syntactic ones, sentences, clauses, phrases). Initially, a
speaker is assigned just one of these turn constructional units the extent of which is
largely within the speakers control due to the flexibility of natural language syntax. The
end of such a unit constitutes a point at which speakers may change, that is a
TRANSITION-RELEVANCE PLACE (TRP). At a TRP the following rules that
govern the transition of speakers and make up the LOCAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
come into play:
RULE 1 applies initially at the first TRP of any turn:
a. If current speaker selects next speaker in current turn, then current speaker must
stop speaking and next speaker must speak next, transition occurring at the first
TRP after next-speaker selection.
b. If current speaker does not select next speaker, then any(other) party may selfselect, first speaker gains rights to the next turn.

c. If current speaker has not selected next speaker, and no other party self-selects
under option (b), then current speaker may (but need not) continue (i.e. claim
rights to a further turn-constructional unit)
RULE 2 applies at all subsequent turn-relevance places.
When rule 1(c) has been applied by current speaker, then at the next TRP rules 1(a)-(c)
apply recursively until speaker change is effected.
Careful consideration of the rules allows us to argue that they predict the
following details:
1. when silence occurs it is differentially assigned on the basis of these rules as:
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a gap before a subsequent application of Rules 1(b) or 1(c)

a lapse on the non-application of Rules 1(a), (b), (c)

a selected next speakers significant/attributable silence after the

application of Rule 1(a)

2. where overlaps do occur, they can be predicted to be precisely placed:

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overlaps may occur as competing first starts, as allowed by Rule 1(b)

or they may occur when TRPs have been misprojected for various reasons,
e.g. a tag or an address term has been appended in which case the overlap
will be predictably brief

Where overlapping talk occurs a resolution system has been devised and integrated into
the main turn-taking system:
1. one speaker generally drops out rapidly
2. the speaker who has thus emerged into the clear, typically recycles the part of
the turn obscured by the overlap
3. if no speaker does immediately drop out, there is available a competitive
allocation system which works roughly on a syllable-by-syllable basis whereby
the speaker who upgrades most wins the floor, i.e. the right to speak in the next
turn; upgrading consists of increased amplitude, slowing tempo and lengthened
vowels.

The managing of conversation has a lot to do with ones ability to foresee what is going
to happen in the next turn and to predict the end of the current turn. Among the formalrelated aspects of this management we can mention the following:
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adjacency pairs

changes of speed delivery, intonation and word-choice patterns

opening up closings prefigures a point where the conversation between

two partners is expected to end and others can have their say; an example
of opening up closings would be signals such as OK, Well or other
summarizing devices accompanied by marked changes in intonation; such
final or intended-to-be-final markers can be used as manipulative devices
not only preventing others from joining the conversation, but signaling
that ones TRP should be considered as the end-point of the entire
interchange (Schegloff 19..).

Adjacency pairs
Another aspect of the local management organization in conversation has to do with the
so-called phenomenon of adjacency pairs. Adjacency pairs are deeply inter-related with
the turn taking system as techniques for selecting a next speaker. Following Sacks and
Schegloff (1973) we can define adjacency pairs as sequences of two utterances that are:
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adjacent,

produced by different speakers,

ordered as a first part and a second part,

typed, so that a particular first part requires a particular second or range of

second parts (e.g. greetings require greetings, questions require answers,
offers require acceptances or rejections).

In addition to these features the following rule governs the use of adjacency pairs:
Having produced a first part of some pair, current speaker must stop speaking, and next
speaker must produce at that point a second part of the same pair.
Not all the potential second parts to a first part of an adjacency pair are of equal
standing, i.e. of equal structural complexity. There is a ranking operating over the

alternatives such that there is at least one preferred and one dispreferred category of
response. The notion of preference is not a psychological one, but a structural one that
corresponds closely to the linguistic concept of markedness. Preferred seconds are
unmarked since they occur as structurally simpler turns. By contrast, dispreferred seconds
are marked by various kinds of structural complexity requiring thus much effort on the
part of the user. For instance, as far as requests are concerned, the general ranking from
structurally simpler to structurally more complex utterances corresponds to the ranking
acceptance rejection. One has to work harder, use more linguistic resources to say no to
a request than to say yes. Rejections are usually shored up with lots of background
material intended to avoid giving the impression that one just declined to perform the
requested action, but rather that the refusal is due to circumstances beyond ones control,
circumstances that generally have to be specified. This specification takes time and
requires a greater effort and more linguistic resources, something which may surface as
hesitation, pauses, repair (i.e. starting over again after a false start). The following
features appear when dispreferred responses are delivered: complex syntactic structure, a
significant delay, some preface marking their dispreferred status (e.g. the particle well),
an account of why the dispreferred second occurred, pauses, self-interruptions, false
starts, repetitions, etc.
Ethnomethodlogists and discourse analysts claim that adjacency pairs are the
fundamental unit of conversational organization. Although conversation proceeds in a
pair-wise fashion, there are also ways that a pair can be expanded before its initiation
(PRE-SEQUNCES), after its completion (POST-ELABORATIONS), or even during its
creation (SIDE SEQUENCES).
Pre-sequences and insertion sequences
Certain utterances are usually, and in some instances always, felt to be precursors to some
other utterance or a sequence of utterances. These utterances which serve as precursors to
others are known as pre-sequences. They can be considered as purely formal tools of
conversation management, but usually, they are more than that, they occupy a position
which is midway between formal and content related aspects of conversation.

Types of pre-sequences
One of the features of many of these pre-sequences is that there is not going to be a case
of a sequence unless the right return is got to the pre-sequence. If one does a preinvitation, then, unless one gets the right return, one doesnt do an invitation. In the case
of pre-request, one thing a pre-request usually elicits is an offer; if one gets an offer, one
need not make a request.
Pre-invitations are treated as transparent by recipients so that their responses are
attuned to the fact that an invitation is forthcoming in the next turn. In:
A: What are you doing?
B: Nothing
C: Wanna a drink
nothing can be read as nothing that would make the invitation irrelevant. Similarly, in
A: Are you studying?
B: No, Im just reading.
just says give me the invitation and Ill accept it, showing thus that the question has
been heard as a pre-invitation.
Pre-arrangements their function is to check whether arrangements for future contact
can be made:
A: What are you doing today?
B: Im supervising in the morning
A: Would you like to come by after that?
B: I cant. I am afraid no
Pre-requests usually precedes a request of some kind; their function is to make sure
that the request about to be made is within the limits of the possible, from the point of
view of the requestee. For instance, before purchasing an item in a shop or requesting

information, help with a task or any favour at all, we enquire about the available
possibilities of obtaining that item, information or favour.
Pre-announcements operate to gain ratified access to an extended turn at talk
A: Guess what?
B: What?
A: Professor Smith came in and put another book on his order
The structure of pre-sequences

T1 (Position1): pre-sequence first part, generally checking whether some condition

obtains for the action performed in T3
T2 (Position2): pre-sequence second part, generally indicating that the condition obtains,
often with a question or request to proceed to T3
T3 (Position3): the prefigured action, conditional on the go ahead in T2
T4 (Position 4): response to the action in T3
T3 is conditioned by T2; in the absence of an encouragement in T2, the sequence can be
expected to abort on the following lines:
T1 as above
T2 answer indicates that the precondition on action does not obtain often so formulated
as to discourage the foreseeable action
T3 withholding the prefigured action, usually with a report of what would have been
done in T3, by way of explanation of T1
Insertion sequences
Even though the requirement of immediate neighbouring (or adjacency) typically holds
for two utterances belonging to the same exchange, there are cases where such
immediacy is not maintained; the resulting overlapping does not damage conversational
coherence. The general name for this phenomenon is insertion. An example of an

insertion sequence would be the embedding of one question-answer pair within another
one:
A: May I have a bottle of beer?
B: Are you twenty one ?
A: No.
B: No.
One the most frequent instances of insertion is the phenomenon of repair. A distinction
should be drawn between self-repair (i.e. repair done by the speaker of
problem/repairable item) and other-repair (repair done by another party/correction
offered to the speaker). Self-repairs can be self-initiated i.e. done by the current speaker
without prompting or other-initiated i.e. repair done by the current speaker with
prompting as in the following example:
A: He likes that waiter over there
B: Wait-er?
A: Waitress sorry
B: Thats better
There is a preference for self-initiated self-repairs over other-initiated repairs. Repairs are
often strategic devices: correcting oneself, in particular, can be a way of gaining time to
think, or a means of preventing someone else from jumping into the conversation at an
upcoming TRP.