Conversation Analysis

Summary
Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction and talk-in-
interaction that, although rooted in the sociological study of everyday life, has exerted
significant influence across the humanities and social sciences including linguistics.
Drawing on recordings (both audio and video) naturalistic interaction (unscripted,
non-elicited, etc.) conversation analysts attempt to describe the stable practices and
underlying normative organizations of interaction by moving back and forth between
the close study of singular instances and the analysis of patterns exhibited across
collections of cases. Four important domains of research within conversation analysis
are turn-taking, repair, action formation and ascription, and action sequencing.

Keywords
 conversation
 interaction
 turn-taking
 repair
 action
 speech acts
Subjects
 Pragmatics
 Sociolinguistics

Introduction
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that
emerged through the collaborative research of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail
Jefferson, and their students in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974, Sacks, Schegloff,
and Jefferson published a landmark paper in Language titled, “A Simplest
Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Not only did this
paper lay out an account of turn-taking in conversation and provide a detailed
exemplification of the conversation analytic method, it also articulated with concerns
in linguistics and brought CA to the attention of linguists and others engaged in the
scientific study of language. The paper remains the most cited and the most
downloaded paper ever published in the history of the journal (Joseph, 2003, see
also Google citation index). Since the publication of the turn-taking paper, researchers
in this area have continued to identify ways in which the study of conversation and
social interaction relates to the concerns of linguistic science.

Interaction as the Home of Language

An underlying, guiding assumption of research in conversation analysis is that the
home environment of language is co-present interaction and that its structure is in
some basic ways adapted to that environment. This distinguishes CA from much of
linguistic science, which generally understands language to have its home in the
human mind and to reflect in its structure the organization of mind. For the most part
these can be seen as complementary rather than opposed perspectives (depending,
perhaps on the model of mind involved). Language is both a cognitive and an
interactional phenomenon, and its organization must certainly reflect this fact.
What do we mean by interaction or co-present interaction? Goffman (who supervised
the PhD studies of both Sacks and Schegloff) described interaction as a normatively
organized structure of attention (see inter alia 1957, 1964)—when people interact they
are, however fleetingly, attending to one another’s attention. While drawing on these
and other ideas from Goffman, conversation analysts tend to emphasize the fact that
interaction is the arena for human action. In order to accomplish the business of
everyday life—for instance checking to see that a neighbor received the newspaper,
updating a friend about a recent event, asking for a ride to work—we interact with one
another. Conversation analysis seeks to discover and describe (formally and in a
rigorous, generalizable way) the underlying norms and practices that make interaction
the orderly thing that it is. For instance, one fundamental aspect of the orderliness of
interaction has to do with the distribution of opportunities to participate in it. How,
that is, does a participant determine when it is her turn to speak, or her turn to listen?
Another aspect of orderliness concerns the apparatus for addressing problems of
hearing, speaking, or understanding. How, that is, do participants in conversation
remedy problems that inevitably arise in the course of interaction and how do they do
this in an effective yet efficient way, such that they are able to resume whatever
activity they were engaged before the trouble arose? A third aspect of orderliness has
to do with the way in which speakers produce, and recipients understand, stretches of
talk so as constitute them as actions by which they can achieve their interactional
goals. A final aspect of the orderliness of interaction has to do with the way these
actions are organized into sequences in such a way as to construct an architecture of
intersubjectivity—a basis for mutual understanding in conversation. Each of these
four domains of conversational organization will be briefly sketched out and ways in
which research in each area connects with the concerns of linguists and other scholars
of language will be highlighted.

Turn-Taking
We can begin by noting, as the authors of Sacks et al. (1974) do, that there are various
ways in which turn-taking for conversation (and indeed the distribution of
opportunities to participate in interaction more generally) could be organized. For
instance, turns could be pre-allocated so that every potential participant was entitled
to talk for two minutes and the order of speakers was decided in advance (by their
age, gender, status, first initial, height, weight, etc.). There are speech exchange
systems (as Sacks et al., 1974 calls them) that operate more or less in this way, such
as debate. But there are reasons that such a system would not work for conversation.
If, for instance, we imagine that in such a system participants A, B, C, D each get an
opportunity to talk and in that order, what will happen if B asks A a question? B now
has to wait for C and D to speak before A can answer. But what if C and D also ask A
a question? Or what if D does not hear the question that B has asked and so on? Of
course, although this kind of pre-allocated system obviously won’t work for
conversation, there are many other ways in which turn-taking might be organized
(and, indeed, is organized for activities other than conversation). We need not review
all the possibilities here. We can already see, in light of these considerations and
common sense, that turn-taking for conversation must be organized locally, by the
participants themselves. As Sacks et al. (1974) puts it, turn-taking in conversation is
“locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled.”
The model these authors describe has two components and a set of “rules” that
coordinate their operation. The “turn constructional component” determines the shape
and extent of possible turns by specifying a sharply delimited set of units from which
turns can be composed. Specifically, in English, turn constructional units (TCUs) can
be lexical items, phrases, clauses, and sentences. In the following case, Shelley’s
declaratively formatted question at line 01, “you were at the Halloween thing.” is a
sentential TCU while her “the Halloween party” at line 03 is a phrasal TCU. Debbie’s
turns at lines 02 and 04 are lexical TCUs.
(1) Debbie & Shelley

Instances of these TCUs “allow a projection of the unit-type under way, and what,
roughly, it will take for an instance of that unit-type to be completed” (Sacks et
al., 1974, p. 702). This feature of projectability allows a recipient to anticipate
possible completion of the current TCU and to target this “point of possible
completion” as a place to begin his or her own talk. We can see how this works in
example (1). Debbie is able to position her talk at line 02 so that it begins just as
Shelley reaches possible completion and, in the case of line 04, just before Shelley
reaches possible completion. As Sacks et al. write “we find sequentially appropriate
starts by next speakers after turns composed of single-word, single-phrase, or single-
clause constructions, with no gap—i.e., with no waiting for possible sentence
completion” (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 702). The precise timing of these starts thus
provides evidence for the projectability of possible completion of a TCU. At the same
time the fact that participants target these points as appropriate places to begin their
own talk indicates that such points are treated as transition-relevant. Points of possible
completion constitute transition relevance places (TRPs), which are, as Schegloff
(1992, p. 116) puts it, “discrete places in the developing course of a speaker’s talk ( . .
. ) at which ending the turn or continuing it, transfer of the turn or its retention
become relevant.”
The “turn allocation component” specifies techniques by which turns are allocated
among parties to a conversation. For current purposes the most important of these
techniques are those by which a current speaker selects a next speaker. A basic
technique in this respect involves combining an address term (or other method of
address such as directed gaze) with a sequence-initiating action such as a question,
request, invitation, complaint, and so on. Consider (2), in which Michael and Nancy
are guests for dinner at the home of Shane and Vivian. In the fragment below,
Michael addresses his talk to Nancy by using her name (or a short from of it) and
produces a question that is also a request. In this way he selects her to speak next,
which she does at line 03.

(2) Chicken Dinner p. 3 (Address term)

According to Sacks et al. (1974), a set of rules coordinates the use of the turn
constructional and turn allocation component. These rules apply at the first transition
relevance place of any turn.
Rule 1 C= current speaker, N= next speaker

(a)
If C selects N in current turn, then C must stop speaking, and N must speak next,
transition occurring at the first possible completion after N-selection.
(b)
If C does not select N, then any party (other than C) may self-select at a first point of
possible completion, first speaker gaining rights to the next turn.
(c)
If C has not selected N, and no other party self-selects under option (b), then C may
(but need not) continue (i.e., claim rights to a further TCU).
Rule 2 applies at all subsequent TRPs:

When Rule 1(c) has been applied by C, then at the next TRP Rules 1 (a)–(c) apply,
and recursively at the next TRP, until speaker change is effected.
This “simplest systematics” allows us to see how turn-taking in ordinary conversation
is accomplished in such a way as to minimize both gap and overlap. It also allows us
to see why (and to predict where) many cases of overlap occur. Consider (3).

(3) Parky

Here Tourist’s turn at line 01, being formatted as a polar interrogative, selects some
other party who is knowledgeable about the park. Parky is the first to respond and his
answer is precision timed to begin at just the point where Tourist’s turn reaches
completion. Parky’s turn does not select a next speaker and, after a delay of one
second, Old man self-selects, elaborating the answer that Parky has provided. Parky
apparently means to agree with this elaboration and produces a turn (line 06) that is,
again, precisely timed to begin at just the point that Old man reaches possible
completion with no gap and no overlap. However, we can see that the talk at line 06 is
in fact Parky’s third attempt to articulate the agreement. What is important to see for
present purposes is that the first two attempts to self-select actually target points of
possible, though not actual, completion within the emerging course of Old man’s turn.
That is to say, “Th’ Funfair changed it” is in fact a possibly complete turn in this
context, as is “Th’Funfair changed it’n ahful lot.” This example, which is in no way
unusual, provides clear evidence that Parky is able to parse the talk as it emerges so as
to project points of possible completion within it and thus be prepared to begin his
own turn at just these places. Overlap of the kind produced here provides further
evidence of the projectability of possible completion and, moreover, of the fact that
participants orient to such possible completion as transition relevant.
Two implications of what has so far been said are first, the turn-taking system for
conversation operates over only two turn constructional units at a time: current and
next. Second, a current speaker is initially entitled to produce only one TCU and at
the first point of possible completion transition to a next speaker becomes a relevant
possibility. Thus, if a current speaker is to talk for more than one TCU, some effort to
secure additional opportunity will have to be made. One set of practices involves
foreclosing the possibility of another self-selecting at possible completion by, for
instance, reducing the extent and recognizability of that point of possible completion.
Another practice involves issuing a bid to produce a longer stretch of talk. If the other
participants buy in and provide a go-ahead response to such a bid, the result is to
effectively suspend the association between possible completion and transition
relevance for the duration of the telling. So, for example, when speakers produce
stories they often begin with a short sequence in which a bid is made with “Guess
what happened to me today?” and a recipient responds with “What.” etc. (see
Sidnell, 2010). Another implication of the foregoing discussion is that the turn-taking
mechanism for ordinary conversation is, as Goodwin (1979) writes, “coercive” rather
than “permissive.” A number of other models of turn-taking propose that speakers
employ “turn-ending signals” or “completion cues,” and that a listener must wait to
hear one of these cues before beginning his or her own talk. Such a system would be
“permissive” in that it would allow a current speaker to continue talk as long he or she
wished. But the system described by Sacks et al. (1974) is not like this. Rather it is
“spring-loaded” with a number of pressures encouraging shorter turns, most important
the fact that a current a speaker is initially entitled to produce only a single TCU.
This analysis of turn-taking draws upon basic ideas about language structure. For
instance, in their description of the turn-constructional component, the authors of
Sacks et al. (1974) suggest that grammar plays a key role in determining what can
count as a possible TCU—these are lexical items, phrases, clauses, sentences.
Subsequent researchers have developed these ideas and have sought to determine the
relative role of intonation, prosody, grammar, and pragmatics in shaping possible
completion (see Ford, Fox, & Thompson, 1996). Other research has addressed the
question of whether the turn-taking system described by Sacks et al. (1974) applies to
English only or, rather, applies generally to all languages (see, e.g., Sidnell, 2001).
Stivers et al. (2009) draws on a sample of 10 languages, showing that there was clear
evidence in all of them for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization
of silence between conversational turns. Focusing on transitions between Yes-No (or
polar) questions and their responses, Stivers et al. provides evidence that in all the
languages they compared the same factors account for the variation in speed of
response. Answers were produced with significantly less delay than non-answer
responses. Within the set of answers, those that were confirmations were delivered
with less delay than those that were disconfirmations. When a response included a
visible (nonverbal) component this was produced with less delay than those responses
without. Finally, in 9 of the 10 languages studied, responses were delivered faster if
the speaker was looking at the recipient while asking the question. This study then
also provides strong evidence that turn-taking for conversation is organized in ways
that are independent of the language being spoken.

Repair
A second important area of research within conversation analysis concerns the
systematically organized set of practices of “repair” that participants use to address
troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding. Episodes of repair are composed of
parts (Schegloff, 1997; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). A repair initiation marks
a “possible disjunction with the immediately preceding talk,” while a repair outcome
results either in a “solution or abandonment of the problem” (Schegloff, 2000, p.
207). That problem, the particular segment of talk to which the repair is addressed, is
termed the “trouble source” or “repairable.”
Repair can be initiated either by the speaker of the repairable item or by some other
participant (e.g., the recipient). Likewise the repair itself can be done either by the
speaker of the trouble source or someone else. In describing the organization of repair
it is usual to use the term “self” for the speaker of the trouble source and “other” for
any other participant. Thus we can identify cases of self-initiated, self-repair (see [4]),
other-initiated, self-repair (see [5]) and self-initiated, other-repair, etc. In these
examples, the arrow labeled (a) indicates the position of the repairable item or
“trouble source,” the arrow labeled (b) indicates the position of the repair initiator,
and the arrow labeled (c) indicates the position of the repair or correction.

(4) XTR (1.2)

(5) NB 1.1

We can immediately see that the components of the repair episode (a, b, c) cluster in
one turn in (4), whereas in (5) they are distributed across a sequence of three turns. In
(4) we see that B initiates repair with a cut-off on “Fri:-” and then subsequently
provides the repair by replacing what was presumably going to be “on Friday” with
“on Sunday.” Several other observations are that the word to be replaced is framed by
repeated material (“on”), and that the problem is pre-monitored by delay (“ah” in line
02). In (5) when Guy asks for the first time “Is Cliff dow:n by any chance?=do you
know?” Jon responds not with an answer to the question (which it can be observed he
knows) but rather with “↑Ha:h?” thereby indicating trouble with some aspect of what
Guy has said and initiating repair of the prior turn. In response, Guy re-asks the
question, hesitating slightly before substituting “Brown” for “Cliff” (a surname for a
first name). At line 06 Jon answers the question, affirmatively, saying “Yeah he’s
down.” (“down” here refers to being at the beach rather than in town).

When repair is initiated by a participant other than the speaker of the trouble source,
this is typically done in the turn subsequent to that which contains the trouble-source
by one of the available next-turn-repair-initiators (NTRI). The various NTRIs “have a
natural ordering, based on their relative strength or power on such parameters as their
capacity to locate a repairable.” (Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 369). At one end of the
scale, NTRIs such as what? and huh? indicate only that a recipient has detected some
trouble in the previous turn; they do not locate any particular repairable component
within that turn. Question words such as who, where, when are more specific in that
they indicate what part of speech is repairable (e.g., who—a person referring noun
phrase, etc.). The power of such question words to locate trouble in a previous turn is
increased when appended to a partial repeat. Repair may also be initiated by a partial
repeat without any question word.
Recent research has sought to describe the linguistic practices and resources used in
initiating repair from a cross-linguistic, comparative perspective. Fox, Hayashi, and
Jasperson (1996) notes differences between self-repair in English and Japanese and
links these to the different “syntactic practices” of the two languages. The authors of
Hayashi and Hayano (2013) describe a particular format used in Japanese
conversation, which they term “proferring an insertable element” (PIE), in which a
next speaker articulates a candidate understanding of the prior utterance, but does so
with an item that is understood to be inserted into rather than appended onto the
preceding turn. In a comparison of a diverse set of languages, Dingemanse, Blythe,
and Dirksmeyer (2014) describes various formats for other to initiate repair,
suggesting that, “different languages make available a wide but remarkably similar
range of linguistic resources for this function,” noting that repair initiation formats are
adapted to deal with different contingencies of trouble in interaction. Specifically,
repair initiation formats respond to the problems of characterizing the trouble
encountered, managing responsibility for the trouble and displaying their speaker’s
understanding of the distribution of knowledge. Thus a form such as “huh?” indicates
trouble but does not characterize it, includes no on-record position with respect to
responsibility for the trouble, and also claims no knowledge of what has been said. In
contrast, a repair initiation format such as “you mean the one around the corner?”
locates (e.g., the expression “the coffee stand”) and characterizes (as a problem of
reference or understanding) the trouble. Although such a format again includes no
explicit indication of which participant is responsible for the trouble, it nevertheless
suggests that the one initiating repair takes responsibility for finding a solution. And,
finally, by displaying an understanding (candidate) of what has been said, it thereby
shows that its speaker is knowledgeable in this respect (and has heard what was said).

Action in Interaction
A basic question addressed by research within linguistic pragmatics concerns how
saying something can count as doing something. Much of the work in this area has
drawn on the ideas of John Searle and others who have argued for a solution to the
problem based on a theory of speech acts. While there are different versions of the
theory, some common assumptions seem to be that actions are relatively discrete and
can therefore be classified or categorized. Applied to interaction, the theory suggests
that recipients listen for cues (or clues) that allow for the identification of whatever
act the talk is meant to be doing (e.g., greeting, complaining, requesting, inviting).
Moreover, the theory seems to presume a closed set or inventory of actions that are
cued by a delimited range of linguistic devices. On this formulation, the basic
problem to be accounted for by scholars of interaction is how participants are able to
recognize so quickly what action is being done (see Levinson, 2012). As we have
already seen, participants in interaction are able to respond to prior turns with no
waiting, no gap, and so on (indeed they routinely respond in overlap). Operating with
the standard assumptions of psycholinguistics (i.e., that speech recognition and
language comprehension requires “processing time,” that speech production requires
“planning time,” and so on), this creates something of a mystery—how are
participants able not only to parse the turn at talk into TCUs (and thereby anticipate
points of possible completion), but also to recognize what action is being done in and
through those TCUs, and somehow be prepared to respond to that action with little or
no latency (indeed, in cases of overlapped response, with less than zero latency).
Sidnell and Enfield (2014) offers a critique of the underlying assumptions of speech
act theory applied to action in interaction describing it as a “binning” approach,
in which the central problem is taken to involve recipients of talk (or other
participants) sorting the stream of interactional conduct into the appropriate categories
or bins. . . . These accounts appear to involve a presumption about the psychological
reality of action types that is somewhat akin to the psychological reality of phonemes.
. . . That is, for the binning account to be correct, there must be an inventory of
actions just as there is a set of phonemes in a language. Each token bit of conduct
would be put into an appropriate pre-existing action-type category. The binning
approach thus also suggests that it would be reasonable to ask how many actions there
are. But we think that to ask how many actions there are is more like asking how
many sentences there are.
An alternative account treats “action” as, always, a formulation or a construal of some
configuration of practices in interaction. For the most part, formulations are not
required to ensure the orderly flow of interaction. Participants respond on the fly and
infer what a speaker is doing from a broad range of evidence. However, on occasion
(such as in some cases of reported speech and in some cases of third position repair),
a speaker formulates, using the vernacular metalinguistic terms available to her, the
action that she or another participant is understood to have accomplished (e.g., “I
requested that he get off the table!,” “I’m not asking you to come down, I’m just
saying you’re welcome if you want,” etc.). And, of course, in various kinds of post
hoc reporting contexts and in scholarly analysis, persons outside of an interaction
routinely formulate the actions that were done within it. So an alternative to the
binning or speech act account is one in which producing an “action” (in quotation
marks to indicate that this is merely a heuristic use of the word) involves putting
together, configuring, or orchestrating a range of distinct practices of conduct to allow
for the inference that the speaker is doing “x” or “y” where “x” or “y” are possible
formulations or descriptions.
It is often suggested by conversation analysts that there is no necessary “one-to-one
mapping” between a given practice of speaking (e.g., “do you want me to come over
and get her?”) and some specific action (such as “an offer”), and this is usually taken
to imply a many-to-one relation running in both directions; that is, there are multiple
practices available to accomplish any given action, and any given practice can, in
context, be understood to accomplish a range of different actions (see, e.g.,
Schegloff, 1997; Sidnell, 2010). But, while this is no doubt true (insofar as the terms
in which it formulates the problem are adequate, e.g., “context,” “an action,” etc.),
matters are a good deal more complicated than this, because any determination of
“what a speaker is doing” is an inference from a complex putting together of distinct
practices of composition and positioning.
Levinson (2012), puzzled as to how recipients are seemingly able to determine what
action is being done so early on in the production of a turn and somehow able to
respond without delay, distinguishes two major types of information that can be
gleaned from a turn-at-talk. On the one hand there is the “front-loaded” information of
prosody (e.g., pitch reset), gaze, and turn-initial tokens (such as “oh,” “look,” “well,”
and so on) that can potentially tip off the recipient as to what is being done. On the
other hand there is the detailed linguistic information that is revealed only as the turn-
at-talk unfolds. This includes much of the information available through grammatical
formatting (e.g., morphological cues, syntactic inversion, imperative forms, etc.), as
well as through richly informative linguistic formulations (e.g., “the deal,” “my boss,”
“stupid trial thing,” etc.). While Levinson thus recognizes that the passage from a
turn-at-talk to “action” involves a recipient putting together various strands of
evidence, he argues that the solution must involve a delimited inventory of actions,
recognition of which these practices, solely or in combination, are able to trigger.
Alternatively, Sidnell and Enfield (2014) argue that a model involving inference from
a complex set of features implies an inevitable degree of indeterminacy in action
ascription, which is always merely an inference from evidence. For the most part,
participants in interaction get along just fine, such inference-based action ascriptions
are good enough for all practical purposes and, because no formulation is typically
required, problems typically do not arise.
It is well established in CA that one can look to subsequent turns in order to ground
an analysis of previous ones—this is called the “next turn proof procedure” (Sacks et
al., 1974). In the analysis of single cases we can ground our analysis of some turn as,
for instance, an “accusation” by looking to see how the recipient responds to it (e.g.,
with an excuse or justification). Sacks et al. (1974) proposes along these lines that:
while understandings of other turns’ talk are displayed to co-participants, they are
available as well to professional analysts, who are thereby afforded a proof
criterion . . . for the analysis of what a turn’s talk is occupied with. Since it is the
parties’ understandings of prior turns’ talk that is relevant to their construction of next
turns, it is their understandings that are wanted for analysis. The display of those
understandings in the talk of subsequent turns affords both a resource for the analysis
of prior turns and a proof procedure for professional analyses of prior turns—
resources intrinsic to the data themselves.
This “data-internal evidence” is used, for instance, to ground the claim that when
Debbie says “what is the deal” in line 15 of example (6), which comes from the
opening of a telephone call, she is not simply asking a question but is, in doing so,
accusing Shelley of wrong-doing:

(6) Debbie and Shelley

“What is the deal” is hearable as an accusation, as conveying that Shelley has done or
is otherwise responsible for something that Debbie is unhappy about. What aspects of
the talk convey that? First, the positioning of the question, pre-empting “how are you”
type inquiries, provides for a hearing of this as “abrupt” and in some sense
interruptive of the usual niceties with which a call’s opening is typically occupied
(e.g., “how are you?”). Second, by posing a question that requires Shelley to figure
out what is meant by “the deal,” Debbie thereby suggests that Shelley should already
know what she is talking about and thus that there is something in the “common
ground,” something to which both Debbie and Shelley are already attending (have “on
their minds”). Third, by selecting the idiom “the deal” Debbie reveals her stance
toward what she is talking about as “a problem” or as something that she is not happy
about. Fourth, with the prosody, including the stress on “is” so that it is not
contracted, the emphasis on “dea::l.” and the apparent pitch reset with which the turn
begins conveys, Debbie conveys heightened emotional involvement. Putting all this
together we can hear in what Debbie says here something other than a simple request
for information—this is an accusation. It seems clear that Debbie is upset and the
implication is that Shelley is responsible for this. But how can we ground the analysis
of the turn in question in the displayed orientations of the participants themselves? To
do this we look to Shelley’s response.

That Shelley hears in this more than a simple question is evidenced first by her plea of
innocence with “whadayou ↑mean.” and secondly by her excuse. All other-initiations
of repair indicate that the speaker has encountered a trouble of hearing or
understanding in the previous turn. Among these “What do you mean” appears
specifically adapted to indicate a problem of understanding based on presuppositions
about common ground (Hayashi, Raymond, & Sidnell, 2013). Here “what do you
mean?,” which is produced with a noticeably higher pitch, suggests Shelley does not
understand what Debbie means by the clearly allusive, in-the-know expression, “the
deal.” More narrowly, it conveys that the expression “what is the deal” has asked
Shelley to search for a possible problem that she is perhaps responsible for, and that
no such problem can be identified. It is thus hearable as claiming “innocence.”
When Debbie redoes the question, in response to the initiation of repair by “What do
you mean,” she does it with a yes-no (polar) question that strongly suggests she
already knows the answer. “You’re not going to go” is what Pomerantz (1988) calls a
candidate answer question that presents, in a declarative format, to Shelley what
Debbie suspects is the answer, and requests confirmation of this. This then reveals the
problem that Debbie had in mind and meant to refer to by “the deal.” And when
Shelley responds to the repaired question she does so with what is recognizable as an
excuse. This is a “type non-conforming” response (i.e., one that contains no “yes” or
“no” token; see Raymond, 2003), in which Shelley pushes the responsibility for not
going (which is implied, not stated) onto “her boss” (invoking the undeniable
obligations of work in the district attorney’s office), and suggesting that the obstacle
here is an inconvenience for her (as well as for Debbie) by characterizing the
impediment to her participation as a “stupid trial-thing.”
Clearly, as the quote from Sacks et al. (1974) makes clear and as the foregoing
discussion is meant to explicate, the most important data-internal evidence we have
comes in subsequent talk. In the case we have considered, subsequent talk reveals
how Shelley herself understood the talk that has been addressed to her because this
understanding is embodied in the way she responds.
It is important to clarify what exactly is being claimed. Subsequent talk, and data
internal evidence, allow us to ground the analysis of this question—“What is the
deal”—as projecting an accusation of Shelley by Debbie. It does not, however, tell us
what specific features of the talk cue, convey, or carry that complaint/accusation. As
the pioneers of conversation analysis demonstrated, in order to address that question,
the question as to which specific features or practices provide for an understanding of
what a given turn is doing, we need to look across different cases. We need to isolate
these practices in order to discern their generic, context-free, cohort independent
character. So case-by-case analysis (single case analysis using data-internal evidence)
inevitably leaves us with a question—specifically, what particular aspects of a turn
convey (allow for an inference as to) what the speaker is doing (i.e., what action is
being done)? What are the particular practices of speaking that result in that
consequence? What are the generic features of the practice that are independent of
this particular context, situation, group of participants, etc.?
In order to attempt an answer to these questions we have to move beyond the analysis
of a single case to look at multiple instances. However, and this is the key point in the
context of the present discussion, when we do this we inevitably find that each
practice that is put together with others in some particular instance (to effect some
particular action outcome) can be used in other ways, combined with other practices,
to result in other outcomes. We can take any particular “practice” from the Debbie
and Shelley case and work out from there. We can look for questions that, like
Debbie’s “What is the deal?,” occur in this position, pre-empting what normatively
happens in the opening turns of a telephone call. If we do this we find that some are
like this one and seem to deliver or imply an accusation, but others do not. We can
look at other cases in which a speaker refers to something as “the deal” or asks “what
is the deal” and again find some cases in which an accusation is inferred but others in
which it is not. And we can find other instances in which similar prosody is used in
the formation of a question or instances in which a question is delivered with an initial
pitch reset. The result is always the same: no single feature is associated with some
particular outcome. The conclusion we must then draw is that “action” is an inference
from a diverse set of pieces of evidence that a speaker puts together or orchestrates
within a single TCU or utterance (see also Robinson, 2007).

Action Sequencing
As we have already seen, in conversation, actions are organized into sequences. The
most basic form such sequences can take is as a set of two paired actions, a first and a
second, known as an adjacency pair. For instance, production of a question
establishes a next position within which an answer is relevant and expected next. In
order to capture this aspect of organization, Schegloff (1968, p. 1083) introduced the
concept of conditional relevance:
By the conditional relevance of one item on another we mean: given the first, the
second is expectable; upon its occurrence it can be seen to be a second item to the
first; upon its nonoccurrence it can be seen to be officially absent—all this provided
by the occurrence of the first item.
Although questions are not always followed by answers, the conditional relevance
that a question activates ensures that participants will inspect any talk that responds to
a question to see if and how it might be an answer, or might account for why an
answer is not being produced. In response to questions the most common account for
not answering is “I don’t know.” So, in the following, when Guy asks Jon if a mutual
acquaintance might like to go golfing with them, Jon replies with “I don’t know,” and
follows up by suggesting that he “go by and see,” thereby indicating a willingness to
obtain the information that has been requested.

(7) NB 1.1 1:05

So even where second speakers do not (for whatever reason) actually produce the
second pair part that is called for, they typically exhibit some orientation to its
relevance and often account for its non-occurrence and even, in some cases, apologize
for an inability to deliver it. The same example also provides evidence that
questioners orient to the conditional relevance exerted by sequence initiating action
such as Guy’s “Think he’d like to go?” in line 07. Thus when Jon does not answer the
question posed Guy reissues it at line 12 thereby pursuing a response.

Schegloff and Sacks (1973) identifies four defining characteristics of the adjacency
pair. It is composed of two utterances that are:
(i)
Adjacent.
(ii)
Produced by different speakers.
(iii)
Ordered as a first pair part (FPP) and second pair part (SPP).
(iv)
“Typed”?, so that a particular first pair part provides for the relevance of a particular
second pair part (or some delimited range of seconds, e.g., a complaint can be
relevantly responded to by a remedy, an excuse, a justification, a denial, and so on).
Adjacency pairs are sequences composed of only two turns—a first and second pair
part. But talk-in-interaction and conversation in particular is not composed solely of
paired actions, produced one after the other. Rather, an adjacency pair may be
expanded so as to result in a much more complex sequence. An adjacency pair can be
expanded prior to the occurrence of its first part, after the occurrence of its first part
but before the occurrence of its second, or after its second pair part. These expansions
are themselves often built out of paired actions and can themselves serve as the bases
upon which further expansion takes place.

Pre-expansions involve an expansion of a base adjacency pair prior to the occurrence

of the first pair part and are preparatory to the action the base pair part is meant to
accomplish. So, for instance, a pre-invitation “hey, are you busy tonight?” checks on
the availability of the recipient. A pre-request such as “You wouldn’t happen to be
going my way would you?” checks on the degree of inconvenience a projected
request is likely to impose, and so on. Such pre-expansions check on a condition for
the successful accomplishment of the base first pair part. Consider the following
phone call excerpt:

(8) HS:STI,1

Judy’s “why” at line 07 displays an orientation to the preceding turn as something

more than an information-seeking question and John’s answer at lines 8–11 confirms
this inference.

As just noted, an adjacency pair consists of two adjacent utterances, with the second
selected from some range of possibilities defined by the first. However, on some
occasions, the two utterances of an adjacency pair are not, in fact, adjacent. In some
cases this is because another sequence has been inserted between the first and second
pair part of an adjacency pair. Such insert expansions can be divided into post-firsts
 and pre-seconds (Schegloff, 2007) according to the kind of interactional relevancy
they address.
Post-expansions are highly variable with respect to their complexity. Schegloff (2007)
suggests that they can be divided into minimal and non-minimal types. Minimal post-
expansions consist of one turn. “Oh” for instance can occur after the response to a
question, thereby registering that the questioner has been informed by that response
and minimally expanding the sequence with a single turn of post-expansion. Other
forms of post expansion are more elaborate and addressed to a range of interactional
contingencies.
This brief overview of conversation analysis has discussed four domains of
organization: turn-taking, repair, action formation, and action sequencing. Research in
each of these four domains has consequences for our understanding of language and
language structure (see Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, in press; Thompson, Fox, &
Couper-Kuhlen, 2015). While work to date has drawn connections primarily between
linguistics and turn-taking and repair, there are obvious ways in which the work on
action and action sequencing bears on the concerns of linguistics. For instance, work
on action formation intersects with research within linguistics on mood and with the
analysis of speech acts. Work on action sequencing bears on problems of anaphora
resolution and inter-sentential grammatical relations. In order to fully explore these
and other themes, we will likely require a robustly cross-linguistic, comparative, and
interdisciplinary program of research.

Further Reading
 Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (in press). Interactional linguistics:
Studying language in social interaction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press.
 Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., & Thompson, S. A. (1996). Practices in the
construction of turns: The TCU revisited. Pragmatics, 6(3), 427–454.
 Hayashi, M., Raymond, G., & Sidnell, J. (2013) Conversational repair
and human understanding: An introduction. In M. Hayashi, G.
Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational Repair and Human
Understanding (pp. 1–40). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press.
 Levinson, S. C. (2012). Action formation and ascription. In J. Sidnell & T.
Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 103–130).
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
 Raymond, G. (2003). Grammar and social organization: Yes/no
interrogatives and the structure of responding. American Sociological
Review, 68, 939–967.
 Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest
systematics for the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.
 Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational
openings. American Anthropologist, 70(6), 1075–1095.
 Schegloff, E. A. (1997). Practices and actions: Boundary cases of other-
initiated repair. Discourse Processes, 23(3), 499–545.
 Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in
conversation analysis. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
 Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for
self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language,
53(2), 361–382.
 Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8,
289–327.
 Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis: An introduction. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell.
 Sidnell, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2014). The ontology of action in interaction.
In N. J. Enfield, P. Kockelman & J. Sidnell (Eds.), The Cambridge
Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 423–446). Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.
 Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi,
M., Heinemann, T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in
turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 106(26), 10587–10592.
 Thompson, S., Fox, B., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015) Grammar in
everyday talk: Building responsive actions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press.

References
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 Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., & Thompson, S. A. (1996). Practices in the
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 Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for
self-correction in the organization of repair in
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 Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8,
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 Sidnell, J. (2001). Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English
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In N. J. Enfield, P. Kockelman, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), The Cambridge
handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 423–446). Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.
 Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi,
M., Heinemann, T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in
turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 106(26), 10587–10592.
 Thompson, S., Fox, B., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in
everyday talk: Building responsive actions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press.