Conversational Analysis

Introduction

In our day today life we use language to exchange our views in a group of

two or more people. We all have ever engaged in a conversation and we know that

in order for it to be successful and meaningful, there has to be an order that the

speakers follow; For example we do not expect people to speak at ago, there has to

be turns of speech where one speaker speaks at a time as the interlocutor listens.

What kinds of social organizations are used as resources when people

communicate through talk in interaction? It is this question that conversation

analysis attempts to answer.

Conversational analysis studies the methods participants orient to when they

organize social action through talk. It investigates rules and practices from an

interactional perspective and studies them by examining recordings of real-life

interactions.

This paper seeks to investigate those methods that speakers use in

organization of their social actions through talk. We shall begin with the definition

of terms namely: Conversation, Analysis, and Conversational analysis, then look

briefly at origins and development of conversational analysis, elaborate five

aspects of its structure, point out its criticisms, and lastly conclude.

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 Definitions

Conversation

According to Levinson (1983), a conversation is the impromptu,

spontaneous, everyday exchange of talk between two or more people. It may be

taken to be that familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more

participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific

institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms and the like.

Conversation is a process in which people interact on a moment-by-moment, turn-

by-turn basis. During a sequence of turns participants exchange talk with each

other, but, more important, they exchange social or communicative actions.

Analysis

Analysis is a careful examination of something in order to understand it

better. (Longman dictionary of contemporary English).

Conversational Analysis

According to Lerner, G. H. (2004), Conversation analysis is an approach to

the study of social and interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct

in situations of everyday life. It is further referred to as an approach within the

social sciences that aims to describe, analyze and understand talk as a basic and

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constitutive feature of human social life. Conversational Analysis is a well-

developed tradition with a distinctive set of methods and analytic procedures as

well as a large body of established findings.

Conversational analysis seeks to describe conversation in a way that builds

upon the way it is taken up by the people who are participating in it. It does this by

paying attention to the way each utterance displays an interpretation of the

previous utterance, and by paying particular attention to problems,

misunderstandings, and repairs. Hutchby, J and Woofitt. (1988).

Background

Conversational Analysis was started by Harvey Sacks and his co-workers –

most importantly Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson – at the University of

California in the 1960s. The initial formation of Sacks’s ideas is documented in his

lectures from 1964 to 1972 ( Sacks 1992a, 1992b). Conversational Analysis was

developed in an intellectual environment shaped by Goffman's work on the moral

foundations of social interaction and Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (the

sociological study of the rules and rituals underlying ordinary social activities and

interactions) focusing on the interpretive procedures underlying social action.

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Sacks started to study the real-time sequential ordering of actions: the rules,

patterns, and structures in the relations between actions. Thereby, he made a

radical shift in the perspective of social scientific inquiry into social interaction:

instead of treating social interaction as a screen upon which other processes (moral,

inferential, or others) were projected, Sacks started to study the very structures of

the interaction itself (Schegloff 1992).

Inspired by Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's

conception of the interaction order, 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. Today it is an established

method used in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and

psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse

analysis and discursive psychology. (Levinson, S.C (1983).

Five aspects of conversational structure

Turn-taking organization

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 According to Coulthard (1977), One of the basic facts of conversation is that

roles of speaker and listener change, and this occurs with remarkably little

overlapping and remarkably few silences. There is an underlying rule ‘at least and

not more than one party talks at a time’. It is an evident fact about conversation

that it takes the form of turn-taking: two or more participants take turns to speak.

But how does this happen? How does someone "get the floor"? It may seem that

people simply wait for the speaker to stop, and then talk, but the gaps between

turns are generally too short for this to be the case: sometimes they are just micro-

seconds in length, and on average they are no longer than a few tenths of a second.

The basic organizational problem that participants have to solve each turn

anew is to determine when the speaker will complete the current turn. The

recipient is not only figuring out what the turn is about and what the speaker is

doing with it, he also has to be alert for the moment it might become his turn to

speak. Recipients anticipate such organizationally relevant moments by building

expectations as to what the utterance underway is going to look like. The turn so

far provides cues as to how the unit underway is constructed and when it will

possibly be complete. Under turn-taking organization we have the following.

(Schegloff 1992)

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 Turn constructional component: The turn constructional component

describes basic units out of which turns are fashioned. These basic units are known

as Turn construction unit (TCU). Unit types include: lexical, clausal, phrasal, and

sentential.

Turn allocation component: The turn allocation component describes how

participants organize their interaction by distributing turns to speakers.

At a transition relevance place (TRP), a set of rules apply in quick succession so

that turns are allocated instantly:

1.Current speaker selects next speaker: this can be done by the use of

addressing terms (for example names), initiating action with gaze, initiating action

that limits the potential eligible respondents and the availability of environmental

cues such as requesting the passing of salt in a situation where only a particular

person is sitting close to the salt.

2. Next speaker self-selects: when there is no apparent addressee and potential

respondents, one might self-select to continue the conversation. This can be done

by overlapping, using turn-entry devices such as "well" or "you know";

and recycled turn beginning, which is a practice that involves repeating the part of

a turn beginning that gets absorbed in an overlap.

3. Current speaker continues: If no one takes up the conversation, the original

speaker may again speak to provide further information to aid the continuation of
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the conversation. This can be done by adding an increment, which is a

grammatically fitted continuation of an already completed turn construction

unit (TCU). Alternatively, the speaker can choose to start a new turn allocation

unit, usually to offer clarification or to start a new topic.

Sequence organization

We now turn to the question of how an exchange is easily understood as a

coherent episode. It is not just the linear temporal order of turns that accounts for

our understanding. The series of turns has a structure. Some turns belong more

together than others. The ways conversationalists link turns to each other as a

coherent series of interrelated communicative actions is called sequence

organization. A sequence is an ordered series of turns through which participants

accomplish and coordinate an interactional activity. This focuses on how actions

are ordered in conversation. For example a question followed by an answer is a

sequence. (J.Cassell 2006)

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 lots of

examples of adjacency pairs including Questions-Answers,

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Offer-Acceptance/Refusal and Compliment-Response. (Schegloff & Sacks.

1973)For example: Mercy: How are you?

Lucy: I am fine.

Or

Tom: Have a sweet!

Gertrude: No thank you!

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.

1. Pre-expansion: an adjacency pair that may be understood as introductory to the

main course of action. A general pre-expansion is a summon-answer adjacency

pair, as in "Mary?"/ "Yes?". It is generic in the sense that it does not contribute to

any particular types of base adjacency pair, such as request or suggestion. There

are other types of pre-sequence that work to prepare the interlocutors for the

subsequent speech action. For example, "Guess what!"/"What?" as preliminary to

an announcement of some sort, or "What are you doing?"/"Nothing" as preliminary

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to an invitation or a request.

2. Insert expansion: an adjacency pair that comes between the first pair part and

second pair part of the base adjacency pair. Insert expansions interrupt the activity

under way, but are still relevant to that action. Insert expansion allows a possibility

for a second speaker, the speaker who must produce the second pair part, to do

interactional work relevant to the projected second pair part. An example of this

would be a typical conversation between a customer and a shopkeeper:

Sipiwe: I would like a turkey sandwich, please. (First pair part base)

Martha: White or wholegrain? (Insert first pair part base)

Sipiwe: Wholegrain. (Insert second pair part)

Martha: Okay. (Second pair part base)

3. Post-expansion: a turn or an adjacency pair that comes after, but still tied to, the

base adjacency pair. There are two types: minimal and non-minimal. Minimal

expansion is also termed sequence closing thirds (SCT), because it is a single turn

after the base second pair part (hence third) that does not project any further talk

beyond their turn (hence closing). Examples include "oh", "I see", "okay".

Example: Betty: Constantine, we are going to have our discourse analysis class in

the Learning Resource Center room six.

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Constantine: Okay.

Preference organization

Conversational analysis may reveal structural (practice-underwritten)

preferences in conversation for some types of actions (within sequences of action)

over other actions. For example, responsive actions which agree with, or accept,

positions taken by a first action tend to be performed more straightforwardly and

faster than actions that disagree with, or decline, those positions (Coulthard 1977).

The former is termed an unmarked turn shape, meaning the turn is not preceded by

silence nor is it produced with delays, mitigations and accounts; while the latter is

termed marked turn shape, which describes a turn with opposite characteristics.

One consequence of this is that agreement and acceptance are promoted over their

alternatives, and are more likely to be the outcome of the sequence. Pre-sequences

are also a component of preference organization and contribute to this outcome

(Schegloff 2007). For example:

Bongisa: Why don’t you come and see me some times

Lora: I would like to

Bongisa: Uh if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning I’ll give you

a cup of coffee

Lora: hehh…well…..that’s sweet of you

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 I don’t think i can make it this morning…..hh uhm….i’m running

Repair

Repair organization describes how parties in conversation deal with

problems in speaking, hearing, or understanding. Repair segments are classified by

who initiates repair (self or other), by who resolves the problem (self or other), and

by how it unfolds within a turn or a sequence of turns. The organization of repair is

also a self-righting mechanism in social interaction (Schegloff, Jefferson, and

Sacks 1977). Participants in conversation seek to correct the trouble source by

initiating self-repair and a preference for self-repair, the speaker of the trouble

source, over other repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Self-repair

initiations can be placed in three locations in relation to the trouble source, in a

first turn, a transition space or in a third turn. Furthermore Repair is the way

speaker’s correct things they or someone else has said, and check what

they have understood in a conversation. There are two types of repair:

Self-repair

Charlotte: I saw her with a man yesterday. I mean, I saw her with a

middle-aged man who looks like her uncle.

Other-repair

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Jane: Watch the way you speak to me!

Julie: Excuse me? You should be the one to watch your tongue!

Action formation

This focuses on the description of the practices by which turns at talk are

composed and positioned so as to realize one or another actions.

Critiques

In contrast to the research inspired by Noam Chomsky, which is based on a

distinction between competence and performance and dismisses the particulars of

actual speech as a degraded form of perfect competence, Conversation Analysis

studies naturally-occurring talk and shows that spoken interaction is systematically

orderly in all its facets (Sacks in Atkinson and Heritage 1984:).

In contrast to the theory developed by John Gumperz, maintains that it is

possible to analyze talk-in-interaction by examining its recordings alone (audio for

telephone, video for copresent interaction). Conversational analysis researchers do

not believe that the researcher needs to consult with the talk participants or

members of their speech community.

It is distinct from discourse analysis in focus and method because its focus is

squarely on processes involved in social interaction and does not include written
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texts or larger sociocultural phenomena; and its method, following Garfinkel and

Goffman's initiatives, is aimed at determining the methods and resources that

the interactional participants use and rely on to produce interactional contributions

and make sense of the contributions of others. Thus conversational analysis is

neither designed for, nor aimed at, examining the production of interaction from a

perspective that is external to the participants' own reasoning and understanding

about their circumstances and communication. Rather the aim is to model the

resources and methods by which those understandings are produced.

Conclusion

We have seen that Conversational analysis studies interaction which

embraces both verbal and non-verbal conduct in situations of everyday life. It is

further referred to as an approach within the social disciplines that aim to describe,

analyze and understand talk as a basic and constitutive feature of human social life.

The aspects of conversational structure elaborated above include: Turn-taking

organization, sequence organization, preference organization, repair, and action

formation. These aspects bring to our understanding how conversations should

flow and it is our belief that if followed, people will interact well and have very

meaningful converstions.

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Garfinkel, H.(1967). Studies in enthnomethodology. Eagle wood cliffs. N.J:

Prentice –Hall

Heritage, J.(1984). Garfinkel ethnomethodology. Cambridge. Polity Press

Hutchy,J and Wooffitt, R.(1988). Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press

Lerner, G.H.(2004). Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first generator.

Philapdelphia: John

Benjamin’s publishing

Levinson, S.C.(1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., and Jefferson, G.(1974). A Simplest systematics of

organization of

turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50,696-735.

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conversation analysis,

volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge press.

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