Overview This series of Human Communication 101 articles entitled CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 101 is all about analyzing talk in social interactions. Conversation appears to be a uniquely human social activity. In its non-institutional, informal forms, it requires a minimum of two people who freely alternate in taking turns at talk.
Contents OVERVIEW CONTENTS Definition of Conversation Analyzing Conversation Discourse analysis Conversation analysis Adjacency Pairs Turn Allocation Rule 1:…
Institutional v informal conversation We generally think of conversations as taking place outside of specific institutional settings such as law courts, doctors’ surgeries, classrooms, religious services, and so on. This is because so-called institutional interactions are typified by at least one of the participants orienting…
Procedures for analyzing conversation As one might expect, there are several approaches to analyzing conversational interaction. The approaches and procedures vary according to such things as the theoretical assumptions the investigators bring to the task and their overarching aim. For example, John Searle (1969) and John…
Discourse analysis: a leading analytical procedure Discourse analysis (DA) is one of two leading procedures for analyzing conversation that we will consider in this introductory series of articles. This analytical approach derives from the field of linguistics and it has provided useful insights into how conversation works. The…
Conversation Analysis (CA) The second of the two leading procedures for analyzing conversational interaction to be considered in this introductory series is conversation analysis (CA). Whereas discourse analysis originated from linguistics, CA is grounded in the techniques and philosophical orientations of ethnomethodology (a branch of sociology…
Adjacency pairs Characteristics In the 1970s, Schegloff and Sacks (1973) noted that conversations appear to be made up of sequences of two utterances. They noted that the utterances are: adjacent produced by different speakers ordered as a first part and a second part typed so that…
Elsewhere (see Definition of Conversation) we have noted several characteristics of conversation, such as: no predetermined cognitive map by which conversations proceed collaboratively achieved managed on a turn-by-turn basis one-at-a-time talk highly coordinated With respect to managing turns at talk, three of the…
