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.

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

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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 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).

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 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.

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

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 Turn-taking organization

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)

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.

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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 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

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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, 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

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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 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.

Constantine: Okay.

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 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

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

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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

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

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 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 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

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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.

References

Cassell, J. (2006). Conversational Agents, Synthesis. USA. Elsevier Ltd.

Coulthard, M. (1977). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. England. Longman

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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Schegloff, E.A.(2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis,

volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge press.

Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T.(1974). The structure of life world. London. Heinemann.

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