Conversation Analysis (Research Methodology)

RESUMO: Neste artigo, revisamos, em linhas gerais, as noções básicas que norteiam os estudos que se valem da abordagem teórico-metodológica da Análise da Conversa, ou como vem sendo chamada mais recentemente pelos seus pesquisadores, dos estudos da fala-em-interação. Revisamos conceitos básicos que orientam as análises baseadas em eventos interacionais para entender como as pessoas realizam ações através de suas falas. Além disso, apresentamos possíveis contribuições do arcabouço através de análises que já vem sendo realizadas no Brasil e também no exterior em dois contextos específicos: em interações na área da saúde e em interrogatórios policiais. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Análise da Conversa; fala-em-interação; Linguística Aplicada. INTRODUÇÃO Neste artigo, pretendemos apresentar, em linhas gerais, os pressupostos que norteiam os estudos que se valem da metodologia da Análise da Conversa (doravante AC), ou como vem sendo chamada mais recentemente pelos seus pesquisadores, Estudos de Fala-em-interação. Essa nova nomenclatura parece englobar mais propriamente os objetivos dos estudos realizados sob essa perspectiva. É importante ressaltar que existem ainda poucos estudos aplicados em AC no Brasil e ainda menos publicações dedicadas a apresentar a AC introdutoriamente. Recentemente, a coletânea Fala-Em-Interação Social: Introdução à

Psychiatric practitioners are currently encouraged to adopt a patient centered approach that emphasizes the sharing of decisions with their clients, yet recent research suggests that fully collaborative decision making is rarely actualized in practice. This paper uses the methodology of Conversation Analysis to examine how psychiatrists justify their psychiatric treatment recommendations to clients. The analysis is based on audio-recordings of interactions between clients with severe mental illnesses (such as, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, etc.) in a long-term, outpatient intensive community treatment program and their psychiatrist. Our focus is on how practitioners design their accounts (or rationales) for recommending for or against changes in medication type and dosage and the interactional deployment of these accounts.  We find that psychiatrists use two different types of accounts: they tailor their recommendations to the clients’ concerns and needs (client-attentive accounts) and ground their recommendations in their professional expertise (authority-based accounts). Even though psychiatrists have the institutional mandate to prescribe medications, we show how the use of accounts displays psychiatrists’ orientation to building consensus with clients in achieving medical decisions by balancing medical authority with the sensitivity to the treatment relationship.

The paper investigates intake calls to community mediation services in which disputing neighbors ask mediators to help them resolve their conflicts. These calls are the first point of contact between potential clients and mediators. To maintain their organization's funding, mediators must convert a sufficient number of these callers into clients of the service. Intake calls, however, are not treated as part of the mediation process proper," and mediators are not trained to handle them.

Child rearing is a universal task, yet there are differing solutions according to the dynamics of socio-cultural milieu in which children are raised. Cultural models of what is considered good or bad parenting become explicit in every day routine practices. Focusing on early mother-infant interactions in this article we examine the discursive practices and strategies that foster cultural values such as autonomy and relatedness. Drawing on micro-analysis of videotaped mother-infant interactions from middle class families in Muenster, Germany and farming Nso families in Kikaikelaki, Cameroon, we aim at illustrating how diverse discursive strategies construct alternative versions of the child’s experience of self and self-in-relation-to-others. In each case, mothers draw on discursive practices that convey cultural norms and values that fit the relevant cultural context.

Goffman's work on footing has paved the way to specifying the analytic concepts of speaker and hearer in social interaction. This article empirically examines participants' momentby-moment negotiated understandings of speakerhood in the context of conversational repair-sequences of talk dedicated to resolving problems of hearing, speaking, or understanding. I demonstrate that participation in repair sequences reflects interactants' orientations to socially distributed rights to knowledge, or epistemics. Even though speakers are ordinarily entitled to speak on their own behalf and, thus, to repair their own talk, the application of this right is a contingent, negotiated, and sometimes contested matter. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine a large corpus of video-recorded English, Russian, and bilingual multiparty interactions, I show how asymmetries in participants' experiences and expertise are drawn upon in the process of repair resolution, suggesting a respecification of the notion of ''self'' as it pertains to repair.

This is a pdf of my CLAN transcription of the film recording of a conference talk by Gail Jefferson in Boston in 1977.

The active CLAN transcript, linked to the video, is now available at

Talkbank.org:
http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=CABank/Jefferson/Boston77-Poetics.cha

and

emca-legacy.info
http://emca-legacy.info/jefferson.html

The film recording was generously made available by George Psathas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Boston University.  Prof Doug Maynard (University of Wisconsin) arranged for the original film recording to be digitised. I am grateful to Julia Ruser for technical assistance to convert my original transcription in Word into CLAN, and for precisely timing silences.

Jefferson later developed elements of her 1977 talk into the paper ‘On the poetics of ordinary talk’ (Jefferson. G. 1996, in Text and Performance Quarterly, 16,1:1-61). An indication of the significance of the talk is given in that paper’s abstract, where Jefferson notes that, “The 1977 talk was specifically directed to loosening up people’s sense of the sort of work done in the field of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson describes the 1996 paper as “a more considered and elaborated version of that talk” (p.1). She notes also that at the time of the talk, a year and half after Harvey Sacks’ death, conversation analysis (CA) was becoming identified very closely with the 1974 Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson paper ‘A simplest systematics...’. Her talk was therefore developed as “an antidote to that drastically constricted version of the field” (p.1), and as “an expression of the wild side of Conversation Analysis” (p.1). Jefferson refers in the paper to a transcription of the talk completed and sent to her by Robert Hopper. I have not seen that transcription and don’t know of its level of detail, but I note that the 1996 poetics paper begins with text apparently paralleling the talk’s content, under the heading ‘The Boston talk (as it never was)’ (p.2) - this would therefore seem to be adapted from Hopper’s transcription. So in my transcription I aim to give a clearer sense of the Boston talk as it actually was.

I developed the transcription primarily as a more detailed record of the talk, as a talk, with no intention to pursue any kind of analysis. I was interested in representing at least something of the content and flow of Jefferson’s spoken analytic voice, especially as reflecting and contributing to the early years of CA’s development and emergence. I hope that the transcription can make further visible the nature of Jefferson’s contribution in the foundation years, such as her approach to data and phenomena, and as representative of the collegial and collaborative context in which she was working.

The period of audience questions and discussion after the talk I have transcribed only relatively minimally.

As a personal comment, it was a delight to listen to and transcribe this video recorded talk by Gail Jefferson, and to see her present on her work in 1977 during the first years of conversation analysis. Apart from the professional interest, I learned that we shared an interest in American football.

As an Australian, I met and knew Gail only much later when I was fortunate to be taught by her in Denmark at two week-long summer schools for new researchers (2000, 2003), and then at a two-day masterclass (2007). These courses were demanding, and in equal measure immensely rewarding and challenging (to say the least), as she responded to and critiqued our analyses of data, and our own transcriptions. I remain indebted to Gail for her insistence on precision in the pursuit and representation of interactional phenomena.

Of different occasions, socially and collegially, of Gail Jefferson I have especially strong and fond memories of a restaurant dinner in Odense with Maria Egbert and Johannes Wagner, and together with Johannes Wagner driving from Denmark to Sweden for the 2007 IPrA Conference in Gothenburg, where she gave what I understand was her final formal conference presentation. Some months later she was kind enough to reply to an email message and tell me of her advanced illness. I remember too her parting comment after one summerschool, “see you in Australia some time”. Unfortunately in Australia I have had no relevant department/discipline position or substantial CA connections, and so I was not able to invite her.

I am certain that Gail would have thought this transcription to be inadequate, but I hope she would not have minded it as a personal, respectful, and appreciative attempt to capture and detail one brief moment of her wider contribution to the field as she gives “a guided tour through the data”, providing in 1977 a view of the “wild side” of CA.

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks’s original analyses – concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members’ actual activities – demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks’s approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks’s legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society.

Table of Contents
1. On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations

Robin James Smith, Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley

2. Discovering Sacks

Rod Watson

3. Action, Meaning and Understanding: Seeing Sociologically with Harvey Sacks

Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock

4. Sacks’ Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders

Andrew P. Carlin

5. From Ethnosemantics to Occasioned Semantics: The Transformative Influence of Harvey Sacks

Jack Bilmes

6. Sacks, Categories, Language, and Gender

Elizabeth Stokoe, Bogdana Huma, Derek Edwards

7. A Most Remarkable Fact, for All Intents and Purposes: The Practical Matter of Categorical Truths

Jessica Robles

8. Sacks: On Omni-relevance and the Layered Texture of Interaction

Richard Fitzgerald

9. Membership Categorization and the Sequential Multimodal Organisation of Action: Walking, Perceiving, and Talking in Material-spatial Ecologies

Lorenza Mondada

10. Revisiting Sacks’s Work on Greetings: the "First Position" for Greetings

Christian Licoppe

11. Sacks, Silence, and Self-(de)selection

Eliot M. Hoey

12. Using Observation as a Basis for Theorising: Children’s Interaction and Social Order

Susan Danby

13. Membership Categorisation and the Notion of "Omni-relevance" in Everyday Family Interactions

Sara Keel

14. Sacks and the Study of the Local Organisation of Second Language Lessons

Ricardo Moutinho

15. Categorisation Practices, Place, and Perception: Doing Incongruities and the Commonplace Scene as ‘Assembled Activity’

Robin James Smith

16. On Sacks and the Analysis of Racial Categories-in-Action

Kevin A. Whitehead

17. Harvey Sacks, Membership Categorisation, and Social Media

William Housley

El habla interaccional, i.e., el habla natural que ocurre en toda interacción social humana, ha sido desde nuestros orígenes la herramienta determinante del progreso de nuestra especie, el nutriente indispensable de nuestro bienestar mental y el medio social más efectivo que tenemos para entendernos y comprendernos como humanos. Este texto, es el primer libro en español que presenta el método y la metodología del análisis conversacional (AC): una forma de investigar cualitativamente el habla interaccional. El libro define la disciplina del AC, describiendo sus orígenes etnometodológicos y sociológicos de los trabajos de Harvey Sacks; muestra y demuestra sus bases metodológicas (como la transcripción jeffersoniana y los procedimientos de análisis) y describe los conceptos utilizados para el análisis estructural de la conversación (como el par adyacente, la preferencia, la composición y la posición). La acción social – unidad de análisis del AC – es tomada como el elemento central del libro: se reportan los descubrimientos fundacionales que se han hecho sobre, las consideradas, acciones sociales básicas de la interacción humana:  reparación, informe, evaluación y petición. Finalmente, el libro presenta ejemplos concretos de diferentes áreas de investigación en donde se aplican los conocimientos generados en el AC, concretamente se presenta su aplicación en el análisis lingüístico, en el análisis de la interacción institucional, en la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras y en las investigaciones sobre la interacción entre humanos y robots.

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun - termed singular de - has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in-interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent's gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

The validity of interview data for social science research is under sophisticated critique. In this article, verbal interaction in semi-structured interviews (SSIs) is compared to that in naturalistic conversation in terms of participant use of and response to indirect complaints (ICs). SSIs are analyzed with Boxer's (1993a&c) IC coding scheme and compared to her findings on conversational data. Interviewees are demonstrated to communicate like friends as opposed to strangers, intimates, or other possibly unique pattern. The SSIs are also shown to be asymmetric in that interviewers focus on topic control although, at times, respond to ICs in more normative ways through offering different kinds of commentary. The pattern of interviewer commentary mirrors that of the conversational data except in relation to the dearth of commiseration in the SSIs. In conclusion, the value of this analysis is that it suggests, tentatively, that interviewee contribution within SSIs might, in some situations, be extrapolated to one particular kind of everyday interactional context—communication between friends— although the asymmetry of the interaction demonstrates its institutional nature.

Language teachers perform constant multi-tasking in L2 classrooms while they are teaching. They manage materials, behaviours, content, discourse, and organise and co-construct learning environments at the same time. At the heart of this multi-tasking lies a process of instant decision making during classroom interaction: they initiate turns, respond to student utterances, attend to linguistic mistakes within micro-seconds. As research in the last two decades has clearly documented, the convergence between pedagogical goals and unfolding classroom interaction (Seedhouse, 2004; Walsh, 2011, 2013; Sert, 2015) is perhaps one of the most important means of creating learning opportunities for students. Opportunities for language learning are facilitated if interactional practices are fine tuned to the goal of teaching the L2. Mainly using conversation analytic methods, researchers of L2 classroom interaction have documented the interactional manoeuvres of teachers so as to understand the microscopic details of instructed language learning and teaching. Findings of these empirical observations have recently been incorporated into teacher education and development programmes, increasing the importance of classroom interaction in teacher education. Against this background, this chapter provides a review of classroom interaction research with a focus on the role of teacher talk in facilitating language learning opportunities and presents how classroom interaction and teacher development are closely related by reviewing research in both initial teacher education and in-service teacher education. After presenting research on the longitudinal development of L2 CIC, it makes a case for a technology-enhanced, reflective, and micro-analytic teacher education framework, presents practical applications, and discusses future directions.

The adjacency pair is the most basic and normatively accountable sequential structure in interaction. This structure can be expanded through pre-sequences, insert-sequences, and post-expansions, which can be seen to be relevantly oriented to by interactants themselves. Various forces drive this normative organization, including issues related to epistemics, intersubjectivity, progressivity, and affiliation. Larger structures—for example, sequences of sequences, overall structural organization, and storytelling—also exist in interaction but are nonetheless composed of smaller units of talk. While potentially open to a certain amount of cultural variation, sequence organization exists cross-linguistically and cross-culturally as a general structural feature of human social interaction.

Der früher einsetzende Unterricht in mindestens zwei Fremdsprachen führt dazu, dass Lernende heute als multiple Sprachennutzende im Unterricht verstanden werden müssen. Eine wichtige Rolle spielt dabei auch eine altersgerechte, affektive Faktoren berücksichtigende Didaktik. Beim Erlernen mehrerer Sprachen treten besonders zu Lernbeginn sog. unbeabsichtigte Sprachenwechsel auf. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Umgang mit diesen im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-mit-Englisch-Unterricht in der Schuleingangsphase einer dänischen Schule untersucht. Die Videointeraktionsanalysen von drei Unterrichtssequenzen zeigen, 1) wie Lehrkräfte unbeabsichtigte Sprachenwechsel in Unterrichtsinteraktionen mit ihren Lernenden bearbeiten, 2) wie sich Lernende an der Sprachenwahl der Lehrkraft orientieren und 3) inwieweit Sprachenlernende als multiple Sprachennutzende zugelassen werden.

The earlier teaching of at least two foreign languages means that learners today have to be understood as multiple language users in the classroom. An important role is also played by age-appropriate didactics that take account of affective factors. When learning several languages, so-called unintentional language switches occur especially at the beginning of the learning process. This paper examines how these are dealt with in German as a foreign language with English lessons in the initial school phase of a Danish school. The video interaction analyses of three teaching sequences show 1) how teachers deal with unintentional language switches in classroom interactions with their learners, 2) how learners orient themselves on the language choice of the teacher and 3) to what extent language learners are admitted as multiple language users.

Studies on Second Language (L2) classroom interaction have placed a great deal of emphasis on the value of teacher third-turn feedback practices. However, the roles that seemingly minor aspects of interaction like minimal response tokens (e.g. ‘Mm’, ‘Mm hm’, ‘Uh huh’, ‘Okay’, ‘Yeah’) play as a feature of these practices have not been investigated in great detail. Studies which have sought to examine what such tokens do in language teaching and learning processes have mostly adopted a discourse analytic perspective, thereby treating them more or less as a homogeneous group (namely, ‘backchannel signals’). However, through ethnomethodological research, each token has been found to be doing distinctive work. This study adopts a multimodal conversation analytic perspective to investigate the uses of ‘Mm hm’ by an English as a Foreign Language teacher in a teacher education context. Analysis demonstrates how the teacher uses the token as a ‘continuer’ to withhold a third-turn evaluation, thereby keeping the channel open for further participation and hence creating space for learning. As such, the study furthers our understanding of L2 teachers’ third-turn feedback practices and has direct implications for L2 teacher classroom interactional competence.

Öz: Bu makale, sosyal bilimlerin bir çok alanında yaygın bir şekilde kullanılan Konuşma Çözümlemesi (KÇ) yöntemini ve bazı çalışma alanlarını tanıtmaktadır. KÇ yöntemi, etkileşime getirdiği mikro-analitik ve dizisel bakış açısı ile toplumbilim, insanbilim, ruhbilim, (uygulamalı) dilbilim gibi disiplinler içerisinde kendisine önemli bir yer edinmiştir. Bu disiplinler arası bağ, KÇ yönteminin toplumsal etkileşimin olduğu her alanda kullanılabilmesini sağlamış; sınıf etkileşimi, hasta-doktor etkileşimi, mahkeme konuşmaları gibi bir çok araştırma konusunun oluşumunda önemli rol oynamıştır. Makalenin ana amacı, kapsamlı bir derleme ile KÇ’nin ilkelerini, veri toplama süreçlerini, dizi düzeni ve onarım gibi çözümleme ulamlarını tanıtmaktır. İkinci amaç ise, ses ve görüntü verisinden elde edilmiş Türkçe doğal konuşma örneklerinin çözümlemelerini  kullanarak, KÇ’nin uygulamalarını mikro-analitik ve dizisel olarak göstermektir. Bu çözümlemeler, günlük konuşmaların dinamiklerinin ortaya çıkarılmasına ek olarak, KÇ yönteminin Türkiye’de hasta-doktor etkileşimi, dil sınıflarındaki etkileşim ve öğretmen yetiştirme gibi alanlara önemli katkı sağlama potansiyeline sahip olduğunu göstermektedir. Budunyöntembilimsel KÇ’nin Türkçe terimlerini belirleyecek bu kapsamlı derleme çalışması, Türkiye’de genel olarak toplum bilimleri alanında çalışan araştırmacılara yeni araştırma alanları açmayı, alanda yöntemsel bir değişim ve gelişime yön vermeyi amaçlamaktadır.

Anahtar Sözcükler: Konuşma Çözümlemesi, etkileşimde konuşma, dizisel düzen, uygulamalı dilbilim, mesleki etkileşim

Abstract: This article introduces Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology and some of its applications that are widely used in social sciences. With its microanalytic and sequential approach, CA methodology has gained a major role across disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and (applied) linguistics. This interdisciplinarity has enabled CA methodology to have a place in all fields related to social interaction, and facilitated the surfacing of research areas such as classroom interaction, patient-doctor interaction, and courtroom talks. The main aim of this article is to provide an introduction through a comprehensive review of the principles, data collection procedures, and analytic categories of CA such as sequence organization and repair. The second aim is to illustrate CA in practice on a micro-analytic and sequential basis using the analyses of naturally occurring talk in Turkish based on audio and video data. These analyses have shown that CA not only uncovers the dynamics of mundane conversations but also has the potential to contribute to patient-doctor interaction, language classroom interaction, and teacher education in the Turkish context. This comprehensive review that offers a Turkish terminology for ethnomethodological CA also sets out to bring new insights into social sciences in Turkey in order to lead to a methodological shift and development in the field.

Keywords: Conversation Analysis, talk-in-interaction, sequential organization, applied linguistics, institutional interaction

[Nota: para una tabla-resumen de la adaptación del código, ver https://www.academia.edu/14836268/Resumen_de_la_adaptaci%C3%B3n_del_c%C3%B3digo_de_transcripci%C3%B3n_de_Gail_Jefferson]



En este trabajo propongo una adaptación del código de transcripción de Gail Jefferson con el fin de promover su uso en investigaciones no discursivas en ciencias sociales. Sostengo que, al contrario de lo que suele considerarse, la transcripción no es una tarea simple e intrascendente: supone la toma de decisiones complejas y, en tanto parte de un proceso de investigación dado, contribuye a construir los resultados. De este modo, transcribir es una tarea política tan digna de atención como cualquier otra. Mi propuesta consiste en: i) reducir la cantidad de símbolos originales, ii) simplificar su acceso en teclados en castellano, iii) anular aquéllos, como puntos y comas, que puedan dificultar la comprensión de un/a lector/a no iniciado/a y, finalmente, iv) anular símbolos a priori poco útiles en investigaciones no discursivas.

On this paper I propose an adaptation of Gail Jefferson’s transcription code in order to promote its use in social sciences non-discursive research. I argue that, contrary to what is commonly believed, transcription is not a simple and irrelevant task: it involves complex decisions and, as part of a given research process, it helps construct the results. Hence, transcribing is a political task worthy of as much attention as any other. With this goal in mind, I propose i) reduce the quantity of symbols, ii) simplify its access on keyboards in Spanish, iii) exclude symbols, such as periods and commas, that can make comprehension harder for the not initiated and, finally, iv) exclude symbols a priori useless within non discursive research.

When people make conversation they use all kinds of devices to convey their messages, including metaphor. Although metaphor is often associated with creative, complex and rhetorical texts (such as fiction, poetry, or speeches), metaphors are actually a characteristic feature of everyday discourse. The type of metaphor used varies per register, from extensive analogies to a single word and from novel comparisons to conventional expressions. Which type of metaphor is typical of conversation can only be established in comparison to other registers.

This thesis provides a unique register-specific description of metaphor use in conversation that results from a corpus-based, cross-register comparison between conversation, fiction, academic writing and news texts. It shows how metaphors in conversation can be identified by using an explicit and reliable tool for metaphor identification (MIPVU) and adopts a three-dimensional perspective on metaphor analysis that distinguishes between metaphor in language, metaphor in thought and metaphor in communication. The quantitative analysis takes into account the frequencies, distribution, form, variation and communicative function of metaphorical expressions in casual conversation. Moreover, an experiment focuses on the multimodal nature of conversations by exploring the effect of tone of voice on metaphor processing.


The thesis stresses the need for a clear distinction between different areas of metaphor analysis as well as the need for an explicit method for metaphor identification and shows how interdisciplinary, corpus-based and comparative research can lead to valid, new, register-specific insights.

This paper provides a worked exemplar of psychotherapy research using the approach of conversation analysis inspired discourse analysis (CA/DA), sometimes known as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter, 2003; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). The aim of the paper is to explore the potential usefulness of discursive analysis for qualitative psychotherapy research within a relational centred ethos. The paper presents an analysis of extracts from a case of psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy based on Hobson’s (1985) conversational model. This model has a particular relational focus in assuming clients’ problems arise from relationship disturbances and that the therapeutic encounter is a vehicle for the manifestation, exploration, and modification of such problems. The model is conversational in that intervention consists of therapists’ use of strategies such as negotiation, metaphor, and development of a ‘common feeling language’...

The primary form of spoken language is the realization of interrelated utterances in different ways for different speaker purposes. Conversation – the exchange of linguistic activities in everyday situations is often developed between physically co-present interlocutors. On this important fact is oriented the linguistic interest about the interaction. If conversation is so important, it must have left traces in language structures or, if we proceed from the assumption of the founders of the conversation analysis that the different structures of language are designed exactly to serve for conversation, then an important area for study opens to linguists.
There are remarkable points of connection between the organization of turn construction units in conversation and the syntax of a clause. Turn organization is interactionally sensitive to the topological syntactic description of the Albanian clausal structure.
Specific parts of grammatical structure can be used by speakers to accomplish specific actions in a turn-taking system. Parts of speech can be used by speakers as turn entries, to connect elements within a single TCU, to connect turns with each other, or to prompt a speaker to provide a sequential contribution.
Sacks et al. (1974) suggested a three-part structure of turns including “one which addresses the relation of a turn to a prior, one involved with what is occupying the turn, and one which addresses the relation of the turn to a succeeding one.” This brings us to a core structure of a TCU with recognizable starting and closing elements.
Starting from the assumption by Sacks et al. that “turn taking depends on subtle features of the utterance enabling a speaker to project the end of a prior turn,” I analysed the relationship between syntactic completion and speaker validated turn units. Since this is the major linguistic resource, which has to be deployed and monitored in achieving turn transfer, I have examined the features that contribute to defining the relevant transition points based on the CA literature.
Grammatical rules provide construction and recognition-guides on the possible completion points of TCUs. I think that the set of features analysed until now from the conversationalists must include not only syntactic, intonational, and pragmatical clues but also the gesticulation. These factors converge in a very complex way for projection in advance of the possible transition points. A more profound level of analysis needs more linguistic investigation to see how these clues interplay to embody this projectability.
Sacks et al. (1974) has classified conversation as ‘one polar extreme’ on the linear array, and ceremony, meetings, press conferences, seminars, interviews, debates, etc. as possibly the other pole, but this should not be understood as proposing the independent or equal status of conversation and ceremony as polar types. This was based ‘on a range of other turn-taking parameters, and in the organization by which they achieve the set of parameter values whose presence they organize’ (Sacks et al., 1974:729).
They generally were based on the allocational techniques that speakers use in these types of conversation, taking into account that the ordering of all turns is pre-allocated during television debates. For this reason, I have examined live television debates (without post editing) to identify similarities and differences compared to common everyday conversations. Analysing high visibility debates between participants with strongly opposed viewpoints, the role of a journalist sometimes becomes weakened. The participants take the role of allocating their turns. They interact with each other without waiting for the journalist to prompt them and, in these cases; we do not have equalization of turns. It becomes evident then the maximization of the size of the set of potential speakers to each next turn. This feature of television debates makes them similar to common conversations.
While television debates are designed to facilitate the equalization of turns by specifying the sequence of speakers, this does not always actually happen. More conflict they have to deal with, more maximization of the size of the set of potential speaker to each turn happens. In this sense, we should see the linear array described by Sacks et al. as having two extreme poles. Television debates do not have a fixed position and may migrate on the array due to multiple factors (such as involvement in conversation.) Conflict, strong opposition, and minimization of the journalist role in allocating turns may influence speakers to use different involvement strategies in television debates that make their positions on the array undefined.

This article reports on the use of syntactically incomplete utterances in talk-in-interaction as a resource for doing two sorts of inquiries: seeking information and initiating repair. The element inquired about is made relevant next, and typically given by the addressee, in the form of a completion fitted to the incomplete utterance. Using a vernacular term, the practice could be referred to as "asking a fill-in-the-blank question," where syntactic structure is distributed across question and answer. It is shown how transition relevance places can be set up in the absence of syntactic completion and how fill-in-the-blank questions thereby differ from other types of collaborative productions. The particular import and usefulness of incomplete utterances is demonstrated relative to other resources. The phenomenon shows that syntactic completion and turn completion need not coincide and illustrates how questions can constrain the form of answers through projection. Data are in French with English translation.

The study reported in this thesis investigates the grammatical and socio-pragmatic characteristics of the conversational code switching (CS) of three Afrikaans-English bilingual children. The study was conducted by analysing spontaneous conversational CS, elicited during multiple play sessions. Three eight year old Afrikaans-English bilingual boys from Paarl in the Western Cape, with varying language backgrounds, participated in the study. Unstructured play sessions were audio and video recorded and transcribed. All three participants took part in one triadic conversational play session and in two dyadic play sessions. The thesis differentiates between the phenomenon of CS and related sociolinguistic phenomena such as borrowing and interference in order to facilitate a clearer classification of the different types of CS. The identification of the matrix language under the asymmetry principle is done by means of a quantitative analysis, while the grammatical characteristics of the children’s CS are qualitatively evaluated under Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame and 4-M models. The socio-pragmatic characteristics of the children’s use of intersentential CS are qualitatively evaluated by means of Conversation Analysis, in which the emphasis falls on turn taking and adjacency pair sequences as well as the negotiation of power relations. The study also aims to contribute towards a better understanding of children’s CS, not only in terms of insights into how CS manifests on the surface level of language production, but also in terms of why CS occurs on a deeper language processing and competence level. The general reasons for which the different types of CS occur, and the examination of which grammatical and/or socio-pragmatic difficulties may drive children to use specific types of CS are investigated, while also considering whether the context and the hidden meaning of an utterance have an influence on how and why CS takes place, and where each type of CS occurs. The study reveals that, in terms of characterising the types of CS that occur in the data, all four conversations provided proof of extrasentential, intrasentential and intersentential CS. A preference was observed for intrasentential single code switched forms and for intersentential CS, which occurs due to the negotiation of context, topic and theme. Such negotiation primarily occurs due to combinations and sequences of talk, self-talk, interaction, conversation, narration and role play. Although all types of CS occurred within the data in both Afrikaans and English forms, Afrikaans was identified as the matrix language of the corpus and the majority of the conversations. The asymmetrical occurrence of different morpheme types provides evidence for the two-system hypothesis, namely that Afrikaans and English occur as two different systems within the children’s brains and that language processing occurs by means of the allocation of different morphemes from both languages at the lexical and formulator level to produce language.

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages (English and Russian), this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct (predominantly with why-type interrogatives). Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct (Bolden and Robinson, forthcoming). When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, they are systematically 'withheld' and, thus, can be characterized as 'dispreferred' actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation, and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld.

This book is devoted to the re-introduction of the remarkably original approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. We intend the volume as an incitement to experts to return to the original lectures of Sacks with fresh eyes, and a provocation for those unfamiliar to read Sacks for the first time. Sacks’ remarkable analyses offer a means of doing sociology that provides for highly technical, detailed, and yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social organisation. The influence of Sacks’ work has not been widespread: something we aim to address with this collection. Yet certain areas of sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, psychology, and linguistics have been re-oriented to the sorts of analyses that are possible by starting with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction; details that are discoverable, rather than contrived or modelled in and through social scientific theory, as they are actually produced, used, and accomplished by members engaged in actual activities. In this collection, scholars working in a range of different fields and with ranging interests, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired and influenced shaped by Sacks’ approach, and how their current research is taking those insights forward in new directions. As such, it provides both an introduction to, and an exploration of, the work and influence of Harvey Sacks.

"This study wants to contribute to a better understanding of child development by considering the broader cultural context in which it is embedded in. It takes a socio-cultural approach and considers child care practices as adaptive to the specific requirements of a given cultural context. Particularly, it is interested in investigating discursive practices in early mother-infant interactions in diverse cultural settings and relating them to prevalent cultural models of child care. A survey of research literature suggests that infant-directed communication varies greatly across cultures. It is suggested that protoconversation as described in the literature might be a cultural manifestation of an underlying innate parenting system prevalent in Western white middle-class context and that there might be other phenotypical forms of protoconversation in non-Western agrarian societies. Moreover, the study takes a practice approach to language and is interested in investigating how the construction of specific versions of the social world is achieved in the process of the ongoing interactions, particularly with regard to the dimensions autonomy and interpersonal relatedness.
The study therefore examines mother-infant interactions from two cultural contexts previously described as prototypically independent (German white middle class families in the city of Muenster) and interdependent (farming Nso families in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon). The data corpus originates from an earlier longitudinal study and consists of video material and transcriptions of 20 Nso and 20 Muenster mother-infant dyads at the infant’s age of 12 weeks.
The data are analyzed following the principles of qualitative social research using strategies from discourse analysis, conversation analysis and documentary method. Different patterns of co-constructing mother-infant interactions were found and are discussed in chapters 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. Chapter 4.1 presents findings of a pattern of co-operative vs. hierarchical discourse; chapter 4.2 discusses findings of narrative-biographical vs. rhythmic-synchronous structuring; and chapter 4.3 surveys examples of individual-centered vs. socially oriented discursive strategies. The results point to the possibility of innate characteristics of protoconversation as well as culture-specific manifestations of their phenotype. The results are discussed with regard to the specificities of the relevant local socio-cultural contexts and possible implications for the development of culture-specific world views and self-construals.
The thesis concludes by arguing that infants’ ‘narrative envelope’ is a powerful medium to transmit cultural knowledge, even in interactions with pre-verbal infants. Maternal discursive practices are both constituted by culture and constitute culture.
Finally, some of the main implications of the study’s findings for theory and practice are discussed. It is suggested that what is healthy and pathological development needs to be (re-)defined for each specific cultural context. Curricula for training pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and other social workers accordingly need to take a socio- or eco-cultural approach in order to ensure culture-sensitive counseling and teaching. Further studies from socio-cultural contexts that have so far been neglected in academic research are needed that systematically relate infant-care practices with cultural models of child care. The study of discursive practices is suggested to be a particularly promising avenue to this line of research."

The main purpose of this study is to provide a detailed insight into the functions of learner code-switching. As code-switching (CS) is a commonphenomenon in foreign language(FL)classrooms, it draws close attention fromresearchers. While some of themconsider it as a resource, others believethat it is a threat to learning as itcouldlimit learners’ comprehensible input. Although it is a component of foreign language education, CS in FL classrooms is a controversial issue. This studyanalyses learner code-switching between first (L1) and second (L2) language. It is conducted in an EFL language classroomforuniversity students at a private language schoolin Turkey. In this context, L1 stands for Turkish and L2 represents the target language, English. The learners are at B1 level(in accordance withthe criteria of European Language Portfolio). Theobservedclass consists of 9learners: 3 female and 6 male, who are native speakers of Turkish, aged between 19-23.The data for this study areobtained throughobservations, questionnaires and audio recordings of an adult EFL classheldregularly. Observation is used to complement the information gathered from the data. Surveys are utilized to describe the profile of the learners in greater details. The class has beenrecorded for two months.16 teaching hours (40 minutes each) have beentranscribed and studiedto identify thepatternsfeaturing the different functionsof learner code-switching. Conversation Analysis (CA) is usedas a methodological framework foranalysis as itallows researchers to look for“fine details” through an in-depth examinationamong other available methodological devices (Markee, 2000: 3).Therecordedinteractionsdemonstratethat learners constantly check each other’s contribution and design their own moves accordingly. This thesis has thus showedthat code-switching is not necessarily connected to learners’ ability levels. Rather, it serves communicativefunctionsin the classroomsuch as engendering metalanguage, comprehension, group membership, language equivalence as well asshowing mood, floor-holding, (dis)alignment, habitual experience and quoting.

Tellability is a notion that was first developed in conversational storytelling analysis but which then proved extensible to all kinds of narrative, referring to features that make a story worth telling, its "noteworthiness." Tellability (sometimes designated "narratibility" or "reportability") is dependent on the nature of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be significant or surprising and worthy of being reported in specific contexts, thus conferring a "point" on the story. The breaching of a canonical development tends to transform a mere incident into a tellable event, but the tellability of a story can also rely on purely contextual parameters (e.g. the newsworthiness of an event); in conversation it is often negotiated and progressively co-constructed through discursive interaction. Tellability may also be dependent on discourse features, i.e. on the way in which a sequence of incidents is rendered in a narrative. Publications devoted to tellability differ according to the importance given to: (a) the concept of narrativity; (b) the nature of the story told and its connection with narrative interest; (c) the discourse features of tellability; and (d) the contextual parameters determining the "point" of a narrative. Scholars generally distinguish tellability from narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity [1]) because, firstly, tellability is perceived independently from its textualization (e.g. tellability is involved when a potential narrator wonders whether his or her story-lived or invented-is worth telling) and secondly, because stories that meet formal criteria of narrativity may remain pointless and simply fail to raise the interest of the audience (cf. Ryan 2005: 589; Herman 2002: esp. 100-09). However, some scholars bring tellability and narrativity closer together by adding to the various formal criteria defining narrativity its "value" in specific contexts (e.g. In light of the story/discourse distinction, it is generally assumed that tellability pertains only to the story level and that it should thus be dissociated from the broader concept of narrative interest as comprising both story and discourse features. Since a good story poorly told can be ruined or, conversely, the most insignificant incident can become captivating when told by a skillful narrator, some critics find it difficult to consider any aspect of narrative (sequence, plot, tellability, point, interest, etc.) independently from its discursive or textual manifestation. Consequently, narrative interest might be proposed as a term for tellability when dealing with the interconnection between story and discourse. Semantic and cognitive studies have provided interesting insights into how salient events can transform a mere occurrence or a "something happens" (type I event) into a "tellable" or "reportable" one (type II event) (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness [2]; cf. Hühn 2007). Bruner has insisted on the fact that "to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from" (1991: 11). Such a "precepting event" can be linked to dynamic conceptions of plot, and in particular to its complication phase (see Baroni 2007: 167-224). At this level, it is assumed that there is a general human interest for stories reporting events that have a certain degree of unpredictability or mystery.

In addressing teacher talk and its role in providing opportunities for learning in L2 classrooms, a growing number of studies have investigated different ways teachers manage learner initiatives and demonstrate L2 Classroom Interactional Competence. However, despite their commonness in L2 classrooms, an investigation into pre-listening/ watching activities (e.g. prediction activities) is scarce in terms of how learning opportunities are created. Based on a corpus of fourteen 45-min EFL classes videotaped at a secondary school in Turkey, the current paper explores the ways student engagement is enhanced and learning opportunities are enacted in pre-watching activities in meaning and fluency contexts. Drawing on the analyses of detailed transcriptions of such activities and utilizing the micro-analytic lens of multimodal conversation analysis, it is revealed that the teacher creates opportunities for language learning by successfully managing learner initiatives and emergent knowledge gaps; evidenced through the appropriate use of resources like embedded correction, embodied repair, and embodied explanations. Evidence for potential language learning will be shown by tracking students' use of a phrase in meaningful communicative events. The findings have implications for research on L2 classroom interaction, teacher talk, and instructed language learning.

This conversational-analytic (CA)-informed study explores the verbal and non-verbal features of learner initiatives (LIs) and the teacher's responses (TRs) to LI in a beginner-level adult English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. The data is drawn from a large corpus of video-recorded classroom data, known as The Multimedia Adult English Learner Corpus (MAELC) which is managed by Portland State University (PSU). The findings challenge second language (L2) classroom discourse studies (e.g. Mori, 2004); these studies begin with an assumption that teachers dictate the interaction in teacher-fronted lessons and that learners are unable to initiate turns in this setting. Findings reveal that beginner-level learners actively initiate uninvited turns in teacher-fronted interaction through the use of verbal and non-verbal communication cues to seek for clarifications and offer volunteering responses as a way to create learning opportunities (LOs) for themselves. In addition, the ESL teacher is found to incorporate LIs to class discussion in order to meet the learners' needs by taking on the role as explanation provider and using confirmation checks to invite further learner contributions. Most importantly, various interactional resources including code-switching, gestures, role play (RP), physical enactments of imaginary interactions are employed to enhance the comprehensibility of the teacher's verbal explanations, help learners to understand the ESL teacher's explanation and facilitate second language acquisition (SLA). This study concludes that LIs in teacher-fronted interaction can offer an important opportunity for language learning (LL) and ESL teachers are encouraged to search for ways to facilitate LIs in the classrooms. The findings of this study contribute to the field of L2 classroom interaction and yield important implications for L2 learning and ESL teacher education.

Zusammenfassung: Die therapeutische Welt baut sich zu einer "Veränderungstechnologie" um, das Selbstverständnis von Psychotherapie der vergangenen Jahre verschwindet-zum Schaden der Psychotherapie. Hier werden empirische Arbeiten genannt, die diesem Trend nachhaltig widersprechen. Der Titel ist These. Verbindung ist nicht einseitig, auch der Therapeut braucht Verbindung zum Patienten, weil er sonst seine Arbeit nicht tun könnte. Diese Verbindung untersuche ich, langjährig erfahrener Psychotherapeut, mit Mitteln der Konversationsanalyse, die das Potential hat, die ermattete Debatte zwischen einem "technischen" und einem "hermeneutischen" Verständnis der Psychotherapie zu einer "triadischen Epistemologie" zu dynamisieren. Die Konversationsanalyse bietet hier insbesondere die Konzepte von Alignment, Affiliation und "common ground" an, die ich als aufeinander aufbauend zur Analyse von transkribierten therapeutischen Gesprächen nutze. Ich führe ein Konzept der "vorausschauenden Empathie" ein. Abstract: The therapeutic world is turning into a change technology, the therapeutic self-image of the last years vanishes-to the detriment of the therapeutic endeavor. The empirical studies discussed here clearly and poignantly contradict this trend. Change needs connection-the title is thesis. Connection is not a one-sided affair, therapists, too, need connection with their patients, otherwise they cannot do their job. As a well experienced clinician I study connection in therapy using conversation analysis (CA). CA hast the potential to reanimate the weary debate between a "technical" and a "hermeneutic" conceptualization of psychotherapy by dynamizing it into a "triadic epistemology". Here, CA offers concepts like alignment, affiliation and common ground which will be used as conceptual architecture for the analysis of transcribed therapeutic conversations. I will introduce a concept of "anticipatory empathy".

There is limited research on second language (L2) vocabulary teaching and learning which provides fine-grained descriptions of how vocabulary explanations (VE) are interactionally managed in beginning-level L2 classrooms where learners have a limited L2 repertoire, and how the VEs could contribute to the learners' conceptual understanding of the meaning(s) of the target vocabulary items (VIs). To address these research gaps, we used a corpus of classroom video-data from a beginning-level adult ESOL classroom in the United States and applied Conversation Analysis to examine how the class teacher employs various gestural and linguistic resources to construct L2 VEs. We also conducted a 4-month microgenetic analysis to document qualitative changes in learners' understanding of the meaning of specific L2 VIs which were previously explained by the teacher. Findings revealed that the learners' use of gestures allows for an externalization of thinking processes providing visible output for inspection by the teacher and peers. These findings can inform educators' understanding about L2 vocabulary development as a gradual process of controlling the right gestural and linguistic resources for appropriate communicative purposes.

Conversation is a central activity in social life. On this important fact is oriented the linguistic interest about the interaction. If conversation is so important, it must have left traces in language structures or, if we proceed from the assumption of the founders of the conversation analysis that the different structures of language are designed exactly to serve for conversation, then an important area for study opens to linguists.
My focus in this article is the syntax of turns in conversation. There are remarkable points of connection between the organization of turn construction units (TCU) in conversation and the syntax of a clause. Turn organization is interactionally sensitive to the topological syntactic description of the Albanian clausal structure.
Specific parts of grammatical structure can be used by speakers to accomplish specific actions in a turn-taking system. Parts of speech can be used by speakers as turn entries, to connect elements within a single TCU, to connect turns with each other, or to prompt a speaker to provide a sequential contribution. This article is a contribution from the interactional linguistics points of view to an understanding of syntactic structures in conversation. 
The analysis is based on the transcripts of television debates that I have published in 2015.