CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

What is Conversation?

A conversation is an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and information between two or more than two people. As its name implies, CA began with a focus on casual conversation but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors’ offices, courts, law enforcement, educational settings, and the mass media.

Talk

The primary focus of research in conversation analysis is ‘talk’ rather than language. “Talk is understood to be an occasion when people act out their sociality.”            (Schegloff-1986)
Talk is, first, “what appears to be the primordial site of sociality” (Schegloff, 1986, p. 112). This is an important notion with its implication that it is talk above all else that allows us to transcend isolation and share our lives with others.

Talk is a crucial activity at the center of world-changing events: summit meetings between world leaders, policy decisions in board rooms of multinational companies, and international conferences on environmental policies. It is also a means we use to do the mundane and routine in life: the exchange of greetings with a neighbor, polite chitchat with workmates during a break, and ordering a snack at lunchtime.

The Development of CA

CA was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and his close associates Emanuel Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. CA 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.

SSJ model

SSJ argue for the existence of a turn “taking mechanism”. They have handled three problems :

1. How people take turns in conversation
2. How to open a conversation
3. How to close a conversation

Their model accounts for the speaker’s role as well as for what is said and done during the time for which the speaker’s role is continuously held by one individual.

What is Turn –taking?

It is a highly skilled activity. It involves many kinds of behavior in addition to speech (e.g. eye contact, head movement ), which are initiated by precise timing and reacted to with great accuracy by other participants.

What Is a Turn?

Ochs (1979: 63) defines a turn as “an utterance bounded by a significant pause or by an utterance of other participants’’. In other words, a turn is the speech of one person continuing until another takes the floor.

Contents of Turn-Taking System

SSJ (1978: 91) describe the turn-taking system in terms of two components:

•  A set of facts
• A number of rules

The Components

1. The turn constructional components
2. The turn Allocational Components

The Turn Constructional Components

This component simply shows that a turn is constructed of various syntactic unit types such as sentences, clauses, phrases, and single words through which a speaker may set out to construct a turn.

The Turn Allocational Components

This component includes techniques that could be classified into:
Those in which the next turn is allocated by a current speaker selecting the next speaker;
Those in which a next turn is allocated by self-selection.

The Set of Facts

Sacks et al. offers a set of facts whose validity and verification determine the organization of the discourse as stated hereunder:
1. Speaker change recurs, or at least occurs.
2. Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time.
3. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common, but brief.
4. Transitions from one turn to the next with no gap and no overlap between them are common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gaps or slight overlaps, they make the vast majority of transitions.
5. Turn order is not fixed, but varies.
6. Turn size is not fixed, but varies.
7. Length of conversation is not fixed, nor specified in advance.
8. What the parties say is not fixed, nor specified in advance.
9. Relative distribution of turns is not fixed, nor specified in advance.
10. The number of parties can change.
11. Talk can be continuous or discontinuous.
12. Turn-allocation techniques are obviously used. A current speaker may select the next speaker (as when a current speaker addresses a question to another party); parties may self-select in starting to talk.
13. Various turn-constructional units are employed. Turns can be projected one-word-long, or, for example, sentential in length.
14. Repair mechanisms for dealing with turn-taking errors and violations are obviously available for use. For example, if two parties find themselves talking at the same time, one of them will stop prematurely to repair the overlap.

The Rules

Additionally, Sacks et al. suggest several rules that operate on turn units using the symbol NS (the next speaker), and TRP (Transition Relevant Place) defined as the recognizable end of a turn constructional unit.

Rule (1)

Rule (1) applies at the initial TRP of any turn.
(a) If CS (Current Speaker) selects NS in the current turn, then CS must stop speaking and NS must speak next, with the transition occurring at the first TRP after NS selection.
(b) If CS does not select NS, then any (other) party may self-select, the first speaker, gaining rights to the next turn.
(c) If CS has not selected NS, and no other party self-selects under option (b), then CS may (but need not) continue.

Rule (2)

Rule (2) applies to all subsequent TRPs. If neither rule (a) nor rule (b) has been applied, and (c) is operated by CS, then, at the next TRP, rules (a-c) are reapplied recursively until speaker change is affected.

Adjacency Pairs

It is a particular type of turn-taking structure. An adjacency pair is a sequence of two related utterances by two different speakers. The second utterance is a response to the first.

Features of Adjacency Pairs

The features were indicated by SSJ, as follows :
1. They are two utterances long
2. The utterances are produced successively by different speakers
3. The utterances are ordered – the first must belong to the class of first pair parts the second to the class of second pair parts.
4. The utterances are related, not any second pair can follow any first pair part, but only the appropriate one.
5. The first pair part often selects the next speaker and always selects the next action – it thus sets up a transition relevance and expectation that the next speaker fulfills. In other words, the first part of a pair predicts the occurrence of the second.

Varieties of Adjacency pairs

Prototypical examples of adjacency pairs would be the following:
1) greeting-greeting:

A: Hello.
B: Hello.

2) offer-acceptance:

A: Would you care for more tea?
B: Yes, please.

3) apology-minimization:

A: I’m sorry.
B: Oh, don’t worry. That’s O.K.

There is a class of first pair parts which includes questions, greetings, challenges, offers, requests, complaints, invitations, announcements, etc.
For some first-pair parts, the second-pair part is reciprocal (Greeting-Greeting)
For some, there is only one appropriate second (Question-Answer), for some more than one (Complaint Apology/Justification)  Coulthard,1985:69.

Sacks suggests that a current speaker can exercise three degrees of control over the next turn. Firstly, CS/he can select which participant will speak next, either by naming him or by alluding to him with a descriptive phrase, ‘the most talkative person in the class’. If the current speaker selects the next speaker, he usually also selects the type of next utterance by producing the first part of an adjacency pair. For example, a question or a greeting constrains the selected speaker to produce an appropriate answer or return the greeting.

DOCTOR: Hello Mrs. Jones
PATIENT: Hello Doctor
DOCTOR: Hello Catherine
CHILD: Hello

The current speaker’s second option is simply to constrain the next utterance, but not select the next speaker. The third option is to select neither and leave it to one of the participants to continue the conversation by selecting himself (Coulthard,1985:60).

The Functions of Adjacency Pairs

Adjacency pairs are used to coordinate turns. They help in,

Opening and closing a conversation
Negotiate deals
Change topics

Preference Organization

Preference is a very powerful concept and once it has been established, it can be used to explain the occurrence of a quite number of other conversational phenomena as the result of speakers trying to avoid having to perform dis-preferred seconds.                (Coulthard 1985:71)

The concept of preference organization underlies the idea that there is a hierarchy operating over the potential
second parts of an adjacency pair. Thus, there is at least one preferred and one dis-preferred category of
response to the first parts.
A compliment can be followed by an ‘accept’ or a ‘reject’. Thus, some second-pair parts may be preferred to others
may be dis-preferred.
For example, a question may be followed by an expected answer (the preferred second pair part) or an
‘unexpected or non-answer’ (the dis-preferred second pair part).
When this happens, the dis-preferred second pair part is often preceded by a ‘delay’, a ‘preface’, and/or an ‘account’.
For instance:
A: Are you going to Lahore with us? (Question)
B: Uhhh….. (Delay) Well, kind of ….. (Preface) There is some problem….. (Account) Actually, I have got an emergency at home. My son is suffering from diarrhea (Unexpected answer)

Insertion Sequences

Insertion Sequences occur (Schegloff, 1972, cited in Alba-Juez,2009) in which, for example, a question-answer pair is embedded within another.
Child: Mom, can I play a video game? (Question 1)
Mother: Have you finished your homework? (Question 2)
Child: No. (Answer 2)
Mother: Then, NO! (Answer 1)

Occasionally, either because he doesn’t understand, or because he doesn’t want to commit himself until he knows more, or because he’s simply stalling, the next speaker produces not a second pair part but another first pair
part. The suggestion is ‘If you answer this one, I will answer yours’ (Coulthard, 1985:73).

Other Sequences

Apart from the local organization operating in conversation using turn-taking and adjacency pairs, there are other orders of organization, such as certain recurrent kinds of sequence which can only be defined over
three or four or more turns.

Repair

An important strategy speakers use in spoken discourse is what is termed as Repair, that is, the way speakers
correct things they or someone else has said, and check what they have understood in a conversation.
Repair is often done through self-repair and other repair (Paltridge, 2006:119).

Self-initiated repair is differentiated from other initiated repair. Self-repair within a turn may be signaled by phenomena such as glottal stops, lengthened vowels, etc. Repair initiated by a participant other than the speaker may be achieved by the use of echo questions, repetitions of problematic items with stress on problem syllables,
or by using expressions such as What?, Pardon?, Excuse me?, etc.( Alba-Juez,2009).

Pre-sequences

Some sequences prefigure a turn which contains a reason for the sequence. For example, a summons prefigures a turn which contains the reason for the summons (Levinson, 1983, cited in Alba-Juez, 2009), as in:
A: Jim! (Summons)
J: Yes? (Answer)
A: Could you come down here and help me with the washing up?

(Reason for summons)

Most pre-sequences can be said to prefigure the specific kind of action that they potentially precede. Other clear examples of pre-sequences are pre-closings, pre-invitations, pre-requests, pre-arrangements, pre-announcements,
etc.

Overall Organization

There is what conversational analysts call overall organization because it organizes the totality of the exchange within some specific kind of conversation. Thus, we may speak of classes of verbal  interchanges (e.g. telephone calls, a talk over the garden fence, etc.)

Opening Conversations

One area where conversational openings have been examined in detail is in the area of telephone conversation.
Schegloff (1986) analyzed a large data set of phone openings to come up with this ‘canonical opening’ for American private telephone conversations:
Summons/answer sequence
Identification/recognition sequence
Greeting sequence
How are you sequence
Reason for call sequence
Closing Conversations
Schegloff & Sacks (1973) have looked at conversational closings, and this work has been continued by Button (1987).
Button points out that telephone closings usually go over 4 turns of talk (archetype closing), made up of:
Pre-closing:
‘OK’ & ‘All right’ with falling intonation.
The closing: ‘bye bye’ & ‘goodbye’
In the closing turn, both speakers mutually negotiate the end of the conversation.
Insertion sequence can be introduced between the two units that make up these turns before the closing finally takes place.
The closing may also be preceded by several pre-sequences e.g. making an arrangement, referring back to something previously said, a new topic (which may not be responded to), good wishes, restatement of the reason for calling, thanks for calling.
Closing may be extended by continued repetition of pre-closing & closing items such as:
‘bye’, ‘bye’
‘love you’, ‘love you’
‘sleep well’, ‘you too’
Closing are complex interactional units which are sensitive to the speaker’s orientation to continuing, closing
(or not wanting to close) the conversation
(Paltridge, 2006:110-113).

Criticisms of CA

CA is an invaluable tool for the analysis of spoken discourse, yet it is somewhat ‘monolithic’.

CA’s view of itself as a self-sufficient research tool is problematic, it does not need data other than the conversation to explain and justify its claims. Data analysts are working as ‘spectators’ not ‘participants’.
CA’s lack of attention to issues of power, inequality, and social disadvantages. It also lacks attention to wider historical, cultural, and political issues.
(Paltridge, 2006:122).