The Handbook of Conversation Analysis

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The Handbook of Conversation AnalysisEdited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers

The Handbook of Conversation Analysis

Edited by

Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2013© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThe handbook of conversation analysis / edited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3208-7 1. Conversation analysis. I. Sidnell, Jack. II. Stivers, Tanya. P95.45.H365 2013 302.3'46–dc23 2012005357

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Jacket image: Claire Bull, The Conversation, 2011, acrylic on canvas. http://claire-bull.artistwebsites.com.Jacket design by Workhaus.

Set in 10/12pt Palatino by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

1 2013

Contents

Notes on Contributors viiiAcknowledgments xvi

1 Introduction 1Tanya Stivers and Jack Sidnell

Part I Studying Social Interaction from a CA Perspective 9

2 Everyone and No One to Turn to: Intellectual Roots and Contexts for Conversation Analysis 11Douglas W. Maynard

3 The Conversation Analytic Approach to Data Collection 32Lorenza Mondada

4 The Conversation Analytic Approach to Transcription 57Alexa Hepburn and Galina B. Bolden

5 Basic Conversation Analytic Methods 77Jack Sidnell

Part II Fundamental Structures of Conversation 101

6 Action Formation and Ascription 103Stephen C. Levinson

7 Turn Design 131Paul Drew

8 Turn-Constructional Units and the Transition-Relevance Place 150Steven E. Clayman

9 Turn Allocation and Turn Sharing 167Makoto Hayashi

10 Sequence Organization 191Tanya Stivers

11 Preference 210Anita Pomerantz and John Heritage

vi Contents

12 Repair 229Celia Kitzinger

13 Overall Structural Organization 257Jeffrey D. Robinson

Part III Key Topics in CA 281

14 Embodied Action and Organizational Activity 283Christian Heath and Paul Luff

15 Gaze in Conversation 308Federico Rossano

16 Emotion, Affect and Conversation 330Johanna Ruusuvuori

17 Affiliation in Conversation 350Anna Lindström and Marja-Leena Sorjonen

18 Epistemics in Conversation 370John Heritage

19 Question Design in Conversation 395Kaoru Hayano

20 Response Design in Conversation 415Seung-Hee Lee

21 Reference in Conversation 433N. J. Enfield

22 Phonetics and Prosody in Conversation 455Gareth Walker

23 Grammar in Conversation 475Harrie Mazeland

24 Storytelling in Conversation 492Jenny Mandelbaum

Part IV Key Contexts of Study in CA: Populations and Settings 509

25 Interaction among Children 511Mardi Kidwell

26 Conversation Analysis and the Study of Atypical Populations 533Charles Antaki and Ray Wilkinson

27 Conversation Analysis in Psychotherapy 551Anssi Peräkylä

28 Conversation Analysis in Medicine 575Virginia Teas Gill and Felicia Roberts

29 Conversation Analysis in the Classroom 593Rod Gardner

30 Conversation Analysis in the Courtroom 612Martha Komter

31 Conversation Analysis in the News Interview 630Steven E. Clayman

Contents vii

Part V CA across the Disciplines 657

32 Conversation Analysis and Sociology 659John Heritage and Tanya Stivers

33 Conversation Analysis and Communication 674Wayne A. Beach

34 Conversation Analysis and Anthropology 688Ignasi Clemente

35 Conversation Analysis and Psychology 701Jonathan Potter and Derek Edwards

36 Conversation Analysis and Linguistics 726Barbara A. Fox, Sandra A. Thompson, Cecilia E. Ford and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen

References 741Names Index 812 Topic Index 815

Charles Antaki is Professor of Lan guage and Social Psychology at Lough­borough University, UK. His interests are in Conversation Analysis, and among his publications are Identities in Talk (with Sue Widdicombe), Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy (with Anssi Peräkylä, Sanna Vehviläinen and Ivan Leudar), and Applied Conver sation Analysis. He is Editor of the journal Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Wayne A. Beach is Professor in the School of Communication at SDSU, Adjunct Professor, Department of Surgery, and Member of the Moores UCSD Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego. His research and teaching focus on the convergence of conversational and institutional interactions. He is the author of Conver sations about Illness, A Natural History of Family Cancer, and the edited Handbook of Patient-Provider Interactions. External funding for his research has been awarded from the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and several philanthropic foundations in San Diego.

Galina B. Bolden is Associate Pro fessor in the Department of Communi cation, Rutgers University. She holds a doctoral degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has conducted conversation analytic research into the organi­zation of talk­in­interaction in English and Russian languages in ordinary and institutional settings as well as into the organization of bilingual talk. She has published articles in venues such as Communication Mono graphs, Discourse Studies, Human Commu nication Research, Journal of Communication, Journal of Pragmatics, and Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Steven E. Clayman is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research concerns human interaction and its interface with social insti­tutions, with an emphasis on journalism, mass communication, and the public sphere. He is the co­author (with John Heritage) of The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures On the Air, and Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions.

Ignasi Clemente is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. He was previously an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Occupational Science and

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors ix

Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, and an international trainee in the Canadian Institutes of Health­Research Strategic Training Program on Pain in Child Health. His research interests include embodied communication in multilingual settings, health com­munication, sociocultural and communicative aspects of pain and suffering, and childhood studies.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen is currently Finland Distinguished Professor for Interactional Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. Before this appointment she held professorships in English Linguistics at the University of Konstanz and the University of Potsdam in Germany. Her interests lie in the study of language in interaction. She is the author of An Introduction to English Prosody and English Speech Rhythm; co­author (with Peter Auer and Frank Müller) of Language in Time; and co­editor (with Margret Selting) of Prosody in Conversation, Studies in Interactional Linguistics, and (with Cecilia E. Ford) Sound Patterns in Interaction.

Paul Drew is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication, University of York, UK. He has pub­lished widely on basic research into ordinary social interaction, including research into repair, teasing and social action (invitations, complaining, etc.), and on inter­actions in institutional settings such as legal, medical and welfare settings. His publications include Order in Court (with Max Atkinson), Talk at Work (with John Heritage), a four­volume collection, Conversation Analysis (with John Heritage), and A Study of Language and Communication Between Advisers and Claimants in Work-Focused Interviews (with Merran Toerien, Annie Irvine and Roy Sainsbury).

Derek Edwards is Emeritus Pro fessor of Psychology at Loughborough University, UK. His research in Discur sive Psychology uses Conversation Analysis to examine how psychological topics and issues are evoked, formulated and made relevant in talk and text. One key theme is how speakers manage relations between mental states and the external world. Specific topics have included emotion descriptions, complaints, causal and narrative accounts, extreme formulations, and the management of subjectivity/objectivity. Settings have included mundane interaction, classroom education, counseling, and police interrogations. His books include Discursive Psychology (with Jonathan Potter), Common Know ledge (with Neil Mercer), and Discourse and Cognition.

N. J. Enfield is a Senior Investigator in the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where he has worked since 2000. He is also Professor of Ethnolinguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen, and leader of the ERC project ‘Human Sociality and Systems of Lan guage Use’ (2010–2014). His broad­ranging work on language, semiotics and social relations is based on regu lar fieldwork in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. Books include Ethno syntax, Linguistic Epidemiology, Roots of Human Sociality (with Stephen C.

x Notes on Contributors

Levinson), A Grammar of Lao, Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives (with Tanya Stivers), and The Anatomy of Meaning.

Cecilia E. Ford is Professor of English and Sociology at University of Wis consin, Madison. Her research focuses on documenting lexico­grammar and multi modal actions as constitutive of social organization. In addition to chapters and journal articles, she has authored Grammar in Interaction: Adverbial Clauses in American English Conversations and Women Speaking Up: Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings, and co­edited (with Sandra A. Thompson and Barbara A. Fox) The Language of Turn and Sequence, and (with Elizabeth Couper­Kuhlen) Sound Patterns in Interaction.

Barbara A. Fox is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. She works within Interactional Linguistics with particular focus on grammar. Her current research includes several areas within language use, including self­repair, prac­tices for building responsive actions, and laughter. Her research often explores the embodied and multimodal nature of grammar, extending our received notions of syntactic and grammatical organization to a view that treats grammar as inform­ing embodied action in interaction.

Rod Gardner is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include the use of response tokens in conversation, having authored When Listeners Talk. A second area of focus is second language talk, co­editing Second Language Conversations (with Johannes Wagner), and currently he is conducting a large research project on classroom interaction in an Indigenous Australian school.

Virginia Teas Gill is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University. Her research focuses on interaction in medical settings, including interaction between physicians and patients during primary and specialty care visits. Her work has been published in journals such as Social Psychology Quarterly, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Sociology of Health and Illness. She is co­editor (with Alison Pilnick and Jon Hindmarsh) of Communication in Healthcare Settings: Policy, Participation and New Technologies.

Kaoru Hayano is a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psy­cholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands and a lecturer at the Center for Foreign Language Education at Ochanomizu University. She received master’s degrees from Japan Women’s University and from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation examines how territories of knowledge are handled in Japanese social interaction. Her research interests include stance, the interplay between bodily conduct and grammar, and self­deprecations.

Makoto Hayashi is Associate Pro fessor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana­Champaign. His research examines ways in which

Notes on Contributors xi

language practices employed by Japanese speakers shape, and are shaped by, the organization of talk­in­interaction. He is the author of Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation and co­editor (with Jack Sidnell and Geoffrey Raymond) of Conversational Repair and Human Understanding.

Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Organization at King’s College London. He is currently undertaking research in areas that include optometry, command and control, operating theaters, and museums and galleries. His publications include Body Move ment and Speech in Medical Interaction, Technology in Action (with Paul Luff) and Video in Qualitative Research: Analyzing Social Interaction in Everyday Life (with Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff). His book, The Dynamics of Auction: Interactional Organisation of Art and Antique Sales, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Alexa Hepburn is Reader in Conver sation Analysis in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University, UK. Broad interests include theoretical and analytical innovations in Psychology, and understanding the rights and competencies of young people. Recent studies focus on the notation and analy­sis of laughing and crying, advice resistance, tag questions, aspects of self­repair, and threats in family mealtimes. She is author of An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology and co­editor (with Sally Wiggins) of Discursive Research in Practice. She is currently co­authoring (with Galina Bolden) Transcribing for Social Research.

John Heritage is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His primary research field is Conversation Analysis, together with its applications in the fields of mass communication and medicine. He is the author of Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology and (with Steven E. Clayman) The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures On the Air and Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. He is the editor of Structures of Social Action (with Max Atkinson), Talk at Work (with Paul Drew), Communication in Medical Care (with Douglas W. Maynard), and Conversation Analysis (with Paul Drew).

Mardi Kidwell is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. She is a conversation analyst with an interest in talk and embodied conduct in very young children’s interaction and law enforcement interaction. She is the author of Gaze as Social Control: How Very Young Children Differentiate “The Look” from a “Mere Look”, Joint Attention as Action (with Don Zimmerman), and “Calm Down!”: The Role of Gaze in the Interactional Management of Hysteria by the Police.

Celia Kitzinger is Professor of Conversation Analysis, Gender and Sexuality at the University of York, UK. Her conversation analytic research ranges across feminism, lesbian and gay issues, basic structures of talk­in­interaction, and appli­cations of CA to counseling interactions in pre gnancy and birth­related contexts. She is currently researching communication bet ween families and health practi­tioners in relation to serious medical decision­making on behalf of people who lack capacity.

xii Notes on Contributors

Martha Komter is Senior Researcher in the Department of Language and Communication at VU University Amsterdam and at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). She has an interest in social inter­action in institutional settings. She is the author of Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews, A Study of Talk, Tasks, and Ideas, and Dilemma’s in the Courtroom, A Study of Trials of Violent Crime in the Netherlands.

Seung-Hee Lee is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Her current interests focus on prac­tices of talk and action in commercial and health service contexts, and their impact on social outcomes. Her publications include work on various aspects of sequence structure, telephone conversation openings, and interactional practices involved in HIV counseling.

Stephen C. Levinson is co­director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholin­guistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is also a PI at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. He is the author of over 150 publications on language and cognition, including the books Politeness, Pragmatics, Presumptive Meanings, Space in Language and Cognition, and has co­edited the collections (with David P. Wilkins) Grammars of Space, (with Melissa Bowerman) Language Acquisition and Conceptual development, (with Pierre Jaisson) Culture and Evolution, (with N. J. Enfield) Roots of Sociality. His current research is focused on the cognitive foundations for communication, and the relation of language to general cognition.

Anna Lindström is Professor of Swedish Language at Örebro University. She holds doctoral degrees in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles and in Scandinavian Languages from Uppsala University. Her graduate work cen­tered on the intersections between grammar, prosody and interaction in mundane Swedish conversation. She has also studied talk in institutional settings, including various facets of home­based healthcare, and has published studies in English and Swedish on affiliation, affect, epistemics, and grammar in interaction.

Paul Luff is Professor of Organiza tions and Technology at the Depart ment of Management, King’s College London, UK. His research involves the detailed analy­sis of work and interaction, drawing upon video­recordings of everyday human conduct. With his colleagues in the Work, Interaction and Technology Research Centre, he has undertaken studies in a diverse variety of settings including control rooms, news and broadcasting, healthcare, museums, galleries and science centers and within design, architecture and construction. He is co­author (with Christian Heath) of Technology in Action, and (with Christian Heath and Jon Hindmarsh) of Video in Qualitative Research: Analyzing Social Interaction in Everyday Life.

Jenny Mandelbaum is Professor of Communication at Rutgers University. Her published work examines the organization of everyday social interaction, with a

Notes on Contributors xiii

particular interest in storytelling and repair in conversation. She is co­editor (with Phillip Glenn and Curtis LeBaron) of Studies in Social Interaction: In Honor of Robert Hopper.

Douglas W. Maynard is Conway­Bascom Professor of Sociology, Univer sity of Wisconsin, Madison. He is co­editor (with Hanneke Houtkoop­Steenstra, Nora Cate Schaeffer and Hans van der Zouwen) of Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview, co­editor (with John Heritage) of Communication in Medical Care: Interaction between Primary Care Physicians and Patients, and author of two monographs: Inside Plea Bargaining: The Language of Negotiation, and Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings.

Harrie Mazeland is Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication at the University of Groningen, the Nether lands. He is a conversation analyst with a special interest in (interactional) linguistics. He is the author of a Dutch introduc­tion to Conversation Analysis and has published several articles on the relation­ship between turn construction and sequence organization.

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of Lin guistics at the University of Basel. Within Conversation Analysis, her research deals with the grammatical and embod­ied resources mobilized by participants in interaction. On the basis of video­ recordings from ordinary conversations as well as institutional and professional settings, she studies the sequential and multimodal organization of social actions. She has recently published articles in Discourse Studies, Research on Language and Social Inter action, Journal of Pragmatics, and co­edited (with Tanya Stivers and Jakob Steensig) The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation.

Anssi Peräkylä is Professor of Sociol ogy at the University of Helsinki. Using Conversation Analysis, he has investigated psychotherapy, counseling, doctor­patient interaction, and facial expressions in interaction. He is the author of AIDS Counselling: Institutional Interaction and Clinical Practice, and co­editor (with Charles Antaki, Sanna Vehviläinen and Ivan Leudar) of Conver sation Analysis and Psychotherapy, and (with Marja­Leena Sorjonen) of Emotion in Interaction.

Anita Pomerantz is an O’Leary Professor in the Department of Commu nication at the University at Albany, SUNY. Using audio and videotapes of interaction, she analyzes the princi ples relied upon and the methods used for agreeing and disagreeing, seeking information, and negotiating responsibility for blameworthy and praiseworthy deeds. She studies provider­patient roles, patients’ methods for actualizing their agendas, and the work of supervising physicians in ambulatory clinics. She has served as Chair of the Language and Social Interaction Division of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association and currently serves on a number of editorial boards of language­oriented journals.

xiv Notes on Contributors

Jonathan Potter is Professor of Discourse Analysis and Dean of the School of Social, Political and Geo graphical Sciences at Loughborough University, England. He has studied racism, argumentation, fact construction, and topics in social science theory and method. His most recent books include: Representing Reality, which provides a systematic overview, integration and critique of con­structionist research in social psychology, postmodernism, rhetoric and ethnometh­odology, and Conversation and Cognition (with Hedwig te Molder) in which a range of different researchers consider the implication of studies of interaction for understanding cognition. He is one of the founders of Discursive Psychology.

Felicia Roberts is Associate Professor of Communication and a member of the Interdisciplinary Linguistics program at Purdue University. Her scholarship explores how meanings and relational identities arise and are maintained through talk and embodied action. She has pursued these interests primarily in medical settings, but also brings Conversation Analysis to the study of child language and family communication. She is the author of Talking about Treatment and has pub­lished in jour nals such as Social Science and Medicine, Human Communication Research, and Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Jeffrey D. Robinson is Professor of the Department of Communication at Portland State University. He holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is predominantly conversa­tion analytic, focusing on the social organization of talk in both ordi nary settings (with an emphasis on repair and remediation) and institutional settings (especially physician­patient interaction).

Federico Rossano holds a postdoctoral position in the Department of Develop­mental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolution ary Anthropology, Leipzig and received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. His doctoral research focused on the organization of gaze behavior in face­to­face interaction. His current research interests include: the role of visible behavior in face­to­face interaction, the sequential organization of communication in human infants and non­human primates and talk in institu­tional settings (e.g., psychotherapy). He has published articles in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, Cognition and Psychological Science.

Johanna Ruusuvuori is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include facial expression and emotion in social interaction, professional­client interaction in healthcare settings and the achievement and loss of intersubjectivity of hearing­impaired people in clinical, everyday and work­life settings. She has published on empathy in healthcare consultations, the organization of gaze in doctor­patient interaction, as well as on facial expression in relation to spoken interaction (with Anssi Peräkylä).

Notes on Contributors xv

Jack Sidnell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto with a cross­appointment to the Department of Linguistics. His research focuses on the structures of talk and interaction in ordinary and legal settings. In addition to research in the Caribbean and Vietnam, he has examined talk in court and among young children. He is the author of Conversation Analysis: An Introduction, the editor of Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives and co­editor (with Makoto Hayashi and Geoffrey Raymond) of Conversational Repair and Human Understanding.

Marja-Leena Sorjonen is a Professor in the Department of Finnish, Finno­Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in the interplay between interaction and grammar, and in linguistic variation. She is the author of Responding in Conversation: A Study of Response Particles in Finnish and of articles in edited books and journals such as Language in Society, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Discourse Studies.

Tanya Stivers is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a conversation analyst with an interest in social interaction in ordinary and healthcare settings. She is the author of Prescribing Under Pressure: Parent-Physician Conver sations and Antibiotics and co­editor (with N. J. Enfield) of Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives and (with Lorenza Mondada and Jakob Steensig) of The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation.

Sandra A. Thompson is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Univer sity of California, Santa Barbara. Her research considers the role of patterns of conversa­tional discourse in shaping morphosyntactic and prosodic regularities, drawing on interactional data from English, Chinese and Japanese. She is the co­editor (with Elinor Ochs and Emanuel Schegloff) of Interaction and Grammar, and (with Cecilia E. Ford and Barbara A. Fox) of The Language of Turn and Sequence. She is currently co­authoring (with Elizabeth Couper­Kuhlen and Barbara A. Fox) Building Responsive Actions.

Gareth Walker is Lecturer in Linguis tics at the University of Sheffield. His research combines auditory and acoustic phonetic techniques with Conver sation Analysis to analyze audio­ and video­recordings of unscripted interaction. He has articles in Journal of Pragmatics, Phonetica, Text and Talk, Language and Speech and in edited collections.

Ray Wilkinson is Professor of Human Communication at the University of Sheffield. His main interest is in the analysis of conversations involving people with communication disorders, in particular those acquired following damage to the brain such as that caused by stroke or dementia. Recent publications include papers in Research on Language and Social Interaction, Dis course Processes, Journal of Pragmatics and Aphasiology.

We began this project late in 2008 when Danielle Descoteaux at Wiley-Blackwell proposed that the time was right for a CA Handbook. We agreed and together sketched our goals for the volume. However, our vision for the volume’s topics and organization was shaped by discussions we had with many contributors to this book. In particular we want to single out John Heritage and Paul Drew who shared their thoughts at various points during the proposal stage and significantly shaped the end product.

Near the end of the project, we began a search for a cover image that would capture something of the nature of our endeavor. We were so pleased to find Claire Bull’s piece, “The Conversation.” Claire is a Canadian artist creating acrylics on canvas and digital fractals. The piece on our cover pays tribute to that period in history when people dressed in their evening finery for a stroll to converse with neighbors. It tells a story of a couple engaged in a secret conversation, whispered under the lamp light during a rendezvous, keeping quiet, perhaps to prevent the woman in the background from hearing what is being said. More of Claire’s work can be seen at http://www.ebsqart.com/Artist/Claire-Bull/41681/.

It has been a pleasure to work with Danielle and with Julia Kirk at Wiley-Blackwell. From broad level conceptual design to cover image and font for transcripts, Danielle and Julia were enthusiastic, helpful and flexible in consider-ing what we wanted to accomplish in and through the handbook. We cannot imagine a better editor-publisher partnership. We are also grateful to our two graduate student assistants, Chase Raymond at UCLA and Tanya Romaniuk at York University for their assistance in preparing the book. Corralling this many academics with at least as many opinions was no mean feat, but Chase and Tanya remained cheerful throughout. They not only contributed to the smooth running of the technical side of preparing the book, but through their understanding of the field were effective contributors to the quality of the end result. Thanks are also due to Clara Bergen, our undergraduate research assistant, who worked with us at UCLA in preparing many of the chapters. Our biggest thanks are to our contributors who generously gave their time and support to our collective

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments xvii

enterprise to have a handbook which we hope will serve all of us as a key refer-ence and textbook in the years to come. We believe that the collection represents a new point of departure for the study of social interaction from a CA perspective, and we look forward to seeing where our field goes from here.

Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers

1  Introduction

TANYA STIVERSUniversity of California, Los Angeles

1  Introduction

The field of Conversation Analysis (CA) began with  just  three people, Emanuel Schegloff,  Harvey  Sacks  and  Gail  Jefferson.  It  grew,  as  many  new  enterprises  do, out of a dissatisfaction with  the methodologies and  theories of  the  time, as they pertained to everyday social behavior. Forty years later, CA is the dominant approach  to  the  study  of  human  social  interaction  across  the  disciplines  of Sociology, Linguistics and Communication. The most recent international confer-ence  on  Conversation  Analysis  (ICCA-2010)  boasted  more  than  600  attendees.  CA publications are estimated to be over 5,000 in number and growing rapidly. In short, CA in the 21st century represents a rich and vibrant community of inter-national  scholars  working  across  a  wide  range  of  languages,  institutional  and ordinary contexts, and disciplinary boundaries.

It  is  precisely  because  of  this  vibrancy  that  the  time  is  right  for  a  handbook  of CA. In perusing the volume, the reader will readily see the solidity of the field, indexed not only by the number of scholars working within this paradigm, but also  by  the  range  of  topics  and  interests  in  the  field  and  the  ways  in  which  CA  scholars  are  reaching  to  connect  conversation  analytic  findings  to  other  fields of inquiry, thereby continuing to increase the breadth and intellectual reach of CA.

Our introduction to this volume is necessarily brief. However, in it we hope to contextualize the rest of the volume by discussing CA relative to other approaches to language use and social interaction, the interdisciplinary nature of CA, and its 

The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, First Edition. Edited by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers.© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

JACK SIDNELLUniversity of Toronto

2  Introduction

institutionalization over the last forty years. Finally, we describe our goals for the volume and its organization.

2  CA in Relation to Other Approaches to Language Use and Social Interaction

As  topics  of  research  in  the  social  sciences,  language  use  and  social  interaction have been approached in quite different ways. Among the many methodological approaches  to  this  domain  are  discourse  analysis,  pragmatics,  ethnography  of speaking,  gesture  studies,  Balesian  interaction  analysis,  corpus  linguistics,  field linguistics, ethnomethodology, behavioral ecology, ethology, experimental studies and semiotics. This volume will make no effort to compare and contrast CA with these  different  methodological  alternatives.  Instead,  we  propose  that  CA  repre-sents an approach which combines five key stances  into a perspective which  is distinctive. These concern: (i) its theoretical assumptions, (ii) goals of analysis, (iii) data, (iv) preparation of data for analysis, and (v) analytic methods.

The CA approach  is distinctive  (i)  in assuming  that  language use, and social interaction more generally, is orderly at a minute level of detail. Additionally, this orderliness  is  conceived  of  as  the  product  of  shared  methods  of  reasoning  and action to which all competent social interactants attend.1 CA is also distinctive (ii) in  that  the  goals  of  the  analyses  are  structural—i.e.  to  describe  the  intertwined construction of practices, actions, activities, and the overall structure of  interac-tions. With these goals and assumptions in mind, the data required for analyses are  also  distinctive  (iii)  in  that  they  must  be  records  of  spontaneous,  naturally occurring  social  interaction  rather  than,  for  instance,  contrived  interactions  or those that might occur in a laboratory. Given the assumption that social interaction is organized at a fine-grained level of detail and that the goal of CA is to identify structures that underlie social interaction, video or audio data are never coded or analyzed  in raw form. Rather,  the preparation of data  for analysis  involves  (iv) detailed transcription in order to facilitate the analysis of the details of turns and sequences. Moreover, given the assumption of fine-grained order  in  interaction, transcripts must be sufficiently detailed to permit its investigation. Finally, CA is distinctive  (v)  in  its  analysis.  As  an  inductive  qualitative  method,  it  seeks  to describe  and  explain  its  focal  domain—the  structures  of  social  interaction—through a reliance on case-by-case analysis leading to generalizations across cases but without allowing them to congeal into an aggregate. CA works from raw data to noticings of patterns using a  combination of distributional  regularities,  com-monalities in contexts of use, participant orientations and deviant case analysis.

As  a  method,  CA  is  not  suitable  for  all  research  questions  pertaining  to  lan-guage use and/or social interaction, but it is well-suited to those concerned with understanding the structural underpinnings of everyday conversation as well as spontaneous  naturally  occurring  social  interaction  among  lay  persons  and/or professionals.

Introduction  3

3  The Interdisciplinary Nature of CA

Although  much  of  the  research  in  CA  is  concerned  with  the  use  of  language, Conversation Analysis has  its roots not  in Linguistics or Communication but  in Sociology, the discipline of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. For these scholars, language was of sociological significance because it serves as a vehicle  for  social action and because  it  can be  studied  in  its particulars. CA’s sociological roots are visible in two of its founding ideas: (i) an institutionalized ‘interaction order’ (Goffman, 1983), comprising shared methods of reasoning and action  (Garfinkel,  1967b),  forms  the  foundation  of  ordinary  action  in  the  social world; and (ii) this institutionalized interaction order is the basis not only of social interaction but also of social institutions (Drew & Heritage, 1992b; Goffman, 1983; Schegloff, 2006a). However, in the days when CA was first being established, links were  forged  to  other  disciplines.  In  fact,  most  of  the  earliest  CA  journal  pub-lications  were  outside  Sociology  in  journals  of  Linguistics  and  Anthropology (Jefferson, 1973, 1974; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977; Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). This interdisciplinarity under-scores the breadth of recognition that these early findings attracted. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s (1974) piece on turn-taking remains, 38 years after its initial pub-lication, the most-cited paper in the history of Language (the official organ of the Linguistic  Society  of America),  despite  it  being  a  paper  by  sociologists  not  lin-guists (Joseph, 2003).2

Edited collections were the other primary outlet for early CA work. Volumes in  which  early  CA  works  were  published  include  Everyday Language: Studies of Ethnomethodology,  edited by sociologist George Psathas  (1979b), Studies in Social Interaction, edited by sociologist David Sudnow (1972) and Studies in the Organi­zation of Conversational Interaction, edited by Jim Schenkein (1978b). Additionally, CA  works  were  published  in  edited  collections  that  were  primarily  directed toward  sociolinguists  such  as  Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication,  edited  by  John  Gumperz  and  Dell  Hymes  (1972),  or  linguistic anthropologists such as Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, edited by Sanches and Blount (1975) (Jefferson, 1972, 1978, 1979; Sacks, 1972a, b, c, 1975, 1978, 1979; Schegloff, 1972a, b, 1979a).

Since those early days, CA has made inroads into mainstream Sociology with publications in the discipline’s flagship journals. However, CA work continues to have  strong  representation  in  publications  in  Anthropology,  Communication, Linguistics, Psychology and other more interdisciplinary journals as well. As CA has moved into the study of various social institutions, CA scholars have placed publications  in  journals  at  the  intersection  of,  for  instance,  Sociology,  Health  and  Communication;  Political  Science,  Mass  Media  and  Communication;  and Education,  Linguistics  and  Anthropology.  The  interdisciplinarity  of  the  field  is  important  for  CA  because  the  knowledge  needed  to  study  social  interaction draws on all of  these disciplines: without an understanding of culture, gesture, grammar, prosody, pragmatics and social structure, it would be difficult to have 

4  Introduction

a meaningful theory or method for the study of spontaneous, naturally occurring social interaction (see Schegloff, 2005b), Thus, the interdisciplinarity of the field, reflected  in  the  departmental  homes  of  CA  practitioners  and  CA  publications, indexes a real complementarity of expertise brought to the enterprise.

4  The Institutionalization of CA

As with many  interdisciplinary fields of  inquiry ranging  from media studies  to gesture studies to biochemistry or geophysics, institutionalization involves a great many small steps. Some of the indicators of institutionalization include publica-tions in top journals; the translation of published work into multiple languages; a  presence  across  many  universities  in  the  form  of  faculty,  course  listings  and available  textbooks;  a  presence  in  terms  of  publicly  available  presentations  at national and international conferences; accessible training centers, workshops and summer  schools;  dedicated  workshops  and  conferences;  dedicated  journals; national and/or international societies; and dedicated university departments or centers with secure funding.

Since 1967, the field of CA has achieved many of these indicators of institution-alization. The 1970s involved a series of setbacks for the field beginning with the tragic death of Harvey Sacks in 1975 and followed by a major international eco-nomic recession which made it difficult for many in the early cohorts of graduate students to secure tenure-track positions (Wiley, 1985). However, the decade cer-tainly included developments that laid the foundations for the long-term success of  CA.  These  included  several  classic  CA  publications  and  the  1973  Linguistics Summer Institute, which substantially broadened the audience for CA, capturing the  attention  of  scholars  who  would  play  important  roles  in  the  development  and  reach  of  CA  not  only  in  the  United  States  but  also  in  Europe,  particularly Britain.

The  1980s  saw  a  surge  in  interest  in  CA,  particularly  in  Britain  where  Gail Jefferson  and Anita  Pomerantz  were  working  and  training  students.  The  1980s began  with  the  publication  of  Charles  Goodwin’s  (1981)  important  monograph Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers.  That  same period  saw  several  other  highly  influential  volumes  being  published.  Stephen Levinson’s (1983) textbook Pragmatics attacked Speech Act Theory and presented CA  as  an  effective  alternative  within  Linguistics.  John  Heritage’s  Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology  (1984b) was important not only for  its exceptionally clear exe-gesis  of  the  roots  of  Garfinkel’s  thinking,  but  also  for  its  masterful  chapter  on CA—a classic introduction to the field from a sociological perspective. Atkinson and  Heritage’s  (1984)  Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis presented a collection of what remain some of the most cited papers in CA. Other significant  volumes  published  in  the  1980s  include  Paul  Drew  and  Anthony Wootton’s  (1987)  Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order  which  included important  contributions  on  Goffman’s  relation  to  CA  by  Schegloff  and  Heath, Atkinson’s (1984) Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics 

Introduction  5

which used CA to examine public oratory, and Button and Lee’s (1987) Talk and Social Organisation which contains a series of important studies by Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Goodwin and others. The 1980s was also Jefferson’s most prolific period. She published more than 20 articles, chapters and reports during the decade.

While  the  1980s  saw  a  substantial  output  and  a  surge  in  interest  in  CA,  the 1990s  saw  a  move  toward  greater  institutionalization  to  the  extent  that  many  more CA scholars secured permanent positions at universities across the United States, Europe and Asia. This, in turn, meant more courses on language and social interaction  as  well  as  courses  dedicated  to  CA.  The  1990s  also  saw  the  devel-opment of centers of CA scholarship and training, in particular at UCLA, UCSB, the  University  of  York,  and  the  University  of  Helsinki. Although  informally  in place prior to the 1990s, it was not until that period that these universities were serving  as true centers of scholarship. Summer schools, both those offered under the  umbrella  of  organizations  such  as  the  Linguistics  Summer  Institute  and  those  offered  under  rather  independent  Ethnomethodology-CA  or  simply  CA  auspices,  provided  another  form  of  training,  particularly  for  post-doctoral  scholars. CA research became, in this decade, a widely recognized method being  discussed  in  presentations  across  national  conferences  in  Anthropology,  under linguistic  anthropology’s  umbrella,  in  Communication,  under  the  aegis  of  lan-guage  and  social  interaction,  in  Linguistics,  within  pragmatics,  in  Psychology, under discursive psychology, and in Sociology, under ethnomethodology and CA.

Since 2000, increases in CA scholarship have been steady, but more critical has been the presence of a series of international conferences on CA. In 2002, the first International  Conference  on  Conversation  Analysis  was  held  in  Copenhagen, Denmark. The second was held in 2006 in Helsinki; the third in Mannheim in 2010. As noted earlier, by 2010 the number of attendees had topped 600. The same year also  saw  the  formation  of  an  international  society,  the  International  Society  for Conversation Analysis, with a founding group of 300 members. In short, CA has moved from a cottage industry to become a major international presence across a range of disciplines. This volume represents an attempt to capture the field’s sig-nificance and diversity.

5  Goals and Organization of the Volume

In  the  course  of  developing  this  handbook,  our  goals  were  manifold.  First,  we wanted to showcase the findings and developments within CA across the last 40 years. To this end we worked to identify the primary structures, topics and con-texts that had attracted CA interest and attention. Second, we wanted to consoli-date CA research across these areas. In this respect the volume was designed to be a comprehensive reference book that would provide a ready resource to estab-lished scholars, advanced students and also those new to CA. Third, we wanted this  book  to  serve  as  a  teaching  resource.  Currently  there  are  a  number  of  CA textbooks available, however none offers the breadth and comprehensiveness of a handbook-style volume.

6  Introduction

The most important aspect of the volume is that it includes the voices of 42 of the world’s leading conversation analysts. Collectively, these voices provide more depth and breadth than any one or two of us could possibly provide on our own. This volume represents the diversity of  the CA discipline and includes scholars who  are  located  in  departments  of  Anthropology,  Communication,  Education, Linguistics/Languages, Management, Psychology and Sociology, among others. Moreover,  the  breadth  of  this  group  of  contributors  allowed  us  to  make  sure  that individuals could contribute chapters in the area of social interaction research s/he knows best.

As a handbook of Conversation Analysis, we wanted  to provide a book  that gave readers an understanding of the theoretical background of CA, discussed the key  analytic  tools  and  strategies  of  the  CA  method  and  provided  substantive chapters in the key areas. This volume is therefore organized into five main sec-tions. The first, Studying Social Interaction from a Conversation Analytic Perspective, includes  chapters  on  the  intellectual  backdrop  against  which  CA  emerged (Maynard), as well as the CA approach to collecting data (Mondada), transcribing data (Hepburn & Bolden) and analyzing data (Sidnell).

The  second  section,  Fundamental Structures of Conversation,  takes  eight  core structures  in  conversation  and  discusses  what  we  know  about  each.  Levinson begins  with  the  critical  area  of  social  action—what  are  conversationalists  doing when they talk in interaction, and how do we recognize these doings as particular actions? Drew then considers the design of turns-at-talk and the consequences of different lexical selections and grammatical formats. Clayman examines the turn-constructional  unit—the  building  block  of  turns—and  its  sister  concept  the transition-relevance place. Hayashi continues the turn-taking topic with a focus on how and when speakers select next speakers and share the turn space. Stivers moves us from the level of the turn to the level of the sequence in a review of how turns are organized into action pairs and other sequential structures. Pomerantz and Heritage discuss differences  in how speakers design actions when they are ‘preferred’ or ‘dispreferred’, offering both a review and a revisiting of prior work in the area. Kitzinger reviews the domain of repair—how speakers manage prob-lems of speaking, hearing and understanding. Finally, Robinson moves us from actions, turns and sequences up to the level of whole interactions—overall struc-tural organization.

The third section, Key Topics in CA, provides reviews of 11 topics of inquiry in the field of CA. Heath and Luff begin the section with a discussion of embodied action, reviewing work on visible behavior in social interaction. Rossano discusses the role of eye gaze in conversation. Ruusuvuori considers how CA has addressed emotion. Lindström and Sorjonen consider how interactants display and manage affiliation  in  interaction.  Heritage’s  chapter  focuses  on  research  in  the  area  of epistemics—domains  of  knowledge—and  how  relative  knowledgability  is managed in social interaction. Hayano’s and Lee’s chapters address question and answer designs,  respectively. Enfield examines  reference  in conversation with a focus on person reference but discusses a number of other domains as well. Walker reviews  the  growing  subfield  of  CA  concerned  with  phonetics  and  prosody  in conversation. Mazeland’s chapter discusses how CA work has analyzed the role 

Introduction  7

of grammar in conversation. Finally, Mandelbaum examines the activity of story-telling, a topic of interest from Sacks’ (1972c) first discussion of “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.”

Whereas the second and third sections cohere topically, the fourth section, Key Contexts of Study in CA: Populations and Settings, covers seven contexts where sig-nificant CA scholarship has been done. Here, then, there is significant crossover with work discussed  in  the prior  two sections. These chapters,  though, have as their  lens what CA has contributed  to each population or setting. Since each of the  chapters’  authors  has  worked  extensively  in  the  setting  about  which  s/he writes, these chapters also provide some sense of how these contexts have been informed by the CA approach. Additionally, these chapters reflect methodological issues that are particular to the population or setting in focus. Kidwell examines CA work on interaction among children, an area of long-standing interest to con-versation  analysts  but  beginning  to  see  significantly  more  growth.  Antaki  and Wilkinson discuss the study of atypical populations such as those with cognitive impairment. Peräkylä discusses CA research in the psychotherapeutic context. Gill and Roberts review the substantial scholarship in the field of medical interaction. Komter’s  chapter  discusses  CA  research  on  courtroom  interaction.  Finally, Clayman reviews CA contributions to the study of the news interview.

As  discussed  earlier  in  this  introduction—and  as  will  be  clear  from  even  a cursory review of where conversation analysts are located departmentally, where CA research is published, or where CA research is presented—CA is an interdis-ciplinary field. We did not attempt to discuss every possible disciplinary connec-tion that CA has. However, there are five disciplines which either house substantial numbers  of  conversation  analysts,  or  are  publishing  a  substantial  amount  of  CA research, or both. It was our view that although CA is a coherent theory and method  with  common  goals  and  a  common  agenda  across  these  disciplines,  the discipline in which a scholar works and publishes will necessarily shape the work—at the very least, its framing. Not only will CA be shaped slightly differ-ently  by  these  disciplines,  but  CA  will  shape  these  disciplines  somewhat  differ-ently. Thus, the fifth section, CA across the Disciplines, has as its goal a review of how  CA  shapes  and  is  shaped  by  each  of  the  disciplines.  Heritage  and  Stivers discuss  this  with  respect  to  Sociology,  out  of  which  CA  originally  developed. Beach discusses CA vis-à-vis Communication, a field which hosts an  increasing number of  CA  scholars.  Clemente  examines  the  long  and  sometimes  fraught relationship  between CA and Anthropology. Potter and Edwards examine how CA and Psychology are beginning to work together. Finally, Fox, Thompson, Ford and  Couper-Kuhlen  discuss  the  long  and  productive  relationship  between  CA  and Linguistics.

6  Conclusion

For  many  years  it  was  supposed  that  interaction  was  a  kind  of  epiphenom-enon  that would ultimately be explained by a form of reduction—i.e. explained and  accounted  for  by  reference  to  language,  mind,  society  or  culture,  or  some 

8  Introduction

combination of them. Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson all strug-gled against such a view and CA can be seen as the intellectual territory gained in  that  battle.  This  volume,  as  a  whole,  presents  CA  as  a  coherent  approach  to social interaction. Although there are differences within CA in terms of the particu-lar ways in which individuals or groups work, their goals, and so on, there is also a great deal of consensus  in terms of method and outlook. While attempting to preserve  some  of  this  diversity  of  perspective,  we  place  the  emphasis  on  the common  core—the  large  body  of  findings  which  has  emerged  over  the  past  40 years, along with the methods which led to their discovery. It is this common core which has been inherited from CA’s founders.

NOTES

1  Indeed members frequently assess another’s competence by reference to that person’s capacity to produce and recognize this orderliness (see Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970).

2  Joseph (2003: 463) writes:

What emerges from these measures is that the 1974 article ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation’ by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson (Language 50: 696–735) is by far the most-cited article from Language, based on the citation indices, and is near the top of both the JSTOR list for 2003 and the LSA reprint-request list.

In November, 2011, Google scholar indicates 7,686 citations to this work.

Part I Studying Social Interaction from a CA Perspective