conversation analysis (CA)

In sociolinguistics, the study of the talk produced in ordinary human interactions. Sociologist Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) is generally credited with founding the discipline.

See also:

• Adjacency Pair
• Broken-Record Response
• Constructed Dialogue
• Conversation
• Conversational Grounding
• Conversationalization
• Cooperative Overlap
• Cooperative Principle
• Dialogue
• Direct Speech
• Discourse Analysis
• Discourse Domain
• Discourse Marker
• Echo Utterance
• Editing Term
• Indexicality
• Pause
• Phatic Communication
• Politeness Strategies
• Punctuation Effect
• Repair
• Short Answer
• Speech Act
• Turn-Taking

Examples and Observations:

• "Conversation [is the] most basic and widespread linguistic means of conducting human affairs. Because of the pervasive, everyday nature of conversing, its scientific study has proved particularly complex. It has been difficult to obtain acoustically clear, natural samples of spontaneous conversation, especially of its more informal varieties."
  (David Crystal in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. by Tom McArthur. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992)



• "CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. But what is the aim of studying these interactions? Principally, it is to discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how sequences of action are generated."
  (Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt, Conversation Analysis. Polity, 2008)



• One very common structure that has been identified [through conversation analysis] is the adjacency pair. This is an ordered pair of adjacent utterances spoken by two different speakers. Once the first utterance is spoken, the second is required. A few of the many adjacency pairs that have been identified are shown.

  Summons--answer
  Can I get some help here?
  On my way.
  
  Offer--refusal
  Sales clerk: May I help you find something?
  Customer: No thank you, I'm just looking.
  
  Compliment--acceptance
  Your hair looks very lovely today.
  Thank you. I just had it cut.

  (William O'Grady, et al. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford, 2001)