Conversational analysis (CA) examines the patterns that occur in dialogue, and how speakers use talk to create orderly social interaction. Work in CA is 'data-driven' and contextual; data comes from transcriptions of taped conversations. Care is given to focus on the empirical conduct of speakers within the surrounding dialogue,
voiding attributing intentions or motives to a speaker's actions.

CA grew out of the ethnomethodolgy work of Garfinkel (1967), and was advanced by Sacks and Schegloff (1973), along with Jefferson (1978).

Certain conversational structures are of particular interest in CA:

Turn-taking

Speakers observe patterns of turn-taking in dialogue: only one participant controls the 'floor' at a time, and may pass this control to another speaker using words or gestures. Aspiring 'next-speakers' may compete for the floor. Participants are thus motivated to listen to the conversation; any speaker may be called upon to be 'next-
speaker'.

Sequential organisation, especially adjacency pairs

Adjacency pairs are (1) contiguous pairs of utterances (2) produced by different speakers (3) that are appropriately matched. Common examples include 'question/answer', 'statement/acknowledgement', or 'invitation/acceptance or rejection'.

Repair strategies

Speakers overcome violations or problems in dialogue using repair strategies. If turn-taking competition exists, speakers may choose to curtail their utterance. Speakers may also choose to edit their own utterances or those of other speakers in order to resolve misunderstandings.

Dialogue analysis (DA) is also concerned with the social order of talk, but it allows for a broader range of data, including interviews, documents, invented examples, and other non-naturally occurring talk.

Both conversational and dialogue analysis are used in sociolinguistics and psychology. Techniques from CA and DA can be applied to natural language processing; much research in dialogue act classification uses adjacency pairs to help determine a speaker's intentions in making an utterance.

Reference book

Silverman, D. (2001). Interpreting qualitative data (2nd Ed.). London, SAGE Publications.

Recommended textbook

Hutchby, I and R. Woofitt. (1998). Conversation analysis: Principles, practices and applications. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

References

Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn taking in conversation. Language, 50:696-735.
Schegloff, E. A., and H. Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica, 7:289-327.

Summary written by

Daniel Midgley
Discipline of Linguistics
University of Western Australia
April 2006