Conversation Analysis, Overview (2015)

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Conversation Analysis, Overview JOSHUA RACLAW University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA Conversation analysis (CA) is an empirical approach to examining the structures of communicative social interaction. A defining feature of the framework is its adoption of naturally occurring episodes of “talk in interaction” as an object of study. ese include not only informal conversations (as the name of the framework suggests), but also task- focused institutional encounters in courtrooms, doctors’ offices, boardrooms, and other specialized settings. CA offers both a distinct methodology and a theoretical framework for analyzing these forms of everyday communication. With roots in sociology, the the- oretical focus of CA is on the local production of social order, and in particular on the ways in which participants organize their contributions to an episode of talk as vehicles for the production of social action. As a method for examining these processes, CA pro- vides the analyst with a set of tools for describing the structural characteristics of talk in interaction. ese include such phenomena as the allocation of turns at talk, the orga- nization of verbal and nonverbal practices into sequences of action, and the operation of repair, which is intended to resolve problems in the pursuit of shared understanding. More than this, however, CA allows the analyst to examine the participants’ own dis- played understandings of these processes within the course of the unfolding interaction. CA thus offers an inductive, data-driven framework for examining the communicative practices through which individuals constitute their social lives. History and development CA first emerged during the 1960s, in the work of Harvey Sacks, particularly his lectures at the University of California, Irvine and Los Angeles (Sacks, 1992), and it developed through Sacks’s collaborations with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. CA was con- ceived of as a sociological enterprise, and early work displayed notable influences from Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and from the microsociology pioneered by Erv- ing Goffman. From both of these approaches, CA inherited a concern for the operation of social interaction in everyday life, an area of inquiry that had been all but ignored in mainstream sociology (which viewed these forms of mundane interaction as being too disorderly for rigorous analysis). e same bias against everyday forms of interaction could also be seen in other fields that have adopted CA as a method of analysis, such as anthropology, communication, and linguistics. From Goffman’s work, Sacks also adapted the idea that interaction has its own locally created order, an underlying structural organization that social actors routinely both e International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, First Edition. Karen Tracy (General Editor), Cornelia Ilie and Todd Sandel (Associate Editors). © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781118611463/wbielsi155

Transcript of Conversation Analysis, Overview (2015)

Conversation Analysis, OverviewJOSHUA RACLAWUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, USA

Conversation analysis (CA) is an empirical approach to examining the structures ofcommunicative social interaction. A defining feature of the framework is its adoption ofnaturally occurring episodes of “talk in interaction” as an object of study. These includenot only informal conversations (as the name of the framework suggests), but also task-focused institutional encounters in courtrooms, doctors’ offices, boardrooms, and otherspecialized settings. CA offers both a distinct methodology and a theoretical frameworkfor analyzing these forms of everyday communication. With roots in sociology, the the-oretical focus of CA is on the local production of social order, and in particular on theways in which participants organize their contributions to an episode of talk as vehiclesfor the production of social action. As a method for examining these processes, CA pro-vides the analyst with a set of tools for describing the structural characteristics of talk ininteraction. These include such phenomena as the allocation of turns at talk, the orga-nization of verbal and nonverbal practices into sequences of action, and the operationof repair, which is intended to resolve problems in the pursuit of shared understanding.More than this, however, CA allows the analyst to examine the participants’ own dis-played understandings of these processes within the course of the unfolding interaction.CA thus offers an inductive, data-driven framework for examining the communicativepractices through which individuals constitute their social lives.

History and development

CA first emerged during the 1960s, in the work of Harvey Sacks, particularly his lecturesat the University of California, Irvine and Los Angeles (Sacks, 1992), and it developedthrough Sacks’s collaborations with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. CA was con-ceived of as a sociological enterprise, and early work displayed notable influences fromHarold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and from the microsociology pioneered by Erv-ing Goffman. From both of these approaches, CA inherited a concern for the operationof social interaction in everyday life, an area of inquiry that had been all but ignored inmainstream sociology (which viewed these forms of mundane interaction as being toodisorderly for rigorous analysis). The same bias against everyday forms of interactioncould also be seen in other fields that have adopted CA as a method of analysis, such asanthropology, communication, and linguistics.

From Goffman’s work, Sacks also adapted the idea that interaction has its own locallycreated order, an underlying structural organization that social actors routinely both

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, First Edition.Karen Tracy (General Editor), Cornelia Ilie and Todd Sandel (Associate Editors).© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.DOI: 10.1002/9781118611463/wbielsi155

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engage with and work to construct. This view of the “interaction order” is reflected inCA’s approach to talk as an inherently orderly activity, with universal characteristics ofstructural organization. Within CA such structures are conceived of as operating inde-pendently of the social particulars of the participants or of the environment in whichthe latter interact. Garfinkel’s insistence on the use of rigorous inquiry and reflexivitywithin his ethnomethodological program also had a profound influence on CA. We seethis influence in the fact that conversation analysts approach their data in a mannerthat Sacks (1984) described as “unmotivated looking.” Analyses are thus begun withobservations that are grounded in the data rather than coming from aprioristic theo-ries of how and why participants behave as they do. Analytic concerns are driven bythose aspects of the interaction that are, first and foremost, meaningful to the partic-ipants. This distinct approach to data reflects a key part of the social theory of CA aswell—which treats the context of an interaction as a locally emergent social fact ratherthan an a priori component of the talk.

Despite its beginnings in sociology and its focus on the social order of interaction,CA has also developed as a novel approach to the study of communicative practice, par-ticularly in research on language and social interaction (LSI). Though the larger fieldof LSI is inherently multidisciplinary, the general preference among LSI researchersfor “smaller scale” data that are unscripted and nonexperimental and for analyses thatdemonstrate the meaningfulness of interactional encounters as sites for communicationhas meshed well with the theory and methods of CA. More thorough discussions of theconnection between CA and LSI research can be found in Beach (2012), in LeBaron,Mandelbaum, and Glenn (2003), and in Sanders (2005).

Transcription as a tool for analysis

The actual “doing” of CA begins even before the analysis of an episode of talk, as theanalyst first provides a detailed transcription of the interaction that captures differentaspects of speech delivery, sequence organization, and embodied practice. The tran-scription conventions that have become standard in this work were first developed byGail Jefferson (2004; see also Hepburn & Bolden, 2012). In the years following the ini-tial development of this system, Jefferson’s papers on the transcription of laughter inparticular (as well as that of a range of other interactional features) have demonstratedthe clear value of discoveries that such close transcription and analysis can yield. Unlikethe transcription systems employed in most areas of qualitative research, the Jefferso-nian conventions thus support accounts for the precise organization of details of thetalk that go beyond its strictly linguistic content: These include semilexical items suchas disfluency markers (like “uh(m)”) and acknowledgment tokens (like “mhm” or “uhhuh”), as well as the occurrence of simultaneous speech, latching, and silences withinthe talk. Additionally, features of the talk that may be understood as “extralinguistic”in other analytic traditions are fully represented within CA transcripts: These includeunit-final intonation, syllabic stress, and shifts in speech tempo, amplitude, or voicequality.

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The relevance of each of these features to the production of action and to the organi-zation of talk has been illustrated over nearly 50 years of conversation-analytic research.In many cases, the detailed examination of these features as they occur in actual dis-course has shown that they serve functions that go beyond what the analyst mighthave otherwise assumed, were s/he normalizing the production of talk by transcrib-ing it exclusively into standard orthography. For example, work by numerous analystshas illustrated how “uh(m)” does not simply mark a participant’s trouble in speakingbut may be used to exit a sequence or to tie an upcoming unit of talk back to an earlierone. This same feature, depending on its location within a turn and the larger contextof the talk, may also project a speaker’s forthcoming disalignment with the prior turn.Silences, too, can project this disalignment, while overlapping talk and latching may(in particular sequential contexts) do much the opposite by showing a speaker’s readyengagement with the prior talk. Meanwhile careful analyses of the actual productionof overlap have shown it to be the exception rather than the rule in talk in interac-tion, though these exceptions are treated as accountable and interpreted as performingsome action other than simple transfer of speakership. As illustrated by these and otherearly and enduring findings of CA, the representation of such features in the transcriptreflects their import as interactional resources for participants, and they provide valu-able sites of analytic inquiry.

Conversation analysts are not simply interested in describing the individual featuresof talk, but also aim to account for what these features allow participants to accomplish.Crucial to the conversation-analytic understanding of interaction is the idea thatlanguage and embodied practice are, above all, resources for the production of socialaction. That is, verbal and nonverbal behaviors allow speakers to recognizably ask aquestion, tell a story, enact a complaint, display their agreement, and perform myriadother actions in the course of everyday activity. Participants organize such actionsinto sequences, as a normative practice, given that questions invite answers andstories invite recipients to display a stance toward what has just been told; and thussequential organization is another crucial element of conversation-analytic research.The manner in which a recipient responds to a first action such as a question or storyis of similar import: A response that aligns with the structural progression of a priorturn, or displays a congruent stance with that expressed by the first speaker, will beformulated quite differently from one that does not. This is an area of analysis thatCA refers to as preference organization. Other aspects of turn design, such as the useof a turn-initial particle like “oh” or “no,” or the use of rising intonation at the endof a turn, also perform significant interactional work for participants and provideanother focus of intensive investigation in CA. And, of course, the orderly taking anddistribution of turns at talk is what allows participants to engage in these practicesin the first place. Each of the aforementioned elements of interaction—social action,sequence organization, preference organization, turn design, and turn-taking—may beunderstood as a basic building block for the structuring of conversation, and each oneis a core concept for the doing of CA research. The sections that follow provide a briefintroduction to these concepts, illustrating their relevance by reference to multipleepisodes of conversational interaction. Each of these episodes is drawn from one ofthree sources: video-recorded data collected by the author; audio- and video-recorded

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data collected by other analysts (some taken from published works); and publiclyavailable speech corpora drawn from the CA Bank archive hosted on the TalkBankdatabase.

Social action

In the course of our everyday activities, we perform any number of socially relevantactions through our turns at talk. We ask questions of others, produce complaints andassessments, lay blame, tell stories, and so on. The minutiae of communicative interac-tion, which comprise various patterns of verbal and nonverbal practices, are all pro-duced in the service of performing these actions. The formation of action is thus asignificant level of the organization of interaction. Conversation analysts seek to pro-vide accounts of action that are empirically grounded, demonstrating how participantsdisplay their own interpretation of an action in the moment-by-moment unfolding ofthe talk. Consider the following episode of interaction, taken from a telephone conver-sation between a mother and a daughter. The mother is living in California at the timeof the call, while the daughter is living abroad in Israel. In this excerpt, the mother anddaughter discuss the suitcase of gifts that the daughter has anticipated receiving duringa future visit from a close family friend or relative living in California, Moshe. Shimon,the mother’s son and the daughter’s brother, is also living in Israel near the daughter atthe time of the call.

(1) EN_4629 2 (CALLHOME: publicly available speech corpus)

01 MOM: I (saw) ( ) ↑May:a she wants to buy you a ↑pre:sent y’know

02 she’s getting around to buying a present someday=ehheh .hhh

03 I said well I can’t send anything more I don’t think with

04 Moshe bu:t, (.) y’know maybe [with ↑Bubbe

05 DAU: [Why:=Moshe said he’s gon pick up

06 a whole suitcase for [me:.

07 MOM: [.hh he ↑i:: ↓s: but the ya know the things

08 add ↑u:p=and I’m also sending something for Shimon too::, so:=

The excerpt begins as the mother produces a new action, which is unrelated to the priortalk (the two had previously been discussing a relative whose new baby has been fussy).Here at lines 1–2 the mother produces news about her earlier discussion with Maya, afamily friend or a relative who is planning to send a gift to the daughter. This news isproblematized at lines 3–4 by the mother’s claim that Moshe, who is already bringinggifts from the mother to the daughter during his next trip to Israel, likely has no moreroom in his suitcase to pack a gift from Maya. The daughter’s turn at lines 5–6 (“WhyMoshe said he’s gon pick up a whole suitcase for me:”) is initially formulated as a ques-tion (“Why::”), then immediately followed by a claim to knowledge. In terms of action,the turn does more than simply seek information from, and share information with,the mother. It also enacts a challenge to the mother’s prior claim that Moshe would nothave enough room to pack a present from Maya.

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This understanding of the daughter’s turn as a challenge is partially grounded in thedetails of her production of the question at lines 5–6. Notice that the daughter’s claimis specifically formulated to assert her own knowledge of how much room Mosheshould have available in his suitcase (“Moshe said he’s gon pick up a whole suitcasefor me:”). Critically, the daughter frames this knowledge as coming from a firsthandaccount of what Moshe has said to her, a practice that establishes the daughter’sauthority to know that Moshe should have enough room for Maya’s gift. Displays ofepistemic authority of this sort are a frequent practice in enacting a challenge, and thusthe daughter’s formulation of her turn at lines 5–6 provides one piece of evidence infavor of analyzing this turn as a challenging action. Its formulation does not accountfor this analysis entirely, however, and other aspects of the daughter’s turn are alsorelevant to understanding it as a challenge. For example, the overlapping brackets inlines 4 and 5 of the transcript mark the daughter’s turn as beginning in overlap withthe mother’s prior turn, but not at a point where the mother’s turn is syntactically,prosodically, or pragmatically complete. The daughter’s question thus effectivelyinterrupts the mother’s turn in progress, and this too may mark the daughter’s turnas doing something that is disagreement-relevant. Of additional import is the simpleorganization of the daughter’s turn following a claim from the mother, as it helps locatethe mother’s initial claim as a site for the daughter’s disagreement.

Finally, and perhaps most critically for CA’s analytic process of accounting for socialactions, we can look to the way in which the mother responds to the daughter’s turn.Challenges normatively invite one of two types of responses: a recipient may displayhis/her agreement to concede the challenge; or s/he may display his/her disagreement toresist it. Looking to the mother’s response at lines 7–8, we see that she initially respondsto the daughter’s turn with agreement (“he ↑i:: ↓s:”), and thus concedes the challengebefore continuing to account for why Moshe couldn’t manage to bring a present fromMaya. In the local context of this particular exchange, we see that the daughter’s turncan thus be understood at several levels as enacting a challenge. In attending to thepractices by which participants display their own understanding of an action to and forone another, the analyst is thus able to provide an account of action in line with the CAproject. For further discussions of the formation and recognition of action, the readeris referred to Levinson (2012).

Sequence organization

As we saw in the prior excerpt, speakers normatively locate an utterance as respond-ing to some prior action or as potentially inviting a relevant responding action in thetalk that follows. The daughter’s challenge at lines 5–6 of Excerpt 1 thus makes relevanta response in which the mother either concedes or resists the challenge. The daugh-ter’s and the mother’s actions at this section of the talk thereby comprise a sequenceof related actions. Similar organizations of actions are common throughout conversa-tional practice. A question invites an answer, a greeting invites another greeting, anassessment invites agreement or disagreement, and so on and so forth. A brief example

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of this organization is illustrated in Excerpt 2 below, taken from an earlier part of thesame telephone conversation between the mother and the daughter.

(2) EN_4629 2 (CALLHOME: publicly available speech corpus)

01 MOM: How::s Bubbe, (.) wh:at happened with that test.

02 (0.3)

03 DAU: Um:: (.) she::’s not getting the results for a couple of day:s.

04 MOM: She’s not getting=oh:, uh huh:.

At line 1 the mother produces an open-ended question that asks after the daughter’sgrandmother (referred to here as Bubbe), then a further question that specifies theinquiry as asking about the test results from a recent doctor’s visit. At a basic level ofanalysis, we can describe the mother’s turn at line 1 as producing a questioning action,and this action invites an answer as a relevant response from the daughter at line 3. Themother’s turn at line 4 displays her understanding of the daughter’s turn as aligning withher prior turn. That is, it supports the structural progression of the first turn’s action byforming a completed sequence (in this case, of the type question–answer). Basic actionslike the ones seen in lines 1 and 3 above form what conversation analysts term an adja-cency pair: a basic organizational unit for a sequence of actions. Adjacency pairs consistof two turns at talk, produced by separate speakers and organized one after the other,such that the first pair-part can be heard to have invited or “made relevant” the secondpair-part. This relationship between the first pair-part and second pair-part of an adja-cency pair is described as one of conditional relevance, meaning that the absence of asecond pair-part is noticeable. Consider the question–answer sequence in Excerpt 3below. The excerpt is taken from the beginning of the phone call between the motherand the daughter of prior excerpts, where the two are catching up on which mutuallyknown parties have recently gotten engaged, married, or have had children since thetwo speakers last talked.

(3) EN_4629 1 (CALLHOME: publicly available speech corpus)

01 MOM: Uh huh:: (.) a:nd um: Samuel Teller’s engaged.

02 (0.2)

03 DAU: .hhh oh he ↑i:s?=

04 MOM: =You- you should [hear

05 → DAU: [>To who.<

06 MOM: what a- (.) what a ( ) he got.

07 (0.4)

08 MOM: T[o-

09 → DAU: [Who.

10 MOM: Lou Torin’s daughter from Toronto.

Following the mother’s news at line 1 that a family friend has recently gotten engaged,the daughter marks her reception of (and surprise at) this information at line 2. At line5 the daughter produces a question about the identity of the family friend’s fiancée,though this action receives no uptake, as the mother continues her prior turn at line6. The mother’s lack of a responsive turn to the daughter’s question produces a notice-able absence, and the daughter orients to this absence as she reformulates the question

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again at line 9. Analyses of sequence organization thus illustrate how the productionof action is a normative, and thus a highly regulated, component of interaction. Adja-cency pairs are only one basic type of sequential organization, however, as participantsroutinely extend base sequences through practices that demonstrate how the organiza-tional mechanisms of talk are fitted to local interactional needs. For further discussionsof sequence organization, the reader is referred to Schegloff (2007) and Stivers (2012).

Preference organization

As seen in the data from the prior sections, the first action in an adjacency pair mayreceive a range of potential responsive actions. Challenges make both conceding andresisting actions relevant—as aligning responses, for example—while in the examplebelow we see that assessments make relevant several potential responses that span fromagreement to disagreement.

(4) A&S 3 (Raclaw: video-recorded data collected by the author)

01 Ali: I lov:e Giselle *thou:gh*.

02 (0.4)

03 Sara: Really:? I [don’t.

04 Ali: [I think she’s [so: funny

05 Sara: [I don’t.

06 (0.5)

07 Sara: I think she’s funny as a person but I dislike her as a

08 teacher=she’s very un↑organized and she’s very li:ke (0.5)

09 unprofessional?

Prior to this excerpt, Ali and Sara had been discussing a mutual friend from their danceclass who had recently grown distant. At line 1 Ali topicalizes another mutually knownparty, Giselle, through a positive assessment (“I lov:e Giselle”). As an extension to thisturn, Ali produces a subsequent assessment of Giselle at line 4 (“I think she’s so: fun-ny”). Though Sara’s responses to these assessing actions display her disagreement, theyare produced in markedly different ways. (But both responses are delayed through pre-ceding silences; more on this below.) At line 2 Sara responds to Ali’s initial assessmentwith a token of disbelief produced with rising intonation (“Really:?”). This formulationprojects her forthcoming disagreement, which is formulated as a negative-polarity cop-ular clause (“I don’t”). At line 7, however, Sara responds to Ali’s subsequent assessmentby first issuing a token agreement. This is formulated as a partial repetition of the assess-ment from line 4 (“I think she’s funny as a person”), but downgraded by her removingthe intensifier “so” and narrowing the scope of the assessment. Sara’s token agreementis then followed by a negative assessment that displays her disagreement with Ali (“butI dislike her as a teacher”). As this excerpt shows, there are thus multiple ways to displaydisagreement with a first assessment. Likewise, there are multiple ways in which Saramight have displayed her agreement with Ali instead: through full repetitions of theassessment, upgraded second assessments, agreement tokens, and similar practices.

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In terms of sequential organization, both of Ali’s positive assessments (at lines 1 and4) make relevant Sara’s agreement or disagreement as an aligning response. This is notto say that all aligning second pair-parts are equal, however. The concept of preferenceaccounts for the fact that particular ways of formulating these responses may be struc-turally preferred to others. These sequential alternatives for producing the action canthus be ranked as being either preferred or dispreferred. For example, as a significantliterature on the organization of preference has shown, there is a general preferencefor agreement in conversation (Pomerantz, 1984). Responsive actions that agree withthe prior speaker are thus produced in a structurally distinct manner from responsiveactions that disagree. Namely, responsive turns that display agreement are produceddirectly and without hesitation. Those that display disagreement are instead delayed intheir production and mitigated in various ways. A common formulation for displayingagreement can be seen in Excerpt 5 below.

(5) Pomerantz (1984, p. 66: data from published research)

01 M: You must admit it was fun the night we we[nt down

02 J: [It was great fun

M produces a positive first assessment at line 1, formulated with a modal preface (“Youmust admit”) that strongly invites agreement as a preferred response. J responds at line2 in just this way, producing an upgraded second assessment that displays their agree-ment. This responsive turn is articulated through a preferred response format, produceddirectly and without delay. In fact it is in marked, notable overlap. By contrast, dispre-ferred responses are more often formulated in the manner of B’s turn in Excerpt 6 below.

(6) SBL 1:1:10 (audio-recorded data collected by another analyst)

01 B: Uh if you’d care to come over and visit a little while this

02 morning I’ll give you a cup of coffee.

03 A: hehh Well that’s awfully sweet of you, I don’t think I can make

04 it this morning .hh uhm I’m running an ad in the paper and-and

05 uh I have to stay near the phone.

Though B’s invitation at lines 1–2 makes relevant either an acceptance or a rejectionof the invitation as an aligning response, it is formulated to prefer an acceptance. A’srejection of the invitation at lines 3–5 orients to this aspect of preference organizationby being produced through a dispreferred response format. The rejection is delayedthrough both laughter and the particle “well,” and is additionally prefaced by a compli-ment (“that’s awfully sweet of you”). The rejection itself is mitigated by hedges (“I don’tthink I can make it”) and followed by an account for the rejection. These features of thetalk are canonical markers of dispreference.

Preference organization accounts for more than just the structural rankings of dif-ferent types of responsive actions. It may also describe the preference structures fordifferent types of first actions (such as the preference for receiving an offer over produc-ing a request), or preferences for referring to nonpresent parties within the talk (such asthe cross-cutting preferences for producing references that are minimal, but also allow

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for recognition from the recipient). Preference comprises a significant aspect of inter-actional organization, and the reader is directed toward Pomerantz and Heritage (2012)for a more detailed overview of its operation.

Turn-taking and turn design

Of the varied forms of interactional organization discussed in this article, the mech-anism of turn-taking is perhaps the most fundamental. The basic operation of talk ininteraction is driven by the norm that only one participant speaks at a time, and uponcompletion of that participant’s turn (or very near it) another participant will follow.Despite variation in turn-taking practices due to institutional constraints or cross-cultural factors, the “machinery” for turn-taking is much the same across interactionalcontexts. These mechanisms were first described in a seminal paper by Sacks, Schegloff,and Jefferson (1974), who observed that, barring some form of interactional trouble,talk tends to proceed without significant gaps or overlaps. The relative smoothnessof this process is made possible by the fact that, at any given moment, the currentspeaker is seen as having primary rights to speak. Other participants then monitor thespeech of the current speaker in order to project the possible completion of their turn.Returning to Excerpt 5, for example, we see that J monitors M’s talk in progress at line1 so as to project where it will possibly end and what type of action it performs andinvites in response.

(5) Pomerantz (1984, p. 66: data from published research)

1 M: You must admit it was fun the night we we[nt down

2 J: [It was great fun

These points of possible completion mark the hearable end of a turn-constructionalunit (TCU), a measurable unit of talk that comprises a possibly complete contributionto the interaction, creating a place for a recipient to respond. TCUs may be constructedof different levels of lexical and syntactic granularity, as it may consist of a word, phrase,clause, or sentence. Following the completion of a TCU, an area of possible speaker tran-sition opens up; this is referred to as a “transition relevance place” (TRP). These pointsof possible completion are a space where transition from a current speaker to a nextspeaker is normatively achieved. This is not to say that a new participant is accountableto speak at each TRP. Rather, at each of these junctures in the talk, a new turn may beallocated according to the following rules: (1) the current speaker may end his/her TCUby selecting a next speaker, often through specific address terms, the use of embodiedpractices like gaze or touch, or the production of a first pair-part that can only be rel-evantly responded to by a particular coparticipant; (2) a next speaker may self-selectupon completion of the current speaker’s TCU, oftentimes marking his/her incipientspeakership through audible inbreaths, shifts in gaze toward the current speaker, orshifts in posture that display his/her forthcoming engagement with the talk at hand;(3) or the current speaker may elect to continue to speak, which results in a multiunitturn. Current speakers may exploit the norms of the turn-taking system to ensure that

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they can achieve such multiunit or extended turns at talk. In Sara’s multiunit turn fromExcerpt 4, for example, she latches the end of the TCU at line 8 with the beginningof a new TCU. This rhythmic rush into the next TCU can serve as a turn-maintenancedevice, allowing her to reach the silence after “like” at a point where her turn in progresscannot be heard to be possibly complete in terms of grammar, prosody, and action.

(4) A&S 3 (Raclaw: video-recorded data collected by the author)

07 Sara: I think she’s funny as a person but I dislike her as a

08 teacher=she’s very un↑organized and she’s very li:ke (0.5)

09 unprofessional?

Each of these practices is a common element of turn design. Turn design entails a greatdeal more than practices for maintaining the floor, however: It encompasses the myr-iad ways in which speakers formulate their turns to achieve interactional ends. It mayentail the production of a turn aimed at inviting a particular response as preferred, theuse of embedded correction practices to tacitly point out an error in another’s talk, theformulation of a responsive turn with turn-initial particles to display a particular stancetoward a prior turn, and many other such practices. Turn design thus encompassesmany of the interactional practices and features of talk examined in the prior sectionson social action, sequence organization, and preference as well. The reader is directedtoward Clayman (2012), Drew (2012), and Hayashi (2012) for a fuller discussion of bothturn design and its relevance for turn-taking and other areas of interactional organiza-tion.

Acknowledgment

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute ofGeneral Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award NumberR01GM111002. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does notnecessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

SEE ALSO: Conversation Analysis, Applied; Conversation Analysis, Feminist;Conversational Preference; Ethnomethodology; Gesture; Interruption; Laughter;Questions and Questioning; Silence; Transcription

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Joshua Raclaw is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Women’s Health Researchand an honorary fellow in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.His research interests are in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and sociolinguis-tics. He is coeditor of the volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language,Gender, and Sexuality (2014, with Lal Zimman and Jenny Davis).