Conversational Analysis

This article looks at conversational analysis (or conversation analysis) from the theoretical assumption that conversation is based on a set of patterns and rules that are found in all languages. The work of Harvey Sacks and his colleagues is cited as the fullest body of work on the topic. Sacks argued that we use a process of turn-taking when we communicate through talking, and these turns are determined by even more tacit rules of turn-taking and turn-yielding cues. The theory has been used to understand why languages are so similar. Hundreds of studies have used this model to understand how humans interact, including looking at gender differences, when children learn to turn-take, and the difference in turn-taking in traditional classrooms vs. online classrooms. Critiques include Noam Chomsky's linguistics theory, in which he argues language emerges out of an inherent grammar all humans have.

Keywords Conversational Analysis; Cues; Ethnomethodology; Gap; Sociolinguistics; Turn Constructional Units; Turn Relevance Place; Turn-Taking; Turn-Yielding

Day to Day Social Interaction > Conversational Analysis

Overview

Conversational analysis is the study of how we communicate through talking. It is a relatively new field in sociology, developed in the 1960s. While it is based on some fundamental theories in sociology, and the methods used to understand how we talk to one another are sociological, it is quite common to see the ideas behind conversational analysis discussed in speech-communication, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. Some believe the term "conversation" is misleading, which has some scholars calling this study "talk-in-interaction" (Schegloff, 2000). Also, the term "discourse analysis" is commonly used, but this can also be misleading, because discourse can also include exchanges involving reading and writing, events at which people offer information, or what is not said, so to be most accurate, conversational analysis is limited to the study of looking at how people interact when talking. Still, this definition should be considered as broadly as possible; so, the interactions considered in this study include chatting with other casually, but also buying tickets for the theater, making appointments for the dentist, talking to strangers at the bus stop, reporting an emergency on the telephone, responding to a grandparent's inquiry about how school is going, and so on.

Conversation analysts look at the order of our everyday interactions when we are talking. Through careful recording of spoken exchanges between people, they have found patterns and structures that, to date, are seen in every culture studied. Conversation analysts assume that people are trying to make sense of the world through the reproduction of what they understand to already be true (Garfinkel, 1967). In other words, people have a notion of what is reality and that reality is constantly being reaffirmed by checking in with others; in this way, the social order is maintained and people know what to expect in social settings. This theory of how we make sense of the social world is called ethnomethodology. These theorists believe that it is enormously important for the social world to be predictable for humans, and this is true in conversations with others.

Theories of conversational analysis grew out of two fields: ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics. Ethnomethodology is a sociological theory that studies how ordinary people make sense of their world. Harold Garfinkel, a sociologist who developed this theory, viewed people as having a folk methodology which comprised a "range of seen but unnoticed" procedures and practices that make it possible for persons to analyze, make sense of, and produce recognizable social activities" (Pomerantz & Atkinson, 1984, p. 286). Ethnomethodologists engage in norm-breaching experiments to determine what these rules are. They intentionally breach rules and document how people behave and in this way determine what the rules are. They don't believe people are aware they are following these patterns, and this is why the rules need to be determined by outside observation. Sociolinguistics is the study of how culture affects language in a society.

The assumption is that conversations are integral to social life, and through them much of life is organized. So, by recording the patterns in conversations, we are able to observe other common patterns in everyday life. Conversational analysts focus on structures, cadences, and other aspects of verbal interaction, looking specifically at dyads and small groups. They are not concerned about what is being said, but rather the patterns seen in how people talk to one another.

In order to determine what these patterns, rules, and structures are, early developers used a research method in which the researcher makes a careful record (ideally a videotape) of talk between people, and later carefully analyzes it. Researchers are looking for patterns such as who initiated the exchange, the number of interruptions, the number of pauses, times people spoke at the same time, and so on. This analysis requires specific training, and it is crucial the researcher is aware of the possibility of making assumptions about what a word or phrase "means" in the analysis. The researcher is looking for patterns in the exchanges and that these patterns exist and what they are is the basis for the "meaning" within the interaction.

Harvey Sacks' Theory of Conversational Analysis

Sociologist Harvey Sacks and his associates A. E. Schegloff and G. Jefferson, using the ideas surrounding ethnomethodology, were interested in what people do in conversation, rather than what they are saying. They followed the assumptions Garfinkel had about how people use methods in everyday life and found that we use two basic elements in everyday talk: interactive reciprocity (when one person says something, there is an obligation to respond), and local management by participants (it is the speakers who decide what is said when). Further, they found that what people say in everyday talk shapes the conversation; put another way, how we talk to each other determines who will speak next, the current speaker, or the person listening.

Sacks and his colleagues used observations of recorded conversations to develop a theory describing the patterns of what they call turn-taking. This means that people almost always take turns when they are talking, try not to leave gaps in between turns, and avoid interrupting one another. Turn-taking allows people to direct and manage conversations, and keeps interactions from being chaotic. People interpret how and when to take turns based on the "surface linguistic meanings and the social meanings inherent in the situation and its expectation" and through signals they get during the conversation as well as the status each person holds (Roy, 2000, p. 36). In other words, we are paying close attention to the specific words another is using, and those words have immediate meaning in the context of the sentence, and have larger meaning found socially. All of this is done based on the other information we are getting from the person and who that person is in relationship to us. In conversational analysis, the researcher does not need to talk to the speakers to determine what is happening in the exchange. Conversational analysis is not concerned with the "meaning" individuals might have. They are only looking at the patterns that are reproduced in the exchange.

Conversational analysis argues that there are several rules to how we exchange with each other in everyday talk. They are:

• One person speaks at a time,
• People commonly speak at the same time, or overlap, although it is brief,
• Usually, transitions, or turns, have no gap and some overlap, although there can be both gaps and overlaps,
• The order of the turns varies,
• The length of turns varies,
• The order of turn is not predetermined.

Two-Turn Constructional Unit

Sacks details this everyday system he says we all use. A turn starts with the first word after breaking the silence that follows another person's turn. Each turn is made up of at least one turn construction unit (TCU), which is a complete linguistic unit. Our speech patterns are made up of these units that, when completed, the other speaker recognizes as time to speak. While it is not always easy to know for sure what the boundaries of these units are, it is at these boundaries that the other speaker understands when it is time to take a turn. To understand this abstract description of a very concrete occurrence, it helps to see that turn construction units can be full sentences, partial sentences, one word or an utterance. It is also possible that two-turn constructional units could be found in the same turn. Here is an example of two-turn constructional units (Thronbury & Slade, 2006, p. 123):

Again, more than one unit can be found in a turn, as we see here (Thronbury & Slade, 2006, p. 123):

Turn Constructional Unit

The end of a turn constructional unit is called a transition relevance place (TRP), and this marks a point where the turn may go to another speaker, or the present speaker may continue with another turn. Turn relevance place is used in all conversations and is a method people use to avoid chaos, or everyone talking at once. To avoid the chaos of us all talking at once, or the discomfort of no one speaking, turn relevance places can be determined in several ways. A speaker can select the next speaker, either verbally (addressing the next speaker in the turn constructional unit) or nonverbally (looking at the next speaker). Still, it is possible there is no apparent or obvious next speaker, and in the absence of this choice, the turn relevance place is an opportunity for any listener to take a turn through self-selection. This can be a problem when one speaker is more comfortable with starting and another is slower to begin a turn. Also, at the turn relevance place, if the speaker hasn't pre-selected the next speaker, and no one self-selects, then the speaker can continue. Sacks, et al. point out that a pause of a half second or more at these turn relevance place could suggest avoidance of participation, mis-speaking, confusion, surprise, anger, etc. (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974).

It is important to note that the methods people use and the implications of these maneuvers is extremely relevant to how acceptable a person is in society. For example, how people select others in turn-taking has, and in this selection keeps other listeners from self-selecting, a great impact on how that person is perceived by others. This can be as simple as a speaker only looking at one other person in a group, which communicates, intentionally or not, that that is the person who shall take the next turn. It is also possible that others are not necessarily interested in what a speaker has to say, rather, they just listen because it is expected. As Nofsinger notes:

No Talk

Sacks and his colleagues look closely at the points in everyday talk when there is no talk. In fact, these spots, called either pauses or gaps, are terribly relevant to the exchange and can determine the comfort level of all speakers. At each turn relevance place (the end of a turn), there is almost always a spot where no one is speaking (sometimes there is overlap, although most speakers try to minimize this). These spots in which no one is speaking are different from one another depending on the length of time the silence goes on. A gap is the comfortable silence between turns, the space in the talking when one person stops talking, but before the other person starts talking. But, a pause is longer; it can occur when one person stops talking and, if the other person doesn't take a turn, the first person resumes talking. It must be made clear that we are not aware of the patterns that underpin conversation and that when we are using methods to keep the conversation even and smooth, we are doing so effortlessly. To insure the pauses don't turn into gaps, and the other speaker picks up the conversation with ease, we use turn-yielding cues, such as raising or lowering the voice, drawing out the final syllable of the last word, use a filler word or phrase, like "you know," or "um." These methods convey the speaker is finished and ready to give way to the other speaker. There are several ways to determine who will speak next. Turn allocation component refers to how turns are ordered. There are three options:

1. Current speaker selects next speaker,
2. Next speaker self-selects as next speaker,
3. Current speaker keeps going.

Adjacency pairs are a pair of turns, logically ordered, in which the second turn must respond to the first turn. Put another way, adjacency pairs are exchanges in which a response is expected from the listener, and this response is often predetermined, otherwise known as preferred response. Further, there is a preference organization in exchanges. For example, it is preferred that when one person makes a statement, the other person agrees with it. A turn that includes agreement comes faster than a disagreement. In other words, if there are preferred structured practices that are followed, these are called preference organization. If someone offers another person something, the preferred response is "yes." Still, the response could be what is called dispreffered response, which is a rejection of the offer. Either way, not responding at all is awkward and rare. Adjacency pairs are very common in everyday life. When someone asks you, "Care for a cup of coffee?" you respond "Yes," or "No." One type of adjacency pairs is called pre-sequences. These are exchanges that occur before the actual conversation takes place, like "Hi, how are you?" "Fine, you?"

Adjacency Pairs

In most formal conversations, which often begin with pre-sequences, there are many adjacency pairs. Formal conversations are more ordered than informal conversations and the way of determining who will speak is often left to one speaker over another. For example, in an exchange between a doctor and patient, the person with higher status will assign the turn. The patient waits for the doctor to yield by asking a question, for example. Further, the person with the higher status also determines the sequence organization of a conversation, or how things are ordered. Here is an example of a student coming to see a professor to discuss an honors program (Thronbury & Slade, 2006, p. 124):

This turn-taking is ordered and determined by the speaker with the higher status, in this case the professor. By contrast, informal exchanges are much more complex, when looked at from a conversational analysis perspective. In informal exchanges, it is often unknown who will speak next, whether there will be overlaps, or be one speaker will interrupt another. The exchange is much more intricate and lacks the staid nature of a formal exchange with all its adjacency pairs. Here is an example of an informal exchange between four British friends at work, who start out talking about food and end up discussing sports (Thronbury & Slade, 2006, p. 125):

The participants in this exchange all have equal status in the talk. There are no adjacency pairs. There are several overlaps, and the conversation is more flexible. But in this way, it is less determined and contains more elements of conversation in general.

Applications

Gender Communication

Work in gender communication has been informed by conversational analysis. Several studies have identified gender as a determiner for whether a person is more or less likely to interrupt another person, or overlap when another person is talking (Kramer, 1973; Lakoff, 1973; Tannen, 1994). To further understand this in the context of conversational analysis, we look at the work of Zimmerman, who compared same sex two-party conversations to cross sex two-party conversations looking for rates of interruptions and overlaps (1975). The findings were striking. While for both men and women in conversation roughly half the time was spent interrupting one another and overlapping in their turn-taking, the results were dramatically different when men and women were engaged in conversation. In the cases of interruptions, 96% were men interrupting the women. In the case of turn-taking overlaps, 100% of the cases were men over women.

Another study looked at how elementary children learn turn-taking. It appears that turn-taking is not fully internalized until about fourth grade, at which time children become less likely to interrupt either one another or the teacher. This is compared to second graders, who are less clear about these patterns in conversation.

Finally, one study compared turn-taking in traditional classrooms vs. online classes (Tan & Tan, 2006). This work revealed that in traditional classrooms, the teacher directed the conversations, determined the turns, and the exchange took traditional linear trajectory. But in online classroom exchanges, the students directed the conversations, turns did not occur in the same way, because students did have to wait for someone to respond to them, they could engage in exchanges without waiting for another to take a turn. Exchanges took on nonlinear forms that were weblike. In the traditional class, student did not build alliances with one another, but with the teacher; in the online course, the students built powerful relationships with the teacher a mere coordinator of the exchange. The traditional authority of the teacher disappeared and the students were more in charge of the learning atmosphere.

Viewpoints

There are several critics of Sacks' theory. One position is the theory does not account for multiple people in a conversation. Most of the work is done on dyad, two person exchanges, and does not look at groups interacting. There is some evidence that the in other cultures, it is not necessarily against the rules to have more than one person speaking at the same time (Tannen, 1989). Further, it is sometimes the case that people talking at once can be perceived as someone being excited and interested in what is being said, as in Deborah Tannen's investigation of holiday conversations (1984).

The most noted opponent of the theory of conversational analysis is linguist Noam Chomsky. Mainly Chomsky sees language as an inherent part of being human, which he calls generative grammar. He says turn-taking is a culturally derived phenomenon, and not a universal aspect of human speech patterns. In other words, Chomsky says turn-taking is purely social structure, or at most, a conversational aid. Chomsky rejects the idea that language can be dissected into individual packets. He says it is impossible for language to be structured in this way given the variation seen across languages. Conversational analysis is a lockstep view of talking to one another, same gestures, same timing, same everything. Instead, Chomsky holds the notion that language is innate to humans. Therefore, grammar is distinguished between competence and performance; he believes that the particulars of actual speech are a degraded form of idealized competence. For Chomsky, nonverbal cues are irrelevant and any repetition is learned, but not universal.

Conclusion

The study of conversation analysis in sociology has been dominated by the work of Harvey Sacks and his colleagues. The theory looks at how human talk is dictated by patterns of turn-taking, turn-yielding cures, and other commonly seen elements of conversations that Sacks and others say they have observed universally. This theory was developed by taking the perspective of the ethnomethodologist, a sociological theory that assumes people make sense of their lives through common practices. Sacks and his colleagues observed hundreds of conversations to find these patterns. Generally, this theory of how we engage in talk is accepted, but the most notable opponent is linguist Noam Chomsky, who posits that turn-taking is a learned behavior, and that humans know how to talk to each other based on generative grammar.

Terms & Concepts

Conversational Analysis: The study of how people talk to one another. The most accepted theory explaining this is Harvey Sacks' look at how we take turns when interacting verbally.

Cues: In the conversational analysis, the means we use to subtly communicate with one another that we are finished with a turn and the other speaker may be speaking.

Ethnomethodology: A sociological theory developed by Harold Garfinkel, that attempts to explain the methods humans use to make sense of the social world.

Gap: In Sacks’ conversational analysis, it is an elongated pause, generally considered to create discomfort for those engaged in talk.

Turn Constructional Units: In Sacks’ conversational analysis, the complete linguistic units that make up a turn.

Turn Relevance Lace: In Sacks’ conversational analysis, the point at which it is clear that the speakers turn is completed and, either another speaker may take a turn, or the original speaker may continue with another turn.

Turn-Taking: In Sacks’ conversational analysis, the process of each speaker speaking without interrupting or overlapping another's speech. These patterns are common to all languages, according to Sacks.

Turn-Yielding: In Sacks’ conversational analysis, it is giving way to the next speaker, through the use of cues.

Bibliography

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Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Nofsinger, R. (1991). Everyday conversations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Tan, S., & Tan, A. (2006). Conversational analysis as an analytical tool for face-to-face and online conversations. Educational Media International, 43, 347–361. Retrieved September 26, 2008 from EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=22897346&site=ehost-live

Tannen, D. (1984). Coherence in spoken and written discourse. Newwood, NJ: Ablex.

Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. In Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Zimmerman, D., & West, C. (1975). Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation. In B. Thorne & N. Henley, Language and sex: Difference and dominance (pp. 105–126). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Suggested Reading

Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. New York: Praeger.

Edelsky, C. (1985). Who's got the floor? Language in Society, 10, p. 383–421.

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Tanaka, H. (1999). Turn-taking in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.