ABSTRACT
As a new method for the study of talk-in-interaction, Conversation Analysis (henceforth ‘CA’) has its beginnings in Harvey Sacks’ lectures (Sacks, 1992) and a number of key publications by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson in the 1960’s and 70’s (Jefferson et al., 1987; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973, etc.). In Sacks’ lectures and publications, one finds, for the first time, close observations of how situated talk is designed to be heard in particular ways. One also finds in Sacks’ work detailed descriptions of the procedures (or ‘ethnomethods’ – see Garfinkel, 1967) with which parties-in-interaction jointly achieve intersubjectivity through sequences of turns-at-talk. Scholarly treatments of language prior to Sacks, as seen in the publications of linguists and philosophers of language for example, suffered from a number of theoretical and empirical problems. Theoretically, linguistic signs were conceptualized as codes, and communication as an encoding and decoding process (Saussure, 1959; Russell, 1940). For a variety of reasons, form was given precedence over meaning (Bloomfield, 1933; Chomsky, 1957). Once form is divorced from meaning, it is impossible to put under scrutiny the true relationship between them – how, in detail, meanings and interpretations are constructed by parties to a conversation with the help of forms. Empirically, while ‘context’ has always been known to be important, in practice more lip service than undivided attention has been paid to it, so much so that one is hard pressed to find a definition or operationally feasible specification of what constitutes ‘context’. Add to this the belief that the study of language could proceed profitably by pondering over single sentences in isolation, which furthermore are invented or re-constituted through memory, and the vicious circle is complete.
