Introduction

Conversation analysis (hereafter CA) is an approach to language and social interaction that emerged in the midto late 1960s through the collaboration of the sociologists Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff as well as a number of their students, most importantly, Gail Jefferson (see Lerner, 2004). Although it originated in the United States within sociology, today working conversation analysts are to be found not only in the United States but also in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, Canada, Australia, Finland and elsewhere, in departments of anthropology, communication studies, education, linguistics and others in addition to sociology. In their earliest studies, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson worked out a rigorous method for the empirical study of talk-in-interaction and, as a result, their findings have proven robust and cumulative. Indeed, these pioneering studies (e.g. Sacks, 1974; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Schegloff et al., 1977 among others) from the 1960s and 1970s have provided the foundation for subsequent research so that we now have a large body of strongly interlocking findings about fundamental domains of human social interaction such as turn-taking, action sequencing and repair (see below). In this brief overview of CA, I begin by outlining the main goals and principles of the field. I discuss how CA emerged out of a convergence of ethnomethodology, Goffman's work on social interaction and a number of other research frameworks of the late 1960s suggesting that a pivotal and transformative moment came when Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson realized that analysts could use the same methods in studying conversation that conversationalists used in producing and understanding it. I then turn to consider a single fragment of conversation in some detail, suggesting that it, as any other such fragment, can be seen as the product of multiple, intersecting 'machineries' or 'organizations of practice'.