Conversation analysis (henceforth CA) has dominated the study of social interaction across the social sciences, providing a rigorous apparatus for understanding social exchange. This book gathers eighteen contributions, organized into three sections, honouring the discipline-defining work of Emanuel A. Schegloff—CA's co-originator and leading authority. His enduring influence, as attested by the contributions to this volume, is widely observable in CA's theoretical formulations, methods, findings, and rhetoric, and expands across many disciplines.
The book opens with an introduction, followed by an extended interview with Schegloff. The former showcases his life and scholarly work. The latter presents, in an easy-to-follow manner, Schegloff's perspective on CA's origins, objectives, major developments, and affordances, and offers rich biographical and other behind-the-scenes details that rarely surface in the CA literature.
The next section comprises eleven empirical studies that espouse CA's sustained cumulative mentality, by building on and developing Schegloff's work. They explicate in detail how talk- and other conduct-in-interaction is organized by using naturally occurring ordinary and institutional interactions in English, German, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian. Most chapters address the management of responses to sequence-initiating actions. Anita Pomerantz identifies three types of sequences where responses to questions expose the latter's inferred purposes, and discusses the relevant bases for understanding the purposes. Irene Koshik investigates (dis)alignment with wh-questions that communicate reversed polarity assertions and challenge the grounds for a prior claim or action. Seung-Hee Lee examines how responding to an institutional request is co-constructed over several action sequences. Anna Lindström shows that accepting remote proposals requires not only an affirmative response token but also a display of commitment to fulfil the proposal. Finally, Sun-Young Oh & Yong-Yae Park explore interactional functions of Korean ung and e acknowledgement tokens.
In the next two articles, Maria M. Egbert identifies an undocumented type of other-initiated repair—positioned questions, which are unique in their remoteness to a trouble-source and exclusive occurrence in nondyadic interactions. Celia Kitzinger & Sue Wilkinson show how the linguistically gendered reference term husband is used to make gender interactionally relevant and how this relevance becomes disattended.
Another two contributions address the overall structural organizations of episodes in talk-in-interaction. Paul Drew probes misidentification and nonrecognition in call openings, while Galina L. Bolden investigates tacit and explicit closing initiations in Russian telephone conversations. In the last two studies, Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu & John Heritage's cross-linguistic comparison of interactional functions of three epistemic particles implies equivalence problems in translation. Gene H. Lerner & Geoffrey Raymond's analysis demonstrates inconspicuous methods for minimizing the transformation (pivoting) of emerging embodied actions into other actions-in-progress.
The third section assesses Schegloff's work. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen catalogues three chronological stages in his contributions to a ‘new-age’, interactional revolution in linguistics. Stephen C. Levinson reflects on the dangerousness of Schegloff's formulation that all social order is interactionally produced, which provokes a brief response from Schegloff.
Overall, this volume evidences the centrality of Schegloff's work to contemporary and, most probably, future CA. The studies present state-of-the-art CA research and can be an inspiration for new scholarly endeavours. The book is valuable to scholars from diverse fields who seek to understand the detailed orchestration of talk- and other conduct-in-interaction.
