Rebecca Clift's Conversation analysis presents an overview of the methods and findings of conversation analysis (CA). Using data from various languages, the book offers an excellent introduction to CA.
Chapter 1 establishes two fundamental issues in CA: action and sequence. The author compares and contrasts CA with three theories in pragmatics, including speech act theory, Gricean implicature, and relevance theory. Observational approaches encompassing sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis are also discussed to show the unique contribution of CA.
Chapter 2 traces the origins of CA in the work of Harvey Sacks and highlights the influence of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel on Sacks. Central to the emic perspective to analyze data is the use of CA transcription conventions developed by Gail Jefferson. This chapter ends with a detailed list of transcription conventions.
In chapter 3, Clift explicates sequence as a fundamental element of the procedural infrastructure of interaction. Both the position and the composition of an utterance in a sequence are analyzed to understand its action. Clift then introduces the minimal interactional sequence: adjacency pairs. Expansions of adjacency pairs into larger sequences are subsequently discussed, including pre-expansion, insert expansion, and post-expansion.
The fourth chapter focuses on turn-taking in conversation and offers an overview of its essential components. The author demonstrates how grammatical resources such as syntactic, phonetic, and pragmatic elements work in conjunction with other resources such as gaze and embodiments when interlocutors take turns. After discussing how interlocutors attempt to achieve the goal of one speaker talking at a time without gap and overlap, the author analyzes how silence, choral talk, and overlap are managed.
Chapter 5 is the first of two chapters examining the structure of longer sequences of action. It focuses on preference organization, the systematic bias observed in interaction towards the use of certain language structures over others. The author illustrates how preference operates with reference to adjacency pairs and how it also shapes larger sequences.
Chapter 6 is the second chapter analyzing the structure of longer sequences of action with an emphasis on identity in interaction. This chapter introduces Sacks’ work on the membership categorization device, the means by which interlocutors organize knowledge of categories and make social inferences. The author then delves into two domains that are essential for understanding actions—knowledge and authority—to demonstrate how identities are constructed in the moment-by-moment unfolding of an interaction.
Chapter 7 explores the organization of repair, the means by which interlocutors maintain and defend mutual understandings. Four types of repairs are examined, including self-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, other-initiated self-repair, and other-initiated other-repair. In addition to analyzing repair initiations via the verbal channel, repair initiations undertaken by nonverbal resources such as gaze and gestures are also discussed.
Finally, Chapter 8 summarizes the main points articulated in the previous chapters and reinforces action and sequence as two essential issues in doing conversation analysis. This informative book will be most appealing to students, teachers, and researchers interested in studying social interaction.
