Abstract
The Handbook of Conversation Analysis presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art in conversation analysis (CA) research, covering the 40 years since the seminal works of Emanuel Schegloff, Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson. The volume provides a detailed description of the key concepts and methods of CA, as well as a critical discussion of its social nature and interdisciplinary relationship with other cognate disciplines.
The book is structured in five parts, each comprising multiple chapters looking at different aspects of CA. Part I includes four chapters that cover the intellectual roots of CA (Maynard), approaches to data collection (Mondada), CA conventions of transcription (Hepburn and Bolden) and basic conversation-analytic methods (Sidnell). These introductory chapters clearly position CA as a theoretical paradigm, as well as a practical method. Two fundamental concerns of CA are highlighted here. The first is the interaction order in talk. The chapters by Mondada and Hepburn and Bolden, focusing on a technical point of view, show that the revelation of the interaction order requires specifically designed methods of data collection and representation. The second concern is the social order enacted in talk. Maynard’s chapter emphasises the social nature of CA, and Sidnell’s contribution further points out that CA is not only interested in the regularities of human interaction, but more importantly the actions and practices enacted in talk that constitute the social order of institutions.
Part II of the handbook focuses on the structure of conversation. The eight chapters in this part cover a wide range of organisations of interaction. These include the three classic structures that are fundamental to the achievement of social order in talk-in-interaction, i.e., ‘turn-taking’ (Hayashi), ‘sequence of organisation’ (Stivers) and ‘repair’ (Kitzinger). Other structures that are covered in this part include ‘action formation and ascription’ (Levinson), ‘turn design’ (Drew), ‘turn-constructional units and the transition-relevance place’ (Clayman), ‘preface’ (Pomerantz and Heritage) and ‘overall structural organisation’ (Robinson). Some of these structures are typically employed in pure linguistic CA research, and the focus is on the recurrent regularities of interaction (e.g. turn-taking, repair). Others are used more often in ethnomethodologically informed CA research, and the focus is on the accomplishment of actions in a lengthy piece of talk (e.g. overall structural organisation, action formation and ascription). The part as a whole provides the reader with a complete toolkit to understand, document and examine the moment-by-moment revelation of interaction.
Part III identifies a wide range of aspects of talk that can be subjected to conversation analysis. A major contribution of the chapters in this part is that they demonstrate that CA can be used not only in the analysis of linguistic features of interaction, such as ‘question design’ (Hayano), ‘response design’ (Lee), ‘reference’ (Enfield), ‘phonetics and prosody’ (Walker), ‘grammar’ (Mazeland) and ‘narrative’ (Mandelbaum), but also in the analysis of paralinguistic features of conversation, such as ‘embodied action’ (Heath and Luff), ‘gaze’ (Rossano), ‘emotion and affect’ (Ruusuvuori), ‘affiliation’ (Lindström and Sorjonen) and ‘epistemics’ (Heritage). The broad coverage of topics reveals the increasing complexity of language use in society and the ways in which social interaction is organised. The chapters on paralinguistic features can also be seen as an open call for a more sophisticated multimodal analysis methodology to capture the visual, spatial, cognitive and aesthetic aspects of conversation.
Part IV contextualises the discussion in the previous two parts and identifies a range of contexts where CA is conducted. These contexts cover different populations and settings, such as children (Kidwell), atypical populations (Antaki and Wilkinson), psychotherapy (Peräkylä), medicine (Gill and Roberts), classrooms (Gardner), courtrooms (Komter) and news interviews (Clayman). The chapters show a shift of focus of CA research in the past 40 years, from identifying linguistic regularities in informal daily conversations to examining the lived ordering of practice in institutional and professional settings. This trend reflects the tendency of CA to go beyond everyday rationality to focus on the process of ‘talking the social institutions into being’ (Heritage and Clayman, 2010: 20).
The final part of the handbook traces the origin of CA and critically discusses its relationship with five cognate disciplines: sociology (Heritage and Stivers), communication (Beach), anthropology (Clemente), psychology (Potter and Edwards) and linguistics (Fox, Thompson, Ford and Couper-Kuhlen). This part echoes the opening chapter by Maynard on the intellectual roots of CA, and demonstrates that each of the five disciplines has made its unique contribution to CA and shaped its development. Of particular interest in these chapters is the discussion of the specific concepts that inform CA, which make CA a truly interdisciplinary subject, such as ‘practice and social order’ (sociology), ‘negotiation and rhetoric’ (communication), ‘participation and membership’ (anthropology), ‘positioning and intersubjectivity’ (psychology) and ‘discourse functions and structures’ (linguistics). The final section of each chapter considers the challenges and future directions of CA. It is suggested that more research is needed to look at the comparative, cultural and multimodal aspects of CA and that the theorisation of CA should draw on more longitudinal, neuro and cognitive research evidence.
To sum up, the book has three goals: to showcase the achievements of CA in the past 40 years, to consolidate CA as an established discipline, and to provide a comprehensive resource for the teaching of CA, all of which have been successfully achieved. The interdisciplinary nature of this collection provides different lenses through which the reader can examine the complexity of language use and social interaction. The book itself also represents the shared resources collectively produced by a community of CA researchers over the last four decades.