Abstract
Inspired by Garfinkel’s insights about locally produced order, Harvey Sacks, together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, developed CA in the early 1960s to study order in casual conversation between peers through tape-recordings. Conversation analysis, since the very beginning, exerted widespread impact on the study of language and discourse. Sacks summarizes some major findings of CA as follows:
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Notes
- 1.
As observed by Murray (1994, p. 364), ethnomethodologists emulate transformational grammar instead of the linguistic views held by ethnographers of speaking such as Hymes. Quoting Garfinkel and Sacks’s words: ‘members are unanimous in their recognition of the ‘machinery’ they posit’ (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1968, pp. 356–357), he argues that their notions of interactional competence were based on analogies of Chomsky’s notions. Another parallel he draws is the feature of ‘ignoring history, geography and cultural variability to hover above the empirical world as a priori, invariant, universal structures’ in both schools. (Murray, 1994, p. 364)
- 2.
Atkinson and Drew proceed from asserting the significance of turn-taking in organizing court proceedings to demonstrate the ways in which the form of question-answer effectively exerts control in court and facilitates the practical work involved. Their analyses reveal how much the ‘form’ of proceedings (more like examination than conversation) shape the way court interactions appear and eventually the way moral inferences are made.
- 3.
Extract (14) quoted in Atkinson & Drew (1979, p. 58):
B: Uh if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning I’ll give you a cup of coffee.
→ A: hehh Well that’s awfully sweet of you, I don’t think I can make it this morning. hh uhm I’m running an ad in the paper and-and uh I have to stay near the phone.
B: Well all right
A: And uh
B: Well sometime when you are free give me a call
Because I’m not always home
- 4.
That is also the reason why CA emphasizes the importance of keeping recorded data so that it can be located and verified by other researchers and lay members.
- 5.
As is made clear by Lynch and Bogen (1994, p. 84), this reflection on reification is also evident in ethnomethodology’s studies of natural scientists’ and mathematicians’ practices. By respecifying such topics as rationality, evidence, facts, methods, rules, measurement, representation and proof which constitute classic themes in intellectual history (Garfinkel, 1991), ethnomethodology demonstrates how these themes are achieved as practical phenomena, e.g. how a medical proof or scientific experiment is constituted through ‘a temporally elaborate assemblage of activities, equipment and literary residues’ (Lynch & Bogen, 1994, p. 84). They further comment that this reflexive tendency converges with the rewriting of the history, philosophy and sociology of science inspired by works of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi, Foucault, etc.
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Zhou, F. (2020). Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson: Order in Conversation. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_12
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