8

Conversational exchanges

Wittgenstein’s notion of language game discussed in the last chapter points to something that is usually neglected in those studies that look at individual speech acts: talk is exchanged, it involves the alternation between different speakers. People do not just produce questions, answers, commands, promises, apologies. They jointly construct and participate in exchanges which comprise different parts and each part acquires its meaning from its location in a sequence of acts.

Take greetings, for example. We can provide a list of expressions people use in greetings. For instance, in English, people use expressions like hello, hi, how are you, see you later, have a nice day, good-bye. But to really understand how these words work, they need to be seen as part of larger units, often a sequence of two turns produced by two different speakers. In other words, they are organized in pairs. A person says something and someone else says something back. What the first party says both conditions and creates an expectation for what the second party will say. More generally, the most common type of speech in everyday life does not consist of individual words, or sentences, or long monologues, but of sequences of relatively short utterances produced by different speakers who are particularly attuned to when to speak and particularly careful at fitting what they have to say with what has just been said.

For a long time both anthropologists and linguists alike neglected the study of conversation. Linguists felt that conversation is too messy, full of false starts and ungrammaticalities, and would not provide a coherent set of data for analyzing grammar in a systematic way. Even sociolinguists like Labov who have always been interested in actual language use, still favor interviews, which are conversa- tion-like but certainly peculiar in their organization (given that one of the party is controlling the direction of talk).

Although anthropologists had long been interested in exchanges and hence in sequences of acts between individuals and groups, up to recently, when they turned to language, they tended to avoid conversations as an object of study. Ethnographers either looked at individual words and phrases (to get the local taxonomy about kinship, illness, etc.) or collected stories or myths told by one

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Conversational exchanges

individual usually to another individual (often the fieldworker). Even those researchers working within the tradition of the ethnography of communication (see sections 1.3.1 and 9.2), for a long time concentrated on monologic genres like oratory, poetry, and personal narratives produced for the ethnographer. Despite the fact that conversational exchanges had always been important sources of information for anyone interested in cultural practices and social organization, it was not until the early 1970s that conversation per se became a proper subject for study. This was mainly due to a small group of sociologists – most prominently Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff – who concentrated on conversational exchanges as the battle ground on which to challenge commonly held assumptions about social order and the units of analysis needed for its study. They called their program “conversation analysis” to stress the point that conversation could be a legitimate topic for sociological inquiry1 and embarked on a research project that has continued to flourish, despite Harvey Sacks’s tragic death in a car accident in 1975. Although their work is still viewed with some suspicion by mainstream sociologists – especially those who consider everyday verbal interaction as a dependent variable and hence conditioned by supposedly more important societal contexts and forces (e.g. economic structures, political and legal institutions) –, conversation analysts’ research has had a considerable impact among those interested in how language is used in social interaction, linguistic anthropologists included. Conversation analysts’ terms like turn taking, floor, adjacency pair, repair, preference, have become part of the tools of the trade of researchers interested in units of analysis larger than individual sentences or individual speech acts. In this chapter I will review some of the basic units introduced by conversation analysts and discuss their epistemological assumptions vis-à-vis grammarians and ethnographers. As with other approaches and paradigms discussed in this book, in this case as well I will not be able to do justice to the wealth of contributions that have been made in the last twenty years by a small but very productive group of scholars who are regarded as the “hard core” conversation analysts.2 I will instead limit myself to two topics: (i) “units of analysis” introduced by conversation analysts and (ii) the critical

1“[In Sacks’s 1964–5 lectures] there is the distinctive and utterly critical recognition ...

that the talk can be examined as an object in its own right, and not merely as a screen on which are projected other processes, whether Balesian system problems or Schutzian interpretive strategies, or Garfinkelian commonsense methods. The talk itself was the action, and previously unsuspected details were critical resources in what was getting

done in and by the talk; and all this in naturally occurring events, in no way manipulated to allow the study of them” (Schegloff 1992a: xviii).

2A detailed introduction to conversation analysis can be found in Levinson (1983: ch. 6). See also Coulthard (1977: ch.4) and Schiffrin (1994: ch. 7). For a review of the main features of conversation analysis written by two practitioners, see Goodwin and Heritage (1990).

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