Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction

Paul EkmanUniversity of California, San Francisco

Klaus R. SchererJustus-Liebig-Universita t Giessen

General Editors

Structures of Social Action

Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction

This series is jointly published by the Cambridge University Press and the Edi-tions de la Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, as part of the joint publishingagreement established in 1977 between the Fondation de la Maison des Sciencesde 1'Homme and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press.

Cette collection est publiee en co-edition par Cambridge University Press et lesEditions de la Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme. Elle s'integre dans le pro-gramme de co-edition etabli en 1977 par la Fondation de la Maison des Sciencesde 1'Homme et les Syndics de Cambridge University Press.

Other books in the series:Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman (eds.) Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal BehaviorResearchPaul Ekman (ed.) Emotion in the Human Face

Structures of Social ActionStudies in Conversation AnalysisEdited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataMain entry under title:Structures of social action.(Studies in emotion and social interaction)Includes index.1. Conversation. 2. Oral communication.I. Atkinson, J. Maxwell (John Maxwell) II. Heritage,John. III. Series.P95.45.S86 1984 001.54'2 84-12169ISBN 0 521 24815 9 hard coversISBN 0 521 31862 9 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

Preface page viiTranscript notation ix

1 Introduction 1John Heritage and J. Maxwell Atkinson

PART I ORIENTATIONS 17

2 Notes on methodology 21Harvey Sacks

3 On some questions and ambiguities in conversation 28Emanuel A. Schegloff

PART II PREFERENCE ORGANIZATION 53

4 Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: somefeatures of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes 57Anita Pomerantz

5 Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, andproposals dealing with potential or actual rejection 102Judy Davidson

6 Speakers' reportings in invitation sequences 129Paul Drew

7 Pursuing a response 152Anita Pomerantz

PART III TOPIC ORGANIZATION 165

8 Generating topic: the use of topic initial elicitors 167Graham Button and Neil Casey

v

vi Contents

9 On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble toinappropriately next-positioned matters 191Gail Jefferson

PART IV THE INTEGRATION OF TALK WITHNONVOCAL ACTIVITIES 223

10 Notes on story structure and the organization ofparticipation 225Charles Goodwin

11 Talk and recipiency: sequential organization in speech andbody movement 247Christian Heath

12 On some gestures' relation to talk 266Emanuel A. Schegloff

PART V ASPECTS OF RESPONSE 297

13 A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequentialplacement 299John Heritage

14 On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles 346Gail Jefferson

15 Public speaking and audience responses: some techniquesfor inviting applause 370/. Maxwell Atkinson

PART VI EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES ASSOCIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA 411

16 On doing "being ordinary" 413Harvey Sacks

References 430Subject index 441Index of names 444

Preface

This book is the result of a collaboration that began when, as co-con-venors of the Sociology of Language Study Group of the British So-ciological Association, we organized the Social Science Research Coun-cil/British Sociological Association International Conference on PracticalReasoning and Discourse Processes, which was held 2-6 July 1979 at St.Hugh's College, Oxford. All the contributors to the present book, withthe exception of the late Harvey Sacks, were among those who partici-pated at the conference, and earlier versions of Chapters 5, 8 and 14were originally presented there. Although the book is not a full collec-tion of the proceedings, it is the result of a cooperative endeavor thatbegan at the Oxford conference.

In acknowledging our debt to all those who helped to make the con-ference a memorable intellectual experience, we would like to record ourthanks to the Sociology and Social Administration Committee of the(British) Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for the award of a grantthat made it possible. Our gratitude to SSRC also extends beyond thisgrant to a longer-term appreciation of the active and constructive part ithas played in facilitating the development of conversation analytic re-search in Britain. For it may be noted that no fewer than eight of thetwelve contributors to this book have, at one time or another, had thebenefit of financial support from SSRC, as research students, as recip-ients of project grants, or as members of its research staff. It is nevereasy to establish new approaches to social science research, especially ifthe concerns of those approaches are perceived as being "pure" or "fun-damental," rather than "applied" or "policy-oriented." Where thenumber of active researchers is relatively small, funding even on quite amodest scale can have a major impact on the extent to which it is possi-ble to develop such work. Conversation analysis in Britain has benefitedgreatly from the flexibility and responsiveness of SSRC funding policies,

vn

viii Preface

and we hope very much that this book will add to the growing evidencethat such investments are beginning to pay dividends.

Of the many colleagues whose assistance made this book possible, weare grateful to Emanuel Schegloff, who, in his capacity as literary ex-ecutor, gave us the necessary permissions to include two previouslyunpublished pieces by Harvey Sacks. We also thank Gail Jefferson, whoselected and edited the original transcripts of his lectures. Her com-ments, together with those of Anita Pomerantz, on earlier drafts of ourintroduction were also much appreciated, though we have probablytaken less notice of them than we should have done. The fact that GailJefferson contributed two original papers is only the most visible evi-dence of a commitment to the present project that was undertaken moreseriously and generously than editors can reasonably expect.

Neither the original Oxford conference nor this book would havebecome a reality without the help of Noel Blatchford of the Centre forSocio-Legal Studies, who, among other things, carried out the oneroustask of preparing camera-ready copy of the transcripts. We are alsograteful to Sue Allen-Mills of Cambridge University Press for her pa-tience, advice, and general support during the various stages leading upto publication.

/. Maxwell AtkinsonJohn Heritage

Transcript notation

The transcript notation used in this book, and in conversation analyticresearch more generally, has been developed by Gail Jefferson. It is asystem that continues to evolve in response to current research in-terests, and for some of the chapters included in the present collection ithas been necessary to incorporate symbols for representing various non-vocal activities, such as gaze, gestures, and applause.

Previous experience suggests that it is useful to group symbols withreference to the phenomena they represent.

1. Simultaneous utterancesUtterances starting simultaneously are linked together with either dou-ble or single left-hand brackets:

rr Tom: rrl used to smoke a lot when I was youngBob: I used to smoke Camels

2. Overlapping utterancesWhen overlapping utterances do not start simultaneously, the point atwhich an ongoing utterance is joined by another is marked with a singleleft-hand bracket, linking an ongoing with an overlapping utterance atthe point where overlap begins:

r Tom: I used to smoke ,-a lotBob: He thinks he 's real tough

The point where overlapping utterances stop overlapping is markedwith a single right-hand bracket:

1 Tom: I used to smoke ra lot-, more than th i s

J Bob: LI seeJ

ix

x Transcript notation

3. Contiguous utterancesWhen there is no interval between adjacent utterances, the second beinglatched immediately to the first (without overlapping it), the utterancesare linked together with equal signs:

Tom: I used to smoke a lot=Bob: =He thinks he 's real tough

The equal signs are also used to link different parts of a single speaker'sutterance when those parts constitute a continuous flow of speech thathas been carried over to another line, by transcript design, to accommo-date an intervening interruption:

Tom: I used to smoke j-a lot more than this=Bob: "-You used to smokeTom: =but I never inhaled the smoke

Sometimes more than one speaker latches directly onto a just-completedutterance, and a case of this sort is marked with a combination of equalsigns and double left-hand brackets:

Tom: I used to smoke a lot==f [ Bob:

= r rH e

thinks he 's toughAnn: Ll So did I

When overlapping utterances end simultaneously and are latched ontoby a subsequent utterance, the link is marked by a single right-handedbracket and equal signs:

Tom: I used to smoke a lot-,] = Bob: ' I seeJ~

Ann: =So did I

4. Intervals within and between utterances

When intervals in the stream of talk occur, they are timed in tenths of asecond and inserted within parentheses, either within an utterance:

(0.0) Lil: When I was (0.6) oh nine or ten

or between utterances:

Hal: Step right up(1.3)

Transcript notation xi

Hal: I said step right up(0.8)

Joe: Are you talking to me

A short untimed pause within an utterance is indicated by a dash:

- Dee: Uhm - my mother will be right in

Untimed intervals heard between utterances are described within dou-ble parentheses and inserted where they occur:

((pause)) Rex: Are you ready to order((pause))

Pam: Yes thank you we are

5. Characteristics of speech delivery

In these transcripts, punctuation is used to mark not conventional gram-matical units but, rather, attempts to capture characteristics of speechdelivery. For example, a colon indicates an extension of the sound orsyllable it follows:

co:Ion Ron: What ha:ppened to you

and more colons prolong the stretch:

co::lons Mae: I j u : : s s can't comeTim: I'm so: : : sorry r e : : :ally I am

The other punctuation marks are used as follows:

A period indicates a stopping fal l in tone,not necessarily the end of a sentence.

A comma indicates a continuing intonation,not necessarily between clauses of sentences.

? A question mark indicates a r ising inflection,not necessarily a question.

? A combined question mark/corana indicates a r isingintonation weaker than that indicated by aquestion mark.

! An exclamation point indicates an animatedtone, not necessarily an exclamation.

xii Transcript notation

A single dash indicates a halting, abruptcutoff, or, when multiple dashes hyphenatethe syllables of a word or connect str ingsof words, the stream of talk so marked hasa starrmering quality.

Marked rising and falling shifts in intonation are indicated by upwardand downward pointing arrows immediately prior to the rise or fall:

| f Thatcher: I am however (0.2) very J fortunate(0.4) in having (0.6) a tmar:vlousdepjuty

Emphasis is indicated by underlining:

Ann: I t happens to be mine

Capital letters are used to indicate an utterance, or part thereof, that isspoken much louder than the surrounding talk:

Announcer: an the winner: j i z : s (1.4) RACHEL ROBERTSfor YfANKS

A degree sign is used to indicate a passage of talk which is quieter thanthe surrounding talk:

0 0 M: -hhhh (. )l*n: :'Ow i s yih mother

by: thfwa:y.h

Audible aspirations (hhh) and inhalations (hhh) are inserted in thespeech where they occur:

hhh Pam: An thi(hh)s i s for you hhh"hhh Don: hhhh O(hh) tha(h)nk you rea(hh)lly

A 'gh' placed within a word indicates gutturalness:

gh J: Ohgh(h)h hhuh huh huh *huh

A subscribed dot is used as a "hardener/7 In this capacity it can indicate,for example, an especially dentalized "t":

dot J: Was i t ?la:sT night.

Double parentheses are used to enclose a description of some phe-nomenon with which the transcriptionist does not want to wrestle.

Transcript notation xiii

These can be vocalizations that are not, for example, spelled gracefullyor recognizably:

(( )) Tom: I used to ((Cough)) smoke a lotBob: ((sniff)) He thinks he's toughAnn: ((snorts))

or other details of the conversational scene:

Jan: This i s just delicious((telephone rings))

Kim: I f l l get i t

or various characterizations of the talk:

Ron: ((in falsetto)) I can do i t nowMax: ((whispered)) He'll never do i t

When part of an utterance is delivered at a pace quicker than the sur-rounding talk, it is indicated by being enclosed between "less than "signs:

>< Steel: the Guar:dian newspaper looked through >themanifestoes< la:st^ fweek

6. Transcriptionist doubt

In addition to the timings of intervals and inserted aspirations and inha-lations, items enclosed within single parentheses are in doubt, as in:

( ) Ted: I ('spose I'm not)(Ben): We a l l ( t - )

Here "spose I'm not/' the identity of the second speaker, and "t-"represent different varieties of transcriptionist doubt.

Sometimes multiple possibilities are indicated:

(spoke to Mark)i e a

* l('spose I'm not)

Ben: We all try to figure a [ ^ f f i ^ r l ] for i t

When single parentheses are empty, no hearing could be achieved forthe string of talk or item in question:

xiv Transcript notation

Todd: My ( ) catching( ): In the highest ( )Here the middle of Todd's utterance, the speaker of the subsequentutterance, and the end of the subsequent utterance could not be recover-ed.

7. Gaze direction

The gaze of the speaker is marked above an utterance, and that of theaddressee below it. A line indicates that the party marked is gazingtoward the other. The absence of a line indicates lack of gaze. Dots markthe transition movement from nongaze to gaze, and the point where thegaze reaches the other is marked with an X:

Beth: . . . . rX

Terry- KJerry's fascinated with elephantsDon: LX

Here Beth moves her gaze toward Don while saying "Terry"; Don'sgaze shifts toward and reaches hers just after she starts to sy "fascina-ted."

If gaze arrives within a pause each tenth of a second within the pauseis marked with a dash:

Ann: . . . rX

Well ( r-) We coulda used La liddle, marijuana.=

Beth: lX

Here Beth's gaze reaches Ann three-tenths of a second after she has said"Well-," and one-tenth of a second before she continues with "Wecoulda used. . . . "

Commas are used to indicate the dropping of gaze:

Ann:Karen has this new hou:se. en it's got all this

Beth: , , ,

Here Beth's gaze starts to drop away as Ann begins to say "new."Movements like head nodding are marked at points in the talk where

they occur:

Transcript notation xv

Ann:Karen has t h i s new hou:se. en i t ' s got a l l t h i s

Beth: , , , ((Nod))

Here Beth, who is no longer gazing at Ann, nods as the latter says"got."

Asterisks are used in a more ad hoc fashion to indicate particularphenomena discussed in the text. In the following fragment, for exam-ple, Goodwin uses them to indicate the position where Beth puts food inher mouth:

Ann:= l ike - (0.2) s s i l v e r y : : g-go: ld wwa:rllpaper.

Beth: ******* # . Lx

8. Applause

Strings of X's are used to indicate applause, with lower- and uppercaseletters marking quiet and loud applause respectively:

Audience: xxXXXXXXXXXXXXxxx

Here applause amplitude increases and then decreases.An isolated single clap is indicated by dashes on each side of the x:

Audience: -x -

Spasmodic or hesitant clapping is indicated by a chain punctuated bydashes:

Audience: -x-x-x

A line broken by numbers in parentheses indicates the duration of ap-plause from the point of onset (or prior object) to the nearest tenth of asecond. The number of X's does not indicate applause duration exceptwhere it overlaps with talk, as in the second of the following examples:

Speaker: I beg >to supp^ort the mJk)tion

xvi Transcript notation

S p e a k e r : THIS JWEEK rSO >THAT YOU C M STILL MAKE-.

A u d i e n c e : l xx~XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXJ"S p e a k e r :

= f f YER MINDS UP Sam: And one for your mother too I ' l l bet

the arrows in the margin would call attention to Sam's utterances asinstances of continuations.

Horizontal ellipses indicate that an utterance is being reported only inpart, with additional speech coming before, in the middle of, or after thereported fragment, depending on the location of the ellipses. Thus, inthe following example, the parts of Don's utterance between "said" and"y'know" are omitted:

Don: But I said . . . y'know

Vertical ellipses indicate that intervening turns at talking have beenomitted from the fragment:

Bob: Well I always say give i t your a l l

Bob: And I always say give i t everything

Codes that identify fragments being quoted designate parts of thechapter authors' own tape collections.

1. IntroductionJOHN HERITAGE J. MAXWELL ATKINSONUniversity of Warwick University of Oxford

The present collection adds to a growing range of studies that report onrecent research into naturally occurring social action and interactionundertaken from a conversation analytic perspective. Foreshadowed bythe investigative initiatives of Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman intothe organization of everyday conduct, this perspective was extensivelyarticulated in Harvey Sacks's privately circulated lectures and developedinto a distinctive research literature in association with his collaborators,Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.

The central goal of conversation analytic research is the descriptionand explication of the competences that ordinary speakers use and relyon in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction. At itsmost basic, this objective is one of describing the procedures by whichconversationalists produce their own behavior and understand and dealwith the behavior of others. A basic assumption throughout is Gar-finkel's (1967:1) proposal that these activities - producing conduct andunderstanding and dealing with it - are accomplished as the account-able products of common sets of procedures.

This objective and its underlying assumption provide a basic means ofanalysis. Specifically, analysis can be generated out of matters observ-able in the data of interaction. The analyst is thus not required to specu-late upon what the interactants hypothetically or imaginably under-stood, or the procedures or constraints to which they could conceivablyhave been oriented. Instead, analysis can emerge from observation ofthe conduct of the participants. Schegloff and Sacks have summarizedthe assumptions that guide this form of research, and the analytic re-source thus provided:

We have proceeded under the assumption (an assumption borneout by our research) that in so far as the materials we worked withexhibited orderliness, they did so not only to us, indeed not in thefirst place for us, but for the co-participants who had produced

1

2 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

them. If the materials (records of natural conversation) were or-derly, they were so because they had been methodically producedby members of the society for one another, and it was a feature ofthe conversations we treated as data that they were produced so asto allow the display by the co-participants to each other of theirorderliness, and to allow the participants to display to each othertheir analysis, appreciation and use of that orderliness. According-ly, our analysis has sought to explicate the ways in which thematerials are produced by members in orderly ways that exhibittheir orderliness and have their orderliness appreciated and used,and have that appreciation displayed and treated as the basis forsubsequent action. (1973:290)

Conversation analysts have tended to present their findings by show-ing regular forms of organization in a large variety of materials producedby a range of speakers. However, the explication of such forms is onlypart of the analytic process. Generally, the analyst will also take steps todemonstrate that the regularities are methodically produced and ori-ented to by the participants as normatively oriented-to grounds for in-ference and action. As part of this latter objective, the analysis of "de-viant cases" - in which some proposed regular conversational proce-dure or form is not implemented or realized - is regularly undertaken.Integral to this analysis is the task of describing the role that particularconversational procedures play in relation to specific interactional ac-tivities. Beyond this task lie the wider objectives of describing, whereverpossible given the current state of knowledge, the role that particularconversational procedures play in relation to one another and to otherorders of conversational and social organization. The pursuit of thesevarious aims has involved the formulation of a distinctive approach todata collection and of new attitudes toward its analysis.

1. The collection and analysis of data

Within conversation analysis there is an insistence on the use of mate-rials collected from naturally occurring occasions of everyday interactionby means of audio- and video-recording equipment or film. This policycontrasts markedly with many of the traditional methods of data collec-tion prominent in the social and behavioral sciences. Most obviously, itrepresents a departure both from the use of interviewing techniques inwhich the verbal reports of interview subjects are treated as acceptablesurrogates for the observation of actual behavior and from the use ofexperimental methodologies in which the social scientist must neces-

Introduction 3

sarily manipulate, direct, or otherwise intervene in the subjects' behav-ior. It also contrasts with observational studies in which data are re-corded in field notes or with the use of precoded schedules. Finally, theempirical emphasis of the research program also breaks with those the-oretical traditions in which native intuitions, expressed as idealized orinvented examples, are treated as an adequate basis for making anddebating analytic claims.

A number of factors inform the insistence on the use of recordingtechnologies as a means of data collection over subjects' reports, observ-ers' notes, or unaided intuitions. Anyone who is familiar with conversa-tional materials or who examines the transcripts of talk used in this bookwill be vividly aware of the limitations of recollection or intuition ingenerating data by comparison with the richness and diversity of em-pirically occurring interaction. Virtually none of the data of this volumecould conceivably be the product of recollection or intuitive invention,nor, as Sacks points out in Chapter 2, would such invented "data"prove persuasive as evidence relevant to the analysis of interaction. Dataof this sort can always be viewed as the implausible products of selectiveprocesses involving recollection, attention, or imagination.

A parallel range of considerations emerges in connection with the useof experimentally produced data. Experimental procedures are generallysuccessful to the extent that, through experimental manipulation, be-havioral variation is limited to those aspects selected for investigationunder controlled conditions. In this context, it is the experimenter whomust determine the relevant dependent and independent variables, andthe experimenter's formulation of these variables will tend to be re-stricted by what he or she can anticipate on an intuitive basis. Yet with-out previous exposure to a range of naturally occurring interactionaldata, the experimenter is unlikely to anticipate the range, scope, andvariety of behavioral variation that might be responsive to experimentalmanipulation, nor will he or she be in a position to extrapolate fromexperimental findings to real situations of conduct. By the same token,while certain of the experimenter's data may or may not be artifacts ofthe more general experimental situation in which the data were pro-duced, such influences (if any) can be determined only by systematiccomparison with a large corpus of naturally occurring data. The mosteconomical procedure, therefore, has been to work on naturally occur-ring materials from the outset. Naturally occurring interaction presentsan immense range of circumstances - effectively amounting to a "natu-ral laboratory" - for the pursuit of hunches and the investigation of thelimits of particular formulations by systematic comparison.

4 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

A further, more general issue is raised by the previous observations.Conversation analytic researchers have come to an awareness that onlythe smallest fraction of what is used and relied on in interaction isavailable to unaided intuition. Conversation analytic studies are thusdesigned to achieve systematic analyses of what, at best, is intuitivelyknown and, more commonly, is tacitly oriented to in ordinary conduct.In this context, nothing that occurs in interaction can be ruled out, apriori, as random, insignificant, or irrelevant. The pursuit of systematicanalysis thus requires that recorded data be available, not only for re-peated observation, analysis, and reanalysis, but also for the publicevaluation of observations and findings that is an essential preconditionfor analytic advance. Therefore in both the original work and its collec-tive assessment, the analytic intuitions of research workers are devel-oped, elaborated, and supported by reference to bodies of data andcollections of instances of phenomena. In this process, an analyticculture has gradually developed that is firmly based in naturally occur-ring empirical materials.

In sum, the use of recorded data serves as a control on the limitationsand fallibilities of intuition and recollection; it exposes the observer to awide range of interactional materials and circumstances and also pro-vides some guarantee that analytic conclusions will not arise as artifactsof intuitive idiosyncracy, selective attention or recollection, or experi-mental design. The availability of a taped record enables repeated anddetailed examination of particular events in interaction and hence greatlyenhances the range and precision of the observations that can be made.The use of such materials has the additional advantage of providinghearers and, to a lesser extent, readers of research reports with directaccess to the data about which analytic claims are being made, therebymaking them available for public scrutiny in a way that further mini-mizes the influence of individual preconceptions. Finally, because thedata are available in raw form, they are cumulatively reusable in a vari-ety of investigations and can be reexamined in the light of new observa-tions or findings. Each recording necessarily preserves a very substantialrange of interactional phenomena, and an initial noticing of any one ofthese can motivate a search through other data for similar occurrenceswhich were previously overlooked or the significance of which had re-mained unrecognized. Such a research process is possible only by virtueof the fact that the data-collection procedure is not constrained by aspecific research design or by reference to some particular hypothesis.

This approach to data collection and use is closely associated withsignificant innovations in the way everyday behavior is researched.1

Introduction 5

Rather than studying single utterances or actions as the isolated prod-ucts of individuals having particular goals or communicative intents, theanalyses presented in this book, without exception, focus on uncoveringthe socially organized features of talk in context, with a major focus on actionsequences. Although the central research topic of these essays - conver-sational interaction - might seem to render this focus on sequence self-recommending, it represents a sufficiently substantial departure fromaccepted practices, both within linguistics and sociology, to requiresome further comment.

2. The focus on sequential analysis

The development of speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) inlinguistics has greatly forwarded the view that utterances can be useful-ly analyzed as conventionally grounded social actions. However, thisviewpoint has developed within a disciplinary matrix which gives ana-lytic primacy to the isolated sentence, and in which sentence analysis isconducted in terms of syntactic and semantic features that are them-selves treated as independent of discursive considerations.2 The netresult is an approach to speech acts that in the first place seeks toestablish the act accomplished by an utterance considered in isolation -the "literal meaning" of the utterance - and then proceeds to accountfor variations in the meaning or uptake of the utterance according tovariations of the circumstances in which it is uttered (Gordon and Lakoff1971; Searle 1975).3 This mode of analysis has been the object of sus-tained criticism within the literature of conversation analysis fromSacks's earliest lectures onward.4 Its many difficulties (Levinson 1979,1981a, 1981b) ultimately derive, as Schegloff (Chapter 3) points out,from the failure of its proponents to grasp that utterances are in the firstinstance contextually understood by reference to their placement andparticipation within sequences of actions. For conversation analysts,therefore, it is sequences and turns within sequences, rather than iso-lated sentences or utterances, that have become the primary units ofanalysis. This focus on participant orientation to the turn-within-se-quence character of utterances in conversational interaction has signifi-cant substantive and methodological consequences.

At the substantive level, conversation analytic research into sequenceis based on the recognition that, in a variety of ways, the production ofsome current conversational action proposes a here-and-now definitionof the situation to which subsequent talk will be oriented. Comparative-ly straightforward instances of this process occur when a current turn

6 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

projects a relevant next action, or range of actions, to be accomplishedby another speaker in the next turn - a phenomenon generically refer-enced as the "sequential implicativeness" of a turn's talk (Schegloff andSacks 1973:296). In its strongest form, this projection of a relevant nextaction may be accomplished by the production of the first-pair part of an"adjacency-pair" structure (ibid.), such as "greeting-greeting," "ques-tion-answer," or "invitation-acceptance/rejection."

Once it is recognized that some current or "first" action projects someappropriate "second," it becomes relevant to examine the various waysin which a second speaker may accomplish such a second, or analyzablywithhold its accomplishment, or avoid its accomplishment by undertak-ing some other activity. If it can then be shown that the producers of thefirst action deal in systematically organized ways with a variety of alter-native seconds (or a noticeably absent second), then it will also be dem-onstrated that the object of investigation is an institutionalized organiza-tion for the activity in question that is systematically oriented to byspeakers.

These observations can be generalized outward from the comparative-ly simple adjacency-pair organization by remarking that virtually everyutterance (excluding "response cries" [Goffman 1981] but including ini-tial utterances) occurs at some structurally defined place in talk (seeSchegloff, Chapter 3). Thus the vast majority of utterances occur asselections from a field of possibilities made relevant by some prior utter-ance, and in their turn project a range of possible "nexts." Most utter-ances, therefore, can be analyzed as dealing with a prior in some wayand, among other things, as indicating their producers' preparedness toforward, acquiesce in, or resist the course of action aimed at by an earlierspeaker. Self-evidently, considerations concerning the regulation of so-cial relationships are raised by these issues (Goffman 1955, 1963, 1964,1971). It follows, then, that just as the "literal meaning" of a sentencecannot be determined by reference to a "null context" (Garfinkel 1967;Garfinkel and Sacks 1970; Searle 1979,1980), so too no empirically occur-ring utterance ever occurs outside, or external to, some specific se-quence. Whatever is said will be said in some sequential context, and itsillocutionary force will be determined by reference to what it accom-plishes in relation to some sequentially prior utterance or set of utter-ances. As long as a state of talk prevails, there will be no escape or time-out from these considerations. And, insofar as unfolding sequences andtheir constituent turns are unavoidable analytic concerns for interac-tants, they provide a powerful and readily accessible point of entry intothe unavoidable contextedness of actual talk.

Introduction 7

All of the chapters in the present book deal with the systematicallyorganized workings of interaction sequences. The particular activitiesstudied vary widely from the organization of gaze and bodily comport-ment in relation to turns at talk (described in the chapters by Schegloff,Goodwin, and Heath); through the sequencing of laughter (Jefferson),particle use (Heritage), the structuring of sequences involving assess-ments (Pomerantz), proposals (Davidson), invitations (Drew), sequencesin which topics are initiated (Button and Casey) or shifted (Jefferson); tothe rhetorical techniques of public speakers (Atkinson). In all cases,however, basic structural forms for the activities in question are outlined,their logic is described and variations or more complex cases are dis-cussed. Throughout, the authors show the normative organization of andorientation to the standard sequences as structures of activity and howparticular sequential variations can be understood with reference to theways in which they display a sensitivity to their interactional contexts(e.g., by being specifically designed for some particular recipient [Sacks,Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974:727]). And, although a shorthand "inten-tionalist" language is employed in these chapters, the perspectivefocuses on the underlying structures informing the interpretation andtreatment of a speaker's action by a recipient and maintains, except inspecific cases, a relatively agnostic stance on the question of how far thespeaker consciously aimed at some particular interpretation. This ag-nosticism is consistent with the proposal that the objects of study areinstitutionalized structures of talk that are oriented to by speakers withvarying degrees of reflexive awareness.

3. Sequential organization: methodological aspects

At the methodological level, that speakers understand an utterance byreference to its turn-within-sequence character provides a central re-source for both the participants and the overhearing analyst to makesense of the talk. A number of points can be made in this connection.

First, it is a general finding within conversation analytic studies thattalk analyzably proceeds on a turn-by-turn basis and that "generally, aturn's talk will be heard as directed to a prior turn's talk, unless specialtechniques are used to locate some other talk to which it is directed"(Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974:728). Moreover, given that eachnext turn at talk is heard as directed to the prior, its producer willgenerally be heard to display an analysis, understanding, or apprecia-tion of the prior turn's talk that is exhibited in his or her responsivetreatment of it (see Schegloff, Chapter 3).

8 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

Thus in the following two sequences the same individual (J) is therecipient of information from different coparticipants about the recentarrival of furniture:

(1)A: the two beds'v come this mo:rning. the new

beids. -hhhh An:d uh b ' t ofnly oneJ: -> LfIh_ b ' t that wz Jquick

that wz quick them coming.0A: Not too ba:d. B't thez only one ma:tress Jwith i t .

(2)I: the things fev arrived from Ba:rker:'n

Stone' ou r : se,

J: l Ohx : : .( -)

J: -> Ofh c'n a.h c'm rouj_nd,h,hI: 'A n ' ^ ^Yefs: rplease-. thatfs1wft=

[ha l h a J *a : hJI: =1 wantche tih come rouind.

Here it can be noticed that while the two "informings" are rather similarin character, J's subsequent treatment of them evidences quite differentanalyses of their implicativeness. Whereas she treats the first as theoccasion for a comment about the speed with which an order was deliv-ered, she treats the second as implicating that her informant wants herto come and inspect/admire the new furniture by preempting a (possi-bly) forthcoming invitation (see Drew, Chapter 6, for a discussion of thisand related examples).

The point here, and it is a crucial one, is that however a recipientanalyzes these informings and whatever the interpretative conclusionsof such an analysis, some conclusion will be displayed in the recipient's nextturn at talk. Thus whereas J's assessment of the events reported in thefirst informing treats the latter as plain news, her self-invitation in re-sponse to the second treats it as implicating her informant's desire tohave her come round. And these treatments of the prior turn are avail-able and publicly visible as the means by which first speakers can deter-mine how they were understood. Thus the sequential next-positionedlinkage between any two actions is a critical resource by which a firstspeaker can determine the sense that a second made of his or her utter-ance. Schegloff and Sacks's observations concerning paired utterancescan thus be generalized to next-positioned utterances as well:

Introduction 9

By an adjacently produced second, a speaker can show that heunderstood what a prior aimed at, and that he is willing to go alongwith that. Also, by virtue of the occurrence of an adjacently pro-duced second, the doer of a first can see that what he intended wasindeed understood, and that it was or was not accepted. Also, ofcourse, a second can assert his failure to understand, or disagree-ment, and, inspection of a second by a first can allow the firstspeaker to see that while the second thought he understood, in-deed he misunderstood. It is then through the use of adjacentpositioning that appreciations, failures, correctings, et cetera canthemselves be understandably attempted. (Schegloff and Sacks1973:297-8)5

It needs only to be added that, just as a second speaker's analysis andtreatment of the prior is available to the first speaker, so it is also avail-able to overhearers of the talk, including social scientists. The latter maythus proceed to analyze turns at talk, together with the analyses andtreatments of them that are produced by the parties to the talk, andemploy methodologies that fully take account of these analyses andtreatments. Students of talk are thus provided with a considerable ad-vantage that is unavailable to analysts of isolated sentences or other"text" materials that cannot be analyzed without hypothesizing or spec-ulating about the possible ways in which utterances, sentences, or textsmight be interpreted.

This discussion can now be further generalized by the observationthat the second speaker can subsequently, by looking to the next turn inthe sequence, determine the adequacy of the understanding and treat-ment of a prior displayed in his or her own turn. This observation can bepursued by noticing, firstly, that one option pervasively open to the firstspeaker after any second turn is explicitly to correct or repair any misun-derstanding displayed in the second speaker's turn. A rather clear in-stance of this kind of "third position repair" (Schegloff 1979c) is thefollowing:

(3) |CDHQ:I:52]A: Which on::s are closed, an' which ones are open.Z: Most of 'em. This, th i s t h i s , th is ((pointing))A: -> 11 'on ' t mean on the

shel ters , I mean on the roads.

In this case, Z's analysis of the prior question as referring to the shelters(as displayed in what he says and the direction pointed to) is explicitly

10 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

corrected by the first speaker in an overlapping next turn. This exampleillustrates a general phenomenon, namely, that after any second actionthe producer of the first action has an opportunity to repair any misun-derstanding of the first that may have been displayed in the second.Given the generic availability of this procedure, any second speaker maylook to a third action to see whether this opportunity was taken and, if itwas not, to conclude that the analysis and treatment displayed in his orher own second turn was adequate. Any third action, therefore, thatimplements some normal onward development of a sequence confirmsthe adequacy of the displayed understandings in the sequence so far.6By means of this framework, speakers are released from what wouldotherwise be the endless task of explicitly confirming and reconfirmingtheir understandings of one another's actions.

Viewed in these terms, it can be seen that J's treatments of the inform-ings instanced in (1) and (2) were confirmed as adequate. Thus in (1),her assessment is briefly (and downgradedly [see Pomerantz, Chapter4]) corroborated by A, who subsequently goes on to detail a misadven-ture with the delivery of the beds (which was initiated, and then aban-doned, in A's first turn). Although, as it turns out in the light of thesubsequent detailing, J's assessment was produced a little prematurely,its treatment of the prior informing as plain news is nonetheless con-firmed as adequate in the subsequent talk. Similarly, in (2), Fs treatmentof J's self-invitation confirms that J's "coming round" was indeed whatwas desired.

It may be added here that these observations concerning the mainte-nance of inter subjective understanding in talk do not simply apply tooccasions in which a second speaker evidences an understanding of theactivity (e.g., an invitation, complaint, accusation, etc.) accomplishedwith a prior turn at talk. They also apply to other aspects or dimensionsof speakers' activities that also, in a variety of ways, display some analy-sis of the state of the talk. For example, when a speaker initiates a newtopic or direction for talk that is disjoined from what precedes it, thespeaker exhibits an analysis that "then and there" is an appropriateplace for something new to be raised, something that may, once again,be confirmed or resisted in the next turn. And studies of such initiationswill reveal systematic features to which they are oriented, alternativemeans of initiation, ways in which such initiations are worked at, and soon (cf. Button and Casey, Chapter 8; Jefferson, Chapter 9).

Although we have focused on the methodological value of sequentialconsiderations in relation to the analysis of responsive utterances, theexamination of sequences can also prove a valuable resource in investi-gating the design features of utterances that are initiatory of (or even

Introduction 11

premonitory of) sequences rather than responsive within them (cf.Jefferson 1980b, Pomerantz 1980a, Schegloff 1980). At the minimum,examination of the talk that is produced in response to initiating utter-ances may have utility for confirming (or undermining) the analyst'sintuition that utterances designed in a particular way are characteristi-cally produced to accomplish a particular task. Such confirmation can bevaluable in encouraging investigation into the operative design featuresof an utterance type and, once isolated, the role of such design featurescan once again be checked with the comparative use of sequential data.

In sum, in examining talk the analyst is immediately confronted withan organization which is implemented on a turn-by-turn basis, andthrough which a context of publicly displayed and continuously up-dated inter subjective understandings is systematically sustained. It isthrough this turn-by-turn character of talk that the participants displaytheir understandings of the state of the talk for one another, and becausethese understandings are publicly produced, they are available for ana-lytic treatment by social scientists. Analysts may thus proceed to studywith some assurance the factual exhibits of understandings that aredisplayed and ratified at the conversational surface.

Before we leave this topic, one final caveat is in order. Although thevalue of sequential analysis in getting at the participants' understand-ings of the talk has been stressed in this section, it should not be con-cluded that the way in which a speaker responds to a prior utterancecan, in every case, be treated as criterial in determining how the utter-ance should be viewed analytically. Obviously, speakers may respondto earlier talk so as to avoid taking up and dealing with what theyperfectly well know it accomplishes or implicates and, by these means,may negotiate the direction of the talk away from an undesired outcomeor toward a desired one. Such occasions are common in talk, and theymay be varyingly transparent to analytic inspection. The characteristicsof these events can themselves be documented by means of comparativesequential analysis, but their existence serves to emphasize that officialtreatments of talk occurring at the conversational surface are the startingpoint for interpretative and analytic work and cannot be treated simplyas unproblematic representations of what the speakers' understandingsor intentions in the talk consisted of.

4. The presentation of data in the book

The progressive accumulation of studies in conversation analysis hasbeen accompanied by a growing appreciation of the extraordinarily de-tailed ways in which conversationalists produce and orient to actions.

12 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

This appreciation has engendered an increasing awareness of the funda-mental organizational importance of details that might seem, on a curso-ry inspection, to be random or insignificant.7 The growing attention todetail is evident in, and has been facilitated by, the continuing refine-ment of the transcription system evolved by Gail Jefferson. However,the widespread inclusion in research reports of extracts transcribed ac-cording to these conventions occasionally gives rise to misunderstand-ings about the ways in which the transcripts are viewed and used inrelation to the recorded data from which they were derived.

At the risk of stating the obvious, conversation analysts do not claimthat the transcription system captures the details of a tape recording inall its particularities, or that a transcript should (or ever could) be viewedas a literal representation of, or observationally adequate substitute for,the data under analysis.8 Like all transcription systems, the one used inthis book is necessarily selective (Ochs 1979), and indeed this system isparticularly concerned with capturing sequential features of talk. It istherefore important to stress that, although the transcripts serve as anextremely convenient research tool, they are produced and designed foruse in close conjunction with the tape-recorded materials that constitutethe data base. The fact that publication conventions allow for the inclu-sion only of data extracts in written form should therefore not leadreaders to the conclusion that the analyses are based exclusively on aninspection of transcripts conducted independently of direct reference tothe original recordings.

The transcription system uses standard English orthographic sym-bols, together with some additional symbols and some modifications ofEnglish spelling. The system is sometimes objected to as a form of "com-ic book" orthography that can be interpreted as being somewhat deroga-tory to the speakers whose talk is thus represented (Sacks, Schegloff,and Jefferson 1974:734). In this context, it should be noted that thetranscripts result from and represent an attempt to get as much as possi-ble of the actual sound and sequential positioning of talk onto the page,while at the same time making this material accessible to readers un-familiar with systems further removed from standard orthography.

5. Concluding remarksStudies of ordinary conversation have been developed on the premise,first suggested by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974), that conversa-tional interaction has a "bedrock" status in relation to other institu-tionalized forms of interpersonal conduct. Not only is conversation the

Notes 13

most pervasively used mode of interaction in social life and the formwithin which, with whatever modifications (Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan 1977, Ochs and Schieffelin 1979, Snow and Ferguson 1977),language is first acquired, but also it consists of the fullest matrix ofsocially organized communicative practices and procedures. A parallelbody of studies involves the implementation of conversation analytictechniques in a range of specialized or institutional interactional settingssuch as courts, classrooms, news interviews, and medical encounters.9A recurrent theme in these studies concerns the ways in which suchspecialized interactions exhibit varyingly detailed and systematic dif-ferences from what is found in ordinary conversation. The practicesinvolved in such settings appear to involve a clustering of particularsubsets of those found in conversation, and their use commonly in-volves a reshaping of the relevances associated with their use in every-day interaction. These characteristics may eventually be shown to con-tribute to what Garfinkel (forthcoming) has referred to as the special"quiddities" and "identifying details" of institutional conduct.

In conclusion, it will be apparent to readers, both of the contributionsto this book and of papers published elsewhere, that conversation ana-lytic research has involved an extended and continuing reappraisal offoundational issues in the theory of social action. The results of thisreappraisal, which is far from complete, cannot be anticipated here.However, the detailed study of actual, particular social actions and in-teractions has revealed the immense variety of the phenomena of action,and it is this variety which has informed our pluralization of TalcottParsons's famous title - The Structure of Social Action (1937). This plu-ralization represents one aspect of an evolving framework of assump-tions that is current in the field to which the following essays contribute.

Notes1. For a sophisticated discussion of the relation between the use of filmed data

and the development of social psychological perspectives on interaction thatrun parallel to those outlined here, see Kendon (1979a).

2. Some relationships between syntactic phenomena and discourse processesare discussed in Schegloff (1979b) and C. Goodwin (1979a, 1981a).

3. Sociologists may see in the linguistic distinction between the literal and thecontextual meanings of an utterance a modern variant of the classical Weberiandistinction (Weber 1968:8-9) between "direct observational understanding"and "motivational understanding." The notion of "literal meaning" has had acheckered career in linguistics. Applied to word meaning, the idea has at-tracted criticism from the Prague School onward (Karcevskij 1964). It is notsupported by studies of translation (Nida 1964) or by current research under-

14 J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson

taken from a psycholinguistic perspective (e.g., Rosch 1977; Rosch and Mervis1975; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, and Boyes-Braem 1976; Rosch, Simpson,and Miller 1976). In application to sentences or locutions, the notion of literalmeaning has been extensively criticized by Searle (1979,1980), and the conclu-sion that the interpretation of a sentence arises from an interaction betweenpractical and lexical knowledge appears quite unavoidable (Miller 1978). In thecontext of analyses of discourses or texts, the idea of literal meaning tends toengender one of two alternative forms of skepticism. Those who believe thataccess to literal meaning is both possible and necessary for their analysisexhibit dismay at the number of contextual rules required to provide for theindefinitely large range of contextual determinations for any locution (van Dijk1977). Alternatively, those who view analyses that purport to establish theliteral meanings of locutions more skeptically (Harris 1979) conclude that thequest for literal meaning is hopeless and that the analysis of discourse istherefore impossible. This latter conclusion, however, is equally premised on amodel of meaning for locutions that demands a "literal meaning" as the basisfor the analysis of subsequent "contextual variation." The affinities betweenthe search for literal meaning and a research program taking the isolatedsentence as its central object have been raised by Goffman (1976). For variouslyprogrammatic objections to decontextualized approaches to meaning from thesociological literature, see Garfinkel (1967); Garfinkel and Sacks (1970); Coulter(1971, 1973); and Heritage (1978).

4. In his unpublished transcribed lectures, Sacks notes (lecture 1, winter 1965)the insufficiency of studies based on isolated sentences for the analysis ofnatural activities. Elsewhere he stresses the crucial significance of an utter-ance's placement for the analysis of its illocutionary force. For example, heproposes (lecture 1, fall 1966) that "what it is that a given object is doing maywell require analysis of its locus in conversation . . . The specification of theuses of sets of objects requires a formulation of the structure of conversationalpossibilities."

5. In his spring 1972 lectures, Sacks proposes that the "adjacency relationshipbetween utterances is the most powerful device for relating utterances" andthat "adjacency pairs constitute the institutionalized (i.e., formal) means forexploiting the relating power of adjacency" (lecture 4).

6. However, it should be borne in mind that first speakers may, and do, goalong with a second speaker's mis-hearing or mistreatment of their priorutterances. A clear case is the following:

E: she gets lawful depressed over these things], ylhknowshe's rea,:l (0.2) p'litical mi:nded'n,TO.3)

L: Ye:ah:E: worr k --.L: -> LShe aj Democraj_t?E: -+ -t-hhhh j[ vote ee ther wa:y.h

( . ) "~L: * Yeah,E: -hntfirrt'h 1^ didn' g i t tuh vote I dec l ine ' tuh

s t a t e this~~ti:me when I r eg i s t e r ed so : . . .

Notes 15

Here L makes no attempt in third turn to correct E's mis-hearing, or mistreat-ment, of her prior utterance.

7. Jefferson (forthcoming c) has elegantly described how a change in the ap-proach to transcribing laughter made it possible to describe organized fea-tures of sequences that would otherwise have been overlooked.

8. If it is the case that, in the light of Wittgenstein's discussions, the notion of a"literal" transcript is an illusion, then it is impossible to accept Harris's (1979)contention that, in the absence of such transcriptions, the analysis of dis-course is impossible. The programmatic relevance of the provision of a literaltranscript appears to derive from presuppositions of linguistic method thatinsist that "each linguistic form has a constant and specific meaning" (Bloom-field 1933:145) and that, ipso facto, each linguistic form is itself constant andspecific. Talbot Taylor has recently published (1981) a subtle discussion of thisissue from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

9. Institutional conduct analyzed with the use of conversation analytic tech-niques embraces a wide variety of domains and substantive phenomena.Several investigators, taking up Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974:729-30) distinction between locally allocated and preallocated turn-taking sys-tems, have described the forms of turn taking that are characteristic in class-room (McHoul 1978, Mehan 1979), courtroom (Atkinson and Drew 1979), andnews interview interaction (Greatbatch 1982), respectively. A considerablecorpus of research has been occupied with the variety of tasks that are accom-plished through the activities of questioning and answering in different in-stitutional settings. This research has involved attempts to describe the waysin which particular institutional contexts are being reproduced in the talk ofthe interactants (Drew forthcoming; Heritage 1980, forthcoming; Heritageand Atkinson 1983). Detailed studies maintain this focus while analyzing theaccomplishment of specific activities, such as the management of accusationsand defenses in criminal courts (Atkinson and Drew 1979, Dunstan 1980),conflict (Pomerantz and Atkinson forthcoming) and arbitrator neutrality(Atkinson 1979b) in small claims courts, plea bargaining (Maynard 1982, 1983,forthcoming), and pretrial conferences (Lynch forthcoming). D. R. Watson(forthcoming a, forthcoming b) has examined some aspects of police-suspectinteraction (see also Eglin and Wideman 1983) and has also followed Sacks(1972a) in examining interactions with suicide-prevention agency officials (D.Watson 1978, 1981). A variety of aspects of classroom interaction have beendiscussed by Mehan (see especially Mehan 1979). Finally Heath (1981, 1982b,in prep.), Frankel (1980, forthcoming), Anderson and Sharrock (forthcom-ing), Bergmann (1979), and Davidson (1978b), among others, have examinedaspects of doctor-patient interaction from a conversation analytic perspec-tive.

PART IOrientations

The first of the two chapters in this section - "Notes on Methodology"by the late Harvey Sacks - consists of a series of programmatic andmethodological observations taken largely from Sacks's transcribed lec-tures given between 1965 and 1971 and edited into a continuous discus-sion by Gail Jefferson. These observations vividly convey the pioneeringquality of his work, some of his motives for undertaking it, and the"lateral thinking" that was such a characteristic feature of his lectures.They also outline some revolutionary methodological orientations thathave since become standard both within the field of conversation analy-sis and beyond it. In particular, Sacks insists (1) that ordinary talk issystematically and strongly organized; (2) that its analysis should bebased upon naturally occurring data; and (3) that analytic interestsshould not be constrained by external considerations. These three rec-ommendations are closely interconnected.

Sacks's initial remarks tackle head on what has arguably been themajor factor inhibiting studies of interaction: the assumption that talk isnot sufficiently orderly to bear formal description. This assumption isshared by those linguists who have treated empirically occurring talk asa degenerate realization of linguistic competence and by sociologists(including anthropologists) who, doubting that social organizationreaches "downward" to the details of interaction, have tended to regardthe data of talk as idiosyncratic or random. One consequence of thisassumption is that many linguists and social scientists have been con-tent to develop idealized models of language and action, respectively.Chomsky's (1965) conception of "competence" and Parsons's (1937)treatment of the "unit act" are merely prominent theoretical expressionsof this belief. Such an attitude is paralleled at the empirical level by theuse of data - whether invented or glossed by a variety of methodologicaltechniques including, most commonly, observer coding - that are essen-tially idealized. The net result is that theories are developed with the use

17

18 Orientations

of data that themselves bear an unknown relationship to what is usedand acted upon in actual occasions of interaction.

If, by contrast, research begins from the assumption that actual talk isstrongly organized, it becomes essential to develop analyses that dealwith the specific events of interaction, including, as Sacks notes, sin-gular instances and, it may be added, deviant cases. This practice repre-sents a strong constraint on analysis, but it has the particular virtue ofconnecting model building with actually occurring data. And, as Sacksshrewdly notes, it can be difficult to advance claims about the events ofinteraction with the use of imagined examples.

To develop a "natural observational science" of interaction demandsan openness to empirical phenomena. Here Sacks insists that observa-tion should proceed without preconceptions concerning what is there tobe found, the intrinsic importance of the talk, or its significance for the"big issues" of the social sciences. Openness to fact is of course a hall-mark of scientific endeavor and a precondition of genuine discovery,and its urging is particularly appropriate for a fledgling discipline ap-proaching the relatively uncharted domain of interaction. Nonetheless,since interaction is the matrix both within which language is learned andused and through which institutional activity is conducted, it is unlikelythat the study of talk will fail to turn up results of major significance forthe parent social science disciplines. If Sacks's suggestion that the "de-tailed study of small phenomena may give an enormous understandingof the way humans do things" seemed an act of faith when it wasuttered in 1964, it no longer seems so today. And the independentadoption of the methodological orientations here recommended bySacks in a range of domains where interaction is the focus of interest -child language development, nonverbal behavior, psychotherapy stud-ies, and human ethology - speaks to a general recognition of theirvalidity.

If Sacks's contribution takes the form of general methodological rec-ommendations, Schegloff (Chapter 3) takes up a number of more specif-ic issues that arise from the study of naturally occurring sequences oftalk. In particular, Schegloff focuses on a central issue arising at theinterface of linguistics and sociology when speech is analyzed as socialaction, namely, the extent to which the linguistic form of an utterancecan be relied upon as an indicator of the activity that an utterance isaccomplishing. In addressing this issue, he explores the methodologicalimplications of a fundamental feature of ordinary conversation: the factthat speakers design their utterances with regard to their specific place-ment in the talk and that hearers routinely attend to such placements as

Orientations 19

a means of determining what was intended or attempted with theutterance.

Schegloff begins by noting a range of ways in which the linguisticform of an utterance may fail to square with its interpretation eventhough hearers may experience no corresponding sense of ambiguity inthe utterance. Question-formed utterances that do not accomplish ques-tioning and statement-formed questions are cases in point. Thoughthese kinds of observations have motivated considerable work on indi-rect speech acts, Schegloff uses these cases to question the central as-sumption of this approach, namely, that linguistic form is to be treatedas the hearer's central interpretative resource unless it is overridden byother factors. He develops this issue by noting that for a variety of caseshearers may orient to the structural location of an utterance (rather thanits linguistic form) as a primary means of interpreting it.

In the main body of the chapter, conversationalists' orientations to thestructural locations of utterances are exemplified through a detailed de-scription of an empirically occurring case of ambiguity, in which a ques-tion-formed utterance is interpreted initially as a question and subse-quently as an instance of showing agreement. Two important features ofthis discussion can be noted. First, Schegloff takes care to demonstratethat the ambiguity in question is not a theoretically possible ambiguitybut rather one that is encountered and dealt with by both speakers.Second, he shows that the ambiguity is potentiated by two alternativeand equiprobable structural analyses of the sequence that precedes andinforms it. Thus the structural positioning of an utterance is a criticalresource for determining what it is accomplishing. It is used, for exam-ple, to determine when a question-formed utterance is questioning andwhen it is not. Similarly, when, as in Schegloff's central datum, thepositioning of a question-formed utterance is structurally ambiguous,the resolution of the resulting ambiguity may invade the talk as a taskfor the speakers. The analysis of the positioning of utterances within asequence thus goes some considerable way toward answering the sets ofquestions that arise if one abandons the notion that linguistic form is aninterpretive resource of first resort for conversationalists, "not onlyabout how a question does something other than questioning, but abouthow it does questioning; not only about how questioning is done bynonquestion forms, but about how it gets accomplished by questionforms."

Schegloff's concluding remarks stand as a valuable corrective to pre-vailing misconceptions about indexicality and ambiguity in natural lan-guages. Noting that much of the logical and linguistic work on index-

20 Orientations

icality and ambiguity has arisen from the study of statements stripped oflocal context, he points out that talk is produced so as to exploit thecontext dependencies that formal languages are designed to exclude.The indexicality of natural language is thus to be viewed as a powerfulresource for participants' understandings rather than as an obstacle totheir achievement.

2. Notes on methodologyHARVEY SACKSLate of the University of California, Irvine

I want to propose that a domain of research exists that is not part of anyother established science. The domain is one that those who are pursu-ing it have come to call ethnomethodology/conversation analysis. Thatdomain seeks to describe methods persons use in doing social life. It isour claim that, although the range of activities this domain describesmay be as yet unknown, the mode of description, the way it is cast, isintrinsically stable.1

Following are some central findings of the researches in which I amengaged.

The detailed ways in which actual, naturally occurring social activitiesoccur are subjectable to formal description.

Social activities - actual, singular sequences of them - are methodicaloccurrences. That is, their description consists of the description of setsof formal procedures persons employ.

The methods persons employ to produce their activities permit formaldescription of singular occurrences that are generalizable in intuitivelynonapparent ways and are highly reproducibly usable.

Such findings have significance for what it is that sociology can aim todo, and for how it can proceed. In brief, sociology can be a naturalobservational science.2

The important theories in the social sciences have tended to view asociety as a piece of machinery with relatively few orderly products,where, then, much of what else takes place is more or less random. Sucha view suggests that there are a few places where, if we can find them,we will be able to attack the problem of order. If we do not find them, wewill not. So we can have an image of a machine with a couple of holes in

This chapter consists of a series of programmatic/methodological considerations by thelate Harvey Sacks, culled primarily from his lectures transcribed by Gail Jefferson. Jeffer-son writes: "I have occasionally edited the selected segments, and that procedure hasundoubtedly resulted in some distortion." The publisher has imposed some furtherediting.

21

22 H. Sacks

the front. It spews out some nice stuff from those holes, and at the backit spews out garbage. There is, then, a concern among social scientistsfor finding "good problems," that is, those data generated by the ma-chine which are orderly, and then attempt to construct the apparatusnecessary to give those results.

Now such a view tends to be heavily controlled by an overridinginterest in what are in the first instance known to be "big issues," andnot those which are terribly mundane, occasional, local, and the like. Itis perfectly possible, at least theoretically, to treat such a view as histor-ically adventitious; a mere fact; an accident of the history of the waypersons came to think about social problems, and to suppose, or dis-cover, or propose to discover, that no such thing is the case, but thatwherever we happen to attack the phenomenon we are going to find(some would say "impose") detailed order.

That possibility would have enormous consequences for what weintend to build. The search for good problems by reference to known bigissues will have large-scale, massive institutions as the apparatus bywhich order is generated and by a study of which order will be found. If,on the other hand, we figure or guess or decide that whatever humansdo, they are just another animal after all, maybe more complicated thanothers but perhaps not noticeably so, then whatever humans do can beexamined to discover some way they do it, and that way will be stablydescribable. That is, we may alternatively take it that there is order at allpoints.

That sort of order would be an important resource of a culture, suchthat, for example, any members of the culture, encountering from theirinfancy a very small portion of it, and a random portion in a way (theparents they happen to have, the experiences they happen to have, thevocabulary that happens to be thrown at them in whatever utterancesthey happen to encounter), would come out in many ways much likeeverybody else and able to deal with just about anyone else. Were itimportant for nature to ensure that if persons are to be workable thingsin a society they have an adequate sampling setup, then a culture mightwell be so arranged. And then, of course, research might employ thesame resources: Tap into whomsoever, wheresoever, and we get muchthe same things.

Furthermore, the fact of order at all points could be used to explainwhat are otherwise fairly strange facts - for example, that conventionalsociological survey research, though it recurrently fails to satisfy con-straints on proper statistical procedures, nevertheless gets orderly re-sults; or, for example, that the anthropologists' procedures, which tendto involve an occasional tapping into a society, asking one or two people

Notes on methodology 23

more or less extended questions, turn out to be often extremely gener-alizable. Now the orderly results and the generalizability could be treat-ed as a warrant for such procedures, or as a tremendous puzzle. Or theycould be seen as a consequence of the fact that, given the possibility thatthere is overwhelming order, it would be extremely hard not to find it,no matter how or where we looked.

If a culture and its members are constructed in that way, then the factthat orderly results are obtained from one informant, or from somesampling procedure, would be not necessarily a warrant for those thingsbeing good procedures on their own terms but evidence for an arrange-ment of the world that could be seen to be usable. We may well find thatwe get an enormous generalizability because things are so arranged thatwe can get orderly results, given that for members encountering a lim-ited environment they have to be able to do that, and things are soarranged as to permit them to. And if we figure that that is the way thingsare to some extent, then it really would not matter very much what it iswe look at, if we look at it carefully enough (lecture 33, spring 1966).

A couple of possibly relevant passages from some authorities follow.The first is from Language, by Edward Sapir:

We're not in ordinary life so much concerned with concepts assuch. . . . When I say, for instance, "I had a good breakfast thismorning," it is clear that I am not in the throes of laborious thought;that what I have to transmit is hardly more than a pleasurablememory symbolically rendered in the grooves of habitual ex-pression . . . the sentence as a whole has no conceptual significancewhatsoever.

It is somewhat as though a generator capable of generatingenough power to run an elevator were operated almost exclusivelyto feed an electric doorbell. The parallel is more suggestive than itat first sight appears. Language may be looked upon as an instru-ment capable of running a gamut of psychic uses. (1921:13)

In the first instance, consider what, for Sapir, is obvious: that whatcould be said to be being done by use of language specifically is trans-parently obvious; statable by stating the sentence itself, and then to beseen to be using little of what language really could do. The import forresearchers of a statement like Sapir's could be small or large.

The second passage refers to this earlier one and draws some conse-quences from it. Weinreich comments:

In a remarkable passage, Sapir likens language to a dynamo capa-ble of powering an elevator but ordinarily operating to feed anelectric doorbell. Language is used more often than not in waysthat do not draw upon its full semantic capacity. In its "phatic"

24 H. Sacks

functions, when speech is used merely to signify the presence of asympathetic interlocutor, it easily becomes "desematicized" to aformidable extent. In its various ceremonial functions, languagemay come to be desemanticized by still another mechanism . . .

. . . The more pressing task for linguistics, it seems to me, is toexplain the elevator, not the doorbell; avoiding samples of exces-sively casual or ceremonial speech; to examine language underconditions of its full fledged utilization. (1963:147)

Now one thing being proposed here is that we know, right off, wherelanguage is deep and interesting, that we can know that without ananalysis of what it is that it might be doing. And we want to see that theset of ways the statement "I had a good breakfast this morning" can betalked about - for example, "phatic," "nonconceptual," "deseman-ticized," and so on - are given as a set of alternatives without its, oranything else's, being studied very much. But a program is laid out.And among the important things about that program is what is not to bestudied. And what is not to be studied is proposed by virtue of pre-sumed results. Those are really quite extraordinary arguments. And ifthey don't proceed quite strictly from a notion that we can or must knowwhat the aims of a discipline are before we begin, at least a good deal ofthat notion is involved in such formulations.

I mention these matters to notice that it is perhaps not incidental thatpeople have not devoted their lives to studying sentences like "I had agood breakfast this morning" or "How are you?" There are more or lessdefensible reasons for not studying such sentences. Not studying suchsentences, however, may have real consequences. The question of whatlanguage can do, what people can do with language, what the results ofan analysis of "I had a good breakfast this morning" would involve,what kind of program it poses for a field - all these things remainabsolutely open (lecture 6, fall 1966).

It is possible that detailed study of small phenomena may give anenormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds ofobjects they use to construct and order their affairs.

It may well be that things are very finely ordered; that there arecollections of social objects (including "I had a good breakfast this morn-ing" and "How are you?") that persons assemble to do their activities;that the way they assemble them is describable with respect to any oneof the activities they happen to do, and has to be seen by attempting toanalyze particular objects.

We would want to name those objects and see how they work, as weknow how verbs and adjectives and sentences work. Thereby we can

Notes on methodology 25

come to see how an activity is assembled, as we see a sentence as-sembled with a verb, a predicate, and so on. Ideally, of course, wewould have a formally describable method, as the assembling of a sen-tence is formally describable. The description not only would handlesentences in general, but particular sentences. What we would be doing,then, is developing another grammar. And grammar, of course, is themodel of routinely observable, closely ordered social activities (lecture,fall 1964, tape 3).

In that the kinds of observations I make involve catching some detailsof actual occurrences, then we can come to find a difference between theway I proceed and one characteristic way social science proceeds, whichis to use hypotheticalized, proposedly typicalized versions of the worldas a base for theorizing about it. Often enough in sociological reports,somebody will say, "Let us suppose that such and such happened," or,"Typical things that happen are . . . " Now a reader finds himself per-fectly willing to grant that such things happen. On the basis of asser-tions, suppositions, proposals about what is typical, some explanationabout the world is built.

I want to argue that, however rich our imaginations are, if we usehypothetical, or hypothetical-typical versions of the world we are con-strained by reference to what an audience, an audience of professionals,can accept as reasonable. That might not appear to be a terrible con-straint until we come to look at the kinds of things that actually occur.Were I to say about many of the objects we work with "Let us supposethat this happened; now I am going to consider it," then an audiencemight feel hesistant about what I would make of it by reference towhether such things happen. That is to say, under such a constraintmany things that actually occur are debarred from use as a basis fortheorizing about conversation. I take it that this debarring affects thecharacter of social sciences strongly.

Our business will be to proceed somewhat differently. We will beusing observation as a basis for theorizing. Thus we can start with thingsthat are not currently imaginable, by showing that they happened. Wecan then come to see that a base for using close looking at the world fortheorizing about it is that from close looking at the world we can findthings that we could not, by imagination, assert were there. We wouldnot know that they were "typical" (lecture 1, fall 1971). Indeed, wemight not have noticed that they happen.

Therefore, the kind of phenomena I deal with are always transcrip-tions of actual occurrences in their actual sequence. But my research isabout conversation only in this incidental way: that conversation is

26 H. Sacks

something that we can get the actual happenings of on tape and that wecan get more or less transcribed; that is, conversation is simply some-thing to begin with (lecture 2, fall 1968).

When I started to do research in sociology I figured that sociologycould not be an actual science unless it was able to handle the details ofactual events, handle them formally, and in the first instance be infor-mative about them in the direct ways in which primitive sciences tend tobe informative - that is, that anyone else can go and see whether whatwas said is so. And that is a tremendous control on seeing whether oneis learning anything.

So the question was, could there be some way that sociology couldhope to deal with the details of actual events, formally and informative-ly? One might figure that it had already been shown that it was perfectlypossible given the vast literature, or alternatively that it was obviouslyimpossible given the literature. For a variety of reasons I figured that ithad not been shown either way, and I wanted to locate some set ofmaterials that would permit a test; materials that would have the virtueof permitting us to see whether it was possible, and if so, whether it wasinteresting. The results might be positive or negative.

I started to work with tape-recorded conversations. Such materialshad a single virtue, that I could replay them. I could transcribe themsomewhat and study them extendedly - however long it might take.The tape-recorded materials constituted a "good enough" record ofwhat happened. Other things, to be sure, happened, but at least whatwas on the tape had happened. It was not from any large interest inlanguage or from some theoretical formulation of what should be stud-ied that I started with tape-recorded conversations, but simply because Icould get my hands on it and I could study it again and again, and also,consequentially, because others could look at what I had studied andmake of it what they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able todisagree with me.

So the work I am doing is about talk. It is about the details of talk. Insome sense it is about how conversation works. The specific aim is, inthe first instance, to see whether actual single events are studiable andhow they might be studiable, and then what an explanation of themwould look like (lecture, fall 1967, Intro.).

Thus is it not any particular conversation, as an object, that we areprimarily interested in. Our aim is to get into a position to transform, inan almost literal, physical sense, our view of "what happened," from amatter of a particular interaction done by particular people, to a matterof interactions as products of a machinery. We are trying to find the

Notes 27

machinery. In order to do so we have to get access to its products. Atthis point, it is conversation that provides us such access (lecture 1,winter 1970).

Now people often ask me why I choose the particular data I choose. Isit some problem that I have in mind that caused me to pick this corpus orthis segment? And I am insistent that I just happened to have it, itbecame fascinating, and I spent some time at it. Furthermore, it is notthat I attack any piece of data I happen to have according to someproblems I bring to it (lecture 7, spring 1967). When we start out with apiece of data, the question of what we are going to end up with, whatkind of findings it will give, should not be a consideration. We sit downwith a piece of data, make a bunch of observations, and see where theywill go (lecture 5, fall 1967).

Treating some actual conversation in an unmotivated way, that is,giving some consideration to whatever can be found in any particularconversation we happen to have our hands on, subjecting it to investiga-tion in any direction that can be produced from it, can have strongpayoffs (lecture 2, winter 1970). Recurrently, what stands as a solutionto some problem emerges from unmotivated examination of some pieceof data, where, had we started out with a specific interest in the prob-lem, it would not have been supposed in the first instance that this pieceof data was a resource with which to consider, and come up with asolution for, that particular problem.

Thus there can be some real gains in trying to fit what we can hope todo to anything that happens to come up. I mean not merely that if wepick any data we will find something, but that if we pick any data,without bringing any problems to it, we will find something. And howinteresting what we may come up with will be is something we cannotin the first instance say (lecture 7, spring 1967).

Notes1. H. Sacks, "A foundation for sociology," MS, Department of Sociology,

UCLA.2. H. Sacks, introduction to untitled MS, Department of Sociology, UCLA, first

line starts with "For sociology . . . "

3. On some questions andambiguities in conversationEMANUEL A. SCHEGLOFFUniversity of California, Los Angeles

The datum I am concerned with is the following, in particular the lasttwo exchanges:

(1)An's- an ( ) we were discussing, it tur-it comes down, he s- he says, I-I-you've talkedwith thi- si- i- about this many times. 1_ said,it come down tfthis:=O u r main difference: _I feel that a government,i- the main thing, is- th-the purpose a'thegovernment, is, what is best for the country.MfnhmmHe says, governments, an' you know he keeps- hetalks about governments, they sh- the thing thatthey sh'd do i s what's right or wrong.For whom.Well he says- rhe-

By what standardThat's what- t ha t ' s exactly what I mean, he s-but he says . . .

B has been describing to A the differences he (B) has been having withhis high school history teacher over the morality of American foreign

This lecture was delivered to a conference on Linguistics and Language Teaching atRutgers University, April 1972.1 am grateful to Dr. J. Barone for inviting me to address theconference. Some of the themes and analyses presented herein were developed in lecturesat Columbia University between 1966 and 1972. At the time of writing I was a visitor in theDepartment of Psychology at Rockefeller University. My appreciation goes to ProfessorMichael Cole for the opportunity and for his hospitality. The lecture is reproduced hereessentially unchanged. Several mechanical errors have been set right; several obscuritiesclarified, though others certainly remain; the effects of certain psychological and stylisticpeculiarities of the time repaired. Some bibliographic references, many of which wereunavailable in 1972, have been supplied. A fuller version of the essay was published inPragmatics Microfiche, 1976, 2.2, D8-G1.

Ways of working change over time, and in many respects this lecture and the statementof many of its themes are now a bit archaic to me. But it may still be of some use; somefriends specially liked it, and I still like parts of it.

28

12345678910111213141516

B:

B:

A:B:

A:B:A:B:

On questions and ambiguities in conversation 29

policy since the time of George Washington. I suppose I should say nowthat the excerpt is taken from a conversation in a radio call-in show (Abeing the radio personality), although that will not matter at all to theanalysis except in one distant way, in which a formal structural charac-teristic of the conversation is in this case supplied by that fact; but it isthe structural feature that counts, not the fact that in this case it issupplied by the radio setting, the feature being supplied in other conver-sations by other circumstances of setting.

My initial concern with the sequence 12-15 focused on the interruptionin 14. Early work on the sequential organization of turn taking in conver-sation (especially that of my colleague Harvey Sacks) made occurrences ofinterruptions and interutterance gaps of special interest, as possibleviolations of the normative organization of the transition from one to anext. Given the recurrent management of that transition with no (orminimal) gap and overlap, and a regular respect for the rights of aspeaker, having begun an utterance, to bring it to a point of possiblecompletion (cf. the later statement in Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson1974), interruptions seemed to warrant examination to find what wasinvolved in departures from that normative practice. In particular, I wasattracted by the possibility that interruptions, or some interruptions,might be - so to speak - finely tuned, that is, quite precisely placed by aninterrupter (a similar interest animates Jefferson 1973a). An adequateanalysis of what was otherwise going on in the sequence might then yieldan understanding of the occurrence, and the precise placement, of theinterruption; and some degree of confidence in an analysis of what asequence was occupied with might be derived if, by reference to it, anotherwise not particularly ordered interruption could get seen as"placed."

Before turning directly to thi