BOOK REVIEWS

JACK SIDNELL. Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Malden, Massachusetts:Wiley-Blackwell. 2010. 269 pp. Pb (9781405159012) $36.95.

JOHN HERITAGE AND STEVEN CLAYMAN. Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities andInstitutions. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell. 2010. 320 pp. Pb(9781405185493) $41.95.

Reviewed by NUMA MARKEE

This review focuses on two books that are relevant to readers with differentamounts of experience with the field of conversation analysis (CA). The first,Conversation Analysis: An Introduction, by Jack Sidnell, is an introductory textfor readers who are interested in getting a general overview of what CA is, howit is done, and what insights this methodology provides into the organization oflanguage and social interaction. The second, Talk in Action: Interactions,Identities and Institutions, by John Heritage and Steven Clayman (henceforthH&C), is a somewhat more advanced treatment of a particular area within CAwork. More specifically, when conversation analysts use the term ‘talk-in-interaction’ (Schegloff 1987), they are referring to two broad domains ofinquiry. The first is ordinary conversation, which is the kind of everyday chitchatthat occurs among family, friends and acquaintances. The second isinstitutional talk, which includes different professional domains such as thelaw, medicine, education, etc. Ordinary conversation is considered to be thedefault speech exchange system that underlies all talk-in-interaction, whileinstitutional talk consists of various modifications to the practices of ordinaryconversation which enable lawyers, doctors and educators to achieveparticular institutional actions and agendas (for example, conducting cross-examinations during trials, gathering information about a patient’s symptoms,or providing feedback to students, respectively) in and through talk. Thus,Sidnell’s book is mainly concerned with ordinary conversation, while H&C’sbook is concerned with the organization of different kinds of institutional talk.Sidnell’s book is organized into thirteen chapters: (1) Talk; (2) Methods; (3)

Turn-taking; (4) Action and Undertanding; (5) Preference; (6) Sequence; (7)Repair; (8) Turn Construction; (9) Stories; (10) Openings and Closings; (11)Topic; (12) Context; and (13) Conclusion. After a brief introduction, H&C’sbook is divided into five parts.

Part 1: Conversation Analysis and Social Institutions;Part 2: Calls for Emergency Service;

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Part 3: Doctor-Patient Interaction;Part 4: Trials juries and dispute resolution; andPart 5: News and Political Communication.

Within each part of this latter book, we find three to four chapters thataddress various issues that are pertinent to each variety of institutional talk.Thus, in Part 1, there are three chapters: Conversation Analysis: SomeTheoretical Background; Talking Institutions into Being; and Dimensions ofInstitutional Talk. In Part 2, we find the following chapters: Emergency Calls asInstitutional Talk; Gatekeeping and Entitlement to Emergency Service; andEmergency Calls under Stress. In Part 3, we have four chapters: Patients’Presentations of Medical Issues: The Doctor’s Problem; Patients’ Presentationsof Medical Issues: The Patient’s Problem; History Taking in Medicine:Questions and Answers; and Diagnosis and Treatment: Medical Authorityand its Limits. In Part 4, we are presented with three chapters: TrialExaminations; Jury Deliberations; and Informal Modes of Dispute Resolution.In Part 5, we get four chapters: News Interview Turn Taking; Question Designin the News Interview and Beyond; Answers and Evasions; and Interactions enMasse: Audiences and Speeches. Finally, there is a stand-alone conclusionchapter. In total, therefore, these five sections yield 19 chapters in all.Let me now consider the strengths and weaknesses of Sidnell’s volume.

Overall, I was very favorably impressed by Conversation Analysis: An Introduc-tion. There are a number of competing introductions to CA on the market (forexample, see Hutchby and Woofitt 2008; ten Have 2007; and Liddicoat 2007),all of them good, and Sidnell certainly holds his own against these competitors.In its own terms, I particularly liked the straightforward, accessible style thatSidnell uses to discuss complex ideas and materials. This is a refreshing changefrom the intimidatingly dense and opaque writing styles often deployed bywriters such as Emanuel Schegloff and Harold Garfinkel (especially in his laterwork). For example, Sidnell typically starts his chapters with a general analyticoverview of materials that are relevant to the subject matter of the chapter,and then expands on the details of the particular technical machinery that isunder discussion with well-chosen and highly detailed examples of talk. Inaddition, I also liked the clarity of his explanations of difficult concepts in CA,such as preference organization (see p. 77ff) and recipient design (see pp. 5,177 and 191), which often cause problems for readers who are new to thisliterature. And finally, I found Sidnell’s discussion of the significance of theGoodwins’ work on what happens within an unfolding turn particularlyenlightening.Good as this book is, there are, however a few minor points with which we

might want to quibble. For example, in his discussion of openings and closingson page 205, Sidnell unequivocally states that: ‘… recognition by other ispreferred over self-identification’ during the first canonical sequence intelephone conversations. Now, while this is indeed the norm in American

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English, it is not the norm in British English and indeed in other languages, asSchegloff himself has always emphasized. Less substantively, there are also anumber of typos in the book (see, for example, ‘Mark’s report about hismother’s heath’ instead of health on page 69; ‘X phenomenon is more primarythen topical organization’ instead of than on page 224; and the lack of anycontent in line 39 of the Dick and Deb transcript on page 220 and elsewhere).And finally, the index is not as helpful as it could be. For example, if we look up‘recipient design’ in the index, we are told that this phrase occurs on pages 5and 177, but as we saw earlier, this phrase also occurs on page 191. But theseare relatively minor issues, which do little harm to what is an otherwiseexcellent book.Let me now turn to Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities and Institutions. As

with Sidnell’s book, it is a valuable addition to an already crowded field (see, forexample, Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Drew and Heritage 1992; McHoul andRapley 2001; among others). More specifically, this book provides an excellentrecapitulation of empirical work in four key areas of institutional talk. Aspreviously noted in this review, these areas include: calls for emergencyservices; medical interactions; legal talk; and news interviews and politicalspeeches. Furthermore, institutional talk represents a modification of the baseline practices of ordinary conversation. So one thing that can be accomplishedby studying institutional talk is to develop detailed accounts of how practicesthat are endemic in mundane talk are used more or less frequently ininstitutional talk in order to achieve particular institutional agendas. Perhapsthe classic example of a sequence type that has a different distribution and adifferent set of purposes in institutional talk from what is found in ordinaryconversation is the question and answer (Q&A) adjacency pair.So, for example, as H&C point out, in mundane talk, questions may be asked

by anybody, about any locally relevant topic, and may be answered by nextspeakers who are selected by members orienting to a set of turn allocationtechniques which enable: (1) a current speaker to allocate next turn to anotherspeaker; or (2) a currently silent participant to select him or herself as nextspeaker. Alternatively, current speaker may self-select and produce anotherturn. These normative rules are part of a larger speech exchange system (i.e.ordinary conversation) that is locally managed, context-shaped and context-renewing (in a technical, sequential sense).In contrast, as H&C make clear in each part of the book, Q&A sequences in

institutional talk are designed to achieve particular (typically, highly focused)actions that are relevant to the agendas of the institutions that are being talkedinto being in and through the emerging talk. This means that the distributionof Q&A sequences is often quite different in institutional talk from that which isfound in ordinary conversation. For example, in calls for emergency services,questions are asked by the emergency services professional who is taking thecall, and answers are provided by the person seeking help. Similarly, in medicalinteractions, it is doctors who ask the questions and patients who provide the

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answers; in trial proceedings, it is up to lawyers to ask witnesses questions, andup to witnesses to answer them; and in news interviews, it is the journalistconducting an interview who properly asks questions, and the intervieweewho must answer them. We can therefore see that Q&A sequences ininstitutional talk are constrained by a turn-taking system that is not locallymanaged. Institutional talk in fact functions on the basis of a pre-allocation ofturns, which serve to do particular institutional identities and agendas.H&C do a very good job of showing how the organization of institutional talk

diverges from that of mundane talk, but this book goes much further than this:it also provides a compelling account of how the same practice achievesdifferent actions in different kinds of institutional talk. So, for example,questions in doctor-patient communication (which, as we have seen, areprototypically asked by doctors) are designed to elicit information about thepatient’s state of health, and are a necessary preliminary to diagnosis.Similarly, in emergency calls, questions by the emergency services professionalare a necessary prelude to establishing the seriousness of the emergencysituation, and to the dispatch of help, if it is actually needed. In televisioninterviews, however, questions are asked for the benefit of an overhearingaudience and are the vehicle used by journalists to probe, confirm, challenge,discredit, etc., an interviewee’s position, within the competing bounds ofproper objectivity and adversarialness (think, for example, of politicalinterviews). A similar agenda is observable in lawyers’ questioning of witnessesduring trial proceedings, which are also designed for an overhearing audience.However, juries are obviously a very different kind of audience than the one forwhom news interviews are produced. Furthermore, the presence of the judgeand the opposing side’s attorney constrains how questions may be asked intrial talk in ways that are significantly different from the constraints thatoperate in news interviews.In summary, these kinds of nuances within and across different kinds of

institutional talk are all clearly noted and well explicated in this excellent book.As with Sidnell’s book, however, there are minor substantive issues of analysis,and the occurrence of various typos and other editing blemishes, whichconstitute minor annoyances. For example, on page 111, the authors talkabout the tense of the verb in the phrase ‘my ear’s been acting up’ as being inthe ‘present perfect,’ whereas in fact it is in the present perfect continuous,which affects the substance of their analysis. And on the typos front, the date ofone transcript is given as 1887 (see p. 240), while on page 149, the authorsrefer in their analysis to a pause that allegedly occurs in line 10 of thetranscript, whereas in the transcript itself, it actually occurs in line 9.To conclude, I believe that both these books are well worth reading. They

will be useful to novices and to more advanced readers of the CA literaturealike, and will likely be used as authoritative references and as course textbooks for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Highlyrecommended!

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REFERENCES

Atkinson, J. Maxwell and John Heritage. 1984. Structures of Social Action.Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Drew, Paul and John Heritage. 1992. Talk at Work. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Hutchby, Ian and Robin Woofitt. 2008. Conversation Analysis (second edition).Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Liddicoat, Anthony J. 2007. An Introduction to Conversation Analysis. London:Continuum.

McHoul, Alec and Mark Rapley. 2001. How to Analyze Talk in Institutional Settings: ACasebook of Methods. London: Continuum.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1987). Between macro and micro: Contexts and otherconnections. In Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Munch and NeilSmelser (eds.) The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley, California: University of CaliforniaPress. 207–234.

ten Have, Paul. 2007. Doing Conversation Analysis (second edition). London: Sage.

NUMA MARKEE

Department of Linguistics

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4080 Foreign Languages Building

707 South Mathews

Urbana IL 61801

U.S.A.

nppm@illinois.edu

COLLEEN COTTER. News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 280 pp. Hb (9780521819619) AUD$99.95/US$109.95 / Pb (9780521525657) AUD$45.41/US$49.95.

SAMIA BAZZI. Arab News and Conflict (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Societyand Culture 34). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. 2009. 222 pp.Hb (9789027206251) €99.00/$149.00.

Reviewed by MARISSA GOLDRICH

The media plays a great role in shaping our view of the world and therefore inour ideologies of ‘the other’. Through the increasing influence of the Interneton our lives, we now have better and quicker access to global news than everbefore. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) emerged as a subfield of linguistics inthe 1970s as a method of analyzing the relationship between language andpower within the social sphere (Fowler et al. 1979). Since then, it hasexpanded to encompass a variety of discourse types and the ideologies thatstem from them, including media discourse analysis. According to Garrett andBell (1998), media discourse is important because of easy accessibility, theheavy representation of ideologies and influence on attitudes within a certain

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