The article begins with an effort to clarify and differentiate a variety of terms used by analysts in dealing with mentions of persons in conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction — such terms as person-reference, identifying, describing, categorizing, and the like. This effort leads to the observation that `reference to persons' and `membership categorization' are quite distinct sets of practices, with most reference to persons not being done by membership categories, and most uses of membership categorization devices being in the (...) service of actions other than referring. Two interactional sequences whose analysis turns on a connection to talk earlier in the occasion are then examined; first, to establish what is going on interactionally without respect to the mentioning of persons, and then as exercises in examining the various ways person-reference and membership categorization can figure in a stretch of interaction. (shrink)

The article begins with a sketch of the relation of interaction to language and to culture, and of the students of interaction to the students of language and of culture. A 10-second segment of recorded interaction at a family dinner is then examined in a fashion meant to preserve the integrity1 of what is being done interactionally while incorporating attention to the deployment of various facets of the language that is used, and its relationship to simultaneously ongoing bodily doings. An (...) interactional practice – whining – from that episode is then juxtaposed with the same practice in several other segments of interaction in the interests of developing a more formal, transsituational account. The viability of research focused on phenomena in an analytically distinct domain of events while preserving the integrity of the occasions in which instances of the phenomenon occurred is then reviewed, using a case study of the conjoint use of phonetic analysis and conversation analysis. The article concludes with a reply to Levinson's article in this special issue of the journal, and uses the occasion to sketch the relationship between interaction and so-called ‘macro’ social and cultural formations such as kinship. (shrink)

In a period given to emphasizing diversity among humans, we would do well to explore diversity among forms of discourse and among forms of talk-in-interaction in particular. Among the speech-exchange systems, ordinary conversation has been claimed to be distinctive and fundamental, but questions have been raised about both claims. The resources for discriminating among speech-exchange systems are located in such generic organizations of practice as turn-taking, sequence organization, the organization of repair and the overall structural organization of episodes of interaction. (...) I try to show that `conversation' as a distinctive speech-exchange system is real and is not only a residual category, and that it is to be understood as the `basic' speech-exchange system, in part by reference to the distinctive turn-taking organization through which it is implemented. The `motivation' for having developed a formal account of this turn-taking organization is recounted, and that formal account is defended for its usability in the analytic explication of singular, contexted episodes of talk. The remainder of the article is given over to such an exemplary account - an examination of an episode of interaction during a testing session between a man whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated and a researcher. (shrink)

Turns-at-talk are fundamental units of participation in talk-in-interaction, and turn-constructional-units are the basic building blocks for turns. Possible completion of a TCU is, in principle, the possible completion of the turn, but multi-unit turns are not uncommon, and participants have practices for constructing multi-unit turns and for recognizing them in the course of their production. This article offers an account of one practice usable by speakers and recipients to convey and recognize the designed completion of a multi-TCU turn and/or a (...) multi-turn sequence in which ‘answering’ is being done: returning to, or ‘re-using’, a word or phrase from the start of the turn or sequence, whether articulated by same or different speaker, whether used to refer to same or different referents. This practice is one of the resources by which the overall structural organization of an interactional unit and its local realization are mutually realized. (shrink)

Although there is no lack of reasons for conversation analysis to be reluctant to adopt a cognitivist idiom and paradigm in studying talk and other conduct in interaction, examination of the literature with an open mind will disclose attentiveness to such themes in the conversation-analytic literature nonetheless. The pursuit of such themes however, cannot be appropriately and successfully conducted under the aegis of currently dominant cognitivist paradigms. One central analytic resource in CA work is the notion of a ‘possible X’, (...) a resource which is here described and exemplified for three discrete ‘values’ of ‘X’. The understanding of how such ‘possible Xs’ could work for participants in interaction invites understanding by analysts by reference to a ‘multiple passes’ model of uptake, a characterization which for now can be no more than metaphoric. Here is a venue at which conversation-analysts and neuro/cognitive analysts might usefully try to work together. (shrink)

One important lesson of Roberts' target article may be potentially obscured for some by the title's reference to “self-experimentation.” At the core of this work, the key investigative resource is sustained and systematic observation, not experimentation, and it is deployed in a fashion not necessarily restricted to self-examination. There is an important reminder here of a strategically important, but neglected, relationship between observation and experiment.

Although Harvey Sacks' `Max Weber's Ancient Judaism' is an early student paper, it raises issues of theory, method and disciplinary mandate which have continuing relevance. I frame the article in two ways. First, I sketch the academic and intellectual context in which the paper was written, in particular the institutional setting in Berkeley of the early 1960s, and the activities and preoccupations animating the work of the group of students which was the most proximate context for Sacks' writing at this (...) time, including the efforts to come to terms with Garfinkel's early work. Second, I relate this article to two others written by Sacks in roughly the same period, and sketch a thematic continuity and development running through them - a theme whose endpoint is the centrality of what must surely be called `culture' to the calling of Sociology. (shrink)

I share the authors' stance on the dialogic or interactional character of language. The authors, however, have left actual interaction out of their conception of dialogue. I sketch a number of organizations of practices of talking and understanding that supply the basic arena for talk-in-interaction. It is by reference to these that mechanisms for speech production and understanding need to be understood.