Discussing Conversation Analysis

Discussing Conversation Analysis: The work of Emanuel A. Schegloff presents an in-depth view on Schegloff’s complex and stimulating work in Conversation Analysis (CA) and offers clear insights into how it has and may be developed further as a research tool in social psychology, social science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics.
• What is the status of fine-grained empirical studies of human interaction in CA and how does CA relate to other approaches to linguistic interaction?
• What is Schegloff’s contribution to CA and how does his work relate to that of Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks?
• How does CA distinguish its own analytical tools and terms from the categories of the participants in talk?
• What can CA reveal about human-computer interaction?
• What can CA contribute to the neurosciences in the study, diagnosis, and treatment of linguistically impaired individuals?
• How does CA account for the socio-historical dimension of the material and semiotic resources that participants co-deploy in talk?

By addressing these and other questions this volume proposes a critical guide to CA and its applications with an extraordinary interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff, and new contributions towards a debate on his work by six commentators — conversation analysts (John Heritage and Charles Goodwin), critics (Rick Iedema and Pär Segerdahl) and appliers of CA in the study of human-computer interaction (Pirkko Raudaskoski) and language disorders (Ruth Lesser).
Schegloff’s Response and a closing discussion with the editors conclude the volume, which also features a comprehensive bibliography of his work edited by Susan Eerdmans.
Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, he has taught at Columbia University as well as at UCLA. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a resident Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1978–79) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1998–99).

Chaoquin Xie, Fujian Normal University in Linguist List, Vol.14-2177:
This book provides a good forum for both supporters and critics of CA to discuss various central issues related to CA. [...] the collection of papers provides a good opportunity, for those interested in CA and Schegloff, to obtain a deep and profound understanding of how CA has come to its present form, to what extent CA has been and can be explored, what Schegloff has contributed to CA as one of its most powerful advocators and, most importantly, how CA as an empirically-oriented research methodology can be used to better account for human interaction and sense-making activities. And the interested reader is referred to Eerdmans et al. (2003) to see in what aspects Gumperz and Schegloff are both similar to and different from each other in their approach to language in social action and interaction.