Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis

Much of our daily lives is spent talking to one another, in both ordinary conversation and more specialized settings such as meetings, interviews, classrooms, and courtrooms. It is largely through conversation that the major institutions of our society – economy, religion, politics, family, and law – are implemented. This is the first in a new series of books by Emanuel Schegloff introducing the findings and theories of conversation analysis. Together, the volumes in the series when published will constitute a complete and authoritative “primer” in the subject. The topic of this first volume is “sequence organization”–thewaysinwhichturns-at-talkareorderedandcombinedtomakeactions take place in conversation, such as requests, offers, complaints, and announcements. Containing many examples from real-life conversations, this volume will be invaluable to anyone interested in human interaction and the workings of conversation.

Introduction. Oneofthemostfundamentalorganizationsofpracticefortalk-in-interaction is the organization of turn-taking. For there to be the possibility of responsiveness – of one participant being able to show that what they are saying and doing is responsive to what another has said and done – one party needs to talk after the other, and, it turns out, they have to talk singly. It is the organization of the practices of turn-taking that is the resource relied upon by parties to talk-in-interaction to achieve these outcomes routinely: they talk singly – that is, one at a time; and each participant’s talk is inspectable, and is inspected, by co-participants to see how it stands to the one that preceded, what sort of response it has accorded the preceding turn. The organization of turn-taking requires a book of its own; all we can give it here is a capsule review, which will appear below. Suffice it to say that the turn-taking organization for conversation works extremely effectively, and produces long stretches of turns-at-talk that follow one another with minimized gap and overlap between them.

Discussion / Conclusion. The organization of sequences is one of the central forms of organization that gives shape and coherence to stretches of talk and the series of turns of which stretches of talk are composed. The focus of this organization is not, in general, convergence on some topic being talked about, but the contingent development of courses of action. The coherence which is involved is that which relates the action or actions which get enacted in or by an utterance to the ones which have preceded and the ones which may follow. The very root of the word “interaction” underscores the centrality of action to the commerce between people dealing with each other, and this aspect of their conduct is a central preoccupation informing what people do in the turns in which they speak, and informing as well what they are heard to be doing. We have focused on what is very likely the basic unit of sequence organization – the adjacency pair. There are other types of sequence in conversation, but a very broad range of the sequences we find organized as systematic expansions of adjacency pairs.