ABSTRACT
Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction which identifies and describes the stable practices of interaction and the encompassing organisations in which they are embedded. Its fundamental assumption is that naturally occurring talk is characterised by ‘order at all points’ ( Sacks 1984 ), and this social order is to be found in the details of interactional events through detailed structural analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk.
Even though conversation analysis emerged within the field of sociology, it has significantly interacted with linguistics with its focus on grammatical forms as a repertoire of practices for designing, organising, projecting and making sense of the trajectories and import of turns-at-talk. Conversation analytic research studies linguistic objects as resources for constructing actions and sequences of actions in talk, and it thus enables us to understand some of the shaping factors of linguistic structures and patterns (grammar being the most researched). Given that the conversation analytic method has predominantly been applied to analyse interactions in English, we now have a wealth of insights into the interactional import of English language phenomena, such as non-lexical particles like ‘oh’ (Heritage 2002), reported speech (Clift 2006), traditionally called ‘elliptical’ sentences ( Schegloff 1996 ), declarative interrogatives (Stivers 2010) and others.
The rapid development of digital technologies in the last two decades opened up new possibilities in conversation analytic research. These possibilities can be grouped under three sections: digitisation of conversation analytic methods, application of conversation analysis to text-based online interactions and automation of conversation analysis. We argue that while in adapting to the digital turn, conversation analysis retains its core methods for analysing interaction, digital technologies have enabled conversation analysts to better (and sometimes faster) answer long-standing questions and to pose innovative research questions that were difficult or even impossible to address without the use of digital means (e.g. searching for universal patterns in social interaction). Subsequently, we discuss the challenges of applying conversation analysis – a method developed for analysing face-to-face or telephone interaction – to text-based forms of talk on social media. We conclude with a brief reference to the very recent effort to automate conversation analysis, and we point out some of its challenges and possibilities.
