ABSTRACT
Although itself understandable as a sustained exploration of what is entailed in giving an analytic account of “a context” (as in the phrase “in the context of ordinary conversation”), various aspects of inquiry in this tradition of work have prompted an interest in neighboring disciplines in relating features of talk-in-interaction to “contexts” of a more traditional sort – linguistic contexts, cultural contexts, and institutional and social structural contexts. At the same time, investigators working along conversation analytic lines began to deal with talk with properties which were seemingly related to its production by participants oriented to a special “institutional” context; and, wishing to address those distinctive properties rather than ones held in common with other forms of talk (as Sacks had done in some of his earliest work based on group-therapy sessions), these investigators faced the analytic problems posed by such an undertaking.
