ABSTRACT
Conversation analysis (CA) has emerged in the last decades as a key perspective to study social interaction within a variety of disciplines, including sociology where it originated and linguistics where it develops nowadays in a dynamic and innovative way. The chapter offers a sketch of the history of this research paradigm and an overview of its conception of social action, interaction, and language. It offers a presentation of CA, showing how it has emerged historically, and sketching its original contribution to the study of social interaction. Then it synthetizes the specific methodological procedures built on this conception, concerning audio/video recordings of naturalistic settings, their transcription and their specific forms of analysis. Finally, the chapter ends with some considerations about current challenges raised by the multimodal analysis of video data.
