ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship between technical and vernacular descriptions of conversation. It brings to the fore how Sacks established the technical analysis of conversation as a defining feature of Conversation Analysis (CA) and explains what that means and how it relates to everyday vernacular formulations of what people are saying. The chapter then elaborates how misunderstandings of the relationship between vernacular understandings and technical analysis have become entrenched in significant lines of contemporary CA. To illustrate such misunderstandings, we examine proposals and examples to integrate CA's analysis of interaction with other disciplinary approaches in linguistics, communication studies, and discourse analysis.
