ABSTRACT
With the help of Chris Ramsden (Kent), Michael Forrester (Kent), and Johannes Wagner (Odense), we recently implemented an alternative to transcription using CHAT. This alternative is known as Conversational Analysis or simply CA. It is a system originally devised by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) for the purpose of understanding the construction of conversational turns and sequencing. It is now used by hundreds of researchers internationally to study conversational behavior. Recent applications and formulations of this approach can be found in Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996), as well as the related “GAT” formulation of Selting (1998). Workers in this tradition find CA notation easier to use than CHAT, because the conventions of this system provide a clearer mapping of features of conversational sequencing. On the other hand, CA transcription has many limits in terms of its ability to represent conventional morphemes, orthography, and syntactic patterns.
