ABSTRACT
CA attempts to “discover the methods by which members of a society produce a sense of social order” and “how language both creates and is created by social context” (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 232). As with IS and EC, CA is concerned with human knowledge (i.e., communicative competence) and focuses on the detailed analysis of particular sequences taken from the transcripts of recorded conversations. CA, however, has very specific theoretical assumptions and provides its own methodology for looking at the sequential organization of talk (see Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Heritage, 1989; Schiffrin, 1994; Wootton, 1989; Zimmerman, 1988).
