This book develops a systematic model for the analysis and description of casual conversation in English, based on a large body of authentic data.

Over the last three decades there has been an ever-increasing interest in the analysis of spoken interaction. Work on casual conversation, which for a time was found to present virtually insuperable problems to the analyst, has now come to occupy as prominent a place as institutional interactions. Many approaches to casual conversation have been partial, and the author's own seminal publication with Suzanne Eggins, Analysing Casual Conversation (1997) was a milestone in demonstrating the value of locating the analysis in a broad framework that was inspired by Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. In this new book Slade amplifies and extends that earlier work, presenting original case material and expanding on her claim that the 'chunks' of genre-based analysis need to be supplemented by the concept of 'chat.' She presents a framework and the tools for describing the dynamics of both the macro and the micro structure of conversation as it creates and recreates social relations. All those whose interests lie in understanding how language works in casual conversation, whether in linguistics sociolinguistics, educational linguistics or cultural studies, will find this an essential read.

In the last fifteen years the analysis of conversation has become one of the most active and fastest developing fields in the study of language and communication but so far there has been no comprehensive critical account of its overall strengths and weaknesses. The authors of this volume have broken the pattern with their critical survey of the concepts and methods of conversation analysis. They examine various approaches to the study of conversation, demonstrating that they share implicit assumptions carried over from the tradition of modern descriptive linguistics. They consider - in relation to literature from philosophy, psychology, sociology and linguistics - whether current models of conversation illumine the phenomena of talk and suggest some new directions for our thinking about these phenomena.

Discussing Conversation Analysis: The work of Emanuel A. Schegloff presents an in-depth view on Schegloff’s complex and stimulating work in Conversation Analysis (CA) and offers clear insights into how it has and may be developed further as a research tool in social psychology, social science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. • What is the status of fine-grained empirical studies of human interaction in CA and how does CA relate to other approaches to linguistic interaction? • What is Schegloff’s contribution to CA and how does his work relate to that of Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks? • How does CA distinguish its own analytical tools and terms from the categories of the participants in talk? • What can CA reveal about human-computer interaction? • What can CA contribute to the neurosciences in the study, diagnosis, and treatment of linguistically impaired individuals? • How does CA account for the socio-historical dimension of the material and semiotic resources that participants co-deploy in talk? By addressing these and other questions this volume proposes a critical guide to CA and its applications with an extraordinary interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff, and new contributions towards a debate on his work by six commentators — conversation analysts (John Heritage and Charles Goodwin), critics (Rick Iedema and Pär Segerdahl) and appliers of CA in the study of human-computer interaction (Pirkko Raudaskoski) and language disorders (Ruth Lesser). Schegloff’s Response and a closing discussion with the editors conclude the volume, which also features a comprehensive bibliography of his work edited by Susan Eerdmans. Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, he has taught at Columbia University as well as at UCLA. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a resident Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1978–79) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1998–99).

This volume contains a collection of original studies in conversation analysis (C.A.) arranged and presented both to introduce the discipline to the newcomer and to reveal some of the expanding range of discoveries which conversation analysts are making in the course of their distinctive enquiries into the order and organisation of natural language. Though sociological in its orientation. C.A. and the papers here represented are of direct methodological and substantive interest to linguists, philosophers, discourse and speech analysts and social anthropologists. Indeed the strict adherence to the methodological principle that analysis can and must be shown to be grounded in data represents a challenge to all those disciplines which set out to use their materials as mere hand-maidens to support preconstructed models, theories and hypotheses. In this series of papers which includes previously unpublished works of the late Harvey Sacks and the last completed joint researches of Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff ordinary talk is shown as consisting of a variety of previously unnoticed socially organised practices which conversationalists engage in to generate the organisation which talk has. The methods and the analytic mentality of conversation analysts are, and are here shown to be, designed to make conversationalist's methods, structure and modes of orientation available for empirical study. The search for order and organisation reveals it everywhere. Laughter is shown to be concertedly organised and negotiated in the finest detail. The machinery of delicate repair systems is revealed. Conversational completions are shown to be the product of elaborate negotiating machineries. Conversationalists are revealed as subtly orienting-to and invoking the visual contexts of their interaction within the framework of the turn-taking organisation of conversation. This volume also contains examples of conversation analytic work into the talk produced in organisational settings such as courts and Doctor/Patient interviews. Such analyses reveal the contribution that the discipline might make towards the exploration of the kind of social phenomena traditionally researched by sociologists, social psychologists and social anthropologists.