ABSTRACT
Through the groundbreaking work of sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, and their associates, conversation analysis (CA) emerged as a distinct research paradigm in the 1960s. Rooted in the ethnomethodological tradition founded by Harold Garfinkel (1967), and sharing Erving Goffman’s (1963, 1967) interest in examining social order through details of everyday interaction, CA established itself as a rigorous empirical approach to the study of conversations and other forms of talk-in-interaction. CA’s primary aim is to discover and describe the mechanisms through which participants in social interaction understand and respond to one another. To this end, CA researchers have conducted meticulous examination of audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interactions to discern recurrent patterns across different data sets. In the last few decades, CA’s research framework and empirical findings on the fundamental architecture of interaction (to be discussed further below) have been adopted in a wide range of disciplines. The field of pragmatics in general, and L2 pragmatics in particular, is no exception to this trend. Pragmatics and CA are both concerned with participants’ choices of semiotic resources for meaning-making and interpretation in communication, and in so doing, they both place great importance on the role of context. CA has contributed to the expansion and reconceptualization of the scope of pragmatics research by introducing fresh perspectives on how to understand the nature of language use.
