ABSTRACT
Conversation (or talk-in-interaction) requires that participants produce utterances whose meanings are (a) responsive to the meanings of what self and others have said before and to the social business at hand that led the participants to talk with each other in the first place, and also are (b) anticipatory of their projected meaning and uptake by the other. The burden on participants is thus to discipline what they say for the sake of coordinating with each other to ensure that a conversation-a sequentially organized progression of alternating turns at talk-does in fact ensue, and the social business at hand is in fact addressed. Viewed in this way, having a conversation is a microcosm of what happens between people in social life more broadly, and it was with this in mind that a handful of sociologists in the 1960s, principally Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, developed conversation analysis.
