Goodwin Charles. Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers

New York: Academic Press, 1982. — 195 р. — (Series: Language, thought, and culture)To engage successfully in conversation, participants are required not only to produce sentences but also to coordinate, in a meaningful fashion, their talk with the talk of others present. Such activity constitutes a pervasive-but intricate-form of human social organization, one that makes full use of both the linguistic and the cultural competence of the parties engaged in it. It is therefore not surprising that the analysis of conservation has begun to attract the attention of scholars from a number of different disciplines. The present study takes as its point of departure the work of Harvey Sacks and his colleagues on the sequential organilation of conservation, and investigates some previously unexamined features of this process.