Harvey Sacks’ Conversation Analysis

This article is part 9 of the collection of articles on discursive cultural psychology. Go to the collection table of contents to read other articles. 

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Another element of discourse as joint activity is action sequence. Joint activity can be seen as an overarching project. This overarching project can be compared to A. N. Leontiev’s (1981) activity or to van Dijk’s (inter-)action macrostructure (van Dijk, 1980) in which an individual interlocutor’s action occurs in a certain place in the sequence of actions with certain goal that is derived from the goal of the overarching project itself. 

These actions are taken in sequence since one action would become a condition for the next. The later action is conditional on the undefective completion of the former. 

Deriving from telephone conversations, Clark provides an example of three broad actions in sequence:
I. A and B open the conversation
II. A and B exchange information
III. A and B close the conversation

These broad actions can be broken down further into smaller action sequences or projects, the minimum of which would consist of two or three actions. These minimum projects can be conceived of as building blocks of the overarching project. 

There has been many conversational analysis studies since initiated first by Harvey Sacks (Jefferson, 1989) that discover various such minimum action sequences in various activity contexts. Examples of such mini-mum sequences are question-answer (QA), summon-answer (SA), greetings (Hallo-hallo), pre-sequences, request-grant/rejection, invitation-acceptance/refusal, offer- acceptance/refusal (Silverman, 1998; Heritage, 1984). 

We shall now however discuss only one of such sequences that may be relevant for analyzing problem solving discourse, i.e. the question-answer sequence. The point is not that QAs comprise a large proportion of conversational activity in problem solving groups. What is intended is to show the form of analysis directed to these sequences.
Probably the most frequently discussed of these minimum action sequences is the adjacency pair of question-answer, usually abbreviated QA (Schegloff, 1972: Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Sacks, 1989; Searle, 1979, 1992). 

Conversation in Transcript 9.1 below provides an example of such a QA sequence. What constitutes QA as an adjacency pair unit is what Schegloff (1972) termed ‘conditional relevance.’ The occurrence of the assertion 9.1.3 is conceived as an answer which is conditionally relevant to the question 9.1.2. This means that if A occurs, it occurs as a relevant response to Q; and if it does not occur, its non-occurrence will be conceived as an event. 

Transcript 9.1 Speech acts sequence in work-group discussion

Utt	Spk	Original utterances	English Translation
9.1.1	B	Ich habe da noch so eine generelle Frage.	I still have one general question
9.1.2		Geht’s nur um Produktion fürs Inland, oder geht’s auch um Export?	Is it about production only for local market, or also for export?
9.1.3	L	Im Moment geht das nur um Inlandprodukte..	Right now, only for local market
9.1.4		Aber das reicht	But that would be enough
9.1.5	C	Ja, genau.	Yes, exactly
9.1.6		Wir müssen uns erst mal hochbringen.	We must first of all bring ourselves higher

To illustrate this, let’s imagine, that after the speaker B utters the question 9.1.2 which is addressed to L, L does not utter anything. L’s silence would create questions as to why L does such an ‘inappropriate action.’ 

The QA adjacency pair may be explained by speech act theory (Searle &Vanderveken, 1985; Searle, 1979, 1992). In Searle’s speech act taxonomy, a question is categorized as a directive which is an action that attempts to get the addressee to perform a speech act (usually assertives). The answer which is an assertive conducted by the addressee would become a condition of satisfaction of the question. A question without answer then is an unsatisfied or unsuccessful speech act. 



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