Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T02:25:39.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and interaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2010

Elinor Ochs
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Emanuel A. Schegloff
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Sandra A. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Get access

Summary

Introduction

From early in its development, conversation-analytic work on interaction has declined to accord language any principled primacy as an object of inquiry (e.g., Schegloff and Sacks, 1973: 290). Although not derived from them, this view was in accord with the stances of such intellectual forbears as Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (1967) and Goffman's several approaches to interaction. It may be recalled, for example, that in “The neglected situation” Goffman (1964) injected into the “coming-out party” of the embryonic subfield known as the ethnography of speaking or communication the observation that speaking occurs most proximately in “situations,” in which it need not occur; speaking, then, had to be understood by reference to exigencies of contexts not designed for speaking in particular (as elaborated, for example, in the earlier Goffman, 1961, 1963, and the later Goffman, 1971). In both of these modalities of work, and in their predecessors, language was not a privileged object of inquiry, however interesting an object of inquiry it might be.

Still, the accessibility of conversation (and talk-in-interaction more generally) to systematic inquiry has brought with it a need to explore the mutual bearing of the various organizations of “language” on the one hand (whatever that notion might turn out to refer to; cf. Schegloff, 1979: 282) and the organizations of interaction and talking-in-interaction on the other. For linguistics, the promise has been to situate language relative to the social/interactional matrix in which it is to be understood as inescapably as it is relative to the organization of the mind/brain.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×