Mighty Digests # 15: TEN HAVE, Doing Conversation Analysis (Chapters 7-8)

(Book: Ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide. (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications) [Chapters 7-8]

Reading these chapters I came to think that talk in interaction is almost like a chess game, with rules, turn-taking, preferred and dispreferred moves/responses…

It also looks like the participants of a conversation are “knitting” together a net that wraps language and reality.

ten Have proposes these analytical organized (and organizing) activities:

1. turn-taking
2. organization
3. sequence organization (“one thing can lead to another”; adjacency pairs; cycles)
4. repair organization
5. organization of turn-design

In a certain sense, it sounds like the opposite of “waiting for your turn to speak”: it’s more like inviting the other person to speak, in a way we may feel comfortable with.

This is clear if we consider that conversation is not only constructed, but also designed. I think this is one of the most interesting perspectives of Conversation Analysis, and possibly one of its most important discoveries.

I am starting to think that the context built through discourse overrides the “extrinsic context”, leaving it blurred and faded in the background. Maybe, the more a discourse creates a context aligned to the extrinsic context, the more it is effective (if we think of the fluency of an envisioned sequence of utterances).