We study "Conversation Analysis (CA)," one of the most successful scientific approaches to analyzing human interaction.
CA has its roots in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), a sociological approach. CA itself was developed in the 1960s by sociologist Harvey Sacks (Schegloff 1989: 189-91), who was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at the time, and further advanced by scholars such as Emanuel A. Schegloff (Heritage 2024) and Gail Jefferson (Drew, Heritage, and Pomerantz 2014).
One of the key pieces of evidence for CA's success is the paper on turn-taking in conversation, published in 1974 by the aforementioned trio (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974 {1978}). This paper was published in Language, the most prestigious journal in linguistics, and has been cited over 20,000 times, making it the most cited article in this journal (Joseph 2003: 463; Person 2022). Furthermore, when OpenAI announced the release of chatGPT-4o in 2024 (OpenAI 2024), the academic paper cited was a CA-based study that quantitatively analyzed the length of time it takes for responses to questions to occur in conversations across various languages around the world (Stivers et al. 2009).
CA has provided valuable insights not only for AI but also in fields such as healthcare, law, media, education, and psychotherapy. In the academic world, its contributions extend beyond sociology and linguistics to anthropology, communication studies, and psychology (Sidnell and Stivers 2013).
I, Atsushi Nakagawa, began formally studying CA in 2011 through Kansai Conversation Analysis Research Group. In 2019, I started working on my doctoral dissertation on CA in the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Humanities and Public Affairs at Chiba University, and I obtained my Ph.D. in 2024. From 2024, I have the privilege of receiving further training in CA at UCLA as a Visiting Associate Researcher at the Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture (CLIC), supported by a Fulbright Research Program fellowship.
To those of you reading this who wish to write papers using the CA approach, I would be delighted if you choose to study CA in this lab. It would be my greatest pleasure to share the knowledge and experience I have gained, thanks to the help of many, to enrich your lives and contribute to the CA community and its ongoing research.
【References】
Drew, Paul, John Heritage, and Anita Pomerantz, 2014, "Gail Jefferson 1938–2008," EM/CA wiki.
Garfinkel, Harold, 1967, Studies in Ethnomethodology , Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Heritage, John, 2024, "Emanuel A. Schegloff 1937–2024," Research on Language and Social Interaction, 57(3): 255-6.
Jefferson, Gail,, 2004, “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction,” Gene H. Lerner ed., Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 13-31.
Joseph, Brian D., 2003, “The Editor’s Department: Reviewing Our Contents,” Language, 79(3): 461–63.
OpenAI, 2024, “Hello GPT-4o”.
Person, Raymond, 2022, “Conversation Analysis,” Oxford Bibliographies.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, 1974, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Language, 50(4): 696-735. {Reprinted in: Jim Schenkein ed., 1978, Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, New York: Academic Press, 7-55.}
Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1989, "Harvey Sacks-Lectures 1964-1965: An Introduction/Memoir", Human Studies, 12(3/4): 185-209.
――――, 2007, Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis Ⅰ, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, Tanya, Nicholas J. Enfield, Penelope Brown, Christina Englert, Makoto Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, Gertie Hoymann, Federico Rossano, Jan Peter De Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon, Stephen C. Levinson, 2009, "Universals and Cultural Variation in Turn-taking in Conversation", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26): 10587–92.