Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis

By “generic orders of organization,” I mean the various organizations of practice that deal with the various generic organizational contingencies of talk-in-interaction without which it cannot proceed in an orderly way: (1) the “turn-taking” problem: who should talk next and when should they do so? How does this affect the construction and understanding of the turns themselves?

(2) the “action-formation” problem: how are the resources of the language, the body, the environment of the interaction, and position in the interaction fashioned into conformations designed to be, and to be recognizable by recipients as, particular actions – actions like requesting, inviting, granting, complaining, agreeing, telling, noticing, rejecting, and so on – in a class of unknown size?

(3) the “sequence-organizational” problem: how are successive turns formed up to be “coherent” with the prior turn (or some prior turn), and what is the nature of that coherence?

(4) the “trouble” problem: how to deal with trouble in speaking, hearing and/or understanding the talk so that the interaction does not freeze in place when trouble arises, that intersubjectivity is maintained or restored, and that the turn and sequence and activity can progress to possible completion?

(5) the word-selection problem: how do the components that get selected as the elements of a turn get selected, and how does that selection inform and shape the understanding achieved by the turn’s recipients?

(6) the overall structural organization problem: how does the overall composition of an occasion of interaction get structured, what are those structures, and how does placement in the overall structure inform the construction and understanding of the talk as turns, as sequences, etc.?