Concurrent operations on talk: Notes on the interactive organization of assessments

Abstract

The analysis of conversation has a strong relevance to the study of pragmatics.Thus in introducing the scope of pragmatics Levinson (1983: 284) notes that It is not hard to see why one should look to conversation for insight into pragmatic phenomena, for conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language usage, the form in which we are all first exposed to language the matrix for language acquisition.The field of study that has provided the most extensive analysis of the pragmatic organization of conversation is the line of inquiry initiated by the late Harvey Sacks and his colleagues.lIndeed * We are very deeply indebted to Alessandro Duranti, William Hanks, Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff for insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this analysis.This paper was initially presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, September 9, 1982.l.For a detailed study of both work in conversation analysis, and how that work is relevant to pragmatics in general, see Levinson (1983).See Heritage (l98 a) for more extensive treatment of the relationship between conversation analysis and the ethnomethodological tradition it emerged from within sociology, and Heritage (1985) for a detailed summary of work within the field.For collections of specific analysis see for example Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Button and Lee (in press), Schenkein (1978), and Zimmerman and West (1980).C. Goodwin (1981) and Heath (1986) examine in detail the IPRA Papers in Pragntatics l, No.l (1987), l-54