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The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics
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Description: The Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA/IL is an online resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki (https://emcawiki.net).
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Components
Allusion
The term allusion generally refers to something that has been conveyed inexplicitly in interaction.
Assessment
Most broadly, an assessment is a type of social action by which an interactant expresses an evaluative stance towards someone or something (e.g., an o...
Retro-sequence
A retro-sequence is a type of sequence that is launched (or ‘activated’) from second position (Schegloff 2007: 217-219).
Advice
Giving advice, according to one commonly accepted understanding, is an action type advocating a future action or activity to be carried out by the rec...
Overlap
Overlap is the simultaneous production of talk by two or more interlocutors. While occurrences of overlap are typically conceived of as violations of ...
Response space
A response space is a sequential environment where a responsive action is made relevant by a first action. What type of response is relevant in a resp...
Abrupt-join
Abrupt-joins are tempo-related turn-holding devices which allow current speakers to extend their turn beyond a possible completion point.
Rush-through
Rush-throughs are tempo-related turn-holding devices which allow current speakers to extend their turn beyond a possible completion point.
Latching
Latching refers to the immediate transition from one turn-constructional unit (TCU) into the next without the usual beat of silence in between the two...
Applied Conversation Analysis
Where "basic" or "fundamental" CA discovers the conversational practices by which people bring off their everyday business, "applied" conversation ana...
Show concession
In an argument, a concession to the other's position weakens one's own. With what Antaki and Wetherell (1999) call a "show" concession, however, the s...
Third position
Third position refers to the sequential environment in which the initial (first action) speaker of an adjacency pair has the opportunity to expand the...
Online syntax
Online Syntax (as introduced by Auer 2007, 2009) is an approach to syntax within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It analyses (turn) constr...
Projector construction
A projector construction is a syntactic construction which grammatically projects a(n) (often) complex continuation in the same turn. The term was coi...
Code-switching
The term code-switching lacks a clear definition. It is used for all kinds of co-occurrences of different languages or varieties in a sentence and/or ...
Footing
Footing (Goffman 1974: 496-559, 1979, 1981: 124-159) refers to the alignments people take up in respect to vocal and embodied actions during social en...
Materiality
In Conversation Analysis, materiality is used to refer to the particulars of the physical (e.g., Goodwin, 2000), virtual (Hindmarsh, Heath & Frase...
Mobility
In Conversation Analysis, the term mobility is used in the context of how social participants talk and interact while moving from one place to another...
Multiactivity
The term multiactivity refers to the ways in which people talk and interact when coordinating or advancing (or not) two or more courses of action simu...
Agreement
The term agreement is used in varying levels of detail to refer to the display and establishment of “being in accord” in social interaction. Most char...
Contiguity
Contiguity is the property of an element in conversation and another element that is the “next one due” (Schegloff 2007: 15) being positioned in immed...
Choral co-production
Choral co-production refers to a form of participation whereby participants aim to co-produce part or all of a turn-constructional unit (TCU) more or ...
Anticipatory completion
Anticipatory completion, also called collaborative completion or co-participant completion, is a practice whereby one participant completes a not-yet-...
Transformative answer
A transformative answer is a type of answer which, though its design, proposes alterations to the terms or agenda of the prior question while providin...
Lapse
A lapse is a period of non-speech that emerges when all participants forgo the opportunity to speak at a place where speaking is a relevant possibilit...
Multi-unit turn
A multi-unit turn is an utterance produced by one speaker that contains more than one turn-constructional unit (TCU), which entails more than one plac...
Single-unit turn
For a single-unit turn, a speaker produces one turn-constructional unit (TCU) that terminates at a first place of possible completion, whereupon turn-...
Delay
Within conversation analysis, “delay” refers to the placement of a unit of talk or embodied conduct later than projected within a turn-constructional ...
Resistance
Resistance represents the interactional accomplishment whereby an individual temporarily suspends their partial or full collaboration with an interloc...
Subject-side assessment
A subject-side (S-side) assessment, also referred to as a ‘subjective evaluation’, is an assessment that indexes an individual’s disposition towards t...
Object-side assessment
An object-side (O-side) assessment, also referred to as an ‘objective evaluation’, is an assessment that indexes attributes of the object it evaluates...
Change-of-state token
A change-of-state token is a linguistic practice for speakers to show that they have “undergone some kind of change in his or her locally current stat...
Discourse marker
Discourse markers are linguistic devices such as anyway, but, so, y’know, and like, that operate on the level of discourse or units of talk. Schiffrin...
Preface
The term preface in generally used in relation to a turn, i.e., a turn preface. Turn prefaces refer to elements that occur in turn-initial position (o...
Particle
CA/IL studies use the term particle to refer to small, uninflected words that can occupy different positions in a turn (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen & Selt...
Turn-initial position
Elements in turn-initial position have been broadly defined as ”any token or formulaic phrase that begins and prefaces a turn (and thus a TCU)” (Kim &...
Modular pivot
A modular pivot is a type of turn-constructional pivot. It is built from syntactically entirely optional items (i.e. linguistic adjuncts) that can occ...
Pivot
The term pivot denotes an element of talk that can be understood to belong to two larger units of talk simultaneously, thereby joining them together a...
Downgrade
A downgrade (or downgrading, downgraded) has been used in slightly different ways throughout the CA and IL literature, but always with a general sense...
Upgrade
The term upgrade (or upgrading, upgraded) is used in a variety of related but different senses within conversation analysis and interactional linguist...
Turn allocation
Turn allocation is one component of the turn-taking system, the other being the turn-constructional component (Sacks, et al. 1974). The turn-allocatio...
Turn holding
Turn holding, also known as floor holding, refers to practices that a current speaker may deploy to inhibit what might otherwise be hearable as a tran...
Turn-taking
Turn-taking refers primarily to the coordinated ways in which speaking turns are distributed among participants, in two-party or multi-party interacti...
Response
A response is a social action which is understood in relation to a previous action. Unlike more specific categories of second-pair parts, which distin...
Pursuit
A pursuit (for response) is a post-first social action that treats the absence of a response (so far) as absent or inadequate. A pursuit may occur aft...
Non-response
A non-response is the absence of a response, in a post-first sequential environment where a responsive action is relevant. As a social action, a non-r...
Deontic authority
Deontic authority refers to the capacity of a person to determine action. It is about defining what “ought-to-be”—what will be forbidden, obligatory, ...
Deontic rights
Deontic rights refer to the authoritative potential that a participant in interaction has in a specific domain of action in relation to his co-partici...
Deontic status
Deontic status is an attribute of a person who is in a position of active or latent authority in a specific domain of action in relation to his or her...
Deontic stance
Deontic stance refers to a participant’s publicly displayed and claimed strength of deontic rights relative to their co-participant(s) in a certain do...
Deontics
Deontics is a topic of conversation-analytic inquiry, focusing on how participants’ rights to determine action are oriented to and drawn upon, as obse...
Participation
Participation as an analytic concept was first introduced by Goffman (1981) in his work on footing. Goffman was critical of the traditional models rep...
Participation framework
As an analytic concept, participation framework derives from Goffman’s work on footing (1981), which is concerned with the alignments of persons in th...
Reversed polarity question
Reversed polarity questions (RPQs) refer to polar questions that convey “assertions of the opposite polarity to that of the form of the questions” (Ko...
Preference
The term preference (as in “preference organization” or “conversational preference”) is used in conversation analytic research to describe how people ...
Preferred
The term ‘preferred’ is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how people systematically time/position and design their soci...
Dispreferred
The term ‘dispreferred’ is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how people systematically time/position and design their s...
Announcing
The terms announcing and announcement are used to describe a declarative utterance presented by its speaker as an intended recipient-informing about s...
Registering
Registering refers to the linguistic and embodied action of calling joint attention to a selected, publicly and concurrently perceivable referent so o...
Noticing
The term noticing is used to describe: (i) a private, individual, perceptual/cognitive action of bringing one’s attention or conscious awareness to a ...
Third position repair
A third position repair is a self-initiated self-repair that is initiated by the producer of the trouble source after the recipient’s talk that reveal...
Third turn repair
A third turn repair is a self-initiated self-repair that sequentially occurs neither within the same turn-constructional unit (TCU) as the trouble sou...
Self-initiated self-repair
In self-initiated self-repair, speakers interrupt the progressivity of their talk in order to deal with different interactional problems that occur in...
Same-turn self-repair
In same-turn self-repair, speakers interrupt their own emerging turn-constructional unit in order to deal with a problem related to the current turn. ...
Other-initiated self-repair
Other-initiated self-repair refers to the range of practices available to the producer of a trouble source to solve the interactional problem indicate...
Self-repair
Self-repair refers to the collection of practices which give the speaker the opportunity to deal with a part of their own talk that either the speaker...
Self-repair operation
Research on conversational repair has identified a range of repair operations that producers of repairables deploy for carrying out self-repair.
Fishing for information
Fishing for information is a way that speakers indirectly solicit information from recipients.
Conditional relevance
Conditional relevance refers to the property that obtains between an initiating action and its type-fitted responsive action whereby the producer of a...
Mobilizing response
Mobilizing response refers to how a speaker elicits a (relevant) response from a recipient in social interaction, and specifically to properties of tu...
Formulation
A formulation is a turn-in-talk in which a conversation participant describes or summarises preceding talk and/or draws out its implications. The term...
Candidate understanding
A candidate understanding is a turn-in-talk in which the speaker presents for confirmation or disconfirmation their understanding of a previous speake...
B-event statement
In the original definition given by Labov and Fanshel (1977), a B-event is one which is known by the recipient (B) but not by the speaker (A). A B-eve...
Go-ahead
A go-ahead is a type of response that occurs in pre-sequences and encourages the prior speaker to proceed with the action projected in first position ...
Blocking
A blocking response is a type of response that occurs in pre-sequences and discourages the prior speaker to proceed with the action projected in first...
Pre-pre
Pre-pre's (short for preliminaries to preliminaries) are a practice with which speakers project an action that is not to follow immediately but will b...
Post-pre
A post-pre is a device by which speakers indicate that they recognized the preceding talk as a pre-sequence, i.e. as preliminary to something else (Sa...
Pre-expansion (sequence)
A pre-expansion (sequence) (also known as a pre-sequence, or just pre) is a sequence type that expands base adjacency pairs prior to their first-pair ...
Next-turn proof procedure
The next-turn proof procedure refers to the practice whereby a next turn is designed/inspected for the speaker’s displayed understanding of the prior ...
Generalized list completer
A generalized list completer is a linguistic device used in the construction of lists, where the final item in the list is semantically broad or impre...
Hesitation marker
A hesitation marker is an element in talk that indicates some hesitation on the speaker’s part. In fields such as linguistics, hesitation markers have...
F-formation
An F-formation (or facing formation) is a spatial-orientational organization, in which participants have arranged their bodies so that their lower bod...
Home position
Home position refers to the bodily configuration to which a moving body part returns after a single move or a series of moves.
Response cry
A response cry is a vocalization that is produced in relation to an event, such as stumbling, experiencing rain or cold, or winning at a slot machine ...
Self-talk
In interaction research, self-talk refers to a speaker’s utterance that is neither addressed to another participant nor designed to occasion a respons...
Incipient talk
Incipient talk refers to a co-present situation where talk can occur at any moment but is not organized as regular conversational turn-taking, allowin...
Compliment
Compliments are social actions that explicitly or implicitly attribute credit to a recipient (Holmes 1988). Most commonly, they are positive assessmen...
Disclaimer
A disclaimer is a form of explanation that functions rhetorically to deflect an anticipated attribution about the identity of the speaker.
Extreme case formulation
Extreme case formulations are expressions that use maximal descriptions which function rhetorically to legitimate or counter a claim or assessment.
Phrase
In linguistics, a phrase is generally understood as a sequence of independently-recognized words. Evidence from child language acquisition, distributi...
Clause
The clause has traditionally been understood as a grammatical concept; here we first discuss its role in linguistic typology, then turn to the role it...
Proposal
The term proposal has been used with varying denotations in CA/IL. Among the earliest uses were those by Davidson (1984), who mentions proposals in a ...
Construction
Pre-theoretically the term construction is widely used to refer to a language-specific phrasal or clausal pattern (e.g., the ‘passive’ construction, t...
Complaint
A complaint is a social action – or activity (see below) – in which one or several speakers express a negative stance about a person, object, or situa...
Progressional overlap onset
Progressional overlap (also progressional overlap onset, or simply progressional onset) occurs when a next speaker initiates talk during an emerging p...
Recognitional overlap onset
Recognitional overlap (also recognitional overlap onset, or simply recognitional onset), refers to the initiation of talk by a second speaker that ori...
Transitional overlap onset
Transitional overlap (also transitional overlap onset, or simply transitional onset) refers to the initiation and production of talk by a next speaker...
Activity
The term activity is used in an imprecise way but generally refers to a larger interactional unit within which an action performed by an individual is...
Project
The term project (noun) is used in an imprecise way. It may or may not be used interchangeably with activity (see Robinson 2003, who distinguished bot...
Professional vision
The term professional vision was introduced by Goodwin (1994) to emphasize the idea that no vision--including scientific vision--is neutral; instead, ...
Prospective indexical
The term prospective indexical was coined by Goodwin (1996) as a notion to be used to explore how vision is organized in interaction. A prospective in...
Pre-beginning
A pre-beginning of a turn may refer to elements of a turn-constructional unit (TCU) which project the start of an upcoming turn, without having the pr...
Pre-opening
The term pre-opening refers to the sequential environment in and through which the conditions for an imminent entry into mutually ratified, jointly fo...
Opening
The opening, or opening phase, of an encounter refers to the sequentially organized activity in and through which participants coordinate entry into j...
Gaze
he term ‘gaze’ refers to the action of directing one’s eyes to a point in the environment (e.g., a person, object, or event). This action enables the ...
Touching
Touching is an embodied sensorial practice consisting in a dynamic contact of the hand and other parts of the body with a touched surface—either anoth...
Multimodal Gestalt
The notion of “multimodal Gestalt” refers to a recurrent accountable arrangement of various multimodal resources that are mobilized by the participant...
Micro-sequentiality
The notion of micro-sequentiality has been used to explore sequential temporal relations in interaction based on relations of successivity and simulta...
Multisensoriality
Multisensoriality refers to an embodied engagement with others and/or the material world mobilizing different senses, possibly combining seeing, heari...
Multimodal transcription
A multimodal transcription is a form of annotation of the multimodal resources organizing social interaction, including language, prosody, gesture, ga...
Interactional space
Interactional space refers to the dynamic (re)arrangement of participants’ bodies in the environment, as interaction unfolds. It is continuously achie...
Sound object
A sound object (Reber 2009, 2012; Reber & Couper-Kuhlen 2010) is an interactional object with phonetic substance but minimal semantic content.
Vocalization
In the seminal work by Erving Goffman, the term ‘vocalization’ is defined as type of “non-words” or “interjections” (Goffman 1978: 810).
Affective stance
Affective stance refers to a participant’s display of their emotional orientation to a stance object: something or someone that is evaluated from an e...
Display of empathy
Definitions of 'display of empathy' vary within conversation-analytic research. In much of CA research, a display of empathy refers to an action claim...
Empathy
Empathy refers to an interactional process where someone displays understanding of and affective affiliation with another person’s emotional experienc...
Affect
Emotions and affects are an omnipresent aspect of all interaction, but they are rarely explicated in words. In conversation analysis the terms ‘emotio...
Emotion
Emotions and affects are an omnipresent aspect of all interaction, but they are rarely explicated in words. In conversation analysis the terms ‘emotio...
Misplacement marker
A misplacement marker is a device used by speakers to indicate that their upcoming turn is out of place and does not follow from what has been said be...
Closing
Closing most commonly refers to the structured ending of a conversation, i.e. the collaborative work of participants to bring a conversation to an end...
Continuer
Continuers are minimal tokens such as mm-hm and uh huh in English, which are produced as displays of continued recipiency within ongoing talk.
Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU)
Within Conversation Analysis (CA), talk-in-interaction is conceptualized as the coordinated alternation of turns that are composed of turn-constructio...
Transition-Relevance Place (TRP)
The notion of a transition-relevance place (TRP) was introduced by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) to explain how a current speaker and a next s...
Membership categorization device (MCD)
Harvey Sacks (e.g., 1972a, 1972b, 1992) coined the term “membership categorization device” (MCD) to describe an apparatus that he observed participant...
Context
Analyses of talk-in-interaction using CA and IL typically approach context by treating it as dynamically constituted in and through the moment-by-mome...
Apology
An apology is a social action whereby the producer enacts a claim to have offended the recipient, thereby implicitly admitting personal responsibility...
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