Key Assumptions

Sacks’ analytic approach was based on three theoretical assumptions, which remain central to CA today (Heritage, 1984):

[i] that talk is a form of action rather than simply a ‘flow’ of information from one person to another. For instance, people use talk to do things like complaining, requesting, agreeing;

[ii] that talk is structurally organised and orderly, rather than purely idiosyncratic or ‘messy’. So turns at talk are systematically related to one another, as, for example, when an acceptance or rejection follows an invitation, or a self-deprecation follows a compliment.

The final assumption, [iii], is that talk creates and maintains intersubjectivity. A first speaker understands, by what a second speaker does, how the second speaker heard their first turn. So if I ask “why don’t you come and see me sometime” and you say “yes,” I understand that you heard my turn as an invitation, whereas if you say “sorry, I’ve been meaning to but I’ve been so busy,” I understand that you heard it as a complaint. CA is about understanding these small slices of everyday life. It is an empirical programme with few theoretical manifestoes, and it offers a set of methods for the systematic identification of the patterns, structures and practices of interaction. Our central concern is to use these tools to demonstrate what is going on in the interaction for the participants themselves.