Extended Reflections

Timothy Halkowski – University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point

“Last night there was a debate in the Arts Club on a political question.  I was for a moment tempted to use arguments merely to answer something said, but did not do so, and noticed that every argument I had been tempted to use was used by somebody or other. Logic is a machine, one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject, the fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any statement, and if any answer is forgotten somebody will go home miserable. You throw your money on the table and you receive so much change.”
 — William Butler Yeats (1926) 

There is an aspect of Manny’s thought (&, it seems, Sacks’ & Jefferson’s as well) that we might want to hold on to as we remember Manny & his life and work.  This aspect is found in the Yeats quotation (see above), found at the start of his Goffman paper (Schegloff 1988), and on pages 37-38 of his interview in the book Discussing Conversation Analysis.  

In both of these excerpts, we see a perspective that is radically processual – seeing (as Mel Pollner put it in a footnote to his own 1979 paper on Explicative transactions) ‘things’ as ‘-ings,’ i.e., as processes.  Seeing all the things in the social world that we nominalize as instead verbs, or practices.  

Gail Jefferson emphasized this perspective to me in a personal chat at a conference in Jyvaskyla, Finland.  She mentioned the Gestalt switch moments she experienced when the people in the interaction became ‘background’, and the practices that manifested ‘personality,’ ‘motives’, etc., became the foreground.  

This Gestalt switch is part of what I think kept Manny’s work connected to founding insights of ethnomethodology, while advancing it with CA’s attention to the details of interaction.  It is one aspect of his strikingly original work.  

____________________________________________________________________

Harrie Mazeland

A couple of months ago, I wrote an obituary for Manny Schegloff for the Newsletter of AWIA, the section for Interaction Analysis of the Dutch Society for Applied Linguistics (Anéla / AILA). The text below is a slightly modified English version.

Harrie Mazeland, 26 September 2024.

Emanuel A. Schegloff (1937 – 2024)

On May 23 Manny Schegloff passed away. Together with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff is one of the founders of conversation analysis. The last time I met him was in 2014 at the triannual international conference on conversation analysis at UCLA, Schegloff’s home base (ICCA 2014). Schegloff was scheduled as the main plenary speaker, but he withdrew because of health reasons.

Conversation analysis developed as a new research paradigm in the 1960s. How enormous this achievement was becomes apparent in Sacks’ Lectures on Conversation (edited by Gail Jefferson, first published in 1992). The lectures Sacks gave from 1964 to 1968 to sociology classes at UCLA and UC Irvine were a kind of lab in which Sacks’ genius explored the transcriptions of naturally occurring talk from an interactional sociological perspective. Sacks died in a traffic accident in 1975 at the age of forty.

Schegloff’s fifty-page long introduction to the Lectures gives a good impression of the scholarly climate in which conversation analysis was developed as a discipline of its own, with a methodology that fitted its research object. Although initially – and in essence – a sociological project, the enterprise was at the intersection of multiple disciplines: sociology, anthropology and linguistics. The introduction also discusses the influence of Goffman and, in greater detail, Sacks’ collaboration with Garfinkel.

I am from a next academic generation. During my masters Linguistics at Nijmegen University in the beginning of the seventies, I studied classes and working groups in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, – all pretty new areas at that time. The project group in which I wrote my masters’ thesis, was one of the very first in the Netherlands that recorded and transcribed naturally occurring talk in interaction (in our case, classroom lessons), and there was not yet a tradition in how to analyse such data. Looking back it is not easy to discern between everything you had to learn as a beginner and how these disciplines themselves developed. Looking back from the first perspective, you are a novice over and over again. If you don’t look back from the second perspective (how these disciplines developed), you don’t see how much has been achieved thanks to scholars such as Sacks and Schegloff.

 One measure for the second perspective – one that is closely related to Schegloff’s work – is the theoretical apparatus we now have for analysing how participants organise “larger stretches” of talk. In those first years, descriptions of a larger episode looked like a list of vernacular action ascriptions which duplicate the succession of turns one-by-one but do not offer insight in more encompassing relations. The categories themselves were usually speech-act based. Some approaches already thought about utterances as moves in a language game, but the characterisation of local connections usually didn’t go any further than sequences of two or three moves (e.g., question / answer / reaction). At that stage, Sacks and Schegloff shaped the concept adjacency pair sequence. It required an explication of the relationship between two successive utterances of different speakers in which the participants co-ordinate the accomplishment of a joint communicative project (for example, the targeted exchange of information in a question/answer-pair), and for which it can be shown that the participants orient to its organisation for making it intelligible, accountable and repairable.

From the beginning of the eighties on, Schegloff gradually succeeded in bringing together more specific organisational principles – especially participant orientations with respect to preference organisation – in ways that explain how participants organise a communicative project (e.g., a request for borrowing something) by preparing it in one or more pre-sequences, negotiating its conditions in one or more insertion-sequences, and accounting for, specifying and ratifying its outcome in one or more post-sequences. With the help of the analytic tools for describing such types of sequence-expansion (pre-, insertion and post-expansion), an intuitively interpretable but analytically unexplicated succession of turns now can be described as the result of the methodic work speakers do by organising a communicative project as a coherent course of action in a series of interdependent sequences.

Schegloff worked for years, or, more correctly, decades long on this line of research, not only building on the work he did with Sacks and Jefferson, but also integrating the contributions of other colleagues from the ‘first generation’ (Anita Pomerantz, in particular). In 2007 this resulted in the monumental study Sequence organization in interaction. A primer in conversation analysis | Volume 1. Two more of such all-encompassing books were in the planning. Volume 2, for instance, would have brought together Schegloff’s work on repair organisation, another important strand of his research. Unfortunately, this plan didn’t come to fruition. But if it had, the book probably would have included the seminal papers on self-correction (1977, with Jefferson and Sacks), self-repair (1979), types of self-repair operations (2013), the positioning of other-initiation of repair (2000), and third-position repair which also sketches the trajectory along which participants have options to initiate repair (1996). Schegloff also worked on an inventory of types of other-initiation of repair, but as far as I know this has not been published.

Other important topics in Schegloff’s research are:

– The relationship between the overall-structural organisation of conversations and how this is organised sequentially (several studies of the opening of telephone calls and the foundational paper with Sacks about closings of conversation, 1973). Together with the work on turn-taking – the paper on the systematics of turn-taking is apparently still the most cited article of Language –, these studies also provide the framework for research into the characteristic features of talk in institutional settings.

– The study of interactional, contextual and situational conditions for speakers’ selection how they talk about the world and how such choices contribute to the action quality of the utterance in question (formulating place (1992), referring to persons, 1996).

– A systematic exploration of the interactionally relevant compositional structure of turn-constructional units (1996). This work also provides the basis for Schegloff’s idea of a ‘positionally-sensitive grammar’, about interactionally oriented-to organisations that structure the in-progress construction of utterances but which are only partially organised along lexico-syntactic lines.  

– The methodology of conversation analysis. A methodology that does justice to the research object was crucial. Almost all of Schegloff’s papers demonstrate and discuss methodological issues. He also wrote a paper that exclusively dealt with the problem of quantification (1993).

– More programmatic and/or polemic papers. For example, a discussion with Levinson about language and culture (2006), or a polemic with Michael Billig about critical discourse analysis (1997, 1999).

Schegloff’s work on sequence-organisation has been an important framework for comparative research of talk in interaction in different languages and cultures,– for example, with respect to action formation, or regarding the use of particles. Among the three originators of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegoff and Jefferson), Schegloff was the more systematic theory builder, elaborating substantially on the many insights that the brilliant observer Sacks developed. Schegloff kept working on the unraveling of the systematics of the organisation in a specific analytic domain – such as turn-taking, repair and sequence-organisation –, whereas Jefferson’s more restrained ad hoc approach aggregates practices from various analytic domains in order to understand how members organise their interaction as a specific activity (e.g., her work on trouble tellings).

Schegloff also played a role in the development of conversation analysis in the Netherlands. In 1979, he stayed for half a year at NIAS (the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study). He then had regular data sessions with a group of primarily Amsterdam scholars (among whom Paul ten Have, Dorothea Franck, Hanneke Houtkoop and Martha Komter). During that year, he also gave a talk about the organisation of repair at Düsseldorf University. I remember we went afterwards to a pub in the Düsseldorfer Altstadt where he told about how scared he had been for the German border control which could be pretty harsh at that time.

In the following decades, at least a dozen Dutch scholars stayed for a longer time to study under Schegloff at UCLA (who meanwhile had gotten company from Charles and Marjorie Goodwin, John Heritage and Steven Clayman). Between 2003 and 2014, Schegloff also participated in research events of the Language and Cognition group of Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.

Schegloff was not an easy man, where CA concepts and methodology were in question. But perhaps this belongs to building a school. It requires a kind of sharpness in everything in order to create and protect the space in which a new paradigm can develop.

____________________________________________________________________

Aug Nishizaka

Memories of Manny Schegloff

I had several chances to discuss Harvey Sacks’s work with Manny in person when I was staying at UCLA. They were the most memorable moments in my life. One was when we discussed Section 2.2.5 of the Initial Investigation paper, where Sacks introduced the notion of Pn2 devices. However, he also mentioned the device class “team,” which is a misfit here (in the sense that “teams” are not a Pn2 but a Pa2 device). I presented Manny with an interpretation that defended Sacks; it seemed to me that whether mentioning “teams” there could be defendable depended on how to interpret the second sentence of the section. Manny eventually sent me an attachment document in which he rejected my interpretation and concluded that Sacks was wrong. Alas! The hard disk crashed, and the document was lost; I hope someone will find its copy in Manny’s machine. In March 2002, just before returning to Japan after my first stay at UCLA, we discussed many things at his office for a long time, perhaps more than three hours (during that time, he received a phone call from his wife, wondering what he was doing). One topic was how to interpret a passage from Sacks’s Analyzability paper: “One of my tasks is going to construct an apparatus”: an apparatus which will provide for observable facts to have occurred. While CA addresses participants’ orientations, the issue was whether the apparatus or machinery to be elucidated should be the one to which the participants also orient. The phrase “construct an apparatus” sounds like the elucidated apparatus is the analyst’s (rather than the participants’) construction. Manny read the passage more literally; his view was (if I remember correctly) that CA had an “etic” aspect as well, which could prevent CA from just tracing the participants’ vernacular knowledge. I have been wondering if the apparatus that Sacks meant could be more like what Wittgenstein called a “perspicuous representation”—though Manny said to me on an occasion, “Aug, don’t read Wittgenstein anymore”; I can visualize very vividly his serious face even more than twenty years later.

____________________________________________________________________

Jenny Mandelbaum

I contacted Manny more or less “out of the blue” in 1983, sending him a couple of chapters of my Master’s thesis, and asking if I could come and work with him at UCLA the following academic year. He agreed, on condition that I forget everything I wrote in my Master’s thesis. The fact that he read those chapters from my Master’s thesis, and had substantive comments, although he really didn’t know who I was, is indicative of the intellectual seriousness with which he treated his students. I learned from Manny many important lessons that are crucial for an empirical discipline, and that influence my work on a daily basis. A small sample: • in working with interactional data, make observations rather than asking questions • do your analytic calisthenics every day • read books and engage in other cultural pursuits that elevate your thinking – that is, seek good intellectual influences • you will think at the level at which you speak – that is, the level at which you want to be thinking should inform how you go about your teaching (among other activities) • choose and use words carefully (even if it means writing long sentences)

____________________________________________________________________

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Oldest
Newest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments