Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Points of Departure
- Part III Collections
- Part IV Evidence
- Part V Avenues into Action
- 18 Single-Case Analysis
- 19 Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life
- 20 Analyzing Categorial Phenomena in Talk-in-Interaction
- 21 Where the Action Is: Positioning Matters in Interaction
- 22 Analyzing Particles
- 23 Analyzing Grammar in Social Interaction
- 24 Listening to Talk-in-Interaction: Ways of Observing Speech
- 25 Multimodality in Conversation Analysis
- 26 System-Oriented Analysis: Moving from Singular Practices to Organizations of Practice
- 27 Comparing across Languages and Cultures
- 28 Methodological Considerations When Using Conversation Analysis to Investigate Institutional Interaction
- 29 Methods for ‘Applying’ Conversation Analysis
- 30 Using Conversation-Analytic Research Methods in the Study of Atypical Populations
- Part VI Situating and Reporting Findings
- Part VII Looking Forward
- Appendix I Jeffersonian Transcription Conventions
- Appendix II Multimodal Transcription Conventions
- Index
21 - Where the Action Is: Positioning Matters in Interaction
from Part V - Avenues into Action
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Points of Departure
- Part III Collections
- Part IV Evidence
- Part V Avenues into Action
- 18 Single-Case Analysis
- 19 Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and the Study of Interaction in Everyday Life
- 20 Analyzing Categorial Phenomena in Talk-in-Interaction
- 21 Where the Action Is: Positioning Matters in Interaction
- 22 Analyzing Particles
- 23 Analyzing Grammar in Social Interaction
- 24 Listening to Talk-in-Interaction: Ways of Observing Speech
- 25 Multimodality in Conversation Analysis
- 26 System-Oriented Analysis: Moving from Singular Practices to Organizations of Practice
- 27 Comparing across Languages and Cultures
- 28 Methodological Considerations When Using Conversation Analysis to Investigate Institutional Interaction
- 29 Methods for ‘Applying’ Conversation Analysis
- 30 Using Conversation-Analytic Research Methods in the Study of Atypical Populations
- Part VI Situating and Reporting Findings
- Part VII Looking Forward
- Appendix I Jeffersonian Transcription Conventions
- Appendix II Multimodal Transcription Conventions
- Index
Summary
When examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – conversation analysts monitor for, and organize collections of target phenomena around, structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? This chapter demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. After first considering how to identify the position of participant conduct, this chapter presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned, including how the position of a silence affects its meaning; the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and the position of an action within a sequence, explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. To exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action, this chapter describes how its author has gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis , pp. 577 - 610Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024