CONVERSATION ANALYSISand next, thus once a current speaker completes
her turn a next speaker begins, typically by ad-
dressing herself to that just-prior talk. According-
ly, if a next speaker has some trouble with the prior
speaker’s turn, the next turn is the place where she
can initiate repair (using a variety of forms, includ-
ing ‘‘what?’’ and ‘‘huh?’’ and other designs that
vary in the degree to which they specify the exact
source of trouble). By initiating repair using one of
these methods, that speaker selects the speaker of
the trouble source to speak next, and to offer a
solution to the trouble indicated. If the next speak-
er has no trouble with the prior turn, and she uses
it to move the action forward (instead of stopping
it to initiate repair), her turn will display a variety
of understandings regarding the talk it follows. In
doing so, her turn may also reveal some type of
misunderstanding (from the point of view of the
speaker of the prior turn). If that occurs the speak-
er of the prior turn can then initiate repair in ‘‘turn
after next’’ (or ‘‘third position’’) and offer a solu-
tion immediately. Perhaps the recurrent and rec-
ognizable format for this is ‘‘I don’t mean x, I mean
y.’’
Thus, the movement of talk through these
three positions—current, next turn, and turn after
next—systematically provides the various parties
to the interaction the opportunity to detect any
trouble in speaking, hearing, and understanding,
whatever its source, and initiate repair on it. As a
consequence almost all instances of repair are
initiated in one of these adjacent locations. The
localization of repair initiation opportunities, and
the distribution of them over three turns, has
several consequences for the organization of so-
cial life. First, the localization of repair within a
finite, and relatively restricted, space ensures that
trouble is dealt with swiftly. Second, and related to
this, given the systematic relevance of repair, if
speakers move through these three positions with-
out any party initiating repair, a shared under-
standing of the talk is thereby confirmed en passant.
Finally, as with sequence organization, the
issue of preference is best grasped as a structural
property of the organization of talk-in-interaction
(rather than being a product of concerns regard-
ing the private desires of the parties). The two
preferences observed by Schegloff, Sacks, and Jef-
ferson are a product of the distribution of oppor-
tunities to initiate and effect repair that systemati-
cally favors the speaker of the trouble source over
others. As Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson ([1974]
1978, p. 40) put it, the organization of turn taking
and the organization of repair ‘‘are thus ‘made for
each other’ in a double sense.’’ It is worth noting in
this regard that insofar as interaction provides the
primary site for the achievement of intersubjectivity,
for what makes sociality possible, the organization
of repair constitutes its last line of defense
(Schegloff 1994).Taken together, the operation of the turn-
taking system and the practices involved in the
organization of sequences and repair account for
many of the detectable, orderly features of conver-
sation. This orderliness was shown to be locally
organized and managed, the product of members’
methods. It will be useful to make note once again
of the research strategy that enabled such findings.
Because the data consisted of recordings of natu-
rally occurring activity, a scientific account of the
phenomenon under investigation could be em-
pirically grounded in the details of actual occur-
rences. The investigation began with a set of ob-
servable outcomes of these occurrences—in the
case of turn taking, for example, speaker change
overwhelmingly recurred; overwhelmingly, one par-
ty talked at a time; turn order, size, and content
were not fixed, but varied; and so on. It was then
asked: Could these outcomes be described as prod-
ucts of certain social organized practices, of meth-
ods of conduct? At the same time, if members of
society did in fact use such formal methods, how
were they systematically employed to produce just
those outcomes, in just those occurrences, in all
their specificity? In addressing the problem in this
way, then, conversation analysis was able to discov-
er how cardinal forms of social order were locally
constituted.The research on turn taking in conversation
has provided one starting point for more recent
studies of interaction in ‘‘institutional’’ settings,
such as news interviews, doctor-patient and other
clinical consultations, courtrooms, plea bargain-
ing sessions, job interviews, and citizen calls to
emergency services. In many of these studies, re-
searchers pursued Sacks, Schegloff, and Jeffer-
son’s ([1974] 1978, pp. 45–47) suggestion that the
practices underlying the management of ordinary
conversation are the ‘‘base’’ or primary ones (for
an example, see Heritage and Maynard in press).