CONVERSATION ANALYSISthat are free of such repair. Schegloff went on to
show that most instances of talk-in-interaction, at
least in English, are organized by reference to the
systematic relevance of repair, whether an instance
of it actually occurs in the sentence or not.
Of course repair is not the only organization
relevant for grammar, and so more recently schol-
ars have begun to examine what more might be
learned about language by studying it as produced
in naturally occurring interaction. With respect to
this problem, conversation analysts have argued
that insofar as language most likely evolved in face-
to-face encounters by members of our species, its
structure and organization must have evolved, at
least in part, to manage the basic exigencies con-
fronted by speakers and hearers. Thus, in addition
to the systematic relevance of repair, the structure
and organization of grammar most likely evolved
as resources that shape, and are shaped by, how
opportunities to speak are distributed, what
constraints are introduced by a current turn on
subsequent ones, and how speakers’ formulations
of the events, persons, and objects are organized.
Perhaps most developed are a series of findings
that link the organization of grammar and the
system for distributing turns at talk briefly de-
scribed above.
As we stated earlier regarding turn-construc-
tional units, one of their key features is that each
sentence, or utterance, projects from its beginning
roughly what it will take for it to be possibly
complete. And over its course, each utterance
projects in finer and finer detail the exact moment
that a speaker may end her utterance. Thus, in-
stead of expressing logical predicates or cognitive
states, grammar may be best understood, in the
first instance, as a sequentially sensitive resource
that progressively projects the course and dura-
tion of turns at talk (Ford and Thompson 1996).
One of the most striking consequences of
such a view of grammar is that the locus of its
organization is transformed. While most approach-
es to grammar rely on the sentence as the basic
unit of organization (with occasional nods to the
organization of ‘‘discourse’’), the grammatical units
produced in interaction are fundamentally organ-
ized relative to their sequential environment, most
proximally the just prior, current, and next turns.
Thus, rather than the sentence, or even discourse,
being the fundamental unit or environment of
analysis, interaction and sequences of turns ap-
pear to be that within which grammar is most
proximally organized. This appears to be true even
at levels beneath the turn whether a sentence,
clause, or phrase. As Schegloff (1996) shows, turn
beginnings and turn endings, as well as what hap-
pens in between, are sites of strategic manipula-
tion. Through this manipulation, both grammati-
cal and prosodic, speakers fit their utterances to
prior talk, launch new actions, and shape when
they will be heard as possibly complete. Any scien-
tific analysis of language, then, must take into
account this central function.Thus, as the collection of papers assembled in
Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996) suggest,
rather than viewing grammar as an independent,
clearly delineated, and internally coherent struc-
ture, it is best approached as one more of the
interrelated set of resources through which inter-
action, and social life more broadly, is organized.REFERENCES
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