The Handbook of Conversation Analysis

6

 Action Formation and Ascription

STEPHEN C. LEVINSON

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & Radboud University, Nijmegen

Talk is constructed and is attended by its recipients for the action or actions it may be doing.

(Schegloff, 1996a: 5)

1 Introduction

The ability to conduct conversation is a miracle in general, but particularly striking is the speed and apparent accuracy of action ascription. To see this, consider the following facts: it takes over 600ms to plan and execute the shortest turn-at-talk (see Levelt, 1989), while on average the gaps between turns are around 200ms, depending a bit on the language (de Ruiter, et al., 2006; Stivers, et al., 2009). As Figure 6.1 makes clear, this entails that B must plan his or her turn well before the prior speaker A’s is finished. Of course, B’s turn will mostly be tied to A’s turn via sequence organization in particular: If A’s turn was a question, B’s turn is expectably an answer; if an offer, an acceptance or rejection is in order, and so forth (see Stivers, this volume, on sequence organization). So action ascription by B of A’s turn is a prerequisite for the design of B’s turn—the very ‘proof procedure’ that makes CA possible.¹ Although occasional misunderstandings of action content do occur, they are surprisingly rare.

Figure 6.1 Overlap of comprehension and production processes in conversation.

The challenge for participants, ...