Lectures on Conversation - Softcover

This project makes available for the first time the entire corpus of lectures by a writer whose thought and method influenced a generation of sociologists and sociolinguists.Originally published as two volumes, this special comprehensive single-volume edition contains the complete lectures, beginning with the lectures delivered at UCLA, from Fall 1964 through Spring 1968. Sacks explores a great variety of topics, but two key issues emerge: rules of conversational sequencing, and membership categorization devices. The lectures culminate in the extensive and formal explication of turn-taking delivered in Fall 1967.The second half contains the lectures delivered at UC Irvine from Fall 1968 through Spring 1972. Again, Sacks touches on a wide range of subjects, such as the poetics of ordinary talk, the integrative function of public tragedy, and pauses in the spelling out of a word. The central theme is storytelling in conversation, with an attendant focus on topic. The volume culminates in the elegant dissertation on adjacency pairs which Sacks delivered in Spring, 1972.

Harvey Sacks taught in the Department of Sociology at UCLA and in the School od Cocial Science, University of California, Irvine, from 1964 until 1975, when he was killed in an automobile accident. Gail Jefferson has held teaching and research positions in Conversation Analysis at various universities in the USA, England, and the Netherlands where she now resides. Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology at UCLA.