From Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991: 101

This is not to say the context of interaction is analytically irrelevant. Context is a relevant issue for the participants. During interaction speakers orient to, and display to each other in the design of their turns, what they understand to be the salient features of their context. And in the same way that we can discover speakers’ own interpretations by examining the design of their turns, so we can discover what they take to be the relevant features of the context of their interaction. We can investigate if the participants’ turns are designed to display, for example, that they are orienting to each other’s work or gender identities; or we can explore how the relevance of the relationship between the participants is invoked, if at all, and so on. However, features of the interaction may themselves be the relevant context for any subsequent contributions. For example, what might be relevant to the way an utterance is produced is the activity performed by the prior turn: a ques- tion, an excuse, a repair, an instruction, and so on. Consider extract 3.9 again. Child: Have to cut the:se Mummy 1.3 Child: Won’t we Mummy 1.5 Child: Won’t we Mother: Yes This child’s first turn is the first part of an adjacency pair. However, after 1.3 seconds, the child produces two further turns, both of which display the under- standing that the conditionally relevant second turn has not been produced. Her turns suggest that the salient context, on this occasion, is an accountably absent turn. Because participants’ turns will exhibit their analysis of relevant features of the context, the analyst is provided with a significant methodological advan- tage. We do not have to speculate what might be relevant, we can see directly what is relevant to the participants. And as the ‘relevant context’ may be as immediate and transitory as the prior turn, CA treats context as a fluid and contingent achievement: a notion like ‘context’ will have to remain substantively contentless, and uncommitted to any prespecified referent and be instead ‘programmatically relevant’ [that is] relevant in principle, but with a sense always to-be- discovered rather than given-to-be-applied. Schegloff, 1987b: 112 The second reason that conversation analysts do not rely in their research on a characterisation of the context is because interaction is viewed as a domain of activity in its own right, and not a reflection of individual personalities or social or cultural constraints. Following Goffman, who was the first to focus on the organisation of mundane, everyday activities, interactional practices are regarded as exhibiting an order which is not reducible to the personality, intentions or mood of the speakers, nor the social or cultural context in which 64 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS they are speaking. As Heritage puts it, ‘the institution of interaction largely antedates the characteristics of those who staff it’ Heritage, 2001: 52. Research in CA, then, focuses on detailed description and analysis of structured interactional practices unencumbered by any formal account of the identity of the participants, speculation about their intentions or goals, or a characterisation of the context of the interaction. Moreover, it does not incorporate explanatory terms or hypotheses associated with more conventional social scientific theories and explanations of human action. Analysis is not directed to confirming or disconfirming, for example, the impact of class, status or gender variables in inter- action. For these reasons, analysis is said to be data driven, not led by theory. Summary • CA studies of institutional interaction examine how turn-taking patterns depart from those observed in informal conversational exchanges. • CA research shows how participants display their orientation to the appropriateness of these distinctive turn-taking patterns. • It thereby identifies participants’ sensitivity to the normative conventions which underpin these turn-taking arrangements. • Departures from established sequential patterns, and the participants’ responses to, or ‘noticings of’ these departures are a useful methodologi- cal resource because they display their understanding of the significance of those departures. • CA seeks to show how participants’ orientation to the relevance of the context physical setting, topic, respective identities, etc. demonstrably informs their talk. Developments, divergences, continuities and convergences In this section I want to trace how the later studies discussed in this chapter relate to the earlier work in each field. Discourse analysis: divergence, convergence and implications What, then, is the relationship between the form of discourse analysis described in Gilbert and Mulkay’s study of scientists’ discourse, and the empirical approach and theoretical arguments developed in social psychology? We start by noting some differences. Influences With the exception of a discussion of Halliday’s work on language and social context, and a brief mention of Foucauldian and sociolinguistic dis- course analysis, Gilbert and Mulkay rarely acknowledge the influence, or even existence, of related approaches to the study of language. For example, except METHOD AND CRITIQUE 65