Conversation analysis developed in the mid to late 1960s in a collaboration initially between Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff and, somewhat later, with the addition of Gail Jefferson. By the early 1970s, several students joined the group, by this point based at the University of California campuses at Irvine and Los Angeles, to form what Lerner calls “the first generation.” Conversation analysis has continued to grow, indeed has flourished, in the years since. Today conversation analysts are to be found not only in the United Stated, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but also Japan, Korea, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and many other countries. There are conversation analysts in departments of sociology, linguistics, anthropology, communication, and psychology, as well as in many modern language and applied programs. The widespread success of conversation analysis is largely attributable to three characteristics of its research program:

1. Formal/Generalizing: Its emphasis on the development of formal accounts that allow for significant generalization across a wide range of instances. The goal of any CA study is to account for all instances of a phenomenon. This is well illustrated by Schegloff's (1968) study which showed that a “summons-answer sequence” better accounted for the data of 500 telephone openings than did “a distribution rule” that specifies “answerer speaks first”.
2. Empirical: Its grounding in close observation and detailed analyses of particular instances recorded mechanically and therefore capable of being replayed an indefinite number of times. The robustly empirical character of CA is evidenced, for instance, in the importance placed on transcription and transcription of a particular kind (Heritage 1984:234–38).
3. Cumulative: The cumulative and interlocking nature of findings arrived at through application of its methods. A handful of early studies have provided a foundation on which many others have been based. The turn-taking paper (Sacks et al. 1974) is now over 30 years old but remains unchallenged as the best available account of how this domain of human conduct is organized. Subsequent research on turn-taking in other contexts and among other groups has strongly supported, and sometimes elaborated, rather than undermined the original analysis.

Lerner's collection of important early papers provides strong evidence that these three features have characterized CA from its inception. The book opens with a brief history and overview of the papers by Lerner. Following this is the first of three contributions by Gail Jefferson. As in her 1985 paper on similar matters, here Jefferson shows that seemingly small phonetic differences can have significant consequences for the production of action and the organization of sequences. Jefferson is, of course, uniquely situated to demonstrate the importance of disciplined observation cultivated, in large measure, through the practice of transcription, having invented, more or less from scratch, the system of conventions now used.

Part I of the book, titled “Taking turns speaking,” begins with a highly compressed account of turn-taking in conversation by Harvey Sacks. This is an early distillation of the analysis that was to become “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation” and well illustrates the formal and generalizing character of CA. With a few basic rules (or principles) Sacks accounts for many grossly observable features of conversation: overwhelmingly one party talks at a time; gap and overlap are common but minimal; size of turns is not fixed but varies; number of parties varies; and many other observations.

Jefferson's second chapter in the volume examines overlap within three conditions: overlap-onset, within-overlap talk, and post-overlap talk. With respect to overlap onset, Jefferson is primarily concerned to show that it can be the product of “systematic procedures” such as displaying (independent) knowledge or showing recognition, and moreover that it is systematically generated – occurring recurrently, for instance, at points of possible completion (“when a possible completion point turns out not to be the actual completion and ongoing speaker appends a syntactically coherent next utterance component while a next speaker is starting up”; p. 45). This chapter draws together many of Jefferson's observations on overlap published earlier (Jefferson 1973, 1983) and develops as well an analysis of post-overlap talk distinguishing between marked and unmarked modes of retrieval.

The next section, “Implementing actions,” begins with a chapter by Schegloff which examines turns that answer the summons embodied in the ring of a telephone. The three forms given extensive consideration here are yeah, hello, and self-identification (police desk in Schegloff's corpus). The essay is centrally concerned with the basic issue of selection. The selection problem can be simply put: Where several alternative forms, formats, or formulations are available, what occasions the selection of one from among them? Within conversation analysis, the problem is not to predict which form will be selected on any particular occasion but rather to determine how participants themselves understand selection to be in operation. Thus Schegloff notes that “the telephone ring, as a form of summons, is not treated by members as displaying selectionality” (66). In contrast, “there is a selection possibility with the class of clearance cue answers” (66–67). Schegloff takes this selection and “what each selection may be said to accomplish” as the focus of his chapter. He suggests that “the answer is fitted not so much to the summons … as to features of the setting in which the answerer is located, and to which the summoner is presumed to be oriented in calling” (67). Schegloff shows that the selection of answers such as yeah and hi “presumptively types the prospective conversation as ‘foreknown,’ as one in which the answerer takes it he has warrantable information about the caller and the prospective course of action.”

These answers stand as the marked option relative to the unmarked (at least in this context) hello. Schegloff notes that “a first question to be addressed with respect to “hello” as an initial utterance in telephone conversation is whether it is an answer, whether it is an answer to a summons that is to be analyzed” (74). Consider the following:

Here an initial hello does not receive a return but rather a candidate identification of the answerer (A). After this is confirmed (yeah), the caller self-identifies and it is only then, once the identities of the parties are established, that a greeting Hi Guy is produced. What this indicates is that at the beginning of telephone conversations, callers treat identification of the parties as a priority task. This in turn explains why, for telephone conversations, yeah and hi answers to summons are marked relative to unmarked hello. Yeah and hi treat the identification task as a fait accompli. Schegloff's chapter well illustrates the strongly cumulative and interlocking nature of CA, illuminating some hitherto poorly understood aspects of telephone openings while at the same time providing support for other parts of a larger analysis (e.g. Schegloff 1968, 1979).

Pomerantz begins her chapter by noting, “In a fair number of jobs, at least some of the work that employees perform involves interacting with others. In these cases, the talk is not incidental to the work; rather it is the way the work gets done” (109). Elaborating this theme, she examines calls from a clerk in a high school to the parents of possibly truant students. While this chapter develops a detailed and nuanced account of one setting and the various practices that characterize it, the relevance of the findings is not limited to this setting. Pomerantz shows, for instance, how the design of the clerk's initial inquiry has consequences for the rest of the call. A question such as Was Mark home from school ill today? incorporates a legitimate excuse for the reported absence that can be confirmed or disconfirmed in next turn. In contrast, when the clerk says I was calling about Michelle she has a couple of absences sin:ce: u-oh:: las:t, Thursday, .hhh She's been reported absent (0.2) .t all day last Thursda:y, she does not offer any possible reason for the absence and in this way establishes different relevances for the response. Pomerantz's observations then illustrate the meeting of generic resources (of turn design and alternate formulations) and context-specific interactional practices (investigating absences). Moreover, insofar as this study resonates with more recent ones on talk at work, it nicely illustrates the cumulative character of conversation analytic research (especially in her emphasis on neutrality; see Clayman 1988).

Jefferson's third contribution in the volume presents a powerful analysis of the preface At first I thought…. Drawing on a wide range of materials from conversation, newspaper reports, and personal anecdotes, Jefferson shows that this is a device for normalizing extraordinary events. When asked about extraordinary happenings such as airplane hijackings, assassinations, or natural disasters, witnesses recurrently report that their first inclination was to hear (or see) their initial evidence as some unexceptional event such as a car backfiring or a film being made. The analysis is powerful, and the paper also includes a very interesting discussion of the project's history (it began with some observations by Sacks).

The final section of the book, “Sequencing actions,” contains three papers. The first, by Alene Kiku Terasaki, is a classic study originally published in an obscure sociology journal that has served since the 1970s as the standard analysis of pre-announcement sequences such as the following:

As later work by Levinson 1983 and Schegloff 1988, among others, has shown, analysis of such pre-sequences has wide significance for an understanding of topics such as indirection, conventionalization, and action sequencing. Terasaki's analysis focuses on three turn types within the sequence: the pre-announcement, the solicit, and the announcement itself.

In the penultimate chapter, Lerner examines collaboratively constructed turns with a focus on the small sequences they may engender. He shows that the production of a completion establishes a position in which the original speaker may accept the completion, reject it, or do something “somewhere between acceptance and outright rejection,” as in the following:

The analysis is presented with exceptional clarity, and Lerner develops an elegant description of the phenomenon itself while at the same time pointing to the various interactional ends it is used to accomplish.

The final chapter, by Goldberg on amplitude shift, explores an aspect of prosody that has not been extensively examined by conversation analysts (or others, apart from earlier work by the same author). What this paper nicely illustrates is early attention to how multiple channels (prosody, semantic content) work together to produce coherent courses of action; in this way Goldberg anticipated a recent emphasis on intonation and multi-modality.

This volume is an outstanding contribution to conversation analysis. The importance of the book is not merely historical. Given the three characteristics of CA mentioned above, these studies remain just as relevant and significant as they were when they were written. Of course, the history is here – and it is fascinating – but the book is much more than a collection of “golden oldies.” These studies are no less contemporary for being 30 years old.