Goffman, Garfinkel and conversation analysis’, in

Talk-in-interaction, Schegloff (1992) remarks, is 'the primordial site of human sociality.' It is the fundamental resource through which the business of all societies is managed, their cultures are transmitted, the identities of their participants are affirmed, and their social structures are reproduced. In almost every imaginable particular, our ability to grasp the nature of the social world and to participate in it is dependent on our capacities, skill and resourcefulness as social interactants. In the past, social scientists have had little to say about how interaction works, treating it as an invisible or inscrutable 'black box'. The advent of conversation analysis, which investigates interaction as a social institution, has begun to end this state of affairs. Consider the following segment of talk from a medical consultation. The patient is a divorced, middle-aged woman who lives alone and works a sixty-hour week in a restaurant she owns. At Line 4, the doctor asks a 'lifestyle ' question. Though opaquely phrased, the question hearably inquires into the extent to which she drinks. She responds with an apparently bona fide effort to estimate it (Line 6) as 'moderate'. Pressed further, she specifies this description in a turn that conveys, without directly stating, that her drinking is social and infrequent (Lines 9 and 10). The doctor is not satisfied with this, and pursues a more 'objective ' numerically specified estimate (Lines 11-12). Mter a brief struggle, a compromise 'quasinumerical ' estimate is reached (Lines 15-16) and accepte