Emanuel Abraham Schegloff b. 1937
Emanuel Schegloff was a professor of Sociology who, along
with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, is regarded as the creator of the field
of Conversation Analysis. The research, which used audio and video recordings
of naturally occurring conversations, enabled Schegloff to discover new areas
for social science inquiry. Through his detailed naturalistic study of
interaction and people’s experience of it, he went on to write over 100
publications, covering a broad range of topics. Schegloff observed that hand
gesturing is a speaker’s phenomenon, and that listeners rarely gesture with
their hands. His work included all manners of turn-taking including the
negotiating of traffic but it was his discussions on the turn-taking system
used for conversation that holds the most interest. He described this
turn-taking system (for conversation) in terms of two components and a set of
rules.
Read Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in
Conversation Analysis (2007) Cambridge University Press.
