Emanuel Schegloff 1937-2024

Reproduced, with permission from Heritage, J. (2024). Emanuel A. Schegloff 1937–2024. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2024.2368389

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The editors of ROLSI are indebted to John Heritage for the following words of appreciation in memory of Emanuel Schegloff. Readers of this journal will know that, as one of the founders of conversation analysis and as a leading figure in its development over many decades, Schegloff was an enormous and inspiring influence over the field of research that is published in these pages.

Emanuel Schegloff 1937-2024

Emanuel Schegloff died on May 23 at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 86. Predeceased by his colleagues, Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, he was the surviving co-founder of the field of conversation analysis (CA), the study of naturally occurring conduct in human interaction. This field, once described by Peter Manning as “perhaps the only completely new sociological research methodology developed in the United States since World War II,” first found published expression in Schegloff’s 1968 paper “Sequencing in Conversational Openings.”

Educated at Harvard (BA, 1958), where he studied under Talcott Parsons and Barrington Moore, and at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD 1967), under Goffman’s direction, Schegloff worked at Columbia and subsequently for 40 years, at UCLA. From its inception, CA began from the perspective that conversation is, in the first instance, a locus of social action and the value of recorded conversations lies in their concrete instantiation of social action in vivo. Within this view conversation is, as Schegloff put it, “a primordial site of human sociality” whose moment-by-moment production sustains an elaborate framework of normative and other expectations. The objective of CA would be to describe this overarching framework as well as its adaptations to all manner of social contexts. The focus would be resolutely empirical, based only on repeated observation of naturally occurring conduct, and combining context-sensitive case analysis with the analysis of collections of cases instantiating discoverable phenomena of interest. Thus, although the emphasis on social action echoed important themes in the theorizing of George Herbert Mead and Talcott Parsons, the approach to the topic could hardly be more different. In place of abstract theoretical schemes, a concrete natural history of social interaction would emerge grounded in the observations of many instances by many investigators in a wide variety of settings and cultures.

Although some, including Goffman, believed that the level of analytic detail entertained within CA would limit its appeal, in fact the field has developed substantially. Since the mid-1960s, more than 11,000 research papers and monographs in conversation analysis have now been published and, in addition to North America, CA is practiced on almost every continent and addresses more than 100 languages. Its use has also broadened from its original and primary domain—ordinary conversation—to increasingly diverse social interactions, ranging from those in medical, educational, and legal settings to those involving the deployment of complex communication technology, and from studies with a focus on the acquisition of language and communicative competence to those that focus on interactional and pragmatic aspects of language loss. Both the specialty and its findings are widely recognized among the practitioners of such cognate social science fields as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and communication, and they are finding practical applications in medicine, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction, among others.

Schegloff was pivotal to this development, producing a string of publications on foundational topics: turn-taking, sequence organization, repair, reference to persons, word selection and turn design, and the overall structural organization of interaction. In each of these areas, he established a domain of study by identifying absolutely fundamental choices that participants in interaction must make, and isolating elements of the functional architecture implicated in those choices. None of these papers was intended to be definitive of its topic; each sketches a terrain. Yet, remarkably, whereas most of these areas have undergone extensive expansion over the years—whether in the form of progressive refinements in the empirical territory staked out or, as in the case of multimodal research, wholesale additions to it—the basic frameworks Schegloff advanced over the course of the last 40 years have remained substantially intact.

These facts speak to the extraordinarily far-sighted theoretical conceptualization of the original papers, which quite deliberately left gaps where the evidence was incomplete, and developed the basic concepts in ways that did not foreclose on the possibilities for further discovery. The result is that the major conceptual maps that Schegloff has sketched have not had to be redrawn even after decades of extremely careful scrutiny, and that there remains tremendous scope for others to contribute to the emerging body of work. It may be added that there is increasing evidence that many of the fundamental structures that Schegloff’s investigations first unearthed are to be found widely, if not universally, in human interaction, and that the “language universals” sought by linguists may turn out to be derived from “interactional universals,” rather than universals of grammatical structure.

Schegloff developed the field of CA, not by means of theoretical manifestos, but rather and exclusively through a series of fine-grained empirical studies of actual conduct in interaction. These studies have shown the truly remarkable degree to which an organized “syntax” of action inhabits the practices and behaviors that make up human social interaction. They amount to an extended demonstration that and how the empirical details of interactionally situated conduct can be brought under precise analytic control, and have served as an inspiration to the specialty that he co-founded and then brought to maturity.

Schegloff once identified what he termed “the implacable familiarity” of conversational materials as an important obstacle to CA research. This familiarity of the “already known” can lead observers to doubt the point of what is being done and delude researchers into the belief that there is nothing there to be discovered. Yet Schegloff repeatedly and painstakingly demonstrated that beyond this “implacable familiarity” lie fascinating and exact orders of organization of great generality and scope. Again and again, he showed that, in social interaction, it is order rather than chaos that is the norm—precise, specific order, order that participants use and rely on to achieve their interactional objectives. Above all, his cumulative body of work underwrites the insight that because “language is the vehicle for living real lives,” its careful study provides an unprecedented and direct window into the “real lives” of ordinary members of society in social interchange.

Schegloff’s brilliance, wit, joy, and sense of fun when working with data was a source of inspiration to us all. His privilege was to co-found a field and work in it for over 50 years. It is ours now to build on and develop the foundations that he laid in an ever-widening field of endeavor.