Yakety-Yak
Frank Cioffi
- Lectures on Conversation: Vols I-II by Harvey Sacks, edited by Gail Jefferson
Blackwell, 1520 pp, £35.00, January 1995, ISBN 1 55786 705 4
An unfortunate student who had been attempting to attract Harvey Sacks’s attention:
HS: Are you asking a question, or are you bidding or what?
Q: Well I was just wondering if we are ever going to get round to the topics of conversation.
HS: That’s an amazing question … What do you have in mind?
Q: I just feel we should get some content. I feel very frustrated about it … I expected at least that you’re going to analyse conversations, or have something a little more interesting …
HS: … as weird as it may be, there’s an area called the Analysis of Conversation. It’s done in various parts of the world and I invented it. So that if I tell you that what we’re doing is studying conversation then there is nowhere to turn … There is no way that conversation is being studied systematically except my way. And that is what defines, in social science now, what talking about conversation would mean … Where I end is where knowledge on these things ends.
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