Whose Terms? Whose Ordinariness? Rhetoric and Ideology in Conversation Analysis

TLDR

The article critiques Schegloff’s defense of Conversation Analysis, arguing that his claims of an empirical, participant‑centric stance overlook the discipline’s reliance on a specialized rhetoric. By dissecting CA’s specialist and foundational rhetoric—terms such as “conversation” and “member” that are not participants’ own—the authors show how these conventions enable analysts to ignore conversational topics and mask power dynamics. The analysis concludes that CA, contrary to Schegloff’s assertion, is ideologically biased, routinely deploying a rhetoric that presents a contestable view of social order.

Abstract

This article examines Schegloff's (1997) defence of Conversation Analysis (CA) and his attack on critical discourse analysis. The article focuses on Schegloff's claims that CA takes an empirical stance without a priori assumptions and that it examines participants' talk in `their own terms'. It is suggested that these claims are problematic, and that CA, as depicted by Schegloff, contains an ideological view of the social world. This can be seen by examining CA's own rhetoric, which conversation analysts themselves tend to take for granted. First, CA uses a specialist rhetoric which is literally not the participants' own terms. Moreover, this specialist rhetoric enables conversation analysts to `disattend' to the topics of conversation. Second, CA's `foundational rhetoric' is examined. It is suggested that this foundational rhetoric, which includes terms such as `conversation', `member', etc., conveys a participatory view of the world, in which equal rights of speakership are often assumed. The assumptions of these rhetorical conventions are revealed if they are applied to talk in which direct power is exercised. In this respect, CA is not, as Schegloff suggests, ideologically neutral, but habitually deploys a rhetoric that conveys a contestable view of social order.