Lectures on Conversation

This two-volume work presents the entire corpus of lectures by a writer whose thought and method influenced a generation of linguists and sociologists. Volume one contains the lectures delivered at UCLA, from Fall 1964 through Spring 1968. They touch on a great variety of topics, but two key issues emerge, rules of conversational sequencing and membership categorization devices. It culminates in the extensive and formal explication of turn-taking delivered in Fall 1967. Volume two contains the lectures delivered at Univerity of California, Irvine from Fall 1968 through Spring 1972. As in Volume one, these lectures touch on a wide range of subjects, and the investigations of storytelling and conversational sequencing, begun in the earlier volume, continues. It culminates in the dissertation on adjacency pairs delivered in Spring 1972.