Conversation analysis

Converstation analysis is a linguistic system developed using linguistic principles to understand the structure of any given "text". Texts in this context ussually are transcriptions, whose participants are referred to as "members". Conversation analysis evolved from Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical notions of language.

Conversation analysis as a system for understanding the rules members apply in texts was pioneered by, Harvey Sacks, who died early in his carreer. His work was championed by others in his field and now conversation analysis enjoys widespread usage across many diciplines ranging from linguistics to statistics. In particular, the field of discursive psychology, and discourse analysis use conversation analysis as a frame work for measuring socio-psychological phenomenon.