UNIVERSITY OF TRIER

English Linguistics Circle 20th April 2011

HARVEY SACKS : The Unfinished Textbook Chapters 1-4

Who am I?

Russell Kelly, lectured in Sociology at the University of Central Lancashire for more than 30 years.

First, connection to Linguistics was a paper for Language and Speech in 1977 1 where I did the computer
based data processing. Around the same time I did some work with some educationists on Reading in
Primary School children where more sophisticated data analysis demonstrated the priority of reading skills
and 'English' over all other learning in educational attainment. It was around this time also that I first
encountered "Ethnomethodology" and acquired photocopies of the original lecture 'transcripts' of Harvey
Sacks which he had left on a visit to Manchester in 1974. Frustrated with Grand Sociological Theorising,
current at the time, I found the focus on the routine, everyday routine activities of ordinary folk stimulating.
More particularly, the recording and the everyday talk of ordinary folk provided both method and content for
my studies for the next 20 years, reaching its climax in 1997 on sabbatical in Manchester with
Ethnomethodologists, like Wes Sharrock and Mike Lynch and Conversation Analysts, J.R.E. Lee and D. Rod
Watson.
In the couple of years following, I came across Sacks' students, Anita Pomerantz and Manny Schegloff
(California), prominent figures in the USA like Barbara Fox and Cecelia E. Ford, the Finns, Hakulinen and
Sorjonen, and then the Germans, Peter Auer (Freiburg), Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Marget Selting
(Potsdam), whose Sacksian focus, they describe using the term, "Interactional Linguistics." Jorg Bergmann
at Bielefeld links several of these people together and links with the important figure of Thomas Luckmann
in Konstanz. Couper-Kuhlen, for example, was a student of Luckmann's. Connections between Luckmann
and Schütz then complete a circle of influences as Garfinkel studied with Schütz and passed those influences
on to Sacks.
Since I have always believed that my teaching and research should have some relevance and practical
application, the early focus of my work was crime and delinquency, then deviance and illness, and for the
last part nursing and nurse-patient interaction.

1
(T.K.Jenkinson and A.Weymouth, “Pronominal Usage, cohesion and explicitness in working-class speech”, Language and
Speech, Spring 1977, pp.101-116)
 HARVEY SACKS 1935-1975

During his visit to England in 1974, Sacks left a suitcase full of mimeographs of his lecture notes and tapes
of his lectures. The 'lectures' have been compiled by Gail Jefferson and Emmanuel Schegloff into: Harvey
Sacks: Lectures in Conversation, which were eventually published in two volumes in 1992. Various lectures,
edited by Jefferson, have been published as the 'papers' of Harvey Sacks appearing mostly in edited volumes
of papers between 1975 and 2011. Suffice is to say, that the Lectures was a mammoth effort on Jefferson's
part although the style and content do vary from the original transcripts.
Digging around in the 'suitcase', Alec McHoul (Murdoch University, Australia) found chapter 2-4 of a
textbook which Sacks was apparently writing for publication at the time of his death.2 During further
'digging', I found what appears to be Chapter One. What I want to do in this paper, is to outline the contents
of Chapters 1-4 as the end stage in a process of development, much of which is constrained in the form it
appears in the 'Lectures on Conversation' and, when explored further, could yield a host of new pathways for
research and development.
In preparing this paper, some interesting questions kept coming to the fore. First, is the work of Harvey
Sacks rather than his affiliates within the realm “Linguistics”? Second, is the “conversation” that Sacks
analyses also the subject matter of Linguistics? How, third, does “conversation” relate to “discourse” and are
either of these within the realm “Linguistics”?
FIRST: Who was Harvey Sacks? Important bits of biography not in Schegloff's Introduction to the
Lectures!

Sacks graduated with a BA from Columbia College in 1955 where he had been influenced by some students
of Franz Neumann and by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills.
In 1959, he took and LLB, from the prestigious Yale Law School. Here he became interested in how the Law
worked, and how it could work, how it rested on canons of something called 'common sense. Legal
reasoning, in and outside the courtroom, jury decisions were guided primarily by 'common sense'. And most
of this process of reasoning occurred in conversations, in talk.
Here, I want to pick out two keys to understanding the textbook:
1. Sacks thinks like and reasons like a lawyer. His approach in analysing 'conversation' often
looks like a search for 'precedents' to 'current decisions'. His question is often not, “What is expected?” but
“What happens when the expected doesn’t happen?” e.g. “Hello-Hello” v “Hello-(Silence)”, or “Hi-Hi” in
the book.

2
Alec McHoul, On Harvey Sacks's "missing" book: Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation (1970), paper
presented to IIEMCA: Ordinary Courses of Action, Manchester Metropolitan University, July, 2001.
 2. The 'talk' that is the law is what is 'heard' by the court and by juries, not necessarily the
words spoken and the meaning intended to be conveyed by speakers. This point comes out forcefully when
Sacks works with Michael Moerman, discussing transcripts of legal processes in Malaysia. 3 Moerman
reports that the Judge “hears” according to certain precepts about the status of the person-as-witness which
can be “heard” in the judgments given but do not “appear” in the transcripts of evidence presented before the
court.

In 1960, Sacks went to Harvard to attend the lectures of Talcott Parsons in Sociology while studying and
working at MIT. Notably, Noam Chomsky was lecturing at MIT and Sacks attended some of the lectures.
Noticeably, Chomsky appears to have little influence on or sign of giving direction to Sacks' thinking about
Language and Conversation.

Of direct significance and influence was another student in Parsons' seminar, Harold Garfinkel, the
ethnomethodologist, who was Parsons' doctoral student and was on sabbatical leave.
Sacks followed Garfinkel back to California and pursued his studies there. Garfinkel was heavily influenced
by Alfred Schütz, the Austrian phenomenologist, who gave seminars with the psychologist, Aaron
Gurwitsch, at the New School of Social Research in New York. Garfinkel regularly travelled down from
Boston to attend these seminars.4

In California, Sacks was attracted by two sociologists, Philip Selznick and the Symbolic Interactionist,
Herbert Blumer. John R. Searle (Speech Acts) was also teaching at Berkeley at this time.

In 1962, with David Sudnow and Emmanuel Schegloff, Sacks joined Selznick's Centre for the Study of Law
and Society as a graduate student, he was teaching Sociology with Garfinkel at UCLA, and was a Fellow at
the Centre for the Scientific Study of Suicide in Los Angeles, directed by Edwin Schneidemann. I suspect
that these multiple positions afforded Sacks sufficient income to live in California but also brought together
a set of circumstances which would see the creation of "Conversation Analysis".

Circumstances:
1. Sacks registered for his PhD with the sociologist Erving Goffman.
3
Michael Moerman and Harvey Sacks, On "Understanding in the Analysis of Natural Conversation (1971)", Appendix B, in
Michael Moerman, Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1987.
4
Although Garfinkel’s dissertation, supervised by Parsons, gives the impression that this is where he first encountered Schütz’s
work, in a personal communication (Manchester, 2001) Garfinkel said that he had read and discussed Schütz’s Multiple Realities
paper while in Newark, that is prior to its publication in English in 1945. It is possible Schütz circulated this paper in English
within the School of Social Research prior to its publication and that Garfinkel had access to it.
2. His work of the Suicide Prevention Centre gave him access to telephone calls from troubled people.
3. The increasing availability of the reel-to-reel tape recorder meant that Sacks has available a technology for
data collection, for recording the calls to the Centre, according to Schegloff.5
4. According to Sudnow,6 Sacks tape recorded the calls to the Centre which he himself dealt with, without
the knowledge, approval or permission of Schneidemann, the SPC staff or the callers, and oblivious of the
legal and moral rights of the distressed callers. This would be a major issue in sociological, linguistic or
other qualitative research approval were it to happen today. This appears, to me, slightly odd, since Sacks
was an extremely well-qualified lawyer!

In Search of Help: No-One to Turn To

This was the title of the doctoral dissertation that was first supervised by Goffman and then Aaron Cicourel,
when Goffman withdrew. Although Goffman was unhappy with the direction of Sacks' dissertation and with
this early version of Conversation Analysis, he would write later his own book, Forms of Talk, covering
very similar ground.

Sacks' focus in the dissertation introduces the first of two major themes in the remainder of his work,
Categorization, or what were termed at this time, Membership Categorization Devices (MCDs) or ways of
establishing a replicable process of their being "No-One To Turn To" where a sequence of categories of
persons connected to the caller are introduced and discounted as "Sources of Help". Sacks' interest was in
the process of "common sense reasoning" applied by both the caller and the recipient to those potential
sources. First that the categories used by both parties were the same, but also that the sequence of priority
worked through in the calls to establish that there was no available source of help, no-one to turn to, was the
same – that Membership Categorization Devices used in the practice of reasoning were SYSTEMATIC AND
ORGANIZED, not RANDOM OR SPONTANEOUS, were SHARED, CONSTRUCTED AND
SUSTAINED IN INTERACTION between persons. So sequences of categories reasoned through in search
of sources of help might follow: immediate family; wider family; friends, acquaintances/neighbours; co-
residents; other contacts.

One feature that Sacks picked up from the calls and that fixed his interest on greetings was noticing that the
call recipient invariably used their own name as in "Hello, this is Mr. Smith" but the caller invariably
avoided giving their own name in response – "Hello – this is Jones" but more often, "Is that Mr. Smith?"
5
Sacks also kept small notebooks which were filled with snatches of conversation in which he noted some point of significance.
These notebooks are listed in the Sacks’ Archive currently held at the University of California Library.
6
Personal conversation with David Sudnow over 3 hours, University of Manchester, 1997. These comments were repeated by
Sudnow in lectures given subsequently at Manchester Metropolitan and Bangor universities.
Schegloff asks "Could talk itself be organized at that level of detail? And in so designed a manner?"
and he comments further "The talk itself was the action and previously unsuspected details were critical
resources in what was getting done in and by the talk, and all this in naturally occurring events"

In a 1963 article (Sociological Description, Berkeley Journal of Sociology) Sacks talks about a "Talking
Machine" – (The Talion Maker) and its, what we would now call, software, Simmscript. We have to
remember that simple computers, at this stage, still filled rooms and buildings. The early Atlas machines
could do simple and repetitive calculations at high speeds to break codes or transmit simple messages. Sacks
seems to have in mind a “talking-machine” that could recognise and obey “rules in conversation”, like turn-
taking.

From Rose's Notebooks there is the outline for the work that Rose, Garfinkel and Sacks are to do in response
to a substantial grant of money from the US Air Force. There are disputed claims between Rose and
Garfinkel about who actually secured the grant but it was awarded to undertake studies of 'decision-making'
with regard to communication to and from 'unmanned aircraft' (compare this, for example, with the current
use of Smart Bombs and Drones in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya).
Edward L. Rose (Notebooks 1953 - ) makes it clear that Garfinkel, Sacks, Egon Bittner and others met in a
group at Rose’s home in Colorado. The famed Purdue Symposium 7 is an extension or replication of these
discussions. Some of the meetings had agenda for discussion which Rose includes in his Notebooks. The
Talion Maker is an example of the range of topics that the group was interested in, of the range of people to
be invited to contribute and to receive some funding from research grant(s) including the one Garfinkel notes
in the Studies in Ethnomethodology. 8

7
Richard.J. Hill, Kathleen S. Crittenden, eds. (1968) Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on ethnomethodology. Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue Research
Foundation.

8
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology Engelwood, Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
 Topics to discuss

1. THE TALION MAKER : a computer simulation

2. Simscript : computer simulation
3. The talion :
a a just act
b a decision
4. Talions in the Life
5. Decisions in the Life
6. A generalized model of Decisions in the Life
7. [?????] Theoretical Approaches to Decisions
8. Empirical Approaches to Decisions
9. A research project on decisions
10. Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology : the ethnography of professional and everyday life.

2. The research project : Validation of Methods of Decision-Making
3. Studies of “Decision-Making”
a Garfinkel : How bad clinical records make for good clinical procedures.
b Garfinkel and Sacks : How patients [???????] patients.
c Garfinkel and Sacks : The recognition of suicides.
d Sacks : The treatment of barbarians in the society of children (Barbarians : adults).
e Egon Bittner : [Ethical Symbols].
f Myself : Making Sense (small languages, translation, conversation).
g Semantic formations of natural languages.
h Evelyn Hooker : How homosexuals cruise.
i Craig McAndrews : Alcoholic Decisions.
j David Sudnow : Putting Criminals Down.
k Egon Bittner : Recognition of the Hypnotic State.
l Egon Bittner : Helping the Experimenter.
m Anselm Strauss : Telling the Dying.
n Harry Stack : How to manage the police.
o Henry Lennard : Talking a Patient out of it.
p Sol Markowitz : Legal Research.
q Sol Markowitz :Jury Decisions.
Erving Goffman, Stigma Schneideman, Suicide [????]
Talcott Parsons, Marion Cummins [???????? ? ??????]

Rose says in The Werald, "Sacks discovered the commentary machine. He described the machine as an
engine composed of two parts, the moving part and the talking part. … Sacks was concerned to point out
that everyone is wonderfully adroit in listening to and watching the commentary machine."

Here again is the emphasis is Sacks on 'listening/hearing', on what is heard rather than on what is said. And
the important consequence that those awaiting their turn to speak have to be attending carefully to the
conversation currently in progress in the event that they are designated “next speaker”. Much of Chapter One
is devoted to the signals (which might be pauses, silences, utterances, sentences, etc.) that the current story
teller includes that the “second-story” teller must carefully attend to such that their story is appropriately a
candidate second story.

We should also note Sacks wonder at the minute details that were to be found in the routine, mundane,
everyday talk and reasoning of ordinary folk. Simple devices like : "Hi", "Hi" take on considerable
importance to Sacks and these are prominent in the chapters that make up the Textbook.

It is my contention that Sacks also picked up from Rose a fascination for 'words'. Rose's notebooks and his
few published papers are about (1) tracing the origin of words, and (2) the idea that a word in current use
carries with it or in it, all of the potential meanings, past, present and future, that the word may have or have
had. His ASR paper focuses on 'socius' as the source of the word society. His notes include words like
'adam', Turkish for 'man' which he traces back to the Ionians of the Tigress Basin in Iraq and then forward
through the biblical uses and translations. Sacks continuously ran a stream of Biblical Studies throughout his
career.
Here, is a modern example to show how the process works. 'Pants' is an interesting word that can be traced
back to medieval times in the form of the 'pantalon' or has cultural-political associations in the French
Revolution with "Sans Culottes" – a dictionary definition would probably make references to some form of
clothing, worn over and around the lower part of the body with a waistband and two leg holes. They might
be described as underwear or, more generically, a trousers-like. In the 1980s, 'pants' re-emerged in popular
culture as the 'under-pants' sported by The Young Ones (a rebellious, punk BBC TV comedy programme
about a student house). The underpants, like the house, were notoriously unclean, unwashed, dirty, and so
on. 'Pants' re-emerged post 2000 as a key argot word among young people (via forms like MTV) meaning
'bad', 'undesirable', 'Not-Us', 'distasteful' …. Associating all the characteristics of 'Young One' references to
the 'underwear' but making no reference to any item of clothing. As Rose would have argued, the meaning
somehow inhered in the word from its various uses over the centuries, to emerge in the 2000 form.

Sacks went one step further than this.

Influenced perhaps by Searle in Berkeley or from reading J. L. Austin's How to do things with words, Sacks
became interested in Austin's notion of 'performatives' rather than 'illocutionary acts' and makes much in the
chapters of what work is done by "sounds, utterances, clauses and sentences". His constant question when
analysing transcripts was “What work is this sound or word doing? Why here? Why now?” For example, he
devotes nearly a page in Chapter One of the book to “Uhh” when preceded by a silence as a claim from the
next speaker that it is “their” silence, prior to their beginning to speak. Equally, the current speaker may
include “Uhh” in a pause as an indication that the pause/silence is still part of his utterance and that he will
continue.

Between 1965 and 1970, Sacks’ lectures were recorded and transcribed and later became the Lectures in
Conversation. They are filled with similar observations. One famous paper, published at the time, “On the
Analysability of Stories by Children (Gumperz and Hymes, Directions in Sociolinguistics, 1972) deals with

The baby cried. The mummy picked it up

The simple ‘story’ draws out an account of several 1000 words and is about Categorization. Babies cry.
Mummies pick them up. Here he introduces the notion of “Category Bound Activities” and “Consistency
Rules”.
“Mummy” and “Baby” are membership categories with the membership categorization device “family”.
Consistency Rules suggest the “baby” determines the other categories available for use in the story (for
example: Mummy –yes, Nuclear Physicist –no, even though Mummy is also a Nuclear Physicist) and
determines “category bound activities” – Babies do crying; Mummies do picking up.

This is one from a host of examples to be found in the lectures. These culminate in a paper written with
Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, The Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn Taking for
Conversation, which has at its core 14 “observations” describing the “organization of conversation and form
the basis of what Schegloff and Jefferson have subsequently developed as Conversation Analysis:
Then Sacks puts together a manuscript which by 1974 looked like this. It appears that Chapters 2,3 and 4
were written with an earlier version of Chapter 1 which has grown considerably in size as Sacks worked on
it. There are references to pages beyond p.80 so there may be a draft of further chapters. It will require
someone to go to the Sacks' Archive at the University of California library and search through the 14 boxes
of material lying there and to sift through to see what can be found … The contents :

The Sequential Organization of Conversation

Contents

Chapter 1
Second Stories
1. Achieved similarities in interactionally oriented work in a second story telling: as a methodological
demonstration
2. Recognizing that a first story has been told
2.1 Telling a joke as a first story
3.1 Looking for the interactional structure: Stories take more than one utterance to produce
3.2 Requests as utterances initiating speaker change
3.3 Giving tasks of talk, talking extendedly as motives for not listening
3.4 Story Prefaces
3.5 Methodological consequences: identifying Story Preface in sequences of utterances
3.6 /3.7 Mm Hm as a request to continue
Criteria for the Co-selection of descriptors
How Stories are tellable
Topic analysis
Clumped Stories
Appendix

Chapter 2
1 On sequential structures
2 On what is a conversation?
3 On the coordination of actions of:
4 Non-current speakers (p. 25-26)
5 On greetings
6 Is “thi” – “thi” – a conversation?
7 Self organising conversation – interrupting
8 Complaint or formulation? (p. 37)
9 Complaints as reports of rule violation
10 Interruption as violation of the most fundamental of rules: sequencing rules as the basis of the
whole rule structure

Chapter 3
1 Greetings
2 Introduction sequences
3 Orientational utterances
4 Reinvokation of topics after introduction sequences
[Note: Sacks divides CA into Sequential Analysis and Reference Analysis as mutually relevant to speakers
and addressees (p. 50)]
5 Invoked topics as permitting membership status in identification [i.e. The topic is reinvoked to
include/exclude the introduced person in among the category of persons having membership status,
as a candidate member of that category = identification, e.g., “Hi, Hubby – this is Jo, Charlotte,
Mary. This is just girl talk.”).
6 Sentence completions.
- “me, too!” – role of “too”.

Chapter 4
1 Utterance completion
2 Utterance completors – and Type 1, Type 2 utterances
3 Sarcasm as sequentially derivative action
4 Utterance completion and etiquette markers, e.g., Please, sir, madam, ..
p. 14 fn. On laughing (where two-at-a-time is permitted).
5 Overlap or two-at-a-time
6 NO GAP AND NO OVERLAP AS THEORETICALLY CENTRAL
 7 “But”, “and”, “or” as utterance incompletors
8 ‘and’, ‘just’ and ‘um’ – in lists (also fn p. 22)
9 stoppers – conclusions on completion markers
10 ‘If’ clauses
11 “a situation of possible completion as transition adequate – a location of possible completion which
an intended, self selected next speaker looks to use
12 Second sentences after correction and corrections that are not needed as corrections as deferrals of
the first possible completion. Or “correction operations can serve as means whereby one can
produce more than a sentence, while not having happen that a possible completion will be found to
have occurred before the end of at least one’s second sentence.” (p. 36)
13 Insertion sentences (sentences inserted in questions/answers where the Q or A is not yet a completed
utterance and so indicates …
14 “I still say though” as an announcement of disagreeing ..
15 “on topic” topic markers – (I just had a thought, It just occurred to me)
16 fn p. 48 – an “insert somewhere” piece of transcript but what was Harvey Sacks thinking about in
relation to topic markers …..
17 something on rhyming in insults
18 on emphasis as a means of indicating an intent to go beyond a single sentence utterance
p. 53. (also refers to p. 70 of rough notes)