What kinds of social organizations are used as resources when people communicate through talk in interaction? It is this question that conversation analysis attempts to answer. Conversation analysis (CA) studies the methods participants orient to when they organize social action through talk. It investigates rules and practices from an interactional perspective and studies them by examining rec...

W hen we walk to a shop in a town, we want to get there in the shortest time. However, finding the shortest route in a big city is quite tricky, because there are countless possible routes and the time taken for each segment of a route is uncertain. This is a typical problem of discrete optimal control, which aims to find the optimal sequence of actions to minimize the total cost from any given...

How is it that the name of a brilliant 18th century scientist and philosopher, many of whose exceptional achievements were often advanced for his time, is almost never mentioned in the annals of science? And how did it happen that a man very deeply dedicated to the advancement of science experienced a vision that completely altered the course of his life? We suggest, based on his extensive self...

If I had to describe Tanimoto Sensei using a single word I would say kindness. When I was attending the PhD course in Hiroshima University, I frequently looked at him and thought: “If I have the chance to be an educator, I would like to be like that man.” The generosity, respect and friendship he employed to treat the students is fascinating. By that time, Professor Tanimoto had just come back ...

This article is concerned with Extreme Case Formulations (ECFs) (Edwards, 2000; Pomerantz, 1986) in spontaneous Cypriot Greek conversations. This study confirms the occurrence of ECFs in complaints as identified by Edwards (2000) Pomerantz (1986), but goes one step further to analyse the sequential and interaction work accomplished with ECFs in reporting “opposition-type stories” (Schegloff, 19...

This study documents and characterizes a phenomenon in noturolly-occurring conversation which I have termed InteractIonal reconstruction. lnteroctional reconstruction involves retroactive reinterpretation of on earlier utterance (or set of utterances) on the basis of a more recent utterance (or set of utterances). This work is meant to serve two functions: first, to enrich our theories of human...