This chapter provides an overview of methods for data collection in Conversation Analysis and practical advice on collecting interactional data. We touch on several recurrent issues that researchers encounter in the process. These issues include accessing data; the use of existing data (including user-uploaded, like YouTube); navigating gatekeepers in accessing a setting; building trust with members of a setting; building ethnographic understanding of activities under examination; obtaining ethical approvals; protecting privacy of participants; methods and materials for informed consent (including with populations with diminished capacities); devising a recording schedule; deciding when/how often to record; selecting the right quantity and type of recording equipment; considerations of spatial and audio environments; the use of alternative technologies for recording; recording mediated interactions; procedures and check-lists for before recording; positioning and framing the camera; when to press record and when to press stop; navigating the presence of the researcher-recorder on site; and gathering supplementary documentation from the setting.

This chapter discusses best practices for conducting a conversation-analytic (CA) investigation into (discourse) particles (or discourse markers). Particles are ubiquitous in talk-in-interaction, making them an attractive research target. CA research into particles aims to elucidate their interactional deployment in the language under study and, more generally, to develop a deeper understanding of the infrastructure of social interaction. The chapter discusses conceptual underpinnings of the CA approach to analyzing particles: first, its orientation to social action; second, its emphasis on positionality (including the particle’s position in a turn, a sequence, a repair segment, and a conversation as a unit); and, third, its use of particular evidentiary procedures (such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure,’ positional deployment, distributional evidence, and deviant cases). The application of these principles is illustrated with two case studies: a semasiological study of the Russian particle nu and an onomasiological study of how courses of action are launched via so and oh prefaced turns. The chapter shows that, while fraught with challenges, a study of particles can lead to important and unexpected findings about social interaction.

This chapter describes and empirically illustrates an approach to analyzing categorial phenomena in talk-in-interaction, grounded in the distinctive conversation analytic practice of building and analyzing collections. We begin by outlining a core set of observations made by Harvey Sacks in implementing a shift from conventional social scientific treatments of categories (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, age) as analysts’ resources, to instead examining them as members’ resources. That is, instead of using categories to study the social world, Sacks’ approach introduced resources for seeing how participants in social interactions use and self-administer categories. We then present an analysis of a collection of openings of interactions from ordinary conversational and institutional settings, considering some ways in which participants explicitly and tacitly use and manage categories in the initial moments of these interactions. Using this analysis as an exemplar, we address a set of challenges and critiques associated with conversation analytic research on categories. We thereby describe how CA can provide an empirically rigorous means of examining the ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship between categories and other ‘generic’ interactional structures and practices – and thus for analyzing the situated (re)production of categories, from the most mundane to those most strongly associated with distributions of power and privilege.

The Introduction is a chapter-length outline of the of the book which does more than simply summarise. Though not exhaustive, it includes both explanation and discussion of the historical context of Brexit and Brexitspeak, combined with a description of the linguistic tools of analysis. The starting point is that without language politics could not happen, so it is essential to understand how language works in general and how it is strategically deployed by politicians. In this chapter populism is discussed as an unwritten ideology best characterised by its demagogic appeal to an idea of ‘the people’ within a nationalist notion of ‘the British people’, at the same time promoting a friend-foe antithesis, stirring up emotion and avoiding reasoned argument. Demagoguery is a little used term in political science but highly relevant to the present state of democracy. Indeed, demagoguery exploits and undermines democracy. It is both an effect and a cause of post-truth politics, where truthfulness and facts are overridden. The final section takes a closer look at the fundamentals of language and language use that are at issue in examining the discourse of Brexit.

This chapter starts by summarising an experiment showing how the brain’s emotion circuitry responds to a set of words signalling threat. The main emotion activated in Brexitspeak is fear; the triggers are both linguistic and visual. They include representation of alarming scenarios, and factual misrepresentations capable of causing various negative emotions. The chapter analyses three well-known cases that illustrate such effects. The first is Vote Leave’s propaganda displayed on the side of a red bus: the slogan was an inaccurate statement that could evoke feelings of attachment, resentment and anger. This is also analysed in terms of speech acts, ambiguous and deniable assertions, and lying. The second case, the rightly controversial ‘breaking point’ poster displayed by Leave.EU had the avowed goal of emotion arousal. The visual element is analysed with reference to cognitive image schemas, and their potential for activating fear reactions. The third case, the most effective of the Vote Leave campaign, was crafted in order to prompt the fear of losing agency. This, too, likely activated the brain’s fear circuitry.

The growing interest in Conversation Analysis (CA) from the wider academic world, and the use of CA in contexts beyond academia, is largely due to the effective communication of CA findings. This chapter focuses on how to effectively communicate CA findings to non-CA professionals, such as healthcare professionals, academics, teachers, the police, politicians, and beyond. When training professionals in CA findings, careful considerations need to be made to make our findings welcome, whilst at the same time preserving the detail and nuances of human interaction. Decisions about the selection and length of representative extracts, together with decisions about the central messages being conveyed, require careful consideration. Challenges and tensions can arise when making these decisions including, managing the issue of (a) the professionals’ expertise, (b) avoiding negative self- and other evaluations, (c) how to present the data without getting lost in the detail; and (d) addressing concerns about generalizability and quantification. This chapter will address these possible tensions and offer guidance and practical solutions regarding the decisions that are made to effectively train non-CA professionals.

The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

What happens to submissions to a journal such as Research on Language and Social Interaction which publishes close, technically sophisticated analysis of interaction? What do its editors look for? We begin by explaining why submission might be desk-rejected: it might be simply unsuitable in topic or methodology for the journal, or it might be that it is somehow not quite up to standard. Methodologically sound work on a topic of interest to the EM/CA community will pass the first hurdle and be sent out for review by knowledgeable peers. Reviewers will report on the strength of the argument, the relation of the work to what is already known, and the quality of the analysis. Most papers at this stage will receive an encouraging invitation to revise and resubmit according to the reviewers’ comments and the editors’ recommendations. The revision, to pass the next stage, should be accompanied by a closely written, collegially written commentary on what the authors have done with the reviewers’ comments. The editors will scrutinize the revision and the covering letter very carefully; if all is well, then, with one last round of very minor tidying up, all is set for publication.

Conversation analysts in a range of disciplines have pointed to a relationship between Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. However, full descriptions of key elements of this relationship, and illustrations of how it matters in practical terms, are scarce. We specify ways in which the concerns and sensibility of Ethnomethodology (EM) can translate into the practice of Conversation Analysis (CA). Employing an EM sensibility involves attending to five major features of social interaction: how members of society co-produce social order, achieve social organization in their everyday lives, deploy concrete practices or methods of talk and embodied conduct, use commonsense knowledge, and operate in real-time, actual social interaction with its temporal dimensions. In specifying these features, our aim is to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Our goal is to appreciate how EM’s view of social phenomena—as actual, lived in real time, and member-produced—is fundamental to CA, and how EM’s theoretical insights and studies of commonsense and practice-assembled social events profoundly paved the way for CA. While integrating this EM backdrop, CA advanced the systematic analysis of concerted, real-time conduct-in-interaction. A concluding section of the chapter provides an illustration drawn from an internal medicine clinic, and involves doctor-patient interaction.

Making collections of conversational/interactional phenomena is a cornerstone of CA’s methodology. Our aim in CA research is to identify the practices through which speakers of a natural language conduct action in inter-action, the practices that enable speakers to engage in conduct that is meaningful to one another (the accountability-as-intelligibility of social conduct). The practices for talk-in-interaction are recurrent phenomena; they are to be found in recurrent patterns of talk – in recurrent sequential positions or environments, in recurrent sequence patterns, and in recurrent features of turn design such as linguistic format including morphosyntactic constructions. Whilst recurrence may not by itself be a sufficient condition for determining that an object or pattern constitutes a practice, it is a necessary condition. It is necessary to show that an object, pattern etc. works in a particular way systematically – and ‘systematically’ requires recurrence. Thus, the identification, the discovery or uncovering of practices in talk-in-interaction rests on building collections of cases of a phenomenon in order to find whether it is systematically associated with some recurrent pattern. In this chapter I describe the history of one such collection assembled by Gail Jefferson, a collection of apologies that served as the basis for several analyses and publications.

The investigation of singular practices and actions is the bedrock of Conversation Analysis (CA), yet it is not the only approach that CA research can take. This chapter poses a series of analytic questions designed to guide the analyst’s attention towards a complementary mode of analysis, one which takes as its object of study not a singular practice but rather a system of practices, alternative solutions to a recurrent problem of social organization. While this approach has been employed to greatest effect in research on generic organizations of interaction, the analytic techniques are themselves generic and applicable across domains of action. Rather than select a practice or action and ask what forms it can take or what environments it can inhabit, conversation analysts can instead select a problem, an exigency of social interaction, and ask how participants solve it. Alternative practices and actions naturally cluster around the organizational problems to which they serve as possible solutions, and it is this endogenous organization that CA research aims to document. The chapter sketches out and illustrates a range of analytic techniques that conversation analysts have employed in past research and can employ again to discover and investigate organizations of practice.

The title of this chapter points to the frequent use of the word ‘we’ in Brexit discourse before and after the referendum. The pronoun ‘we’ in Brexitspeak almost always serves the exclusion of other nations or those in the domestic arena perceived as enemies of ‘the people’. Three different cases of the uses of ‘we’ are examined, each of which in their different ways shows how ‘we’ expressed an exclusionary notion of national identity. One of these cases shows how Brexitspeak persisted in the years after the referendum, and included the long-standing idea, at all levels of society, that ‘we’ speak only English. The second case is the 2013 speech by the then prime minister David Cameron, who favoured remaining in the EU. That speech, which announced the referendum, was apparently intended to placate the Eurosceptics and neutralise UKIP’s attractiveness. The speech repeatedly used ‘we’, embedded in an exceptionalist narrative of British greatness. Cameron’s speech failed in its aims and in fact boosted national-populist discourse. It was in tune with Farage’s own speeches of the same year, which is the third case of Brexiter ‘we’ examined in this chapter.

The goal of this chapter is to guide the reader interested in grammar in interaction through the entire research process, beginning with how to find a researchable phenomenon and culminating in how to reveal the larger significance of research findings on grammar. We focus primarily on grammatical phenomena that are morphosyntactic in nature but include discussion of how prosodic-phonetic and embodied practices can impact the exploration of morphosyntactic phenomena. We begin by addressing some of the multiple sources of inspiration for a new research project on grammar, including starting with an observation in the data, or with an observation from the linguistic literature, or with an observation from the CA/IL literature on a different language. We then explore how to delimit the phenomenon chosen and how to build a collection of pertinent instances. Finally, we turn to issues of analyzing the collection and constructing an argument, with a final discussion of how to probe the theoretical significance of grammatical findings. In conclusion, we note that because of its orderliness, grammar in general as well as language-specific grammatical practices contribute to establishing and maintaining the social order.