CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Geoffrey Raymond (Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara): " Opening Up Sequence Organization: The Activity Context as a Source of Organization for Talk-in-Interaction " April 5, 2006, 5pm. Haines 332.

This talk (based on a paper co-authored with Gene H. Lerner) traces some aspects of action sequencing, produced through talk-in-interaction, to organizational sources beyond the boundaries of the sequences themselves. We show how the overall structural organization of some activities that encompass talk-in-interaction can be consequential for both a turn's composition and a sequence's development. In particular we identify one type of activity context - the "completable project" - and show how turns at talk and sequences of action that comprise this type of activity are specially designed for it.