Work
Sacks became interested in the structure of conversation while working at a suicide counseling hotline in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The calls to the hotline were recorded, and Sacks was able to gain access to the tapes and study them. In the 1960s, prominent linguists like Noam Chomsky believed that conversation was too disorganized to be worthy of any kind of in-depth structural analysis . Sacks strongly disagreed, since he saw structure in every conversation, and developed conversation analysis as a result.
Sacks's recorded lectures were transcribed (by Gail Jefferson who also edited them posthumously) but the tapes were not saved. The duplicated copies of the transcribed lectures were made freely available by Sacks and achieved international circulation and recognition during his lifetime and subsequently .
He treated such topics as: the organization of person-reference; topic organization and stories in conversation; speaker selection preferences; pre-sequences; the organization of turn-taking; conversational openings and closings; and puns, jokes, stories and repairs in conversation among many others .
Read more about this topic: Harvey Sacks
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