Silences, by virtue of being found everywhere in talk, require some account. Or as Sacks put it: “There’s a lot of talk going on in conversation. There is also a lot of silence going on. How can we turn silence in to a thing that can show something?” (1992a: 672). Carving up silence into analytic objects was the focus of much early work in CA, and these investigations developed much of the technical apparatus that has come to define CA. The question of ‘how to render silence as occurring outside the conversation?’ (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Sacks, 1992b: 364), for instance, yielded the notions of adjacency pairs, noticeable absences, pre-closing sections, adequate utterance completion, and transition-relevance. Similarly, the matter of ‘how to minimize inter-turn silence’ (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1987) led to the concepts of turn-constructional units, the turn-taking ruleset, speaker-selection devices, silence classification (pause, gap, and lapse), and the preference for agreement.

In this half-day workshop, we will continue this analytic pursuit of making something out of nothing. We will begin with a review of these seminal early works and then turn to more recent studies of lapses, incipient talk, and silent action. The bulk of the workshop will be devoted to hands-on analysis of silences in the format of exercises, data sessions, and guided group work. Using data provided by the facilitator, workshop participants will analyze silences as social objects with the aim of identifying potential phenomena and developing collections.

Facilitated by: Elliott Hoey