Studying sequences of sequences: How to bring about an activity in an interactionally ordered succession of sequences

In his 2007 book Sequence Organization, Schegloff focuses on the organization of subsequent actions in adjacency-pair structured successions of turns. In the concluding chapters of this study, Schegloff gives an overview of the ways in which successions of sequences are used for bringing about larger courses of action. The question 'why that now' – viz. 'what is a speaker doing with their utterance at this point in the interaction' – can not be answered without considering the encompassing activity framework. Participants in talk in interaction organize activities as discrete organizational domains (cf. Jefferson 2015; Drew et al. 2015), and depending on what kind of activity they are involved in, and at which stage the activity is progressing, specific sequencing practices are used for bringing about the activity (Mazeland 2019). In the workshop I'll try to sketch a framework for studying sequencing practices in activities, and exemplify it it with excerpts from such activities such as arrangement making (see also Heritage & Clayman 2025), reporting, and topic-talk. I will also discuss how the construction of sequence-initiating turns, some forms of pre- and post-expansion of sequences, or the use of turn-initial particles relates to the organization of sequences of sequences in activities. The second half of the workshop is organized as a data session in which various ways of shaping activities are explored.

Facilitated by: Harrie Mazeland