Gail Jefferson
Encyclopedia
Gail Jefferson was, along with Harvey Sacks
and Emanuel Schegloff
, one of the founders of the area of research known as Conversation Analysis
(CA). She is particularly remembered today for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing talk. The system of notation widely used today in CA research bears her name.
Jefferson was born on April 22 1938 in Iowa City, and after relocating to New York for a short while, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she attended high school, then UCLA (B.A., Dance,1965). After completing her Ph.D. (Social Sciences) at UC Irvine in 1972, she had temporary appointments at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California (UCSB, UCI and UCLA), then research positions at the Universities of Manchester (1978-1981), Tilburg, Netherlands (1981-1983), and an honorary position at York (1984-1985) – after which she moved (back) to the Netherlands and married (1987) Albert Stuulen. She died in Rinsumageest, The Netherlands, in 2008 just two months short of her 70th birthday.
In the spring of 1965, to fulfill a requirement for graduating at UCLA as a dance major, Jefferson enrolled in a course Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) was teaching. Having had some previous experience in transcribing when she was hired in 1963 as a clerk typist at the UCLA Department of Public Health to transcribe sensitivity-training sessions for prison guards, Jefferson began transcribing some of the recordings that served as the materials out of which Sacks’ earliest lectures were developed. Later she did graduate work under his supervision, by which time she was already beginning to shape the field conceptually as well as through her transcriptions of the really fine details of interaction, including the detail of laughter, capturing as closely as possible precisely what is said and how it is said, rather than glossing things in the talk as, for instance ((S laughs)). The distinctiveness of Jefferson’s research, in contrast to the more ‘structural’ (sequence pattern) work in CA, was to focus on the machineries through which interaction is constructed and how they are deployed in the moment-by-moment shaping and re-shaping of interaction. Her special contribution was to reveal how interaction is endlessly contingent. For almost the last decade, and right up to her death, Jefferson has been transcribing the Watergate tapes
. Jefferson’s last paper, delivered at a conference in Sweden in July 2007 was about the machinery for laughter. Much of the data for that paper were from the Watergate materials; in it, she resumed the dialogue she’d had with Sacks more than 40 years previously.
Over four decades, for the majority of which she held no university position and was unsalaried, Jefferson’s research into talk-in-interaction has set the standard for what became known as CA. Her work has greatly influenced the sociological study of interaction, but also disciplines beyond, especially linguistics, communication, and anthropology. It would not be so much true that her work was inter- or multi-disciplinary as that disciplinary boundaries were irrelevant to her enquiries into what Erving Goffman
referred to as the interaction order.
Harvey Sacks
Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of...
and Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born in 1937 in New York. With Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff was one of the principal creators of the field of Conversation Analysis...
, one of the founders of the area of research known as Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis
Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction . CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional or in casual conversation.Inspired by ethnomethodology Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the...
(CA). She is particularly remembered today for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing talk. The system of notation widely used today in CA research bears her name.
Jefferson was born on April 22 1938 in Iowa City, and after relocating to New York for a short while, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she attended high school, then UCLA (B.A., Dance,1965). After completing her Ph.D. (Social Sciences) at UC Irvine in 1972, she had temporary appointments at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California (UCSB, UCI and UCLA), then research positions at the Universities of Manchester (1978-1981), Tilburg, Netherlands (1981-1983), and an honorary position at York (1984-1985) – after which she moved (back) to the Netherlands and married (1987) Albert Stuulen. She died in Rinsumageest, The Netherlands, in 2008 just two months short of her 70th birthday.
In the spring of 1965, to fulfill a requirement for graduating at UCLA as a dance major, Jefferson enrolled in a course Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) was teaching. Having had some previous experience in transcribing when she was hired in 1963 as a clerk typist at the UCLA Department of Public Health to transcribe sensitivity-training sessions for prison guards, Jefferson began transcribing some of the recordings that served as the materials out of which Sacks’ earliest lectures were developed. Later she did graduate work under his supervision, by which time she was already beginning to shape the field conceptually as well as through her transcriptions of the really fine details of interaction, including the detail of laughter, capturing as closely as possible precisely what is said and how it is said, rather than glossing things in the talk as, for instance ((S laughs)). The distinctiveness of Jefferson’s research, in contrast to the more ‘structural’ (sequence pattern) work in CA, was to focus on the machineries through which interaction is constructed and how they are deployed in the moment-by-moment shaping and re-shaping of interaction. Her special contribution was to reveal how interaction is endlessly contingent. For almost the last decade, and right up to her death, Jefferson has been transcribing the Watergate tapes
Watergate tapes
The Watergate tapes, a subset of the Nixon tapes, are a collection of recordings of conversations between Richard Nixon and his fellow conspirators plotting a break in to the Watergate Hotel. U.S. President Richard Nixon and various White House staff started communicating on February 1971 and...
. Jefferson’s last paper, delivered at a conference in Sweden in July 2007 was about the machinery for laughter. Much of the data for that paper were from the Watergate materials; in it, she resumed the dialogue she’d had with Sacks more than 40 years previously.
Over four decades, for the majority of which she held no university position and was unsalaried, Jefferson’s research into talk-in-interaction has set the standard for what became known as CA. Her work has greatly influenced the sociological study of interaction, but also disciplines beyond, especially linguistics, communication, and anthropology. It would not be so much true that her work was inter- or multi-disciplinary as that disciplinary boundaries were irrelevant to her enquiries into what Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born sociologist and writer.The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective that began with his 1959 book The Presentation of Self...
referred to as the interaction order.
Selected bibliography
- Jefferson, G. (1972). Side sequences. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 294-338). New York: Free Press.
- Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on 'latency' in overlap onset. Human Studies, 9, 153-183.
- Jefferson, G. (1988). On The Sequential Organization Of Troubles-Talk In Ordinary Conversation. Social Problems, 35, 418-441.
- Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13-31). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.
- Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696-735.
- Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361-382.