Reflections on Quantification in the Study of Conversation
Several years ago, a graduate student with a quantitative back-ground who was taking my course on "Conversational Structures" raised the question, "Why don't you people quantify? " This student seemed clearly to find the materials and the course's stance toward them engaging, and did not mean the question so much as a challenge as a recommendation. Perhaps it had been prompted by the so-called informal quantification represented in the common use in some conversation-analytic writing of terms such as massively, overwhelm-ingly, regularly, ordinarily, and (as in the current sentence) commonly. I responded to the question at some length, reviewing a number of constraints on "serious " or "formal " quantification in the study of conversation-matters that seemed to me common knowledge (in a difference sense of common), although mostly disregarded in practice; in any case, nothing new. Since that time, I have had occasion to discuss these reflections with practitioners of several disciplines in the social/human sciences, in-cluding many for whom quantification is an important tool. ' On the Requests for reprints should be sent to Emanuel A. Schegloff, Department of Sociology,