What a difference forty years make

In great part thanks to Manny Schegloff’s contributions, CA has brought with it a fresh new way of thinking about language. Three roughly chronological stages can be identified in Schegloff’s linguistic development: (1) casual observation about small-scale linguistic phenomena, including silence, timing of sounds, syllables and words, non-lexical tokens, reference and deixis; (2) serious engagement with largescale linguistic phenomena, including sentences, questions, speech acts, coherence, and prosody; (3) full-blown linguistic theorizing about, e.g., the natural habitat of language and grammars as positionally sensitive objects. The conclusion is that Manny Schegloff has contributed, if unwittingly, to a ‘new-age’, interactional revolution in linguistic thinking.