Reflections on Quantification in the Study of Conversation

Several years ago, a graduate student with a quantitative background 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, overwhelmingly, 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, including many for whom quantification is an important tool.' On the

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