2018 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 4-18
This article provides an overview of comparative studies in Conversation Analysis (CA) and critically considers their findings and remaining issues. I start with a discussion of a ‘mismatch’ between CA’s goals and those of comparative research. I then critique three representative studies in comparative research in CA published in the 1990s that compared interactional practices observed in English conversation and those in Japanese. Finally, I introduce the newly developed field of pragmatic typology and discuss the significance of its central method, the natural control method.
