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Gail Jefferson (22 April 1938 – 21 February 2008) was an American sociologist with an emphasis in sociolinguistics. She was 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 CA notation system that she created is still used today and is called the Jefferson system in her honor. It uses a set of symbols in order to denote subtle conversational cues to help researchers understand the deeper meaning behind what has been said.

Early Life

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).

Conversational Analysis

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. After his death in a car accident, she posthumously edited his works and published them. 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)), instead paying attention to the meaning of the laughter and how the subject laughs. At the time of her work with Sacks, CA was a revolutionary new field in sociology and marked the beginning of studying into what is known as micro-sociology. The distinctiveness of Jefferson’s research, in contrast to the more ‘structural’ (sequence pattern) work in CA, was to focus on the machinery 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.

Jefferson’s research into talk-in-interaction has set the standard for what became known as CA. Her contributions to Conversational Analysis were significant as she created what is now referred to as "Jeffersonian Transcription" or the "Jeffersonian Transcription System". This system is composed of several different symbols each followed by a detailed explanation of what the symbol itself represents in the context which it is used. The underlying purpose of this system is to aid in the identification of speech patterns, and assist those trying to annotate a conversation. 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.”

Later Life

After completing her Ph.D. (Social Sciences) at UC Irvine in 1972, she had temporary appointments at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and University of California (UCSB, UCI and UCLA). In 1978 Jefferson took up a research position at the Universities of Manchester (1978–1981) in the UK, transcribing for John R.E. Lee whose project was titled "conversations in which 'troubles' and 'anxieties' are expressed". After about four years she traveled to Tilburg, Netherlands (1981–1983) where she became a research associate with Konrad Ehlich. Together they worked on a project concerning the topics of overlap and interpretation. She then left the Netherlands to take up 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.

During the last decade of her life, Jefferson had 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.

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. (1991). List construction as a task and resource. In G. Psathas, ed. Interactional Competence. New York, NY: Irvington Publishers. pp. 63–92.
• 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.