In this study I employed conversation analytic and ethnomethodological approaches to describe and explicate the relationship between talk and activity. Data consisted of videotape and audiotape recordings, and transcripts of participants preparing and eating meals, playing card games, and playing board games. These materials were examined to discern how participants interactively organized those activities, and how they coordinated shifts between activity-oriented talk and topic-oriented. Analysis performed under conversation analytic auspices yielded the following findings: Speakers organize shifts between activity-oriented talk and topic-oriented talk using adjacency pairs (e.g., question-answer formats). Speakers use first pair-part techniques to initiate transitions between topic-oriented talk to activity-oriented talk. Participants produce activity-oriented talk such that it occurs as side-sequences within ongoing sequences of topic-oriented talk. The structural features of activity-oriented shifts suggest that participants orient to the evolutionary statuses of topics and activities to discern when shifts between activity domains are appropriate. Through activity-oriented talk and action social actors establish participation frameworks and activity-related identities which link particular participants to particular tasks. In this way, social actors establish who does what, when, and how with respect to an activity, as interaction unfolds. Activity-related participation frameworks shape and are shaped by activity structures (structures of action which constitute activities as units of interaction). Activity structures constitute sequential contexts for talk and action, insofar as social actors orient to them as relevant aspects context, and insofar as such structures have procedural consequences for social actors, conduct. Social actors coordinate multiple activity contexts using methods which are related to and emerge out of the methods they use for taking turns at talk.
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