A conversation analytical approach to a/symmetries

In everyday thinking, symmetry is often approached as a conventional and ordinary state of affairs: something we expect to encounter in normal everyday situations, for ex- ample, in a conversation between two speakers with the same language skills. In con- trast, asymmetry is commonly considered to be something unconventional and out of the ordinary taking place under special circumstances. This everyday thinking is, howe- ver, challenged by Conversation Analysis, in which neither symmetry nor asymmetry is seen as a stable state of affairs but rather as processes in which the ordinary and unor- dinary can vary from one moment to another.