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Although organization of conversations into a series of topics appears (to both analysts and participants) to be a ubiquitous feature (Holt and Drew 2005: 39), it is difficult to define what constitutes a topic (Brown and Yule 1983; Levinson 1983; Schegloff 1990; Drew and Holt 1998; Stokoe 2000). In contrast, it is easier to trace how topics are produced and where topics shift (Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Jefferson 1984; Myers 1998). Consequently, conversation analysts shifted their focus to the mechanics of topicality production, including initiations, closings, and shifts, and an increasingly large body of MBT Shoes research about how topicality is accomplished by conversationalists has been conducted.

To analyze how topicality is accomplished and how topic shifts are managed, a strategy sometimes adopted has been to treat topic as 'constituted in the procedures conversationalists utilize to display understanding and to achieve one turn's proper fit with a prior' (Maynard 1980: 263). Within this analytical framework, topic is conceived as something that is achieved by participants, turn-by-turn in their talk, through repetitions, ellipsis, pronominalization and deixis, rather than as something which is defined externally by the analyst (Stokoe 2000:187); and topical talk is occasioned as conversationalists initiate, maintain, close and shift between 'potential mentionables' (West and Garcia 1988). Such a conversation analytic approach is also in line with Sacks' (1992a: 535-43) argument that topics are an artifact of the way each turn is built to display an understanding of and 'fit' with the previous turn. What is important about this conversation analytic approach is that the basis of the analysis is in conversationalists' own orientation to and construction of what they take to be relevant and pertinent to the set task as interaction proceeds. In other words, the analytical focus is on participants' rather than analysts' categories (Stokoe 2000). Stokoe (2000) investigated the production of topical talk in a university seminar context: she found that MBT Chapa students explicitly mark what types of topics are relevant, appropriate, and legitimate to discussion. Stokoe (2000) points out that employing the categories of 'on-' or 'off-task' (or -topic) talk1 may miss complexity in topicality production, that is 'it would have ignored the students' own display of what is treated as relevant to the discussion' (Stokoe 2000:199).

In previous studies of topic transition, there has been discussion of 'marked' (Sacks 1992b: 352) or 'disjunctive' (Jefferson 1984) topic changes that involve the introduction of a markedly different matter to the one discussed in the prior turn and thus are obvious topic changes. In a study of the role of figurative expressions in the management of topic transition in conversation, Drew and Holt (1998) found that the recipient's topically disengaged minimal concurrence (represented by, e.g., 'Yeah' or 'Yes') with the prior speaker's production of the figurative summary is sufficient to give either speaker the opportunity to embark on a new topic (Drew and Holt 1998: 507). However, topic shifts in conversation usually do not have clear-cut boundaries. This is because, generally, conversationalists tend to tie each turn topically to the previous turn such that analysts find it difficult to distinguish the precise point at which topics change. Jefferson (1984) refers to these turns as 'pivotal utterances in that they are connected to the prior topic but also have "independent topical potential"' (Jefferson 1984: 203). This phenomenon of the speakers linking a new matter to the previous, such that a range of matters may be discussed without any overt termination of one prior to the introduction of a next (Holt and Drew 2005: 41), is called 'stepwise' movement (Sacks 1992a: 566). In other words, stepwise topic transitions occur in turns in which a speaker links what is being introduced to the previous turn. Holt and Drew (2005), in a study of the interactional use of figurative expressions in conversations, report instances of stepwise topic transitions, and claim that the figurative expression forms a bridge connecting to the previous talk but opening the possibility of moving away from that matter to a different one.

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