General Editor: N. J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the University of Sydney
This series promotes new interdisciplinary research on the elements of human sociality, in particular as they relate to the activity and experience of communicative interaction and human relationships. Books in this series explore the foundations of human interaction from a wide range of perspectives, using multiple theoretical and methodological tools. A premise of the series is that a proper understanding of human sociality is only possible if we take a truly interdisciplinary approach.
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Michael Tomasello (Max Planck Institute Leipzig)
Dan Sperber (Jean Nicod Institute)
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (University of Helsinki)
Paul Kockelman (University of Texas, Austin)
Sotaro Kita (University of Warwick)
Tanya Stivers (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto)
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Exploring the Interactional Instinct
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Relationship Thinking
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Edited by Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner, and Anita Pomerantz
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Asking and Telling in Conversation
ANITA POMERANTZ
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Names: Pomerantz, Anita, author.
Title: Asking and telling in conversation / Anita Pomerantz.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Series: Foundations of human interaction | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020036195 (print) | LCCN 2020036196 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190927431 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190927448 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190927462 (epub) | ISBN 9780197522875
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190927431.001.0001
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3.
Series Editor’s Preface
In December 1975, just two weeks after her doctoral supervisor, Harvey Sacks, was tragically killed at age forty, freshly minted PhD Anita Pomerantz presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. Her paper was titled “Why Compliments Get Rejected.” The study, which appears as a chapter in this book under the title “Compliment Responses,” is the type of work that exemplifies her foundational contributions to research on human interaction and language-mediated sociality. Pomerantz’s puzzle concerning compliments begins with a “Dear Abby” column: Perplexed wonders why his wife “can’t accept a compliment without putting herself down.” Pomerantz’s analysis invokes the idea of preference in interaction, and with this she explains the awkwardness of accepting compliments. There is a conflict of incentives: It is socially preferable to agree with what others say, but at the same time it is socially preferable not to praise oneself. Problems of constraint satisfaction are usually encountered in theoretical domains of economics or evolutionary psychology. Pomerantz’s pioneering work instead is grounded squarely in social practice. This collection is a landmark in research on social interaction, bringing together core analysis and findings of studies from throughout Pomerantz’s long career as a conversation analyst. It is a searching inquiry into the sociality of information exchange.
N.J.E. Sydney, June 2020
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the publishers for their agreements to republish the following papers in this volume:
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57–101. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.
Pomerantz, A. (1978). Compliment Responses: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. New York: Academic Press, 79–112. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.
Pomerantz, A. (1988). Offering a Candidate Answer: An Information Seeking Strategy. Communication Monographs 55: 360–373. Reproduced with permission of Taylor and Francis.
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling My Side: “Limited Access” as a “Fishing” Device. Sociological Inquiry 50, nos. 3–4: 186–198. Reproduced with permission of Wiley-Blackwell.
Pomerantz, A. (1978). Attributions of Responsibility: Blamings. Sociology 12: 115–121. Reproduced with permission of Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Pomerantz, A. (2004). Investigating Reported Absences: “Neutrally” Catching the Truants. In G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 109–129. Reproduced with permission of John Benjamins.
Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims. Human Studies 9, nos. 2–3: 219–229. Reproduced with permission of Springer Nature.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling “How I Know.” Journal of Pragmatics 8: 607–625. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.
Pomerantz, A. (2017). Inferring the Purpose of a Prior Query and Responding Accordingly. In G. Raymond, G. H. Lerner, and J. Heritage (Eds.), Enabling Human Conduct. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 61–77. Reproduced with permission of John Benjamins.
Glossary of Transcript Symbols
The transcript notation used in this book was developed by Gail Jefferson.
[ Left square brackets indicate the onset of overlapping, or simultaneous, speech by two or more speakers.
Cust: I haven’t got the [other one.
Rep: [What’s thuh date on the bill?
] Right square brackets indicate the point where overlapping speech ends. This may not be marked if it is not analytically important to show where one person’s speaking “in the clear” begins or resumes.
Andy: We’re all gonna meet ‘n come back he[re `n then we’ll go back.]
Mom: [I don’t understand that-] See- I thought you w’d meet here
(0.5) Numbers in parentheses indicate a timed pause (within a turn) or gap (between turns) represented in tenths of a second.
Ted: Or you could have a barbecue at uh (0.2) Indian School. (3.5)
Carol: Just be easier he:re.
(.)
A dot in parentheses indicates a “micropause,” hearable but not readily measurable; conventionally less than 0.2 seconds.
Eddie: Oh yeah. (.) Yeah, that’s right, yeah.
: Colons are used to indicate the prolongation or stretching of the sound just preceding them. The more colons, the longer the stretching.
Cop: Go over the:re, go over there and siddown and be coo::l. A’right?
- A hyphen after a word or part of a word indicates a cut-off or self-interruption, often done with a glottal or dental stop.
Doc: And for the p- for the pain I’ve g- I’ve given you something called Dolobid.
A period indicates a falling, or final, intonation contour, not necessarily the end of a sentence.
Dad: I did not know. that you needed to know the location of the- (.) film.
? A question mark indicates rising intonation, not necessarily a question.
Dad: If you? (.) wanna look at em now? you can look at em now?
, A comma indicates “continuing” intonation, not necessarily a clause boundary.
Gor: D’y’ave a goo- (0.4) you had a good time?
Den: Yeah I di:d, I had a lot of fun.
= Equal signs within or between turns mark speaking as “latched,” with no break or pause, when a speaker makes two grammatical units vocally continuous, or the onset of a next speaker’s turn follows the prior speaker’s turn immediately without break or pause.
Carl: And- you know=you know what’s uh goin’ on right now?=It’s theSa:n Genaro festival.
= . . . = Two equal signs are used to show the continuation of an utterance from the end of one line to the start of a successive line when overlapping speech comes between the two lines.
Ava: Yea:h. Like group therapy. Yuh know [half the grou]p thet we had=
Bee: [0 h : : : ]
Ava: = la:s’ term wz there en we wz jus’ playing arou:nd.
Word Underlining is used to indicate some form of contrastive vocal stress or emphasis.
Pat: And uh: erm I need, really nee:d (0.2) um:: (0.5) reading glasses.
WORD Capital letters are used to indicate markedly higher volume.
Staff: She called the number?
Boss: And she should [’ve gotten a fair]
Staff: [she GOT THIS] co:nference?
°word° The degree sign indicates that the talk following it was markedly quiet or soft. When there are two degree signs, the talk between them is markedly softer.
Doc: How long has this been going on? (1.2)
Pat: About three or four months?
Doc: °Mm mm.°
↑ or ↓ The up and down arrows occur prior to marked rises or falls in pitch.
Staff: Well- my question is ↓this,=she sa:ys that she gave them the information they ↑wan↓ted.
> < The stretch of talk between inequality signs in the order “more than”/“less than” indicates that the talk between them is compressed or rushed.
Mar: Yeah,=b’t we don’ wannen extre:me scen[a:rio
Mal: [>No,=I know<
< > The stretch of talk between inequality signs in the order “less than”/“more than” indicates that the talk between them is markedly slowed or drawn out.
Ann: They sponsored this vide↓o (0.5) <a:nd (.) the sci:ence depa:rtment ma::de>, (0.4) six hundred
hhh
·hh
Hearable aspiration or laugh particles; the more h’s, the longer the aspiration. Aspiration or laugh particles within words may appear within parentheses.
Les: aa,hhhhwhich ‘e dzn’t ↓no:rmally (.) bother to do.
Skip: So’ee said where the devil do you(hh)u ↑come vro(h)m
Hearable inbreaths are marked with h’s prefaced with a dot (or a raised dot).
Ellen: I mean (0.4) well I think it’s kinda good news. [·hhh]
Jeff: [↑Tell] me
(word) Parentheses around all or part of an utterance, or a speaker identification, indicate transcriber uncertainty, but a likely possibility.
Mom: (I don’t understand that- see-) I thought you w’d meet he:re ’n have a barbecue.
( )
Blank space inside single parentheses instead of a speaker ID indicates the transcriber could not tell who spoke; blank space inside single parentheses in the transcript indicates that something was being said but it was unintelligible; the size of the space is relative to the amount of talk that was unintelligible.
Dad: Well. That- (0.2) Ya don’t need ta:: (0.2) Well yeah, once we take th’ cover [off]. As long as the cover’s = ( ): [( )]
Dad: = o:n (0.2) ah, we don’t need ta >worry and it’s heating up ni:ce.
(( )) Matter within double parentheses is a transcriber’s comment or description.
Mark: When I went to one of their meetings at Bouchard ((a tugboat company)) they had a couple of attorneys there
Introduction
This book brings together nine of my papers on the topic of asking and telling. Each paper analyzes complexities that are involved when people ask or tell something to other people. Some complexities that are illuminated in the papers are:
• Asking and telling is not only about information exchange. It includes sharing our opinions, reactions, and evaluations via assessments.
• Implicit and explicit knowledge claims and expectations are foundational to asking and telling activities.
• Participants engage in, and understand, asking and telling activities in relation to the sequence of actions in which those activities reside and, when relevant, as part of a course of action or interactional project being realized.
• Actions that are performed through asking and telling may be regarded as relationally supportive or unsupportive and/or as helpful or detrimental to the participants’ interactional projects.
• The ways participants perform actions reflect the participants’ orientations to the actions and implicitly propose how the actions should be regarded.
• The participants’ sense of what is appropriate/inappropriate to ask and tell bears on whether and how they do so.
• Participants directly and indirectly seek information, and they directly and indirectly provide information.
• Participants use reports to perform other actions.
For each of the nine papers, I wrote a short lead-in that precedes the paper and a commentary that follows it. The lead-in, in italics, identifies the research interests that drove the analysis. The commentary provides my current sense of the paper, including a critique of it when relevant. As I conducted some of the research, including the work on preference organization, nearly fifty years ago, I have had ample time to reflect on these papers. In the remainder of the introduction, I briefly describe the atmosphere during the early years of Conversation Analysis (CA), my approach to the field, themes that occur across several of the papers, the order of the papers, and the central points of each paper.
The Early Years of Conversation Analysis
In the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the climate that the CA cohort experienced was one in which we saw language and social interaction scholars exploring and developing a different way of doing social science than had been accepted theretofore. The excitement of doing this kind of innovative research was rooted in the sense of discovering new ways of seeing everyday ordinary interaction. The focus on discovery led us away from searching for prior research to build upon and cite and toward immersing ourselves in the details of social interaction and social life.
During this period, I came to understand that the goal of CA is to analyze how social life and social interaction are constituted. This includes describing the resources available in our culture that interactants use in performing and interpreting actions, activities, persons, scenes, and so on. This sense of CA can be seen in Harvey Sacks’s lecture “Suicide as a Device for Discovering if Anybody Cares” (Sacks, 1992), when he discussed how isolated old ladies sitting in the park organize their days:
Even though they have almost no money they, for example, never purchase at supermarkets and never purchase more than a day’s food. Because if they did, they’d have nothing to do the next day. And they routinely will get up—you’ll be sitting in the park talking to them, the only person who’s talked to them since God knows when—they nevertheless get up and say “It’s 11 o’clock, I have to go home and check the mail.” Now there’s nobody who’s writing to them. What it is, is that there’s that trash mail coming, and that’s something. (p. 39)
From its inception, CA’s goal has been to discover how meaning is created and maintained in and through the practices engaged in by members of the culture.
One further aspect of the early work is that it dealt with not just word selection, categories, and sequences but also, importantly, with the inferential work that was associated with the talk and action. An example can be seen in Sacks’s analysis of the MIR device. He asserted that categories for members of the culture are inference-rich and then gave examples of how that feature is used in interaction (Sacks, 1992, pp. 40–48).
My Approach to Conversation Analysis
I learned to analyze interaction in the early days of CA’s development. I took a course with Harvey Sacks in the Sociology Department’s master of arts program at UCLA in the 1960s and was intrigued by his novel approach to understanding
social interaction. When he left UCLA to teach at UC Irvine in the late 1960s, I transferred to a doctoral program at UC Irvine to continue to work with him. I attended his lectures and participated in his graduate seminars, and on occasion I went to UCLA to sit in on Harold Garfinkel’s seminars. Our training consisted of participating in data sessions in which we listened to audio-recorded phone interactions or watched videotaped interactions, attending seminars in which we presented our analyses to each other, and writing papers that we handed in for feedback. Harvey Sacks and Manny Schegloff were on my dissertation committee and provided ways of thinking and analyzing data that I value and have carried with me throughout my career.
CA works to account for the orderliness of human action. While identifying regularities of conduct is an important step in working up an analysis, it is not itself a complete analysis. An analysis involves not only identifying regularities but also, importantly, proposing an organization that can account for them. Some regularities may be accounted for by noting the participants’ orientation to rights and obligations and/or to maxims. A regularity that Sacks noticed is that when a baby cries and a woman picks it up, observers see the woman as the mother of the baby. To explain the basis of that regularity, Sacks proposed the following viewer’s maxim: “If a Member sees a category-bound activity being done, then if one can see it being done by a member of a category to which the activity is bound, see it that way” (Sacks, 1992, p. 259). He also discussed the subversion of viewer’s maxims, situations in which a person adopts an appearance that is associated with a category when that person would otherwise be seen in a different category (p. 254).
There are many models aimed at explaining social action. One model is that social action is a consequence of normative constraints; people generally follow norms and are sanctioned for observably violating them. Another model proposes that social action occurs when actors select strategies to actualize their interests and goals. A third model views social actors as responding to momentto-moment contingencies, including interactional and practical problems that arise. My view of social action draws from all three of these models. In my papers, I sometimes argue that participants’ ways of performing actions are shaped by normative constraints. Other times I have treated participants’ strategies as responsive to the problems they face at particular interactional junctures. All of my papers appreciate the fact that the point at which a participant contributes talk and gestures within a sequence of actions is fundamental to understanding of talk and gestures. I believe all of my research seeks to discover the shared understandings and reasoning associated with practices that I analyzed.
Sacks provides a good example of participants using a culturally available practice to solve an interactional problem. He observed that when a psychiatrist asked a potential patient “How are you feeling?” the potential patient responded
with “It’s a long story” or “It’ll take hours” (Sacks, 1992, pp. 14–15). Sacks argued that the dilemma the potential patients face is that they want to present their troubles but feel it is inappropriate to do so directly following a ceremonial opening such as “How are you feeling?” In responding with something like “It’s a long story” or “It’ll take hours,” patients offer a tentative refusal while inviting the psychiatrist to give the go-ahead to talk about the problem. The culturally available device of tentatively refusing is a solution to their dilemma.
As a conversation analyst, I had significant exposure to two disciplines. I was trained as a sociologist and had my first positions in sociology departments, then spent the remainder of my academic career in communication departments. Whereas sociologists study the constitution of social order with an interest in the cultural machinery or apparatus that provides for meaning-making, communication scholars consider strategy as a key concept and study how strategies are used to accomplish the participants’ goals. My research draws on both disciplines.
Complexities in Asking and Telling Activities
Several kinds of complexities are made visible in the analyses of asking and telling practices. In what follows I indicate four of the complexities: (1) the interconnections between knowledge claims and asking and telling, (2) the ways asking and telling activities depend upon their places in sequences of actions and interactional projects, (3) how responsibility is attributed and negotiated for blameworthy or praiseworthy attributes and actions, and (4) the ways in which moral orientations influence how asking and telling activities are performed.
Knowledge Claims
Knowledge claims are part and parcel of asking and telling. I analyzed their place in asking and telling activities throughout my career, from my earliest works to my most recent papers. The entitlement to assess a referent is gained by having had firsthand experience of the referent, and an implicit claim of knowledge is made when an assessment is offered (Chapters 1 and 2). The knowledge claims of the speaker and the speaker’s assumptions about the recipient’s knowledge are central to performing indirect actions (Chapters 4 and 5). Participants exhibit carefulness by invoking or implying limited knowledge when damaging evidence is sought or presented (Chapter 6). In discussing various question forms, I presented a radically different approach to epistemics than was popular at that time (Chapter 3).
Sequences of Actions and Interactional Projects
The prior actions and/or the anticipated upcoming actions are central for determining the actions being performed by reports. When a report is in response position, the prior action constrains what is relevant to report. When certain kinds of reports are in sequence-initial position, they can prompt specific actions in response. This is particularly visible in Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5. Understanding a report’s place in a sequence of actions is part of understanding what action the report is performing.
In addition to the relevance of sequences of actions for asking and telling activities, interactional projects shape the participants’ understanding of the actions. Alternating between the terms “an interactional project,” “a course of action,” “an interactional line or stance,” and “a thematic thread,” Schegloff described the phenomenon as follows:
Under whatever term, what is at issue here is a course of conduct being developed over a span of time (not necessarily in consecutive sequences) to which co-participants may become sensitive, which may begin to inform their inspection of any next sequence start to see whether or how it related to the suspected project, theme, stance, etc. (Schegloff, 2007, p. 244)
When the attendance office clerk called the home of an absent student, the institutionally defined interactional project was to merely gather and provide information, not to arrive at a judgment about the status of the absence (Chapter 6). In response to requests for information, recipients take into account the request in relation to the inferred purpose of the question and the questioner’s interactional project (Chapter 9).
Attributing and Negotiating Responsibility
When participants talk about praiseworthy or blameworthy actions, attributes, or outcomes, they negotiate how much and what kind of credit or blame is deserved. When responding to compliments, participants have ways of negotiating the amount of credit they deserve and/or who or what deserves the credit (Chapter 2). Participants report unhappy outcomes to involved parties to elicit the recipients’ accounts of how and why they performed the blameworthy actions (Chapter 5). A speaker may back away from taking authorship responsibility for a delicate or offensive formulation by attributing the formulation to a person other than oneself (Chapter 8).
Moral Judgments Regarding Actions
In social conversations between friends, participants treated the actions of agreeing with co-participants’ evaluative observations as supportive and disagreeing with them as potentially threatening or disruptive (Chapters 1 and 2). On some occasions participants treated the action of directly seeking information as normal and unproblematic (Chapter 3), while on other occasions they treated it as intrusive and/or offensive and sought the information indirectly (Chapter 4). Participants often treated the actions of criticizing and accusing coparticipants of wrongdoing as delicate or offensive, and they opted to perform them indirectly (Chapter 5) or to attribute authorship to sources other than oneself (Chapter 8).
The Order of the Papers
After experimenting with numerous ways of sequencing the papers, I decided that none of them stood out from the other possibilities. I ended up putting my papers on the preference organizations that apply to responses to assessments as the first two chapters. One reason for the early positioning is that assessments, including evaluative observations, understandings of reports, reactions to experiences, compliments, self-deprecations, and so on, are pervasively sought and told, and hence belong in a lead position in a book on asking and telling. Another reason for placing “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes” and “Compliment Responses: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints” early in the book is that I am best known for my early publications on preference organization.
The next three chapters concern direct and indirect actions. Chapter 3, “Offering a Candidate Answer: An Information Seeking Strategy,” discusses features of various methods of directly seeking information and analyzes the complexities of one explicit information-seeking practice. Chapter 4, “Telling My Side: ‘Limited Access’ as a ‘Fishing’ Device,” describes the kind of telling that is used to indirectly seek information. Chapter 5, “Attributions of Responsibility: Blamings,” illuminates a kind of telling that functions to prompt recipients to address their responsibility for untoward outcomes.
Chapter 6, “Investigating Reported Absences: ‘Neutrally’ Catching the Truants” is the only case study included in this book. I analyzed telephone interactions drawn from a single setting: calls in which the interactional proj ect involved the exchange of information. The practices for seeking and reporting information that I analyzed in this setting are used in other settings as well.
The papers in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 contain analyses of different phenomena under one rubric. Chapter 7, “Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims” analyzes three distinct functions of the formulations in the collection. Chapter 8, “Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling ‘How I Know,’ ” analyzes at least two uses of including a source or basis of an assertion or action. Chapter 9, “Inferring the Purpose of a Prior Query and Responding Accordingly,” analyzes three kinds of inferences that recipients make and describes resources used to make each type of inference.
Brief Description of Papers
In “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/ Dispreferred Turn Shapes” (Chapter 1), I examine features of responses in two sequential environments: when neither party is responsible for the evaluated referent and when a prior speaker has offered a self-deprecation. I demonstrate that the relevant alternatives for responding in each of these sequential environments are produced very differently, and I propose an organization that accounts for the differences.
In the paper “Compliment Response: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints” (Chapter 2), I start with a puzzle as to why recipients of compliments do not simply accept the compliments. I propose that when an initial evaluation credits the recipient with a positive attribute, action, or accomplishment, responding to the compliment involves a situation in which multiple constraints operate. Speakers rely on a variety of resources to deal with the conflicting constraints. The resources and ways of responding are detailed in the paper.
As discussed in “Offering a Candidate Answer: An Information Seeking Strategy” (Chapter 3), questions built with candidate answers (also referred to as polar or yes-no questions) are used massively in conversational interaction. Although they seem simple and straightforward, analysis reveals several kinds of complexities associated with these types of questions. Candidate answer queries carry claims about the speaker's knowledge. They are understood as the speaker's best guess and hence display the speaker’s knowledge about the matter at hand. They also have a moral dimension. Candidate answers may reference a normal, legitimate possibility versus an abnormal, illegitimate one. The moral status of the incorporated candidate answer may be read as reflecting the speaker's attitude and sympathy about the matter at hand. Finally, by incorporating a candidate answer in a query, a questioner provides a model of what would satisfy the questioner's purpose in asking.
“Telling My Side: ‘Limited Access’ as a ‘Fishing’ Device” (Chapter 4) describes a way of seeking information without going on record with an explicit request.
The practice involves a speaker’s reporting recognizably limited access to, and knowledge of, a situation in which the recipient was an actor. A 'limited access' formulation may be likened to an outsider's or observer's version of a situation. This practice is used when there are negative sanctions for directly seeking the type of information being sought. Its success relies on participants' orienting to a sequence of actions: the limited access report setting up the relevance of recipient's providing information. The recipient needs to infer that the speaker seeks further information and, furthermore, is willing to provide it.
The paper, "Attributions of responsibility: Blamings" (Chapter 5) describes a practice that may serve as an alternative to directly blaming or accusing the recipient. In reporting an 'unhappy event,' a speaker identifies an unwanted outcome without indicating what or who is responsible for the outcome. While this type of report appears to be an informing, it is used to elicit the recipient's account if offered to a recipient who is implicated in, and possibly responsible for, the unwanted outcome. The report provides the recipient with the opportunity to volunteer an account that relates to their responsibility for the unwanted outcome. The practice relies on the participants' orientation to a sequence of actions. The report of the unwanted outcome is a sequence initial action. A relevant next action is for the recipient to offer an account that deals with their responsibility for the outcome.
The data for the paper “Investigating Reported Absences: ‘Neutrally’ Catching the Truants” (Chapter 6) consist of telephone calls initiated by a high school attendance office clerk to the home of absent students. The primary purpose of the calls was to exchange information relevant to a later determination of whether the student’s absences were legitimate or not. The clerk’s interactional project was to merely investigate, not to make judgments about the status of the absences. A primary finding is that when a parent’s report indicated a likely conclusion of truancy, the clerk sought and provided information differently than when the parent’s report pointed to a legitimate absence. When the clerk suspected truancy, she assumed a “neutral” stance, displaying cautiousness by affirming only what could be asserted with certainty at that time.
One important function described in the paper “Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims” (Chapter 7) is that these types of descriptions are used to convince, defend, or justify a claim. When we tell or describe things in the course of selling, convincing, arguing, defending, justifying, accusing, complaining, and so on, we design our descriptions in ways that portray a state of affairs as believable, obvious, compelling, unreasonable, illogical, et cetera. Characterizing an attribute with an extreme case formulation works to strengthen and/or legitimize the claim being made.
“Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling ‘How I Know’ ” (Chapter 8) describes several uses for giving a source or basis of an
assertion. Reporting a source may be used to argue for the validity of a claim, back away from the validity of a claim, and/or remove oneself from authorship accountability. The credibility of the cited source is crucial for whether a claim is portrayed as more or less believable. Interactants report their sources during disputes, in situations of doubt, and when they perform sensitive actions.
The starting point of the paper “Inferring the Purpose of a Prior Query and Responding Accordingly” (Chapter 9) was a claim previously made by conversation analysts: as part of making sense of talk and action, participants answer the question “Why that now?” The paper examines three different types of inferred purpose along with the sequential features of each inferred purpose. The process of inferring the purpose of the prior query relies on the nature of the query, the actions prior to the query, the ongoing activity, and the relevant membership categories of the participants.
References
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1
Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments
Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes
This project was driven by two issues. The first was to understand why assessments are so prominent in our interactions. A partial answer is that assessments are requested and are offered as the products of experience. We ask for and provide assessments when we share experiences, calibrate our views and opinions with others, and demonstrate our understanding of the point of a story or the import of news. In other words, seeking and providing assessments are fundamental to living in an intersubjective social environment. Intersubjectivity includes not just what members of society treat as “fact” but also their understandings and assumptions about when assessments should be offered and how to interpret them.
The second issue that drove this research was to understand why some alternative actions are performed so differently. I especially wanted to understand why participants understate their disagreements. The short form of the answer is that participants have assumptions about whether the action in question would be appreciated or unappreciated, approved or disapproved, appropriate or inappropriate, normal or abnormal, supportive or unsupportive, advantageous or disadvantageous, and so on. These types of assumptions bear on how participants perform the actions.
Introduction
When persons partake in social activities, they routinely make assessments. Participating in an event and assessing that event are related enterprises, as the following excerpt illustrates:
(1) [VIYMC 1:4]
J: Let’s feel the water. Oh, it
R: It’s wonderful. It’s just right. It’s like bathtub water.
