Interactional Sociolinguistics

Reading

Week 5

Required Reading

'Doing Being Ordinary' Revisited: Conversation Analysis and the Ethnomethodological Tradition

So far we have a studied a number of ways people manage their interaction. We have talked about how people play different roles in different situations, how they use different verbal strategies to protect their own 'face' and the 'face' of the people they are interacting with, and how they use contexualization cues to signal that they are doing and create a context within which their words and their actions can be interpreted. This week we will return to our discussion of how people 'do being normal (or ordinary)'. This time, however, we will focus on more delicate aspects of conversational management-- how people begin and end conversations and manage things like topic choice and turn-taking. The study of the 'mechanics' of conversation is part of a branch of linguistics called 'Conversation Analysis' (CA), a field which has grown out of the work of ethnomethodologists. 

As you have already learned, the ethnomethodological tradition was founded by Harold Garfinkel, who was interested in  how social actors use shared commonsense knowledge and reasoning to conduct their everyday affairs. Garfinkel's methods included 'breaching experiments' ('Garfinkeling'), staging interruptions to the normal flow of interaction to see how people would act. 

Like ethnomethodology, the goal of conversation analysis (CA) is to determine the unspoken, shared understandings and methods of commonsense reasoning that guide and orient participants' actions in a given practice in a given context. Its focus, however, is much narrower, emphasizing in particular the mechanics or procedural rules of everyday conversation. 

Developed collaboratively by three sociologists named Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, CA starts from the premise that conversation is not random, but has an underlying order. In fact, conversation analysts believe that the people use the rules of conversation to jointly construct an orderly world. Of course, what is orderly and what is not may be different for different people and different groups. The tools of  conversation analysis, then, can help us to determine the different rules and different logic people from different cultures use to manage conversations, and thus help is to understand the root of a lot of inter-cultural miscommunication. 

    The main principles of CA are as follows: 

• Conversation is a kind of activity with which people bring order to the world
• This activity is made up of a sequence of orderly actions (utterances are ‘doings’ in which certain things are accomplished like greeting, asking, leave-taking, etc.)  
• These actions are governed by rules or sets of expectations which people share with one another
• These rules determine things like how we begin and end conversations, who gets to talk about what and when, and how we know when it is our turn to talk and when it is not.

The 'Pairwise' Organization of Talk

    The core of conversation analysis is the exploration of the sequential structures of social action which shape the world, turn by turn.. According to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson social interaction is basically arranged in pairs of utterances -- what one person says basically determines what the next person can say. They call these sequences of 'paired actions' adjacency pairs. Examples of common adjacency pairs are 'question/answer', 'invitation/ acceptance or refusal', and 'greeting/greeting'. The idea behind adjacency pairs is that when one person says something, they create a 'slot' for the next person to fill in a particular way. If they fill it in the expected way, this is called a 'preferred response'. If they do not fill this slot in the expected way, this creates some kind of special meaning (implicature). For example, if you greet me, you expect me to greet you in return. If I do not do so, you infer some kind of special meaning (maybe I didn't hear you, or maybe I'm angry with you). 

You can divide almost any conversation into pairs. Sometimes, though, adjacency pairs can be quite complicated, with pairs of utterances overlapping or being embedded in other pairs of utterances. It is this 'pairing' of utterances that helps us to make sense of our conversations and use them to accomplish orderly activities. 

One important thing for students of professional communication to remember is that adjacency pairs are different in different circumstances and among different cultures. In Western culture, for example, the 'preferred response' to a compliment is accepting the compliment by saying 'thank you'. In Chinese culture, however, the preferred response is to show modesty by refusing the compliment.

Openings

Of course the most important thing about any conversation is beginning it. Different cultures have different ways to begin conversations and in the same culture conversations are begun in different ways when different forms of communication are used (e.g. phone, ICQ). 

According to Schegloff, openings of conversations consist of three distinct moves: 

1. The opening of the 'channel' (consisting of a summons-answer sequence)
2. An identification sequence
3. A topic negotiation sequence

For example, a typical phone conversation in my culture might go something like this: 

Of course, often conversational openings are much more complicated than this. They must always, however, contain these three sequences in some form or another.

One thing that often complicates openings is that people often insert some kind of 'facework' in between the identification sequence and the introduction of the topic. This is especially true in situations where people are friends, one person has power over another person or the topic involves some kind of face threatening act. 

Different forms of communication tend to come with different rules about who speaks first, how the identification sequence is managed and who is supposed to introduce the topic. In a phone conversation like that above, for example, the person who is called speaks first, but the caller is generally expected to identify themselves and to introduce the topic.These rules might be different for different forms of conversation (like mobile phones in which the identification sequence is often made unnecessary by caller-display and replaced by a location sequence--'where are you?', or ICQ where to person who is summoned is just as likely to introduce the topic as the person who issues the summons). In face to face conversation between friends, the identification sequence is often very subtle, consisting of 'recognizing' the other person and 'ratifying' your relationship

Turn-taking

One of the most important aspects of interaction is turn-taking--how we decide who gets to talk and when. 

Turn-taking entails: 

• who may speak (take the speaker role)
• when they can begin to speak
• how they can achieve this right
• how they can hold on to this right
• how they can relinquish this right (freely or otherwise) 

We refer to the right to speak in interaction as 'the floor'. Rules of turn-taking tell us how to 'get the floor', to 'hold the floor' and to 'give up the floor'. generally, the person who is speaking has the most rights over the floor. They usually can hold the floor for as long as they want, can select who will speak next, and can constrain the next turn by controlling the topic.

'Getting the floor', 'holding the floor' and 'giving up the floor' involves a whole series of signals, some of which can be rather subtle. The most common signal that someone is ready to give up the floor is pausing. one problem with this is that people from different cultures are used to pauses of different lengths. People from my hometown, New York, are used to very short pauses, whereas people from most other parts of the United States are used to longer pauses. So, when a New Yorker is talking to, say, a Californian, the New Yorker is likely to think that the other person is giving p the floor after a very short pause, when actually they may just be pausing to take a breath. This is why many people in the United States consider New Yorkers rude and aggressive. 

Interruption is another important and often misunderstood part of interaction. Many people think that people interrupt in order to get the floor and that interrupting is rude. Actually, most interruptions are what we call 'cooperative interruptions'--they are not meant to take the floor away from the speaker but rather encourage the speaker to continue talking. 

Other signals we use to give up the floor in English include falling intonation and other paralinguistic cues like looking down or looking at the other speaker with an expression of expectation. People also have various signals for when they want to take the floor, including breathing in to show they are about to talk and making their bodies more tense.

Having different rules for turn-taking is one of the main causes for misunderstanding among people of different cultures.

Closings

One of the hardest things about having a conversation is knowing how to end it. This is because ending a conversation works against the 'pairwise' organization of talk. Different kinds of conversations end in different ways. Conversations that are instrumental in nature (you ask me some questions about an assignment) are easier to end--they end naturally when the purpose of the conversation is fulfilled. Casual conversation between friends is much harder to end, as you probably know from you own experience. People usually start ending the conversation well before the actual closing, offering what we call 'pre-closings'-signals to the person they are talking to that they want the conversation to end. This is sometimes done rather directly ('Well, I've got a lot of homework to do') or in rather subtle ways with things like minimal responses (not elaborating too much or raising new topics), speed and intonation (slower, lower) and use of discourse markers ('so', 'well'). One of the most common ways to end a conversation 'politely' is by making it seem like the other person wants to end it ('I know you're busy, so I won't bother you anymore'). Ending a conversation abruptly creates the implicature that you are angry at the other person or do not feel very close to them (which is okay if you really are not very close to them).

Supplementary Readings

Paul ten Have, 'Three Exemplary Studies' (from Doing Conversation Analysis, 1999 Sage, pp. 13-26)

Ronald Wardhaugh, 'Topics, Turns and Terminations' (from How Conversation Works, Blackwell pp. 138-161)

Optional Readings

Paul ten Have, 'Methodological Issues in Conversation Analysis' (URL)

Margaret C. Laney, 'How is communication possible? From the perspective of Harold Garfinkel' (URL)