CMN 457, Spring 2003

Lect #8: Schegloff (1995) "Discourse as an interactional achievement: the omnirelevance of action."
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Central themes: Action, doing things between us by intertwining our words and other actions, interactional achievements.

1) He suggests that in the past there have been four central concerns in the classical study of communication.

2) However, he wants to make the focus on information problematic

-He wants to study the interactional details involved in how is it given or got?
-Thus, his central focus must be on people's actions - on their 'doings'
-This means also a focus on "the absence of actions"
-Not doing something when 'something' is expected is significant also

3) Three premises for his own approach (in contrast to the classical approach):

-(i) The study of real-world, naturally occurring ordinary discourse.
-(ii) Discourse is an interactional product of conversation - see note below.
-(iii) The 'primordial scene of social life:" direct interaction between members of a social group who are physically co-present - in responsive relation to each other.

Note: Discourse: an ordered body of talk - e.g., the discourses of mathematics, of communication studies, of modernity, etc.

-in which people talk with each other, not in terms of events immediately occurring in the interactional environment,
-but in terms of a pre-existing framework or theoretical system.

Conversation:

-"Conversational interaction may then be thought of as a form of social organization through which the work of the constitutive institutions of societies gets done - institutions such as the economy, the polity, the family, socialization, and so on" (p.187).
-"The basic and primordial environment of the development, the use, and the learning of natural language" (p.187).

4) The centrality of (open) conversation:

-In open dialogue or conversation, each utterance is in response to (is 'into') its own surroundings, "local" context or environment.
-Central in that environment are other people's immediately previous utterances.
-"The basic natural environment for sentences is turns at talk in conversation" (p.187).

5) In this context, not only is action central, but the absence of action (when expected) is central also.

-Talk is attended to, not so much for what is said (what the words 'stand for'), as for what is being done by an utterance.
-What is an utterance's 'point'
-What is the "overall aim," the 'whole' of which the present words are a 'part' (remember Garfinkel's "documentary method"!).

6) First example: What is Debbie trying to do? What part does Nick play in her actions?

-Nick is Mark's roommate, Mark is Debbie's boyfriend.
-Orientation to take here: ask yourself: "What's happening 'in' these utterances?
-Debbie wants to shine before Nick as ahse's got some 'important news' for him
-But Nick fails to 'get' this, and 'blocks' her efforts

Lets' see how this gets played out - Debbie makes three attempts:

-Debbie asks Nick if he has his waterbed yet (line 35).
-He says he has (line 36).
-This is met with three rounds of questioning, challenging, or disbelief:
-line 37: "Oh really? Already?" line 40: "Are you kidding?" Line 43: "Oh no but youh - you've got it already?"

What is going on here?

-Debbie's question can be seen as a preliminary to getting a "No" answer from Nick (what Schegloff calls a "backdown") - so that Debbie can then present her little 'triumph'.
-But Nick cannot say "No" (i.e., backdown) - he can't even say: "Well, I might have already got it" (a position of uncertainty).
-He might be teasing or kidding around.
-But why the persistence in her stance?

Attend to her actions as part actions in a larger (whole) course of action :

-The course of action, the expected interactional sequence, constitutes "a telling"
-Tellings should not be done to people who already know "the news"

Checking out whether the recipient 'already knows':

-Line 34: "Guess what?" is a "pre-announcement."
-It allows the speaker to check out whether the recipient already knows the news or not.
-Response usually: "What?" (preferred - 'go ahead') - "I already know" (dispreferred - 'blocking').

Another constraint (or utterance 'shaping' influence):

-Often pre-announcements contain clues as to what is going to be announced: "I was looking in the paper (lines 34-35) - have you got your water bead yet?"
-Debbie is trying to assess whether what she has to offer (her 'gift') is relevant and will be welcomed by Nick - a pre-offer (a pre- sequence).

Relational consequences:

-So, when Debbie questions Nick - she is not just asking for information, she is waiting for a go-ahead to her pre-offer.
-So, when Nick responds "Yes" to her question, he is not only "confirming the proposition at issue" (what she "said" in her question).
-He is also blocking her from giving her 'gift' (what she is trying "to do" in her saying).

Feelings (participant's sense) of what is involved here:

-Debbie can't accept that Nick is not giving her the opportunity to 'give her gift'
-Nick can't 'get' her offer, and thus makes her out to be 'slow on the uptake'
-We can fail to 'get it' if we do not distinguish: (i) what an utterance is saying or is about, and (ii) what it is doing, showing, or displaying.
-Answering, as Nick does, to what Debbie says, he fails to answer to what she is doing.

Local Understandings:

-The 'units' of action we must attend to are not those defined by professional analysts.
-The 'units' and 'understandings' are "local" and "indigenous to the actors' - the interactional participants' - worlds" (p.192).

Another aspect of the interactivity of discourse production: its "co-construction:"

-As Roberts and Bavelas (1996) show, the hearer (listener) must be included in the speaker's processes - Schegloff puts it down to Charles Goodwin (1979, 1981).
-We look to see if a listener is appropriately aligned to be the recipient of our talk.

Alignment:

-We always know if we are in eye-contact with another.
-Other routine confirmations: nods, uh-uh, smiles, etc.
-All 'units' such as clause, sentence, turn, utterance, and discourse, are all 'shaped' as "co-constructed, interactional units."

7) Second Donny-Marcia example: We 'expect' co-construction: what happens when we don't get it?

8) Marcia's silences are not nothing

-the 'something' that they are is given by their sequential context - their placement
-it is not just the listener's uptake (responsiveness) that shapes a speaker's talk - but the absence of that uptake.

More details:

Analytic and terminological tools:

-The idea of an "adjacency pair "
-"My car is stalled" as a possible announcement - a "first pair part" (FPP) that makes one of a set of potential "second pair parts" (SPP) relevant next
-The idea of "conditional relevance"
-Generates expectations that give a sense of what is missing if silence follows