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The language of grammatical categories and the language of social action*
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. ThompsonUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison / University of Colorado at Boulder / University of California at Santa Barbara
First, the embarrassing question of units. Erving Goffman (1981)†
Responding to Sacks et al.’s 1974 call for linguists to join in the study of resources for turn construction, the authors of this chapter long ago took on turn formulation as an issue which linguists must account for. In this chapter, we return to this aspect of CA’s charge to linguists, noting that CA continues to borrow the meta-language of linguistic unit types which are based in a tradition that does not address the practices of humans in real-time and contingent social
* We are grateful to Brendan Barnwell, Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Joseph Brooks, Joan Bybee, Irene Checa-Garcia, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Veronika Drake, Virgina Gill, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie Goodwin, Makoto Hayashi, Ritva Laury, Douglas Maynard, Lorenza Mondada, Bracha Nir, Simona Pekarek Doehler, Felicia Roberts, Richard Sandoval, Suzanne Stevenson, Beatrice Szczepek Reed, and Alex Wahl for valuable discussion of the issue of ‘units’ in interaction. We are particularly grateful to Geoffrey Raymond for his insightful input on the shape of this chapter. None of them is responsible, however, for the approach to ‘units’ taken here or for the way we may have interpreted their input in writing this chapter. Authorship is shared equally among the three of us.† We include this quote lightheartedly, just as we believe Goffman intended it in the opening of a section of “Replies and responses”. The section of that essay that he opens with this sentence is, however, nicely related to our concerns in the present chapter. Goffman discusses what term might be best to designate the bounded units that interactants use and recognize as resources in conversation. He rejects grammatical terms as being “responsive to linguistic, not interactional, analysis” (23), and he settles instead on the term “move”, a term he prefers “not to fix very closely” (23). He characterizes a move in relation to the activity in which it is built to play a part: a move is a “a stretch of talk or its substitutes which has a distinctive unitary bearing on some set or other of the circumstances in which participants find themselves (some ‘game’ or other in the peculiar sense employed by Wittgensein).” (24)
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
action. We experiment in grounding accounts of turn construction in action rather than linguistic-category types, offering two detailed analyses of utterances that emerge in ordinary interaction, avoiding dependence on linguistic categories. In line with longstanding trends in CA, we experiment in moving further toward a descriptive meta-language for turn construction based in the particulars of moments of naturally occurring interaction, with attention to vocal and embodied conduct of the multiple copresent participants.
. Introduction
An abstract notion of projectable unit-types is central to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s classic 1974 account for turn taking in interaction (hereafter ‘Sacks et al.’). The authors are unequivocal in presenting the turn-constructional unit (TCU) as a fundamental component to account for interactants’ ability to achieve the normatively smooth turn transitions that they so evidently do. Units, or “unit-types” (702), are thus at the very foundation of the turn-taking system as Sacks et al. describe it:
– Sacks et al. describe speakers as building their turns from among projectable unit-types whose trajectories are revealed bit by bit from their beginnings: “There are various unit-types with which the speaker may set out to construct a turn.” (702).
– They point to grammatical resources as providing unit-types usable for support-ing the projection of where a turn unit could come to possible completion before such completion is reached, defining unit-types for English in list fashion as “ sentential, clausal, phrasal, and lexical constructions”. (702)
– They emphasize the interactional nature of turn construction: observing that a turn is not unilaterally managed but rather an “interactional production”. (726)
– Of particular relevance for linguists, they propose that “[h]ow projection of unit-types is accomplished, so as to allow … ‘no gap’ starts by next speakers, is an important question on which linguists can make major contributions.” (703, n. 12)
Each of the current authors entered enthusiastically into the CA dialogue precisely in response to Sacks et al.’s radical programmatic mandate to linguistic theory. By using the term “mandate”, we index both the power that the CA method offers and the responsibility that the CA method placed upon us, a responsibility to bring it to, and integrate it with, linguistics. More specifically, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, we were among those linguists (see, e.g. Givón 1979, 1983, 1984; Hopper & Thompson 1980; Li 1976) struggling to bring balance and ‘functional’ explanatory grounding to a highly abstract and formally oriented linguistics. At that time, the intellectual context was one in which many linguists were deeply committed to modeling the abstract formal resources that could economically ‘generate’ the infinity of ‘sentences’ that native speakers of a given language would judge as grammatical. Our intention in this
paper is to probe the notion of syntactic categories used in CA, using the spirit of CA’s empirical standards, its agnosticism with respect to abstract categories, and its methodological practice of grounding categories in the particulars of social actions as captured in audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interaction.
In earlier work, building upon and responding to research on turn construction, subsequent to the publication of Sacks et al., we jointly explored the possibility of rethinking the ‘unitness’ of TCUs in terms of practices (Ford et al. 1996). In that study we suggested that even the minimal unit which Sacks et al. so compellingly propose, i.e. the minimal first TCU a speaker gets when allocated a turn, is perhaps better understood not in terms of an inventory of structural or formal unit-types, but as a provisional and contingently unfolding projection. Thus a new speaker may claim an interactional space in which to produce a turn, but how participants shape this unfold-ing action is determined in an incremental manner and is susceptible to contingencies involving not just the speaker but other participants as well, as recipient actions affect turn trajectories in progress (as has been demonstrated by many researchers; see, e.g. C. Goodwin 1981, 1984; M. H. Goodwin 1980; Goodwin & Goodwin 1986; Schegloff 1987). We observed that interactional data do not unequivocally demand the postu-lation of an abstract inventory of a priori grammatical structures for turn construc-tion. What studies in turn construction in interactional data do support, however, is the need for practices for formulating trackable trajectories.1 These trajectories are provisional and malleable claims to interactional space in which speakers contingently produce spans of talk with beginnings, trajectories, and always-negotiable points of possible completion.
In referring to a priori grammatical structures, we invoke the work of Harris (2003) and Hopper (1988), and the distinction within linguistic theory between ‘a priori’ and ‘emergent’ grammar. Hopper (2011) notes that linguists (and, we would add, Sacks et al. and virtually all students of talk-in-interaction, including ourselves) have generally adopted
the standard view that speakers of a language communicate by virtue of a uniform common grammatical system. Disagreement only occurred over the source of this grammar – discourse pragmatics or mental structures. The validity of this assumption, which by some has come to be called the fixed code (Harris 2003) or a priori grammar (Hopper 1988) theory, was rarely questioned; yet when examined, it was found to be full of paradoxes. (303)
In the current chapter, then, we draw attention once again to the importance of rethinking grammatical units in interaction. Given that CA is a radically bottom-up analytic approach to interaction, and given the compelling way that CA has, from
. See Clayman (2013) and Drew (2013) for recent overviews of turn design and turn construction.
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its origins in ethnomethodology, consistently questioned the importation of a priori (rather than participant-constructed and emergent) social categories to explain contingent, dynamic, and locally managed interaction, we treat linguistic categories (top-down notions derived primarily through introspective methods) with the same spirit. We interrogate the reliance on such concepts for arriving at accounts for the interactional construction of turns in the course of joint activities, be they sequences or courses of action. Aiming toward an action-based metalanguage to account for turn construction in sequential context, we present a data-based inquiry into the degree to which a priori linguistic categories and linguistic units are relevant and necessary to account for turn construction, and into what might be gained through mindful use of action-based descriptive language. Ideally, the CA and ethnomethodological charge that categories meet the evidentiary requirement that they be treated as real by the participants is one we believe linguists, and CA practitioners who use linguistic terminology, should aim to fulfill.2
Sacks et al. allude to, and explicitly state, the need for caution in importing linguistic categories (Sacks et al. 702–703, 720–722). However, it is also the case that, in presenting their empirical evidence of participants’ orientations to unit-types (702–3, n. 12), Sacks et al. draw upon linguistic categories as unexamined givens. Most specifically, Sacks et al. offer examples of participants’ treatment of grammatical units as possibly com-plete (702–703), but those unit-types are drawn directly and without reflection from an already existing taxonomy of traditional grammatical-unit categories: “sentential, clausal, phrasal, and lexical constructions” (702). That is, they use grammatical category names as theoretical primitives. By “primitives” we mean theoretical concepts that are to be understood as self-evident and derived from intuitively obvious and shared knowledge. As Sacks et al. state it (with our italics added on the linguistic-category terms):
Our discussion in §3.1 of the turn-constructional component of the turn-taking system identifies the types of turn-constructional units as sentential, clausal, phrasal, and lexical, i.e. syntactically. The discussion of appositionals and tag questions – and, most importantly, the way in which the prospect of turn-transfer at the first possible transition-relevance place conditions decisions as between left-embedded and conjoined sentence structures – should indicate the deep ways in which syntax matters to turn-taking, albeit a syntax conceived in terms of its relevance to turn-taking. (720–721)
. At the end of their linguistics-based critique of the notion of unit, Taylor and Cameron (1987, 156) make a similar point: “What research into conversation shows is that many of the basic assumptions underlying the study of verbal interaction, including those supporting such traditional linguistic domains as syntax, have to be reconsidered; and this reassessment must be performed in the light of conversation analytic discoveries about what speakers and hearers really do with words, and not just what grammarians, following an in-built scriptist bias, have for centuries been telling us that they do.”
As linguists and CA practitioners concerned to ground linguistic categories in the particulars of interaction, we respectfully submit that linguistic unit-types, useful as they may seem in providing initial and provisional leverage on what may underlie turn projection, are not exempt from the fundamental commitment to understand-ing the moment-to-moment, locally emerging trajectories that participants build and orient to as they collaboratively do action in interaction. Thus, in alignment with the empirical program of CA, we understand the linguistic unit-types and categories such as “apposition”, “tag question”, and “left-embedded structure”, as inherited from methods that are either introspective or aimed at cognitive explanations (or both), rather than derived from a commitment to understanding forms of social action. The “syntax for conversation” (Schegloff 1979) that we are pursuing can only be arrived at by subjecting such linguistic primitives to the same standard of scrutiny that ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts bring to bear on categories dear to quantitative sociology (e.g. race, gender, class, and the like), inherited as they are from traditions and methods distinct from ethnomethodology.
With respect to the continued relevance of grounding grammatical categories in social terms, we note that throughout the several decades of CA’s development, gram-matical forms have been regularly cited and used in CA research (including our own). When used, the categories and forms themselves have seldom been subject to question or revision from a social and interactional perspective.3 Indeed, the goal of discovering the nature of TCUs or the practices upon which they are based, beyond the listing of grammatical categories, seems to have been set aside as a problem for linguistics rather than a challenge for conversation analysts to legitimately address. As a recent example, in a useful introductory CA textbook, Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt (2008) affirm that CA is fundamentally concerned with
the nature of turn taking: how is it organized, how do participants accomplish orderly (or even apparently disorderly) turn taking, and what are the systematic resources which are used in this accomplishment? (2008, 41)
They go on to explain that TCUs “broadly correspond to linguistic categories”, listing the same grammatical structures as do Sacks et al. (1974). However, Hutchby and
. But see Schegloff’s (1996a, 450) distinction between “locally initial and locally subse-quent reference” formulations (in line with Fox 1987), a distinction that could be described in linguistic terms alone (e.g. ‘Full NP’ vs. ‘Pronoun’). To us this represents precisely the sort of move toward a more action-based metalanguage that we advocate in this chapter, particularly when taken along with Schegloff’s consideration of mismatches between the general norm for reference and the interactional work such distinct formulations may be doing in addition to mere reference (1996a, 451–58).
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Wooffitt are unequivocal in treating the challenge of grounding TCUs as beyond the aims of CA:
[I]t is not part of the conversation analyst’s aim to define in some abstract way, what a turn-construction unit is, as a linguist for instance may want to define what a sentence is. Conversation analysts cannot take a prescriptive stance on this question, because what a turn construction unit consists of in any situated stretch of talk is a members’ problem. That is, such a unit is essentially anything out of which a legitimate turn has recognizably – for the participants – been built. (2008, 49–50)
While we thoroughly agree that the rules of prescriptive or even descriptive grammar do not provide appropriate grounding for a CA account of the social action of turn con-struction, this does not lead us to abandon the need to work toward socially grounded accounts of turn constructional practices and resources. Our interest, then, is in hold-ing ourselves and others more accountable to a social action-based grounding for turn construction.
Since the original publication of Sacks et al.’s account for turn taking, a great deal of CA research has continued to augment our understanding of turn construc-tion. In our analyses for this chapter, we include reference to such work where relevant. In particular, we attend to embodied conduct, an area of findings intri-cately related to the systematic coordination of actions in interaction.4 The current study takes prior CA research on turn taking as foundational for, and informing of, what we attempt here. We push a step further by explicitly calling into question the usefulness of uncritically adopting a priori grammatical units. Instead we model an attempt to replace grammatical terms with terms of social action, concepts grounded in the local particulars of unfolding interactions. In our experience, such care in the metalanguage we use in describing interaction serves as a heuristic, drawing us away from reliance on the terminology of grammatical units and draw-ing us toward actions and practices. We see this as analogous to CA’s language of ‘doing being’ as a heuristic to help the analyst avoid mind-reading in accounts of interaction, thereby drawing attention to participants’ displays and orientations (e.g. Sacks 1984).
. See, among others, Auer (1992, 2005), Fox (2002), C. Goodwin (1979, 1984, 2000, 2007a, b), M. Goodwin (1980, 2006), Goodwin and Goodwin (1986, 1987, 1992, 2004), Hayashi (2003, 2005), Mondada (2006, 2007, 2011), Streeck (2002, 2009), Streeck and Hartge (1992), and Streeck and Knapp (1992).
Let us begin by considering two alternative ways in which we could articulate an analy-sis, taking a case from Makoto Hayashi’s research on Japanese face-to-face interaction. We first offer an analysis that uses traditional grammatical unit terms for the struc-tures in the talk, and we then experiment with using language that supports a more action-oriented understanding of the unfolding talk, doing so in an effort to avoid abstract and static structural unit-types. If this can be successfully done, we will move toward more alignment with the CA perspective on what people do when they talk: after all, people are, in the first place, doing social actions, with grammatical patterns as epiphenomenal emergent structures5 from this behavior.6
Hayashi (2001, 2003) draws on a traditional linguistic category to describe an aspect of one speaker’s talk, referring to it as a “postposition-initiated utterance”: one speaker uses a “postposition” to launch a turn, thereby tying what she will continue to say to something said by an immediately prior speaker. Thanks to Hayashi’s generous sharing of his data and analysis, we are able to give the context surrounding those lines as Extract (1). Hayashi (2001) attends to lines 23–24 of this extract to illustrate how the “postposition-initiated utterance” functions. Three young women, Aiko, Mami, and Sana, are talking about Mami’s recent trip to Nepal and India. In lines 2–11, Aiko and Sana comment on the cost of the trip, and how okanemochi ‘rich’ Mami must be to make such a trip. In lines 13 and 17, Mami informs them that she doesn’t spend her money on anything but travel.
(1) from Hayashi (2001, 319)
1 Mami: [( ).]
2 Aiko: [okane (.) ikura] gurai kakatta:? money how.much about cost “How much did it cost?”
3 Mami: eetto ne:: sa::nju- yonjuu man:: well FP 30 40 10,000 “Let’s see:, a little less than 300-400,000
. See also Hopper (2004, 153): “ ‘Grammar’ is an epiphenomenon of frequent combina-tions of constructions. Because grammar is a result of interactions rather than a prerequisite to them, it is not a fixed code but is caught up in a continual process of local adaptation ( emergence)”.
. We note that Szczepek Reed (2012) makes a very similar point regarding phonological terminology, showing the value of talking of ‘intonation phrases’ as “action components”.
--> 23 Aiko: de! nan’nichikan gurai °sore tte.° andhow.many.daysaboutt↑hatQT “And about how many days| was that (trip)?” | ____________________| |
--> 24 Mami: ga tookakan. SP ten.days “For ten days.”
25 (0.5)
26 Mami: ( )
27 (0.5)
28 ?: 0u::[n0
“0Hmmm0”
29 Aiko: [ja kekkoo suru n ya. then quite cost N CP “It’s quite expensive then.”
In response to Aiko’s question at line 23, Mami begins her answer with ga, a form which linguists would unequivocally call a ‘postposition’, meaning that it normatively occurs immediately after a noun phrase within a single speaker’s utterance. However, interestingly, what Mami does here is to begin her turn with this ‘postposition’, creating an utterance that, in traditional grammatical terms, would be an anomaly. To make sense of Mami’s ‘postposition-initiated’ response in line 24, her recipients must have shared knowledge of ga as grammatically ‘belonging’ to, or being part of, something previously uttered.7 Because there is nothing previously uttered in Mami’s own talk, her recipients must understand Mami’s ga to be tied to something in Aiko’s previous talk, and conclude that her turn-initial postposition and what follows it is tied to the item sore ‘that one’ in Aiko’s utterance.8
Based on this analysis, relative to the norms for Japanese in use, we can represent the following abstract schema as relevant for, and drawn upon by, Japanese interactants:
. We know Aiko does make sense of Mami’s utterance from her ‘upshot’ in line 29.
. As Hayashi notes, the element ga would normally not occur following the quotative par-ticle tte, so Aiko will not understand Mami’s utterance as a continuation of her own utterance in line 23.
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
Using a ‘shorthand’, then, demonstrably useful in communicating with other members of our scholarly community, we can employ such terms as ‘postposition’ and ‘nominal element’, that is, linguistic unit-types. However, we note that this shorthand not only fails to capture the actions in which Aiko and Mami are engaged, but it fails to even capture the real-time tying and projecting work that Aiko and Mami are doing. And this is because these terms were arrived at in a grammatical tradition not aimed at understanding grammar in its social interactional context.
Let us, then, reformulate our description in a way that foregrounds practices rather than abstract unit types.9 For example, in place of the abstract unit ‘nominal element’, we can understand Mami’s response at line 24 in terms of how she uses a familiar form, in local practice, to orient to the action of reference formulation.10 By begin-ning her turn with ga, Mami establishes a syntagmatic relation, tying her responsive action to a previous reference formulation. In this way, Mami suggests a link back to Aiko’s previous action. To make sense of Mami’s response, Aiko may also draw on the practice of understanding ga as tied to a previous reference formulation.11 Thus, both Aiko and Mami seem to be oriented to ga as doing linking work, linking the current turn’s action to some prior action (though, as we will note below, whether that prior action is done discretely with a ‘nominal’ or whether it is done with a more diffuse and malleable span of talk is not self-evident). In action terms, then, the work Mami does through the use of turn initial ga may not be well-captured by the traditional denotation of ‘ postposition’ nor by the association with the discrete abstract unit-type
. We note that Hayashi, both in the paper we are drawing from and throughout his career, has shared our interest in interrogating the notion of ‘unit’, but that, as we have done here, he made use in this paper of the ‘shorthand’ linguistic labels that we refer to in the conclusion to this chapter.
. Levinson (2013: Section 3) noting that there are other ‘doings’ in turns besides their ‘main job’, suggests that these other ‘doings’ may often be done as ‘off record’ and are generally not explicitly responded to by recipients. In this chapter, we are not making a strong distinction between these two types of actions a turn may be doing. So when we say that Maureen’s turn the café de yin yang?, is doing “reference formulation”, we are not insisting that this is its ‘main action’. This follows analyses such as those of Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), who demon-strate that recipients can be responsive to assessments within turns, even when those turns are primarily doing other actions and are responded to on other terms at their completion.
. This is of course similar to what the word ‘postposition’ means to linguists. Our point is that without further explication, the term ‘postposition’ tends to evoke for most linguists the structural properties of a given single clause independently of the temporal and interactional exigencies of everyday talk, and would fail to account for the kind of tying to the previous speaker’s turn that Mami accomplishes here. We do not object to the term per se, but to the unquestioning use of such terms, which has typically not taken account of the nature of talk-in-interaction.
‘postpositional phrase’, consisting of a noun phrase and a postposition. Aiko is thus able to interpret Mami’s ga as building upon sore ‘that one’ in Aiko’s own utterance, projecting that what Mami will say next will draw on that connection in building a responsive action.
In an analysis of the broader stream of participation, then, we note that the partic-ipants are involved in a number of sequentially and simultaneously unfolding actions:
– Aiko’s turn in line 23 is doing questioning (Ford 2010), requesting a specific tem-poral duration as a response (see Thompson et al. (frth.)), making it relevant and expectable that Mami will provide her with a response indicating a period of time.
– In doing questioning here, Aiko adds to an ongoing sequence in which Mami is telling of her recent trip to Nepal and India.
– Accordingly, Aiko’s questioning in line 23 begins with de, roughly translatable as ‘and’, which is routinely used by Japanese interactants to continue an agenda or activity made up of subsequent and related items (Sadler 2001, 2006); in the inter-actional context of (1), this de can be understood as sharing some features with the and-prefaced questions in interview sequences discussed by Heritage and Sorjonen (1994), which they analyze as implementing ‘agenda-based’ actions.12 Thus, by starting out with de, Aiko is projecting that it will implement an addition to the larger activity she is carrying out of displaying interest in Mami’s account of her travels.
– Aiko brings her questioning action to a point of possible turn transition after the final particle tte, and Mami treats that action as complete by providing a no-delay, no-problem response to Aiko’s time-period question, the target turn in line 24.
– As Hayashi notes, to understand how Mami’s response is fitted to its position in the developing activity, i.e. how it forms a relevant responsive action, Aiko must also draw on a practice that she has often encountered in Japanese interac-tion, namely ga links back to some prior reference formulation. Mami’s action smoothly unfolds as responsive to Aiko’s turn. It begins with a ‘non-beginning’ item (Schegloff 1996a), so Aiko is alerted, from the outset of Mami’s turn, that it is built on something prior, perhaps in Aiko’s very own turn. As we noted just above, the ‘something prior’ is not entirely determined. Such uses of what are traditionally called ‘postpositions’, but at turn beginnings, are, as Hayashi puts it, “built off of, or on to, the preceding utterance, and draw on it as a resource for their construction and comprehension.” (338)
. In Heritage and Sorjonen (1994), the ‘agenda’ derives from the institutional identity of the questioner (a home health worker), whereas we are suggesting that Aiko’s de-prefacing indexes an ‘agenda’ of hearing about Mami’s extensive travels. We thank Geoffrey Raymond for helpful discussion of this point.
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
– That is, in constructing a response to Aiko, Mami most immediately draws into use a token which is predominantly used immediately following a reference formula-tion within the same speaker’s utterance. In using ga turn initially, Mami links back to, and builds from, a reference formulation, sore in Aiko’s turn in line 23. Simultaneously, Mami appropriates Aiko’s entire prior action and its formation, putting it to use in constructing her (Mami’s) own current action. Through this tie and this continuation, Mami symbiotically transforms the sore, and the entire turn it was initially part of, to make it work as a component of her own response.13
In other words, we are suggesting that Mami’s turn-initial ga guides Mami’s recipient Aiko to reinterpret her own prior talk for what ga is building on, and for how ga, together with what follows, forms a responsive action. In terms of social action, ga is an interactional link, using sore as a fulcrum for relating the current turn’s action to that of a previous turn. To account for Mami’s use of ga, we evidently don’t need a notion of the abstract unit ‘postpositional phrase’, itself internally structured through the combination of the abstract units ‘noun phrase’ and a ‘postposition’. We have instead analyzed what Mami does in building her response to Aiko’s question in terms of the unfolding social actions that form the functional foundation for what we define, in a post-hoc fashion, as abstract units. It is this kind of formulation, in terms of actions and trajectories rather than abstract grammatical units and categories, that we pursue in this chapter.
In this initial example, we have thus seen that we can account for one kind of recurrent social action without recourse to abstract grammatical categories derived from traditional linguistics. But what about the value of such categories for projecting possible turn completion? It is our position that characterizing a turn- constructional unit as having an independently projectable possible completion point based upon any fixed, decontextualized, and autonomous set of linguistic unit-types is not com-patible with the highly localized and contextual nature of interaction, particularly as it is understood from a CA perspective. Sacks et al.’s (1974) account for the turn- constructional component of the turn-taking system allows the interpretation that TCUs exist independent of action context (702–703). Describing TCUs in terms of grammar, and later noting the importance of sound production (721), Sacks et al. do not foreground action context as part of turn projection or of the turn-constructional component. Thus, their account implicitly proposes projection to be based on a shared, abstract, and acontextual understanding of grammar and intonation, such that at the end of one thereby projectable TCU, a transition relevance place (TRP) occurs:
. We can say that she is drawing into use a “practiced solution” to the management of this response at this moment (Schegloff 2006, 2007: Chapter 13). We thank Geoffrey Raymond for drawing our attention to Schegloff’s articulation of this notion.
As for the unit-types which a speaker employs in starting the construction of a turn’s talk, the speaker is initially entitled, in having a turn, to one such unit. The first possible completion of one such unit constitutes an initial transition relevance place. (703)
We aim to encourage a move toward describing action, rather than drawing from an inventory of previously defined abstract unit-types. For example, a particular string of words, such as English ‘the editor’, when articulated in a particular context, may accomplish the action of referring to a non-co-present party rather than being catego-rized as a ‘noun’, or a ‘noun phrase’. The word the may do the action of indexing that a reference formulation is in progress and that the reference will be one already shared among the participants (from the current interaction or from more generally shared social experience).14 Possible completion of that projectable trajectory of action would be limited by locally relevant potential objects of reference, the work that the reference formulation might need to accomplish to be taken as complete in the sequential con-text (e.g. is it a response? is it a part of a topic initiation? etc.), and the sound qualities and bodily movements with which the unfolding turn is produced.15
Returning to excerpt (1), Mami and Aiko’s orientation to Mami’s ga-initiated utterance can be understood from this perspective as well. Aiko’s question makes relevant a temporal-duration response from Mami. As Mami’s utterance is produced, Aiko is carefully monitoring it to determine how it will be that response. As we noted just above, socially, Mami’s ga alerts Aiko that in order to project completion of this action, Aiko must ‘back up’ to reinterpret her own prior talk for what ga might be building on, and for how Mami’s entire ga-initiated turn will unfold to constitute a possible response.
In this chapter, then, we hope to bring to the attention of linguists and conversation analysts our recognition that a priori linguistic units are not exempt from the funda-mental commitment to understanding, in action terms, the practices that participants draw upon as they collaboratively construct action in interaction. On the contrary, the full power of the CA method demands this move, both for the continued development of a socially grounded linguistic theory and for the grounding of CA in its own right.
. The observant reader will note that, while arguing against the unquestioning use of linguistic-unit terminology, we will be using such terms as ‘word’ and ‘velar obstruent’. We remain committed to subjecting such terminology to close scrutiny, but we also acknowledge that doing so may not always be feasible. Here, for instance, we judge that grounding the vernacular ‘word’ or the phonetic term ‘velar obstruent’ in action terms would take us far afield of our goal for this chapter.
. We are fully in line with the linguistic and conversation analytic investigation of how action formation may become, as some linguists term it, “fixed” over time. Our argument is simply that those fixed forms are epiphenomenal and emergent at their core, based precisely on the tasks that humans do in social interaction.
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
Our interest, then, is in encouraging a move away from abstract formal unit-types imported from linguistics, convenient as they may be as provisional resources for analysts, as we try to account for the no-delay, no-gap nature of most turn transitions.
The body of this chapter is taken up with pushing the experiment begun in Extract (1) further by analyzing two extracts from a single videotaped interaction, and doing so without dependence on abstract grammatical units. In our final discus-sion, we evaluate this CA-inspired experiment in using a metalanguage of actions to account for turn construction.
. Two cases
. Case 1: The Café de Yin Yang
In our first case, we examine the very local emergence of a specific turn and how it fits within the larger flow of the interaction. Our analysis incorporates the fact that forms of visible and hearable conduct are mutually contextualizing, simultaneous aspects of turn construction (Bolden 2003; M. H. Goodwin 1980; Schegloff 1987; inter alia). That is, it has been well-established that during what could be character-ized as verbal turns, the bodily actions of both speakers and recipients are calibrated with, and affecting of, one another. Thus, we attend as closely as we can to bodily actions, by the speaker and her recipients, in terms of both what precedes and what accompanies her talk. In our analysis of the turn’s construction, as it develops in the context of already-in-progress bodily conduct and orientation to that conduct, we explore to what degree we can usefully use action terms, based in the particulars of the unfolding social interaction, in accounting for turn construction, rather than depending on abstract, autonomous grammatical unit-types without reference to social action.
We can transcribe in a single line the turn that we will argue is deeply embedded in its sequential context, including embodied actions:
(3) Maureen: the café de yin ya:ng? when he was tw- te:n?
This turn can be analyzed as composed of at least two “communicative acts” ( Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, 18–19, n. 10), the acts themselves being formed up through specific vocal practices. There is clearly rising pitch and a sound stretch on ya:ng, and such prosody is often, though not always, associated with possible turn completion and turn transition.16 There is a very brief silence of 6/100ths of a second between the end
. See, among others, Ford and Thompson (1996), Szczepek Reed (2004, 2010), and Ford et al. (2004).
of ya:ng and the start of when, and there is no release of the velar closure at the end of ya:ng until Maureen begins articulating the beginning of when.17,18 Even after what some might argue constitutes the completion of a projectable, abstract grammatical TCU, at the point where rising intonation and sound stretch accompany the delivery of ya:ng there is no attempt at turn transition and no visible or hearable orientation to its absence as accountable or problematic. On the contrary, it is not until the possible completion of te:n that a recipient initiates a spoken response, with no gap or overlap. Maureen is looking at a drawing on the wall labeled ‘The Café de Yin Yang’, drawn by the young nephew of one of the other participants:
(4) Maureen: the café de yin ya:ng? when he was tw- te:n? Terry: yeah:.
As we will show, given the action context (viewed both locally and broadly), and with access to the embodied conduct before and during Maureen’s production of this talk, it is far from clear that Maureen’s turn is nearing possible completion as she produces the word ya:ng.19 On the other hand, if we were to consider the whole utterance as a complete turn, as does one recipient (Terry), then the second “communicative act” would be understood as an increment to the first, the two TCUs combining to form a complete TCU ending in a TRP.20 In either analysis, the TRP at the end of te:n ends a stream of speech that does not constitute a grammatical unit in any linguistic sense.
Using grammatical unit-types, we could describe Maureen’s utterance (ending with te:n) as made up of a noun phrase (NP) followed by an adverbial clause (AdvCL):
(5) [the café de yin ya:ng?] NP + [when he was tw-te:n?]AdvClause
This is a combination of grammatical units yielding an anomalous whole, a ‘non-unit’ within the inventory of such units as proposed and accepted in linguistics. That is, the
. To our knowledge, no one working with these data has timed and represented this silence in a published transcript, though we ourselves have vacillated between putting both acts on a single line versus each on a separate line. Such transcription decisions are also analytic and theoretical decisions (Ochs 1979), representing whether or not the transcriber interprets the rules of the turn-taking system to have allowed or not allowed for transition to a new speaker (Sacks et al. 1974, 704, rule 2; Selting et al. 1998; Wilson & Zimmerman 1986).
. See Local and Kelly (1986) on the significance of holding of glottal closure during what is transcribed as silence.
. As we have argued elsewhere, in line with the highly contextual nature of interaction, an understanding of action in sequential context is essential to projection of turn completion and to the likelihood for speaker change to occur (Ford & Thompson 1996).
. On ‘increments’, see, e.g. Ford et al. (2002), Walker (2004), and papers in Couper-Kuhlen and Ono (2007).
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combination of [NP + Adverbial Clause] does not constitute a ‘canonical’ grammatical turn structure in English. Thus, one warrant for our attention to the stretch of Maureen’s talk treated as complete by a recipient (Terry) is the fact that the grammati-cal make-up of this turn does not fit any a priori linguistic category that would qualify it as a coherent syntactic unit-type.
A further warrant for attending to this turn is a more fundamental methodologi-cal and theoretical one. As we have noted, unit descriptors such as Noun Phrase and Adverbial Clause were not arrived at through analytic commitment to understanding social interaction; that is, the structural terminology, both for the two parts and for the whole, is not based in action. Drawn as they are from traditional linguistic meth-ods and commitments, these unit terms have implications within linguistics which may be largely irrelevant to our concerns with language in its natural habitat. Looking at Maureen’s utterance, our interest, then, is in experimenting with a more socially grounded account for its construction, one not carrying the baggage of the very differ-ent empirical methods of linguistics. What happens if we avoid the structural language represented in (5)? What might such a shift do for us as we work to understand how this utterance came to be produced? How does this turn function, for the participants, as a recognizable trajectory of action in its sequential context? What are their visible and hearable orientations to its real-time production?
By attending to the sequential context and the multiple embodied orientations produced before and with it, we find that this unfolding turn not only reintroduces a prior assessment activity and indexes the age of the young artist when he produced the picture (when he was tw- te:n?), but it also does so with a particular kind of intona-tion and within a particular stream of local and broader action. Locally, the stream of bodily and vocal actions by the speaker forms an interactive matrix for a number of simultaneous and mutually elaborating trajectories of action in the stream of activity shared by all the participants at this moment.
The formulation of the turn and the precision timing (Jefferson 1973) of one recipient’s vocal response are far from aberrations. The shaping of the vocal turn is fitted to the particulars of the unfolding dynamics of the broader and more local inter-actional environment leading up to the turn, and to the action that the turn itself enacts. An analysis that engages with the larger action context in which this turn emerges, as well as the actions and coparticipation accomplished within it, helps us understand the interactional logic at play, and should point us in the direction of a more action-based terminology for how turn trajectories are co-constructed.21
. See Ford and Thompson (1996), Houtkoop and Mazeland (1985), and Lerner (1991, 1996, 2004) on collaborative turns and on prompting, as well as Jefferson (1978) and Sacks (1974) for attention to different forms of projection and to the role of sequential context and turn transition in the projection of a turn’s trajectory.
In what follows, we examine the practices through which this stream of activity is organized, including the smooth transition of speakership accomplished at its completion. We offer an account for the unproblematic engagement of the participants in a course of joint action.
Three women (Maureen, Abbie, and Terry) are sitting around a table waiting for a fourth (now in the kitchen) to finish a phone call and return to the table (see Figure 1).
Pam Maureen Abbie Terry
Figure 1. Maureen, Abbie, Terry at the table
As the Extract in (6) begins, a previous sequence and topic appears to be closing. Resumption of a prior turn, or opening a new sequence, are relevant next actions, but so far no one has done either. Through their gaze behavior at the very start of the extract, all three women are enacting non-engagement with one another (Goodwin 1981); they are performing minor self-grooms, and they are not orienting their bodies, faces, or gazes towards each other.
(6) Café de Yin Yang turn in context (GN 2:55)
1 (3.5) 2 Abbie: mmmm. 3 (1.5) 4 Terry: gosh. 5 (1.0) 6 Abbie: [0( )0] 7⇒ Maureen: [the café ] de yin ya:ng? when he 8 was tw- te:n? 9 Terry: yeah:. 10 (1.2) 11 Maureen: [0that is really something.0] 12 Terry: [ an- an- no:te, (.) ] the uhm
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13 (.) 14 Maureen: is that a [realf- (.) fe]ather= 15 Terry: [ y’see on the dress?] 16 Maureen: =on there? 17 Terry: the yin yang? 18 Terry: symbols?
What visible and hearable actions lead up to the target turn in line 7? How do the participants shape both the unfolding bodily movements and the talk into possible trajectories of action in lines 1–5?
In lines 1–5, both Abbie and Terry produce vocalizations, but neither produces more than turn-passing tokens; neither turn is formulated in a way that makes any specific kind of responsive action by a co-participant relevant. Furthermore, by gazing at no one during the silences at lines 1, 3 and 5,22 Abbie and Terry are also embodying disengagement. Thus, through their minimal tokens (lines 2 and 4), by not elaborating those vocalizations, and by gazing vaguely forward toward the middle of the table, they construct the moment as a disengaged one.
However, Maureen’s embodied actions are different. During the 3.5-second silence at line 1, while Terry and Abbie are enacting disengagement, Maureen begins an embodied and visible trajectory of conduct. She starts to fix her gaze on something on the wall across from her, and she separates her hands from a clasped position on the table, moving her right hand toward her cheek (Figure 2).
Maureen Abbie Terry
Figure 2. Just before Abbie says, Mmmm (line 2), Maureen moves hand to face
. By “gazing at no one” we refer to the fact that neither participant has fixated her gaze on Maureen. Research reviewed and reported in Gullberg and Kita (2009) makes clear the fact that recipients do not need to gaze directly at the movements of other participants in order to take up information so communicated, particularly socially relevant movements. Many gestures and body movements are in a recipient’s peripheral vision, with uptake of informa-tion unaffected by this fact. We thank Charles Goodwin and Richard Sandoval for drawing our attention to this research.
At this point in our analysis, we must look further back in the previous sequential context if we are to understand how this speaker and these recipients are to interpret the trajectory of action Maureen may be forming up; relevance of action in relation to specific sequential contexts is an essential part of projecting what it may take for a turn to develop and for it to reach possible completion, making speaker change relevant and making its absence accountable. The object of Maureen’s attention is a drawing that had been briefly mentioned and pointed to five minutes earlier by Pam, who is currently on the phone in another room. At that earlier time, Pam explicitly assessed the drawing as one she was proud of her nephew for creating (Figures 3A–B and Extract (7)):
(7) 5 minutes earlier, Pam had mentioned the drawing
1 Pam: did you notice the lovely a::rt? 2 (0.2) 3 Pam: my nephew did this when he was te[n. 4 Maureen: [grea::t,
Maureen Abbie Terry
A
Pam
B
The drawing they are looking at(Stacy behind Maureen)
Figure 3A–B. Did you notice the lovely art?
With this previous context noted, we might propose that Maureen’s later turn in line 7 of Extract (6), the cafe de yin ya:ng? when he was tw- te:n?, functions as a proffer of topic resumption and a redoing of the stance enacted in the prior sequence as well as the grounds for that positive stance: the age of the artist.
Returning to Extract (6), we can see that Maureen’s visible movements make available to the other participants that her attention is directed to some object, with such embodied conduct available to, and consequential for, recipient perception and processing (Gullberg & Kita 2009). We might think of Maureen’s embodied action as a pre-beginning to a verbal turn (Schegloff 1996b), but the fact that she is going to speak
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is only available in retrospect to us as analysts. Her embodied actions offer a possible trajectory for co-engagement, a trajectory that Abbie and Terry could join in on by moving their own gazes and bodies into responsive alignment with that of Maureen (e.g. by gazing toward the object on the wall).
As Extract (7) shows, earlier in the interaction, Maureen had delivered a clearly positive assessment of the drawing: grea::t (line 4). Thus, the object of Maureen’s attention display at the beginning of Extract (6) has already been at the center of an interactional sequence, and has already been positively assessed by both Pam and Maureen. Viewed in this larger temporal and sequential context, we can there-fore note that Maureen’s embodied orientations just before she speaks in Extract (6) propose a possible return to a previous object of joint attention, a potentially already-shared stance toward that object, and a sequence of action organized around doing admiration of the art and the artist. All of this is available to Terry and Maureen, and that previous action context limits the work Maureen needs to do to resume that assessment activity.
During the 1.5-second silence at line 3 in Extract (6), by firmly settling her head into a resting position on her hand, Maureen constructs her new gaze position as an orientation that will not be fleeting (see Figure 4). Maureen projects that she will continue her gaze toward the drawing for some duration.
Figure 4. Maureen brings head to rest on hand while gazing toward drawing
This head-resting position makes Maureen’s attention display further available to the others for responsive co-engagement; it can be seen as an upgrading of her offering a trajectory for joint participation in relation to the drawing on the wall. In other words, though Maureen is not gazing at either of the others and is not selecting anyone to speak, by moving her gaze toward a region on the wall which had served as a locus of joint attention five minutes earlier, and by resting her head on her hand while holding that gaze direction, she is initiating a concerted action that is peripherally visible to the others and that may invite them to join in on.
How do the others display (or not) that they are taking in Maureen’s visible shift in attention and possible proffer of an object of joint attention? At first, neither Abbie nor
Terry looks at Maureen. However, as Maureen settles her head onto her hand, Terry looks toward her (movement visible in Figures 5 and 6):
Figure 5. Maureen’s hand moves toward her face
Figure 6. Terry shifts her gaze toward Maureen
What we have seen so far is the fine-tuned coordination of visible orientations, reactions, and body adjustments by all three participants as Maureen shifts her arm, hand, head, and gaze. Thus, in the local context of a lull in the conversation, and in the broader context of how the picture on the wall has figured in the interaction five minutes earlier, relevant next verbal actions are already limited. That is, the context of the currently-in-progress coordination of bodies and gaze directions provides an unfolding framework in which any verbalization will be interpreted for its relevance.23 The conduct of Maureen, Abbie and Terry, as described up to this point, is all prior to Maureen’s launching of a verbal trajectory.
Just after moving her gaze toward Maureen, Terry says gosh, looking downward but keeping her head position at an angle that is more toward Maureen than it was
. The ensemble of body positions in this moment of interaction involves the consequences of a “postural configuration” (Schegloff 1998).
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before. Note that Abbie has just raised her eyelids and moved her eyes in their sock-ets toward the direction of Maureen. This is potentially a reaction to both Terry and Maureen’s movements, and it allows Abbie more access to Maureen’s current gaze direction, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Abbie raises her eyelids and moves her eyes to her left just before Terry’s gosh
Terry’s produces gosh with her gaze beginning to return toward the central part of the table, though her head position and gaze direction still remain slightly toward Maureen. Thus, although Terry has made it socially available that she has reacted to and taken in Maureen’s new embodied orientation (just before gosh, Figure 6), Terry’s gosh does not display any specific responsiveness to Maureen’s now-stable gaze direction.
After Terry’s gosh, Abbie turns toward Terry. During the time it takes for Abbie to shift her gaze toward Terry, Maureen does a pre-beginning, opening her mouth while tilting her head slightly (Figure 8). Maureen’s mouth (Streeck & Hartge 1992) and head movements draw Terry’s gaze once again:24
Figure 8. Abbie gazes to Terry, while Maureen opens her mouth and tilts her head, and Terry gazes to Maureen
Once Maureen’s turn is launched, there is a rapid shift in the visible embodied alignments of her coparticipants. During the, Terry is gazing at Maureen but she quickly
. Here, Abbie utters something that is not hearable, since Maureen starts to talk simultane-ously and much more loudly. Abbie’s indecipherable utterance begins while she is still gazing toward Terry, so it seems to be responsive to Terry’s Gosh, but how it is responsive is not avail-able to us as analysts. In any case, in the interaction, it is not Abbie’s utterance that is taken up.
moves her gaze toward the drawing on the wall. Terry has interpreted and responded to Maureen’s the and accompanying gaze direction as projecting reference formulation and inviting co-orientation to a visual object targeted by her gaze. Maureen’s use of the (which projects an identifiable known-in-common referent, in contrast to a), built as it is into the already registered new home position (Sacks & Schegloff 2002), that is, head on hand, gaze toward wall, enables Terry to find the picture that had been discussed earlier. The picture on the wall is the known-in-common object that Maureen’s gaze plus the are guiding Terry to. That is, Terry can look at where Maureen is looking and track the unfolding utterance to see whether she, Terry, has located the referent, and why it might be formulated here as already shared.25
Abbie is the next to achieve embodied alignment with Maureen’s “visual point-ing” (cf. Levinson 2010). The relative delay in Abbie’s arriving at embodied alignment with Maureen’s gaze arises from Abbie’s gaze direction as Maureen is starting to speak. As Maureen begins to speak, Abbie is gazing toward Terry, and possibly beginning to speak herself (Figure 7 & Extract (6), line (6). As Maureen utters the, Abbie initiates a turn toward Maureen. As Maureen continues into the first syllable of café, Abbie briefly gazes toward Maureen, and by the moment Maureen initiates the first sound of when, Abbie is also gazing toward the picture on the wall (Figures 9 and 10).
Figure 9. Abbie at end of café
Figure 10. Abbie as Maureen begins first sound of when; note Terry’s smile
Figure 10 also shows us that, simultaneously with the first sound of Maureen’s when, Terry is smiling, quite possibly in affiliation with the return to the positive assessment activity that Maureen has now indexed by remarking on the drawing.
. Thanks to Geoffrey Raymond for particularly helpful analytic discussion of this part of the extract.
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Maureen’s turn-so-far, if it is to be considered a unit, should be understood as an unfolding and projectable matrix of identifiable action, action which is coordinated reflexively with and by the conduct it guides on the parts of the recipients as they do referent identification and, at least in the case of Terry, the possible beginnings of an affiliative response to a possible assessment action.
What we have analyzed in detail up to this point is the coordination of embodied action that leads up to Maureen’s vocal turn beginning. This level of close analysis is vital for understanding what Maureen rapidly accomplishes as she begins to speak in line 7 and how her possible turn completion can be projected. In the first place, five minutes prior to this turn, all the participants were engaged in the activity of gazing at the picture in response to Pam’s directive that they notice it. In the second place, all were also engaged recipients of an assessment of the drawing followed by an informing that the artist was ten years old, as shown in Extract (7). Thus, the larger context of action in which Maureen’s current actions are positioned is highly relevant to, and limiting of, the interpretation of the action Maureen is initiating here and its projectable possible completion.
More locally, we have seen that Maureen is able to perform a reference formulation during whose unfolding trajectory she also succeeds in guiding the gaze directions of the other participants into alignment with her own. The action Maureen initiates in her spoken turn is built within the framework of the already established embodied action she has set in motion through her visible bodily-visual shift and her arrival at a resting posture (during the pause at line 3), with her head and gaze both index-ing the drawing on the wall. On the foundation of that orientation, which we have noted is visible to both recipients, and by holding that position while she begins her vocal action, Maureen successfully guides the displayed attention of her recipients and subsequently reintroduces a stance-taking, assessment activity.
How can we describe the trajectory of Maureen’s verbal action, the temporal construction of her turn at talk? As discussed above, Maureen begins her turn with the. In terms of turn projection, Maureen is doing a beginning; the is hearable as a marker projecting further verbal material, not extending anything previous in the immediate context. But what sort of verbal material is projectable from the? All three participants draw on an extremely frequent practice in their experiences with English: the linguistic form the not only projects more to come, but it projects that a trajectory of reference formulation is underway, specifically, reference to an object that is formu-lated as already familiar to the recipients. This is a more action-based characterization of what linguists identify as the distinction made by the definite versus the indefinite article (Schegloff 1996a). Furthermore, the first sound of whatever word will follow the is projected by the hearable velar closure Maureen produces at the end of the. Thus, even with the mere beginning of this turn, the recipients can be alerted to the fact that a familiar referent is being formulated and that the continuing formulation of it
is likely to involve a velar obstruant (i.e. the initial [k] of café). In order to identify the object of Maureen’s gaze and the referent that is being reintroduced through her gaze and her turn beginning, these recipients need not search a wide inventory of possible reference components that might be formulated.
One relevant action for recipients of a reference formulation is to display that they have recognized, or are in the process of recognizing, the indexed referent. Terry and Abbie do this by looking toward the picture, displaying their understanding that the drawing is relevant to the unfolding reference formulation and the other actions that reference formulation may be part of building.
As we noted, the picture has already been mentioned with an admiring stance in the larger conversational context. With the production of ya:ng, Maureen’s pitch rises from 252 to 347 hertz, a pitch movement that we suggest is doing (or re-doing) the admiration that both she and Pam had displayed earlier (though her pitch does not rise to its highest).26 As support for our interpretation of the work Maureen’s prosody is doing, we note that just as Maureen produces ya:ng, with its sound stretch and rising pitch, Terry begins a closed-lipped smile. Terry’s smile displays affiliation with what is prosodically available as Maureen’s admiring stance toward the drawing. At this juncture, neither Abbie nor Terry appears to be preparing any verbal action. Thus, neither of them displays an interpretation that Maureen’s turn is complete or that any response beyond their gaze alignment and perhaps smiling is relevant after ya:ng.
Maureen now adds to the verbal material she has just produced by offering her recollection of the age of the nephew when he drew the picture. She begins that part of her turn with when. On the foundation of the now-established referent reintroduction and marked pitch movement doing something like astonishment, Maureen’s when is hearable as reintroducing the relevant time reference as a phrasal newsmark (though over a long distance in the interaction) of what Pam had earlier said, my nephew did this when he was ten (Extract (7), line (3)).27 Maureen’s use of he in when he was tw- ten?, another subsequent reference form (Schegloff 1996a), creates a connection back to the previous assessment sequence, in which Pam’s nephew was introduced.
Maureen continues forming when he was tw- te:n?, and with the exception of the repair from tw- to te:n, this is an exact repeat of what Pam had said five minutes
. For an interesting study of the use of marked loudness and pitch in repair initiations in German, see Selting (1996). These are cases where it is not hearing or understanding that is at issue; rather, intonation and loudness index that a question, a next turn repair initiator in Selting’s cases, is doing surprise or astonishment.
. See Svennevig (2004) for an account of such repetitions as initiations of repair, and Thompson et al. (frthc) on newsmarks and other responses to informings.
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earlier.28 In line with our experiment in moving towards more action-based refer-ences to grammatical patterning, we here draw attention to the prosody and bodily comportment of participants as part of the action that Maureen’s turn is accomplish-ing. Maureen’s when he was tw- te:n? is delivered at an increased pace, and ends with an even higher pitch rise than the one at the end of ya:ng (235–400 hz). Again, we argue that Terry’s reaction supports our interpretation that Maureen’s pitch movement enacts admiration and perhaps astonishment: at this point Terry treats Maureen’s turn as complete: still smiling, she responds with yeah just as Maureen completes te:n. Terry’s yeah shows an understanding that a response is relevant, confirming the understanding that Maureen has offered in lines 7–8. This yeah thereby completes an initiation and response sequence, in response to Maureen’s initating action having done two jobs. First, Maureen’s turn has served as a newsmark, responding to Pam’s earlier report of the artist’s young age: my nephew did this when he was ten (Extract (7), line (3). Second, Maureen’s turn has also proposed a continuation of the topic and assessment activity Pam initiated at that same time, five minutes earlier. In addition, with the smile, though not likely visible to Maureen, Terry can be seen by the analyst to be responding in a positive way to the admiration hearable in Maureen’s prosody.29 It is what Terry does next that confirms her responsiveness to Maureen’s turn as hav-ing also been the vehicle for a topic proffer, a bid for re-engagement, and as a positive assessment.30 As we see in (8), repeating lines 11–18 of (6), Terry proceeds to point out some noteworthy positive features of the drawing, whereupon further positive assessments of the young artist ensue:
(8) Talk beyond Maureen’s initial turn.
11 Maureen: [0that is really something.0] 12 Terry: [ an- an- no:te, (.) ] the uhm 13 (.) 14 Maureen: is that a [real f- (.) fe]ather= 15 Terry: [y’see on the dress?] 16 Maureen: =on there? 17 Terry: the yin yang? 18 Terry: symbols? 19 Terry: [(over there?) 20 Maureen: [oh my go:sh. 21 Terry: I was so impressed.
. We interpret Maureen’s tw- as the beginning of twelve, which she immediately repairs to ten.
. Again, for possibly comparable prosodic marking in German, see Selting (1996).
. See Goodwin (1981) for a discussion of (re-)engagement.
Maureen’s topic proffer has been successful: she has initiated a sequence in which jointly appreciating both the picture and the creativity of the boy who drew it are relevant actions.
A fuller analysis of Maureen’s turn could be given here. However, what is essen-tial for our purpose is that we have experimented with an action-based alternative to linguistic unit-based accounts for both turn construction and the coordination of speaker and recipient visual and vocal conduct. Maureen has constructed unfolding trajectories of conduct that encompass bodies, space, time, and talk. As these simul-taneous and mutually contextualizing trajectories of conduct emerge, her recipients can and do co-participate. The verbal turn develops as part of a stream of activity, with relevant next bits of that emerging stream (i.e. projection of places for responsive action) made available through those multiple trajectories, including the trajectory of the conversation-so-far, viewed more broadly. While verbal turn completion is arrived at and turn transition is achieved without overlap or delay, this is not a turn constructed of an abstract unit-type that would be available at the turn’s beginning. Moreover, in this bit of interaction, Maureen’s visible embodied movements, taken in as they are by her recipients, form an essential unfolding action trajectory into which her verbal utterance is placed. Her embodied orientation is arrived at prior to, and works in essential coordination with, the construction and interpretation of her verbal reference formulation and her reintroduction of a positive assessment activity.
With this first extract and our analysis of it, we hope to have shown how we might understand one small but rich stretch of talk in terms of unfolding actions within larger contexts of action and projectable on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis. Such trajectories form a matrix for co-participation, with recipient responses coming not only at points of verbal completion but at a continuum of points where action is interpretable and responsive coordination is relevant. We have offered an account for Maureen’s turn’s production and its uptake that makes use of action description rather than an inventory of a priori grammatical unit-types.
As a part of the stream of participation, then, Maureen’s verbal utterance can certainly be described in terms of syntactic units, but we do not find such abstractions to be adequately relevant to understanding what Maureen, Abbie, and Terry accomplish here together. We might rather approach what they are doing in terms of their visible and hearable actions, and through reference to the project-able trajectories and actions the participants co-construct. As has been demon-strated in much work on multimodality in interaction, this view, along with the details it calls to our attention, provides a more complex analysis of the ways that the conduct of multiple parties are reflexively coordinated before and during the unfolding spoken turn. In this example, we find that in a larger context of dis-engagement, Maureen has brought to visual focus a co-present object which can
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serve as a locus of joint (re)engagement, attention, admiration, assessment, and topic continuation.31 Our account does not challenge the vital need for an account of smooth transition in verbal turns; indeed, it builds on and augments such an account. But it does move us away from abstract units and closer, we believe, to the social life that gives rise to the epiphenomena that linguists call grammatical units. We are arguing for a continued move away from simply borrowing from an inventory of abstract linguistic units as the foundation of an account for turn construction and turn taking.
One could suggest that this example is somewhat unusual with respect to gram-matical unit-types and that it therefore uniquely requires more attention to local particulars and practices than do most utterances. Perhaps, one might propose, a vast majority of simple utterances in everyday talk can be adequately described using the kinds of a priori categories and units with which linguists are familiar, and from which conversation analysts have regularly borrowed. It is, after all, such bounded and projectable abstract units that most efficiently, from an analyst’s per-spective, account for when the next utterance comes to be produced. We respond to these suggestions by returning to our purpose in this chapter: we are interested in seriously identifying with, and working from, the fundamental CA commitment to grounding analytic terms and categories in terms of participants’ actions. Our interest is in moving toward an analytic vocabulary that foregrounds actions rather than inventories of abstract unit-types borrowed from another empirical tradition. However, we also understand the concern that Maureen’s utterance in our first case may seem rather far from the norm for turn construction and turn transition. To address that concern, we focus next on a grammatically and sequentially very simple turn: It is cool.
. Case 2: My favorite poster
Our next extract is taken from the same interaction as our first case. The turn we target in order to offer an action-centered alternative to unit-centered accounts for turn construction is the following:
(9) Abbie: It i:s cool.
. Cf. Ochs et al. (1979) and Ochs and Schieffelin (1983) on similar functions of what has been called ‘left-dislocation’.
Abbie’s turn could accurately be described in terms of such grammatical categories as shown in (10):
(10) [it]Noun Phrase [i:s]Copula [cool]Adjective
However, as with Maureen’s turn examined as Case 1, such a labeling involves abstractions that may obscure the enterprise of understanding the actions done by conversational turns at talk. This is because, as we’ve suggested for Maureen’s turn introducing the ‘Café de Yin Yang’, the abstract categories in (10) fail to reveal the complex interactional work being done both before Abbie begins her turn and during it.
To show how interactants “monitor and analyze [the talk-in-a-turn] for what action or actions its speaker might be doing with it”. (Schegloff 2007, 2), let us look closely at Abbie’s turn in its context. Maureen is the only participant who has not visited Terry and Pam’s home before. She has been noticing the many photographs of sheep on the walls. Terry has made it clear that Pam, who had been a sheep farmer in the past, is responsible for the photos. A bit before our excerpt begins, Abbie has pointed over her shoulder to the poster on the wall behind her, and Maureen has responsively gazed toward the poster. Now another sequence begins and Maureen has turned her gaze back to Terry. Just before our excerpt begins, Maureen has once again turned her gaze towards the poster (see Figure 11 below).
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
Terry responds by turning her head to find the object of Maureen’s gaze. Terry then raises her arm with index finger extended in a long point, and produces line 1, an extremely positive assessment32 (see Figure 12 below):
Figure 12. Terry That’s my favorite poster right there
(11) Gamenight Poster
1 Terry: that’s my favorite poster right there. 2 (0.7) 3 Terry: [all those sheep.] 4 Maureen: [that’s a ] lo:t of 5 different [sheep.] 6 Abbie: [yes I ] 7 hear, you two ever get divorced that that’s 8 like, the one [thing that’s] gonna be a= 9 Terry: [a(h)ehgghh ] 10 Abbie: =big issue. 11 Terry: I would not think so (h)uh huh. 12 Abbie: a::: [ha ha ha 13 Maureen: [ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha you’re 14 notgo(h)nnafighttoo hard over it,1 15 Terry: no. >but I think< it’s coo:l.2 16 Abbie: [it i:s cool.] 17 Maureen: [it i:s (great.)] yah?
Terry brings her arm down during the silence at line 2, and then produces a turn extension at line 3, all those sheep, reformulating her reference to the poster by noting
. For a close examination of the gaze organization in this sequence, see Haddington (2006).
the remarkable number of sheep it depicts.33 At lines 4–5, Maureen produces a rel-evant response affiliating with Terry’s talk by displaying appreciation of the number of sheep in the poster, that’s a lo:t of different sheep., but Maureen does not produce an explicit positive assessment here.
At lines 6–8, Abbie begins a turn with the epistemically and evidentially down-graded I hear. She reports that, based on second-hand knowledge, she understands that the poster might be a point of dispute should Pam and Terry divorce ( knowledge which may derive from Pam, since earlier conversation reveals that Abbie knows Pam much better than she knows Terry). In lines 9 and 11, Terry rejects the factual-ity of Abbie’s turn. Maureen turns towards Terry during her laughter at line 13, and then turns once again to the poster just as she produces line 14 (you’re not gonna fight too hard over it), which is a candidate understanding, offering the possible upshot of what Terry has implicated in lines 9 and 11. At line 15 Terry agrees with Maureen’s understanding, but she formulates her agreement with a shaping toward disagreement, agreement with Maureen’s negative assertion is enacted through Terry’s initial no, and her shaping toward possible disagreement introduced by but I think it’s cool.
Terry’s utterance at line 15 is skillfully designed. By starting with an agreement and moving towards disagreement, Terry attends to the preference for agreement (Sacks 1987; Pomerantz 1984) and avoids displaying a negative stance toward her partner’s poster. She also ties back to her earlier very positive assessment in line 1, that’s my favorite poster right there. In the continuing turn projected through but to involve a contrast with something prior, Terry returns to a positive assessment: but I think it’s cool. Just as Terry says no at the beginning of line 15, Abbie – who has had her head down and to the side – now rotates her head further to her right to look at the poster behind her. By the time of Terry’s assessment at line 15, all three participants are thus looking at the poster, and are positioned to be able to inspect it jointly, as shown in Figure 13.
Terry’s assessment at line 15, a sequentially new first assessment, has invited the recipients to visually inspect the poster to see if they find her assessing term to be appropriate, and if so, to respond with agreement or second assessments (Pomerantz 1984; Goodwin & Goodwin 1992; Heritage & Raymond 2005; Raymond & Heritage 2006; Fasulo & Monzoni 2009; Thompson et al. frth.).34 This leads us to the simple second-assessing action that Abbie formulates in the target turn: it i:s cool.
. Again, see Couper-Kuhlen and Ono (2007) and references cited there for discussion of turn extensions.
. For further consideration of second assessments, see Mondada (2009a, b) and Golato et al. (frthc.).
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
Figure 13. Terry’s >but I think< it’s coo:l
Abbie, through a torqueing of her upper body and head (Schegloff 1998), positions herself to have visual access to the poster and thereby makes herself an appropriate recipient of a first assessment, as one who can operate on a first assessment and her-self produce a second assessment. Goodwin and Goodwin (2004) comment on just this kind of work in positioning oneself bodily in order to have direct visual access to a co-present object being assessed in discussing a calendar being jointly assessed by Chil:
Central to the organization of assessments is a particular kind of experience that requires appropriate access to the event being responded to. It would be quite possible physically for Chil to immediately follow Pat’s “Wow!” with a congruent reaction of his own, that is to rapidly produce an assessment without waiting to actually see the object being commented on. However Chil doesn’t do this. Instead, by moving his gaze to the calendar he works to put himself in a position where he can independently assess the picture, and only then reacts to it. (228)
Having physically positioned herself appropriately to align with Terry’s first assess-ment, Abbie is now available as a recipient of that first assessment. Abbie’s recipients may thus hear the first word of Abbie’s utterance, it, as tying to the referent of Terry’s assessment, thereby accomplishing reference to the same assessable (Fox 1987). In addition, given that the object being assessed is co-present and visually available to all three participants, the recipients can project that an exactly matching assess-ment may be forthcoming. The next word, is, produced with prosodic upgrading ( including wider pitch range than the first assessment), confirms this projection,
and further confirms the affiliative nature of the assessment in progress (Ogden 2006). In fact, Abbie does go on to produce exactly the same assessing term as Terry’s, cool.35
With this second case, then, we have offered another demonstration of our pro-posal that an action-centered analysis of turn construction is a useful alternative to an account based upon ‘unit’ deployment, such as that in (10). In so doing, we hope not only to have bolstered that proposal, but also to have shown that it is not exclusively useful for managing apparently unusual linguistic combinations such as Maureen’s turn in Extract (6). While Abbie’s it is cool accurately exemplifies what linguists would call a simple copular clause, its structure described in such terms reveals little about the action it is doing in this context, the practices through which Abbie produces this action, and the trajectory that all the participants orient to as the turn unfolds.
In other words, our account must include the fact that the job done by Abbie’s turn is directly relevant for the utterance as an assessment, and not just to the role of this turn as a second pair part in an adjacency pair. The local specifics of what could be described in terms of grammatical forms are deeply implicated in participants’ action as well as in their interpretation of where the turn occurs in a sequence and when it is likely to reach completion (Ford & Thompson 1996). That is, the location of some item or object (via it) and its evaluation (via the use of an assessing-term social action format (Fox 2007; Kärkkäinen 2009; Rauniomaa & Keisanen 2012)) constitutes a recognizable form of action, and, by virtue of that, a possibly complete action in this sequential environment.36
. An apparent counter to the focus on action in describing turn construction
In this section, we will begin by using our analysis of Abbie’s second assessment as a point of departure for addressing what we believe would be a concern for many linguists and perhaps for conversation analysts as well. One could well argue that by using action-oriented terms to describe it is cool, we miss linguistically signifi-cant generalizations across similar utterances produced on different occasions but perhaps in similar sequential environments. The pursuit of descriptive categories that
. See Stivers (2005) and Thompson et al. (frthc.) for further discussion of such ‘modified repeats’.
. We appreciate Geoffrey Raymond’s helpful discussion on this point.
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
humans orient to across interactional contexts is a fundamental quest in both inter-actional linguistic and conversation analytic studies. By going in the direction we have explored in this chapter, have we deprived ourselves of the descriptive resources required for capturing generalizations across particular occasions? For example, in describing second assessments such as it is cool, would it not make sense to capture the recurrent grammatical form of those utterances in terms of a formula such as that in (10), [pronoun + copula + adjective], since that does seem to capture a format that English speakers might recurrently draw on in producing second assessments, and it is at the projectable completion of that grammatical formula that turn transition is relevant?
We find several problems with this way of arriving at and accounting for cross-utterance generalizations. First, the category ‘pronoun’ turns out to propose a set of forms far too diverse for what is actually produced in this type of second assessment. Thus, not any pronoun will do; it must obviously be linkable to the assessable of the first assessment. In addition, in our collection of second assessments (Thompson et al. frth.), it is used in second assessments that assess concrete objects, while that is used in second assessments that assess discourse actions such as tellings, songs, and so on. So in beginning her turn with it, Abbie is creating a more specific and locally fitted action projection than would be the case had she begun her turn with that.
Second, the category ‘copula’ is similarly overgeneral: in fact, not only may the copula be hedged (e.g. with epistemic, temporal, or up- or down-grading lexicogram-mar, such as might be, or was), but it must be accented, that is upgraded prosodically. Moreover, it could be a non-be form such as looks. Third, we note that ‘adjective’ is once again both too broad and too insufficient a category for what actually happens in forming second assessments. The literature makes clear that it is crucial to distinguish cases of same assessing term, upgraded assessing term, and downgraded assessing term (see Pomerantz 1984; Heritage & Raymond 2005; Ogden 2006, inter alia), as these are not only grammatically different, but also interactionally different. More-over, ‘adjective’ is, once again, too large and diverse a category to serve our analytic needs – only terms that provide a positive or negative evaluation are part of second assessments in our data. In other words, while terms like green could occur in this sequential environment, none do in our collection (Thompson et al. frth.). In fact, it is a fairly restricted set of words that are found in our collection of same-assessing-term second assessments: good, funny, warm, cool, weird, and hilarious. This is highly reminiscent of recent findings for a wide range of grammatical formats in conversa-tional language: of the imaginable instantiations of a given grammatical ‘category’ that could occur in a given construction, only a very limited range actually do occur with any frequency (e.g. Bybee 2010; Hopper 2000, 2010; Manes & Wolfson 1981; Stubbs 1995; Thompson 2002; Thompson & Mulac 1991).
So if we were to attempt an empirically accurate template for second assessments, it would have to be extremely lexically and prosodically specific, and, as such, could lose most of what linguists think of as linguistically significant generalizations.37
Finally, as we have noted throughout our discussion, format descriptions like [pronoun + copula + adjective] are less than satisfactory because they are not inter-actionally relevant in the first place. Not only have they been developed based on a very different set of methods, but they do not reveal the real-time work that is being done by participants in any of our exemplars in their particular sequential locations; accounting for the social work that practices allow participants to do is fundamental to understanding talk-in-interaction. In fact, it is really this concern that gives rise to the issues raised in 3.2: second assessments are not just anonymous statements about objects in the world, like ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘the cat is on the mat.’ They are actions formulated through practices, and making available, through their temporal unfolding, usable and contingent moments for operating on the talk by the current speaker and by other participants. Thus, as previous research has amply demonstrated, second assessments provide opportunities for the self and others to align/disalign or affiliate/disaffiliate, and thereby to do social positioning and social organization in real time (cf. C. Goodwin 1986; M.H. Goodwin 1990; Stivers 2008). Assessments involve complex practices for local social organization through the unfolding construction of first assessments, through the concurrent opportunities they offer for recipient align-ment, and through the consequential ways that second assessments enact agreement/ disagreement, affect, rights to assess, and so on (Pomerantz 1984; Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, 1992; Heritage & Raymond 2005; Raymond & Heritage 2006), as noted early on by Goodwin and Goodwin (1987):
In brief, despite their apparent simplicity assessments constitute one central resource available to participants for organizing the perception and interpretation of what is being talked about, providing them with the ability to not simply display alignment to ongoing talk, but establish and negotiate that alignment through a systematic process of interaction while the talk being aligned to is still in progress. (49)
A description in terms of the practices involved in constructing and projecting an assessing action as it unfolds seems truer to the work that participants are actually doing with their utterances than does an analysis based upon abstract grammatical units.
. See Bybee (2010) for evidence that language users draw on highly specific, rather than abstract and general, schematic formats.
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Finally, to explore just one step further the problem with importing the terminol-ogy of linguistic unit-types, let us look back at the turn we discussed in 3.1, the café de yin ya:ng? when he was tw- te:n?. What are the implications of using the linguistic terminology of unit-types as represented in (5) (i.e. noun phrase (NP) and adverbial clause)?
Using descriptive language closer to our aims in this chapter, conversation analysts and linguists might analyze Maureen’s utterance as an instance of a ‘Topic- Comment’ construction, itself formed up through two separate action units. Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) use just such terms in analyzing concurrent operations in assessment activities, and their use of terms represents a position much closer to the action- oriented grounding we are promoting in the current chapter. As we have noted, they suggest that the parts of a ‘topic-comment’ structure in assessment activities might be best characterized in terms of “sequences of communicative acts” (18–19, n. 10).38 Returning to the specifics of Maureen’s turn, however, the linguistic denota-tion of ‘topic-comment’, as identifying a format type, falls short in other ways. Whereas in Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), the data involve assessments formed up as what linguists would term ‘clauses’, in our case (Extract (6)), Maureen’s when he was tw- te:n? is not, in linguistic terms, an independent clause, nor does it represent an English predication (a ‘comment’) on the referent just introduced (presumably the ‘topic’). Rather, the second communicative act introduces a temporal reference.39 Again, we are suggesting that borrowing linguistic-unit terms must be done with due consid-eration of whether they contribute to a satisfactory account of turn construction and action formation.
We propose that the approach we have taken, using action-based descriptions, grounded in the particulars of sequential locations, captures as much generalization as
. Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) cite earlier work, in particular that of Ochs and Schieffelin (1983), who also eschew a static linguistic-unit characterization (“left-dislocation”) in favor of a functionally relevant information-flow account whereby a speaker is characterized as moving from referent introduction to the formation of a proposition about the referent. They note, as we would, that “while organizing information is a very important aspect of the discourse orga-nization of such constructions, information management is nonetheless only one of a range of functions that such structures can perform” (18–19, fn. 10). Our interest is in moving toward an analytic vocabulary that helps us attend not only to information management but, more importantly for our purposes, action-based descriptive terms for projectable but unfolding and contingent practices for constructing turns at talk, in their sequential context and with reference to non-vocal conduct and the activity context in which turns at talk occur.
. We would be happy to see this observation brought back to linguistics for a better understanding of what constitutes a ‘topic-comment’ structure. Here, students of social interaction have much to teach linguists about what people really do in topic-proffering. But it is not accurate to borrow this structural descriptor from linguistics, as the constitution of Maureen’s structure does not fulfill what the structural unit-type requires.
is possible given the evidence we have garnered thus far regarding the circumscribed and particular practices actually employed in interaction.
In focusing on action terms and in looking at actions and responses within unfolding trajectories of vocal conduct, we implicitly challenge any neat separation between turn taking and sequence organization, finding action context and respon-sive vocal and non-vocal conduct during a turn’s course inextricably intertwined with turn projection and, thus, with the turn-constructional component of the turn-taking system. This is not new; many researchers explicitly attend to within-turn interac-tion (Goodwin 1981; Schegloff 1987; Hayashi 2005), and of course we have elsewhere included action projection as part of an account for turn taking (Ford & Thompson 1996; Ford et al. 1996). Turn construction and turn taking are not only about precision timing after transition relevance places, though that is clearly a bottom-line fact that any full account of turn taking must address. We are suggesting that linguistic units, though possibly analytically helpful, are at best place-holders as we work to construct more valid action-based characterizations of linguistic forms.
. Conclusions: Summing up the evidence
In this chapter we hope to have demonstrated (1) the possibility of doing analysis of turn construction with a central focus on action-oriented accounts for turn construc-tion rather than on accounts which use linguistic-category terms from a tradition not committed to understanding talk as real-time and contingent social action, and (2) the value that such a shift in analytic orientation offers to the CA enterprise. In our analy-ses, we have explicitly avoided dependence on longstanding linguistic-unit categories in an effort to build analyses that bring us closer to grounding our descriptive terms by reference to the thick particulars of moments of interaction.
With this focus on actions, practices, and trajectories, we have detailed the temporal unfolding of two turns. The first, the cafe de yin ya:ng? when he was tw- te:n?, instantiates what might be considered a rather unusual grammatical form; the second, it is cool, appears to be quite an ordinary grammatical form. In each instance, we were able to successfully describe the emergence of a target turn without recourse to abstract a priori grammatical categories. We did this by making use of action-based notions such as ‘reference formulation’, ‘assessing action’, and orienting to a ‘locus of joint attention’, and by attending to the ways these trajectories unfold, creating opportunities for co-participation.
In sum, our analytic position and our demonstration of its viability support a focus on action in the projection and construction of trajectories, and do so in a manner that is sensitive to the unfolding orientations of the participants.
We recognize that we and others will continue to borrow linguistic categories, given that these categories are indeed associated with turn transitions. However, it
Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson
is our hope that those linguistic units will be viewed, not as explanatory in them-selves, but as epiphenomena of social interaction, which must themselves be subject to further grounding.
Here we find Linell’s distinction between first-order and second-order phenom-ena relevant, ‘first-order’ being “people’s meanings and meaning-making practices”, and ‘second-order’ being the “analytic, scientific practices themselves”. Linell goes on to suggest:
What we do in the human sciences are reconstructions of the ‘first order’ meaning constructions by participants. However, the analysts’ reconstructions are not merely copies of participants’ constructions, but they are rebuilding the latter, recontextualizing them, under conditions of (attempting some kind of) generalization, systematization and explanation. (Linell 2009, 29)
We wholeheartedly agree with this point. It is our position, however, as contribu-tors to CA, that we must begin to explicitly acknowledge the fact the socially relevant terminology for imported linguistic categories has not yet been fully addressed. To acknowledge this challenge is to maintain the CA spirit of inquiry into the bases of social action and to pursue systematic accounts for how turns are formulated such that they are recognizable in their unfolding particulars and their sequential contexts.
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