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professor's office. The participants knew they were being tapted, but were
meeting for the purpose of transacting routine business, rather than
to record their talk.
In an earlier portion of the conversation from which Data Display
1 is taken, D (a graduate student at a western university) is talking
with P (a faculty member at the same university). The conversation is
discontinued when S (an undergraduate student), arrives to have her
enrollment form signed by P, her advisor. This bit of business is itself
momentarily discontinued when D offers to remove a bug from S's hair.
She agrees and, just prior to line 01, remarks on its being springtime.
Data
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Display 1 [TAM:BP
S:
. . . It's (0.6) Spring bugs in rmy hair.
P:
1-Well it's it's one of
tho:s:e ruh: insects that consu.-7nes uh hair sprray.
S:
LBack t' nature (.) heh heh heh
'Yah=
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
Iprobafc/j-,
D: 'r somewhere and it couid have been that ((gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
*-hhhhh\hhh
*heh
S:
l-Or Hawaii an they c'be crawlin'
outta the
(0.6)
D: phhYou wish VA said whrat
hhhh
S: l-XJhkay (1.0)
Uhen 111 see you on Tuesday.
P: All right (.) Good.=
S: =With my little thing all fillred out? (Ueaving))
D:
LWe could be at Texas A
roa'tAhhhhhhhhhhhh
heheh
rfeo
P: l-A'right ( ) That's exactly it I wish I wi Lsh you had
*
*
said College St(h)ation Tex(h)as.
(1.0)
P: .hhHaha
D: .hhhh 'at's right,
P: Heheh
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ANALYSIS
Ordinarily, participants in a conversation experience it as orderly
(Schegloff, 1987a). A fundamental tenet of conversation amalysis is that
the participants produce such orderliness in the routine course of orienting to each other and to the "occasion-at-hand" (Beach, in press). This
segment of conversation is clearly orderly for the participants, despite
the fact that whatever "occurs to" P is never articulated by him, either
in line 9 or elsewhere. It seems that both P and D have used the same
item(s) of shared knowledge to reach the final state of agreement and
mutual appreciation that they display at the end of the segment. But
since neither participant articulates the item(s) of "shared" knowledge,
the sources of this orderliness are not immediately apparent. Conversation analysis should be able to reveal, even in a single episode
(Schegloff, 1987a), the practices by which the participants enable each
other to locate and thereby use this knowledge. Beach (in press) argues
that "exactly what gets achieved is undeniably the upshot of how
speakers and hearers fashion, shape, and make available to one Einother
their understandings...." The present analysis reveals these sources
of orderliness to be such routine conversational practices as designing
and positioning utterances so that they project a contrast, display a
specific relevance, initiate a repair, or ratiiy another's proposal.
Since the allusion in line 9 seems to arise because Ps utterance is
unfinished, the analysis begins by characterizing the utterance in relation to D's initial attempt to get it repaired Qine 14). Second, an analysis
is undertaken of the design* and sequential placement of line 9, comparing it to D's prior utterance (the one that "triggered" something for
P). Third, the analysis focuses on what seems to be an interactively constructed list of locational terms (Dallas, Hawaii, etc.) and on whether
D's 18-19 r . . .Texas A an' M") fits such a list. Fourth, D's candidate
repair (lines 18-19) and the participants' ratification of it are considered.
These four steps provide a description of how the allusion arises and
how the participants collaboratively cope with the problem of accessing and relevancing an item of shared knowledge, as they try to "makle]
sense of how [the] others are making sense" (Beach, 1983, p. 197). That
is, the analysis identifies the practices used to collaboratively construct
the participants' context-of-the-moment.
Allusiveness and Repair
In the subsequent turn to D's remark about Dallas, Texas, P says
"I wish (.) I wish you had s:" and strikes the desk with his hand during
"you" and "s:" (as indicated by the asterisks beneath that talk in Data
Display 2). This utterance is oriented to by D as being incomplete
(broken-oif by P, most likely due to overlap with the other participants).
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Data
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
The most immediate evidence supporting this interpretation is D's utterance: ".hhYou wish I'd said what hhhh" (line 14). It takes the form
of a next turn repair initiator (NTRD, in this case, a partial repeat of
the utterance proposed as needing repair, plus a question word
(Schegloif, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, pp. 367-369; Scheg:loff, 1979, p. 38).
The design of D's utterance shows specifically that it is P s line 9 that
D is proposing needs repair (an important point, since technically the
NTRI does not occur in the very next turn, but in D's next turn). The
perspective of the personal pronouns is switched to preserve their
referents, of course CVou" replaces "I" and "I'd" replaces "you had"), but
with this taken into accoimt the wording of D's utterance matches that
of Fs. This establishes that D is asking ahout P's utterance. Note also
that D uses the word "said" at the corresponding point where F s talk
had ended with an "s" sound, thus displajdng D's orientation to the way
P might have finished. Finally, D ends 14 with the interrogative pronoun "what," displasdng his orientation to the incompleteness of Fs utterance and, correspondingly, the need for repair.*
D's utterance proposes that he knows something of the form, though
not necessarily the content, that Fs completed utterance would have
had. That is, line 14 treats F s uttersince as a truncated form of: "I wish
(.) I wish you had said Y," where the letter Y represents some word,
phrsise, or larger unit that would have made F s utterance complete.
(That Fs line 9 projects this particular design will turn out later to have
important consequences for D.)
Now, insofar as P does not actually mention what he is talking about,
he can be said to be alluding to it (see Sacks, 1971, on the allusive discussion of a topic). In this case, the allusion arises initially from the incompleteness of F s utterance; but even if P had completed it by producing Y, the utteramce still could have been allusive to the extent that
the shared knowledge P is relying on is only alluded to-rather than
stated-in Y.
Not only is F s utterance incomplete in the sense described above,
but he fails to take several opportunities to repair it himself. Schegloff,
Jefferson & Sacks (1977) have argued that converaation is structured
to favor self-correction, that is, repair of an utterance hy the original
speaker of that utterance. The first place where P could correct his utterance is line 9 (by continuing or restarting it immediately). This may
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turn slot following D's utterance in lines 5,7-8 (presented again in Data
Display 4).
Data
05
06
07
08
09
10
Display 4 [TAM:B]
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
Iprobaiiy,
D: 'r somewhere and it could have been that ((gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
heh
The adjacent positioning of F s utterance Gine 9) indexes D's justcompleted turn as momentarily relevant to the contrast projected by
the format of F s utterance. That is, it proposes that something of what
D has just said is relevant to the construction of the missing final component, Y. This provides a potential steirting point in D's search for the
specific contrasting categories: Y would seem to be something that D
might have said, contrastively related to Dallas, or to Texas, or to bugs,
and so forth. D must access the shared knowledge that was involved
in his utterance that triggered something for P.
But is this a case of shared but unstated knowledge? It was claimed
in the Invoking Shared Knowledge section above that this case involves
alluding to shared knowledge without explicitly describing it, thus making available something the participants never mention. The issue here
is whether "Dallas Texas 'r somewhere" formulates the same item(s) of
knowledge that Texas A an' M" does. In other words, is "Texas A an'
M" a possible "somewhere"?
Indexicals of Location
It might be argued that the three participants in lines 05-12 of this
conversational segment (reproduced below in Data Display 5) are collaboratively constructing a list of locational formulations and that D's
" . . . Texas A an' M" in lines 18-19 is merely another item on that list.
ScheglofPs (1972) analysis of the selection of locational terms shows that
participants select formulations with features that fit the ongoing conversation. Such formulations are oriented both to who the participants
are and what they have been talking about. Schegloff calls these considerations a membership analysis and a topic analysis, respectively
(1972, pp. 88-106). In the present conversation, talk has focused on insects and climate in the several utterances prior to line 05 of Data
Display 5 (e.g., "Spring bugs" earlier in line 01).
Data
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
Display 5 [TAM:B]
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
^prohably,
D: 'T somewhere and it could have been that {(gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
^hhhhhVhhh *
*heh
S:
1-Or tHawaii an they c'be crawlin'
outta the
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Data
17
18
19
20
21
22
23 P:
24 D:
25 P:
That is, the status of lines 18-19 as Y, the acceptable repair of F s brokenoff utterance, is collaboratively achieved by P and D through their
responses to those lines, as well as by the design of D's utterance. Notice
that P not only says (with some emphasis) that D's utterance is "exactly
it," but he repeats his own line 9 even to the recycling of "I wish" Oines
20-21). ITiis directly treats D's utterance as relating specifically to that
earlier utterance. P also transforms "Texas A an' M" to "College
St(h)ation Tex(h)as," a form that more closely matches D's original utterance (lines 5 & 7), in that a city name is used. In so doing, P
demonstrates that he understands D's formulation well enough to
tremsform it (Schegloff notes such transformations, 1972, pp. 95-96). F s
laugh tokens in the name (line 21), and his laughter in lines 23 and 25,
further display an appreciation of D'B candidate repair. Notice also that
D (in line 24) responds "[th]at's right" to F s transformation, thus further collaborating in their joint achievement. AU this helps to constitute
their invocation of shared knowledge: P shows that "Texas A an' M"
is indeed recognizable to him as a formulation of some resource shared
by him and D, and D shows his recognition that "College St(h)ation
Tex(h)as'' is also a formulation of that resource and shows his confidence
that they both know what has been alluded to.''
CONCLUSION
In this conversation, Dfiguredout what P had been going to say (what
P wished D had said)a particularly clear instance, it would seem, of
the "operation of context." The problem with resorting to the concept
of context to explain such a striking instance of communication is that
we tend to take for granted the very processes we ought to be studying.
In this case, P and D share a very large set of items of background
understanding (knowledge, perceptions, and other interpretive
resources), only a few particulars of which can be helpful to D in figfuring out what P wanted him to say. The ways in which P and D
methodically help each other to access those particular items as relevant to a specific moment of the conversation are ways of achieving context. That is, context works because it involves subtle processes of participants communicating to each other (or indexing for each other) which
particulars have momentary interpretive value. By treating context as
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an achievement of the participants, it is made available for communication study. Accordingly, the point of this analysis has been to discover
the practices employed by P Eind D to achieve the context that enables
D to repair P's utterance.
The participants invoked shared knowledge through the use of five
conversational practices, none of which involves the explicit mention
of that knowledge. First, P produced an utterance designed to project
(but not provide) a contrastive final component (Fs broken-off line 9).
Second, P positioned this utterance (adjacent to D's 5,7-8) so as to display
its relevance to a specific prior turnthat is, to show that elements of
the prior turn had triggered a contrast for him. Third, D initiated
(solicited) a repair of the utterance, displaying his recognition that some
further talk on his part had been projected by P (D's line 14). Fourth,
D designed an utterance as a recognizable candidate repair, formulating
for the first time what some of the features of their shared, locally relevant knowledge might be (D's line 18-19). Fifth, P and D in turn designed
several utterances to ratify and show appreciation of D's camdidate repair
and the item of shared knowledge that it invoked (lines 20-25).
Invoking shared knowledge can be accomplished through practices
of utterance design and sequential placement. Such practices need not
involve either direct reference to, nor passing mention of that shared
knowledge. Allusions to such background understandings, effected
through the organizational characteristics of talk, are sufficient for participants to locate and make momentarily relevant the particular(s) that
constitute the context of a conversational moment.
ENDNOTES
1. My interest in the achievement of context was stimulated by a discussion by Emasuel
A. Schegloff about constraints on the analytical use of tbe concept, in a paper now available
in published form (Schegloflf, 19B7b). I also wish to thank Wayne Beach, Robert Hopper,
and Gene Lerner for their vry helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
2. I have used an asterisk, placed below a line of talk, to mark the occurrence of a
sharp rap or striking a desk (possibly by that speaker). Also, the italicized h represents
a strained exhale, bordering on laughter.
3. The term design, as used here, does not imply any conscious planning or
deliberateness on the part of the speaker. The design of an utterance is its shape or pattern regardless of the processes that shape or pattern it.
4. D's utterance, then, is sequential evidenix for the incompleteness of Ps line 9. There
are linguistic bases for hearing this utterance as incomplete, as well. For example, to
the extent that the final "s" sound does not count as a complete lexical item, the utterance
is syntactically ill-formed.
5. This point and several others in the following discussion on format were conveyed
to me by Gene Lerner (personal communications. Fall, 1988).
6. My thanks to Gene Lerner for pointing this out to me.
7. Sims D could have designed lines 18-19 to contrast with his lines 5,7-8 in a multitude
of ways, it seems parsimonious to conclude that D's success is due to his having accessed
the same item of shared knowledge that P is tising. In this particular case, the analyst
is privy to what that rraource probably is: A mutual friend of P and D had recently moved
from their university to Texas A&M. Bat note that this information telJs us nothing abotit
how the participants brought that shared knowledge to bear in their talk. Knowing what
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participants jointly know helps to explain their conversational achievements only in light
of the practices through which they invoke their shared knowledge as context. Note also
that D's formulation in lines 18-19, "Texas A an' M," preserves F s earlier allusiveness
in that it does not directly mention their mutual friend. P then continues to preserve that
allusiveness with 'College St(h)ation Tex(h)as.'' Sacks (1971) discusses some of the reasons
why participants might want to preserve the allusiveness of prior utterances.
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