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| Analysing Talk In Interaction |
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|
Charles Antaki
Loughborough University |
Lecture / Seminar 3: Conversation analysis I - the roots in sociology
Introduction Like speech act theory, Conversation Analysis (CA) believes that talk 'does' things. Like Grice's co-operative principle, it sees that what talk does depends on (at least) the assumption that one piece of talk is relevant to another. So far so good. But CA departs from these two theories of pragmatics in important ways. It doesn't depend on invented examples, it doesn't limit itself to units like sentences, and it wants to understand social action. Indeed, it started in Sociology. Sociology? Surely the question of how people do things with language is a linguistic one? How come CA started in Sociology? The very start was at the desk of an emergency psychiatric telephone help-line. Harvey Sacks, a young PhD student, was listening to tapes of these calls, and kept noticing things that struck him as sociologically interesting. That is, interesting for what they told him not about 'psychological' matters like depression and distress, but about how people do such basic human actions as 'introduce themselves', 'have a problem' and 'sound concerned'. These things are sociologically interesting because (Sacks argued) sociology is about human action. Even when sociologists are apparently talking about something more abstract (like 'the health professions' or 'mental disorder') they must mean what real people actually do. A term like 'mental disorder' must be a shorthand for a whole load of specific actions that people do. So if you have tape recordings of real people 'doing' those actions, you have a very solid base of data. For Sacks, much more solid than sociology normally had. Things like questionnaires and surveys never showed you how people 'did' actions - only what they said about them afterwards. Actions The most basic action was to engage with the world, and for Sacks, this meant engaging in talk. As soon as you see that this is an action, then you appreciate that there must be rules, and that to use these rules is what it means to be human. So Sacks started there, trying to discover what rules people were using when they engaged with each other through talk. Pragmatics Sacks found pragmatics largely useless, and linguistics in general no help at all. Most of it was about langue, nor parole anyway (language as an abstract system, rather than talk in interaction). Pragmatics (as we have seen in previous lectures) was, with the honourable exception of Grice, concerned with isolated utterances; and the trouble with Grice was that he (and his followers) used made-up examples. Why not, asked Sacks, look at what people actually say? With a tape-recorder you can listen over and over again. No linguists ever did that. And what the linguist was looking for in language was 'meaning'; Sacks was looking for action. What kind of action? It helps to start with one of the first things that Sacks noticed, which was how someone managed to call the emergency line and not give his name. Sacks puzzled over this, and wondered how the chap had done it; after all, in the usual case, if you call someone, and they say who they are, then it is expected that you say who you are, then carry on. Sacks shows us this stretch of talk (Sacks 1992
p7-8, edited), and invites
us to think about it. ["A" is the call-taker, and notice that he
speaks in line 5 and 6 without the caller speaking in between]
Not giving his name is obviously a significant thing to do (psychologically, sociologically...). How does the caller manage that?
Sacks realises that there must be at least two rules here (of course there are
many more, but keep to these two for the moment). To account for lines 1 and 2,
there must be some rule like 'if what precedes your turn is an introductory greeting then you must respond in the same way'and also another one to the effect that 'not-hearing is an acceptable reason to be excused the demands of the previous turn'. The very fact that the caller is using the second rule to escape his obligation to reciprocate the introduction means that the first rule must normally be binding. Poeple normally must follow the rule that if someone introduces her/himself to you with her/his name (on the phone, at least), you say your own name back. Rules We'll talk more about that extract in the lecture and the seminar afterwards, to try and tease out more rules that both speakers are using. But now let's think about what the term 'rule' means for CA. The basic idea is that they are normative rules. That is, people expect you to follow them. If you do, then the conversation proceeds smoothly, and what you say has its normal implications. If you don't, there's trouble, of two kinds. a) interactional troubles. If someone breaks a rule - for example by saying something unintelligible, then you will see the next speaker either give a brief pause (which people hardly ever do in free-flowing conversation) or try and repair the damage, or both, as in this example. From my own data; A is a doctor, B is a patient. You might like to consult this page of notation to make sense of some of the odd symbols.
The patient reports that her partner has a name for her difficulties in moving about - he calls it (what sounds like) 'plattered leg walking'. This is not a recognisable expression in English and indeed 'plattered' is not a known English word, so not surprisingly the doctor has trouble with it; hence the pause at line 5. The patient explains (lines 6-10), but it is not clear whether this explanation completely covers everything about the expression, so the doctor tries a bit more directly (line 11) to see if that is what she meant. b) implicational troubles. The other kind of trouble that the rule-breaker gets into is that what he or she says is now much more significant. It isn't what-people-normally-say. By breaking the rule, your words mean something different. Of course, this need not be 'trouble'; this kind of rule-breaking is usually done deliberately so that people see explicitly that you could have said the expected kind of thing, but didn't. [You may link this with Grice's observations about people 'flouting' the co-operative maxims; see the lecture on Grice]. Look at this example: From Levinson p 320
Note that it is A who is responsible for both turns - so why does s/he answer his or her own question, and answer it with a negative? Because B has done the unexpected thing of not answering, and thus allowed the implication that the answer is 'no'. Summary We shall see much more of how people use these rules as we go along, and next lecture I'll talk a lot about the basic rules of the conversational system For the moment, though, the thing to remember from this lecture is that Sacks set out to understand human actions through investigating how people engage with each other in detail, and when he started looking, he found a very complex world. We shall spend the bulk of the remaining lectures following his footsteps and those of his successors. This week's Seminar: Discussion about 'rules' of human action, and what we might learn from looking in great detail at how people engage with each other. Reading as for the lecture (see top of page).Next Week's Seminar: Read further in Hutchby and Wooffitt, as we shall we shall going further into the 'basics' of CA. | A course for the University of Southern Denmark, Odense 2003 |