This article contributes to ongoing studies in conversation analysis dealing with the way in which epistemic authority is displayed, claimed, contested and negotiated in social interaction. More particularly, it focuses on the articulation between action format, sequential organization, membership categorization and epistemic authority. The article offers an empirical analysis of the way in which knowledge is distributed and recognized in social gatherings, with a special focus on guided visits. Guided visits are a perspicuous setting for this analysis, since it is (...) an activity in which the guide displays knowledge in comments and explanations and the guided seeks for knowledge in questions. However, this distribution of knowledge is regularly challenged. The article offers a systematic study of a collection of sequences initiated by turns beginning with ‘et là’ and locating a new referent in the environment, either in informings or in questions. While the former are frequently produced by the guide, assuming a knowing status, and the latter by the guided, assuming a not knowing, it is possible to observe informings initiated by the guided, who, by so doing, claims a revision of his or her epistemic authority. Likewise, in second position, questions are generally answered by the guide, but can also be answered by another person, claiming alternative epistemic rights. By examining the details of turn and action design in these environments, the article shows how they either reproduce and confirm the current epistemic status of the participants or challenge, negotiate and transform them. The latter case is particularly revealing of the fact that epistemic status and stance are constantly reflexively elaborated by the participants in social interaction. (shrink)

This study analyses joint decisions. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings in a workplace context as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I investigate what is needed for a proposal to get turned into a joint decision: How do people negotiate the outcome of the decision-making processes in terms of whether they indeed comprise new decisions and whether these decisions are really joint ones? This study identifies three essential components in arriving at joint decisions, and discusses two other possible (...) outcomes of decision-making processes – non-decisions and unilateral decisions – as being a direct result of the deployment of the same components. These observations help explain the exact mechanisms involved in approving and rejecting proposals in joint decision-making settings, as well as the ways in which people may negotiate their rights and obligations to participate in decision-making processes. (shrink)

The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis, written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number (...) of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children. While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or (...) desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same. (shrink)

Problem solving can be readily described as one of the key activities regularly performed by professionals in any workplace setting. Despite its importance, however, there is relatively little linguistic research which looks at the complex ways in which problems are constructed in discourse. This article sees the enactment of a ‘problem’ as a discursive phenomenon with fluid boundaries. It draws on business meeting data recorded in multinational companies in Europe and focuses on excerpts identified by the participants as having a (...) PbS function. The data show that problem solving processes and practice are anchored to the structure of the organizations, the local history and employees’ shared perceptions of professional practices and hierarchies in their workplace. The analysis also shows two focal points in the PbS talk of the participants in this study, namely identification of a problem and its ownership. These, however, are not predetermined starting points but rather locally constructed in relation to the status, expertise and shared/past history of the interactants. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

Although the production and recognition of social actions have been central concerns for conversation analysis from the outset, it has recently been argued that CA is yet to develop a systematic analysis of ‘action formation’. As a partial remedy to this situation, John Heritage introduces ‘epistemic status’, which he claims is an unavoidable component of the production and recognition of social action. His proposal addresses the question how is social action produced and recognized? by reference to another question how is (...) relative knowledge recognized? Despite the importance placed on the latter question, it is not clear how it is to be answered in particular cases. We argue that the introduction of epistemic status builds on a reformulation of the action formation problem that unnecessarily de-emphasizes the importance of the sequential environment. Our re-analyses of key sequences cast doubts on the empirical grounding of the epistemic program, and question whether the fundamental role of epistemic status has been convincingly demonstrated. (shrink)