Gaze is a central mechanism for the entry into and coordination of face-to-face interaction. As such, persistent and sustained gaze withdrawal may indicate significant troubles in an interaction. This article examines how two police officers, in seeking to calm a hysterical woman whose grandson has been shot, treat her refusal to gaze at them as a central component of her persisting hysteria. Toward the end of getting the woman to calm down, one officer seeks her return gaze using embedded and (...) exposed methods of gaze pursuit. These methods work on a continuum in which, at one end, a turn at talk can be preserved as the main activity, while at the other end, the main activity becomes remedying the interactional trouble. These methods address different interactional relevancies having to do with 1) being a listener to a speaker, 2) being a recipient of a directive action, and 3) a basic obligation to comport oneself as at least minimally aware and responsive when targeted by the actions of co-present others. (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)