Any Questions?: Identity Construction in Academic Conference Discussions 9781614510246, 9781614510222

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Any Questions?

Trends in Applied Linguistics 14

Editors

Ulrike Jessner Claire Kramsch

De Gruyter Mouton

Any Questions? Identity Construction in Academic Conference Discussions by

Carmen Konzett

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-1-61451-022-2 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-024-6 ISSN 1868-6362 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 쑔 2012 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover image: Roswitha Schacht/morguefile.com Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To my parents, to Stefan, and to Matt

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

1

Chapter 2 Researching talk-in-interaction

9

2.1 Looking through the participants’ eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

2.2 Doing CA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

2.3 Investigating institutional talk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

Chapter 3 The dynamic discursive nature of identity

20

3.1 Identity as a social construct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21

3.1.1 Symbolic interactionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21

3.1.2 Impression management theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25

3.2 Identity as a members’ category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

3.2.1 Indexicality and members’ construction of reality . . . . . . .

31

3.2.2 Membership categorization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

3.2.3 Doing being X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41

3.3 Identity, self, and, face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

3.3.1 Goffman’s notions of face and facework . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

3.3.2 Face in Watts’ social theory of politeness . . . . . . . . . . .

47

3.3.3 Integrating the concept of face in a CA approach . . . . . . . .

51

3.4 Identity construction as a means to an end . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

3.4.1 Social positioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

3.4.2 Stylization of self and other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

viii Contents

Chapter 4 Ethnographic background

61

4.1 Structure of conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

4.2 Types of contributions in conference discussions . . . . . . . . .

65

4.3 Discursive roles in discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

4.3.1 What questioners do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77

4.3.2 What answerers do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

4.3.3 What chairpersons do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

82

4.4 Asking questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

84

4.4.1 What is a question? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

84

4.4.2 Yes/No interrogatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

87

4.4.3 Constructing questions to achieve agreement

. . . . . . . . .

93

4.4.4 Contrasting academic question-answer sessions with interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

96

4.5 Self-presentation – a key feature of conference participation . . .

97

4.5.1 Members’ reasons for organising and participating in conferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

4.5.2 Self-presenting in the community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

Chapter 5 The data

107

5.1 Data collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 5.2 Corpus structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 5.3 Transcription conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Chapter 6 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences

115

6.1 TCU completion and assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 6.2 Speaker selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Contents

ix

6.3 Sequential organisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 6.3.1 Side-sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 6.3.2 Pre-sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 6.4 Formulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 6.5 Preference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Chapter 7 Results of the data analyses

135

7.1 Doing being expert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 7.1.1 Having the overview: doing formulations . . . . . . 7.1.1.1 Doing formulations to prepare the ground . . . 7.1.1.2 Responding to formulations by referring to data 7.1.1.3 An ambivalent face strategy: si j’ai bien compris 7.1.1.4 Achieving co-agreement in formulations . . . . 7.1.1.5 SUMMARY of 7.1.1. (Doing formulations) . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

7.1.2 Displaying alternative access to an idea . . . . . . . . 7.1.2.1 moi je vois. . . juxtaposing own research and presenter’s ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2.2 have you done X? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2.3 is it not X? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.2.4 Putting an additional interpretation up for inspection 7.1.2.5 SUMMARY of 7.1.2. (Displaying alternative access to an idea) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

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139 140 146 155 158 167

. . . . 167 . . . .

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169 175 189 207

. . . . 212

7.1.3 Granting the presenter a claim of expertise: requesting information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3.1 I’m thinking of other types of data: requesting confirmation of informed guesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3.2 c’est juste une toute petite question: pure information questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3.3 have you seen this in language X? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.3.4 parce que c’est important: information questions with an agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

212 213 221 227 231

x Contents 7.1.3.5 SUMMARY of 7.1.3 (Granting expert status to the presenter) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 7.1.4 SUMMARY of 7.1 (Doing being expert) . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 7.2 Doing being a (good) researcher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 7.2.1 Collaborative labelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 7.2.1.1 Displaying collective membership to the scientific community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 7.2.1.2 Displaying understanding and competence . . . . . . . . . 251 7.2.2 Explicit (and critical) reflection on research practices . . . . . 256 7.2.2.1 Lecturing on good research practice . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 7.2.2.2 Displaying research practices as personal experience . . . . 262 7.2.3 Intertextuality at conferences: semiotic spanning . . . . . . . 274 7.2.3.1 Positioning self in the scientific community . . . . . . . . 274 7.2.3.2 Referring to a third party as a specific academic practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 7.2.4 SUMMARY of 7.2 (Doing being a (good) researcher) . . . . . 294 7.3 Doing being entertaining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 7.3.1 Punchlines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 7.3.1.1 Punchlines as part of one’s own turn . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 7.3.1.2 Punchlines triggered by other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 7.3.2 Inserting formulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 7.3.2.1 Provocative statements to entertain . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 7.3.2.2 Formulations as laughables to connect with other(s) . . . . 308 7.3.3 Second laughables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316 7.3.4 Entertaining through narratives . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4.1 Everyday-type narratives . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4.2 Micro-narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4.3 Requested narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.4.4 SUMMARY of 7.3 (Doing being entertaining)

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320 321 327 329 332

7.4 Performing collective multiple professional identities . . . . . . . 334 7.4.1 Displaying self’s professional identity as multi-layered . . . . 335

Contents

7.4.1.1 They – you – I: using pronouns to construct different viewpoints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1.2 Relating personal experiences: narratives and recipient design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1.3 Displaying affiliation with a category through prosodic and lexical markedness . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1.4 SUMMARY of 7.4.1 (Displaying self’s professional identity as multi-layered) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

. . . . 335 . . . . 339 . . . . 344 . . . . 347

7.4.2 Multiple professional identities presented as dilemmas of the self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.2.1 Dilemmatic identities as an argumentative strategy . . 7.4.2.2 Stream-of-consciousness self-disclosure: content reflected by linguistic structure . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.2.3 SUMMARY of 7.4.2 (Multiple professional identities presented as dilemmas of the self) . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 348 . . . 348 . . . 354 . . . 360

7.4.3 In-groups and out-groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.3.1 Constructing group identity through joking and laughter 7.4.3.2 Competent self vs. incompetent other: precise wording and vague references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.3.3 Othering through stylization: stereotyping absent others 7.4.3.4 A present other categorised as in contrast to in-group norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.3.5 SUMMARY of 7.4.3 (In-groups and out-groups) . . . . 7.4.3.6 SUMMARY of 7.4 (Performing multiple complex professional identities) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 361 . . 361 . . 364 . . 367 . . 374 . . 383 . . 385

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387

Chapter 8 Conclusion

389

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412

Chapter 1 Introduction This book describes some interactional and linguistic practices of a particular kind of discourse community, which is also a community of social practice. Its members are academic researchers from the humanities, that is, people working in linguistics, literature, culture and translation studies, most of them teaching and/or researching at universities or similar institutions. The term discourse community indicates that its members share a common discourse, in other words, certain forms of linguistic behaviour; the second term – community of social practice – underlines the fact that social activities are at the centre of interest. Following Swales (1990: 24–27), discourse communities are defined as groups consisting of members who share a common set of goals, dispose of established ways of communicating with each other, engage in exchanging information and feedback relating to their goals, are characterised by the use of certain genres and a certain vocabulary, and are made up of both newcomers and more experienced members. In a broader sense, this study is also about a community of social practice, a term coined by the learning theory researchers Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1999), and defined as “[a] group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger 2006). Researchers of a particular field are interested in the same subject or area of research and interact in different ways – e.g. through conferences – in order to enlarge their knowledge about this subject. It is through particular practices known to and performed by all members of the group that they interact and learn from each other. We observe this community in a particularly important sphere of their world: the environment of academic conferences. The present study focuses on one particular genre within this domain, namely discussions taking place in paper presentation sessions, which we consider the core activity during academic conference events. We are particularly interested in one communicative task participants at such events have to achieve: the construction of their professional selves. We aim to explore the specific ways in which researchers present themselves to others, the strategies others employ to respond to these self-presentations, and how they thus manage to interactively co-construct their professional identities in the process of academic discussions.

2 Introduction There are several major areas of research to which the topic of the present study contributes. Most of these belong to the field of applied linguistics, that is, they are concerned with concrete linguistic problems and describe ways of solving them (Knapp and Antos 2009: xi). This view of applied linguistics goes beyond the rather narrow definition of equating it with language acquisition and language teaching, and includes research areas such as institutional discourse, business communication or translation and interpreting (cf. the contents of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics 2011). If we consider the language of science/academia as a type of LSP (cf. its discussion in Hoffmann, Kalverk¨amper, and Wiegand 1998), the most immediately obvious research field to which this study contributes is the area of languages for specific purposes (LSP), and more precisely, specialized communication (cf. Munsberg 1994; Th¨orle 2005). It is only very recently that interaction analysis – and indeed the analysis of talk in general – has appeared as a methodology of studying LSP, a fact that Bowles and Seedhouse (2007: 9) of empirical research into actual talk. However, their publication (as well as Richards and Seedhouse 2005) clearly shows that applied linguistics in general and LSP in particular can and should benefit from studies in interaction analysis. This book represents another building block in this expanding interdisciplinary field. What applies to LSP research in general, is also true for the sub-field of academic discourse studies: so far, it has primarily been concerned with written discourse, i.e. academic research papers, dissertations, written work by students etc. (e.g. Flowerdew 2002; Ivanic 1998; Hyland 1998a; Ravelli and Ellis 2005; Badger 2006; Rakotonoelina 2006; Sok´ol 2007). This bias towards the written language has partly been influenced by the available technical standards, since recording speech for a more detailed analysis has only been possible relatively recently. However, an equally important reason for the relative lack of studies on spoken academic discourse might be the fact that in academic environments the written word is given a much higher status than the spoken language, particularly because it can be published and thus made accessible to a larger audience. It may therefore seem more worthwhile analysing (cf. also Baßler 2007: 133). Moreover, many researchers study written academic discourse because they are not predominantly interested in the process of the creation of knowledge, but in its results, i.e. the way in which research products are presented as accomplished facts.

Introduction

3

A large number of studies on written and spoken academic discourse have been carried out with a view to developing the pedagogy of academic discourse at tertiary level (e.g. Cheng 2006; Jung 2006; Paltridge 2004; Recski 2004; Oakey 2002). Conferences, however, have not yet received much attention as research objects; they are often not included as a topic of research in publications and conferences on academic discourse and communication, although few would deny the importance of conferences or similar meetings in the research process. In the rare cases where conferences have been the subject of research, they have generally focused on the aˆ conference presentation’ activity type. Ventola, Shalom, and Thompson (2002) is one of the few publications considering the conference event as a whole and investigating its interwoven network of genres, and the contribution by Webber in that collection is one of the rare studies we know of that deal with discussions at academic conferences (cf. also Baßler 2007; Shalom 1993). On the other hand, there has been a recent development of research into spoken practices in scientific discourse, although only rarely in conference environments. Studies such as (Mondada 2005; Rowley-Jolivet 2004; RowleyJolivet and Carter-Thomas 2005; Rendle-Short 2006; Law 1988; Hood and Forey 2005; Farr 2003; Fortanet G´omez and Bell´es Fortu˜no 2005; Vassileva 2009; Vehvil¨ainen 2009; Limberg 2010) have looked at areas as diverse as medical operations, historians’ workshops, genetics laboratories, scientific conferences, academic presentations, oral exams, student-tutor meetings and lectures at universities, although not all of them concentrate on the interactions occurring in these situations. Moreover, publications are typically the result of corpus linguistic research (e.g. Harwood 2005; Mauranen 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006; Biber et al. 2001; Biber 2003; Fandrych 2009) rather than qualitative studies of spoken interactions. Again, this is due to the fact that these researchers are interested in the results of academic discourse rather than its process. This book is situated at the crossroads between more general sociolinguistic analyses of conference practices, and more detailed studies on laboratory work and research groups. It focuses on the linguistic strategies used by researchers in their interaction with colleagues, and it describes the ways in which academics create and organise their own community of practice in conference discussion. Furthermore, in contrast to most previous studies, our data was recorded at humanities’ conferences rather than at science events, and it depicts a Romance language community with a strong multilingual aspect rather than an English-only environment.

4 Introduction A further research area to which this book contributes is institutional and professional discourse. This means investigating the linguistic practices and conventionalised behaviour of professionals (in this case, academic researchers) in institutions, and the way in which these professionals through their behaviour also display and re-construct their institution’s rules and general ideology (cf. Roberts 2010 : 183). In particular, this study is a representative of research into institutional talk, a research field that has expanded rapidly in the last two decades, encompassing a very large field of studies with topics as diverse as scientific discussions (e.g. Drew and Sorjonen 1997; Drew and Heritage 1992; Mondada 2000), business communication (e.g. Poro 1999; Pan and Scollon 2001; Becker-Mrotzek and Fiehler 2002; M¨uller and Kieser 2003; Th¨orle 2005; Clifton 2009), news interviews (e.g. Heritage 2002; Clayman, Steven 2010), medical interactions (e.g. Heritage and Maynard 2006; Antaki 2007), psychotherapy (e.g. Per¨akyl¨a et al. 2008), aviation (e.g. Nevile 2004; Arminen, Auvinen, and Palukka 2010), court room settings (e.g. Galatolo and Drew 2006; Burns 2009), tourist offices (e.g. Chevalier 2011) etc. Three keywords very broadly characterize the research methodology of institutional talk: context(ualisation), participant orientation and asymmetry. The first two concepts are strongly linked in the sense that institutional talk’s view of context fundamentally relies on participant orientation. This is a concept adopted from conversation analysis, in which context is defined as follows: “The assumption is that it is fundamentally through interaction that context is built, invoked and managed, and that it is through interaction that institutional imperatives originating from outside the interaction are evidenced, and made real and enforceable for the participants” (Heritage 1998: 5). The participants of an interaction orient to their understanding of the (situated, institutional) context by displaying this orientation in their talk, e.g. by engaging in a particular turn-taking structure. In a conference discussion for example, members of the audience might display their orientation to the institutional character of the event by restricting themselves to asking questions and the presenters by restricting themselves to producing answers. In this way, they contextualise (Gumperz 1982, 1992; Auer 1992) their talk as a conference discussion. Rather than reacting to a pre-existing context determined by the institution they are seen as producing this context through their talk. In other words, from the perspective of our analysis, a paper presentation discussion at a conference can not simply be classified as such because it happens during the slot of time labelled

Introduction

5

paper presentation discussion in the conference programme, but because the participants of this discussion structure their interaction in a way that contextualises their talk as academic discussion. A third important feature of institutional talk is the concept of asymmetry (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 160–170). Again, this is a factor that is partly caused by the extra-linguistic set-up of the institution (e.g. the presenter as holder of knowledge in a paper presentation session vs. the audience as receiver of information), but it is also something participants need to orient to in their interactional behaviour to make it work (cf. Schmitt and Heidtmann 2002: 186). They have to claim the discursive rights they are allocated by the institutional framework; otherwise these rights do not come into existence. On the other hand, participants also have to grant others their discursive rights; otherwise they cannot be maintained. We shall see in the analyses that the asymmetric relationship of information holder vs. receiver is not always clear-cut and pre-determined. On the contrary, participants have to constantly re-negotiate their standing towards each other, particularly as far as their expert status is concerned. One interesting phenomenon related to asymmetry in institutional talk that was discovered for courtroom discourse is also visible in our data: the favourable effect of being the last speaker in an interaction on the power relationship between the interactants. In a pre-determined question-answer sequence such as between an attorney and a witness or, as in our case, a presenter and a discussant, one of them will be the person having the last word (in court, the attorney; in an academic discussion, the presenter), and as a consequence, the “power of summary” (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 166). This means that they have the opportunity to summarise the previous stream of arguments from their point of view, interpreting and defining it according to their wants and needs. This is particularly useful if the talk is not just addressed to the interaction partners but also to an audience. As for the relationship between professional and institutional discourse, academic conferences are certainly professional environments: it is part of a researcher’s job to go to conferences, present their work in form of research papers and participate in discussions. Moreover, academic conferences are certainly part of – and themselves form – institutions, which implies that certain rules of conduct apply before, during and after a conference, that people usually fulfil certain pre-determined roles (organizers, delegates; presenters, listeners, chairpersons; researchers, students; experts, non-experts) and that some quite specific expectations come with the frame (i.e. “structure of ex-

6 Introduction pectation”, also called “script” or “schema”, cf. Tannen 1993) conference: for instance, researchers can reasonably expect that there will be a call for papers some months before the conference, that the conference will have an official opening speech, that there will be some form of reception or otherwise an official conference banquet on one of the conference days, that the talks given will be related to the main theme of the conference, that there will be small breaks in between the talks, that there will be many opportunities for discussion, that all delegates will receive a badge with their name etc. Researchers will also have to possess a certain kind of “genre knowledge” and “enact” this knowledge (Shalom 2002) in order to find their way through the conference event and participate appropriately. This knowledge does not come naturally and is rarely explicitly taught during graduate, let alone undergraduate study programmes. Although academic writing is a standard subject in the curriculum of many degree courses, the social competences and speaking skills needed at academic conferences (or, for that matter, other professional occasions of a similar kind) are not usually taught in any form. The only way a young researcher can learn how to do being a conference goer is by observation and imitation. If they are lucky enough to have a thesis supervisor who considers this important, they might be given tips, feedback and encouragement from them. Since this is unfortunately not always the case, this obvious gap in academic training needs to be filled, especially in view of the fact that – at least in Europe – an increasing number of students are faced with fewer academic research positions at universities every year, which means that there is a growing number of researchers (especially in the humanities) who are not employed by a research institution and do not have the support of research colleagues in a department. This study on the interactive behaviour of academics is therefore truly applied linguistics: our analyses allow insights into the mechanics of conference discussions – one of the core elements of an academic conference and one of the trickiest to handle for newcomers – and so provide a basis on which to build future guidelines and training for young researchers. A third research area, besides LSP and institutional or professional discourse, to which this study quite obviously contributes, is the study of identity. This is in fact the main theoretical research interest of this thesis. In particular, the interest is on socially constructed forms of identity. Chapter 3 gives a brief introduction to some sociological ways of looking at identity, in the shape of self and self-presentation, in order to establish an ideational framework within which our more detailed and empirical analyses can be

Introduction

7

situated. In brief, the basic principle underlying our approach is the image of identity as a social concept, and as a constructed, dynamic process rather than a stable entity. The environment in which social identity is constructed is social interaction, which is the focus of our study. For our theoretical concept of identity we draw some inspiration from the writings of two scholars who both studied the display and negotiation of identity in interaction: George Herbert Mead (1910b, 1913, 1922) on symbolic interactionism and Goffman (1959) on impression management theory. A further section in chapter 3 addresses Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of members and members’ construction of reality, followed by an overview of conversation analysis’ way of analysing identity through membership categorization devices. Yet another perspective on the same issue is provided by a short description of some empirical concepts related to conversational rhetoric, such as social positioning, contextualization, style and strategies of stylization. It should by now have become apparent that the nature of our research material and research question calls for the synthesis of quite a range of methodological approaches. Since we are looking at natural interaction, and because we are interested in what participants do when they talk and what patterns and strategies they follow, ethnomethodological conversation analysis (or CA) lends itself to our purpose. However, CA methods are not always fruitful for the analysis of interactions in our data: firstly, because the talk consists in large parts of relatively long blocks produced by one speaker with no or only minimal responses (“multi-unit-turns”, Th¨orle 2005: 31), in other words, it lacks the so-called next-turn proof procedure (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1978: 44), and secondly, because they are sometimes made up of many individual, scarcely connected two-turn-sequences (question-answer). This means that there is not always enough interactional development and movement for a classic CA-style sequential analysis. As a consequence, we are going to include other methodological perspectives to complement our CA analysis, taking care not to contradict CA’s core understanding of talk as a co-constructed process brought about by the participants. Besides related theories, such as Gumperz’ (1982) contextualisation theory and concepts of conversational rhetoric, such as social positioning, style and stylization (which are particularly suitable for analysing longer turns of talk, cf. Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996: 10), the analyses will be supported by a social theory of facework compatible with our interactional approach and able to give a more complex, representative and convincing picture of identity construction. We

8 Introduction will partly draw on the theory of Watts (2003) because his approach, which he traces back to Goffman’s (1967) original conception of face, relies on a dynamic, members’ concept of face and facework. The decision to undertake the study of these data from a variety of analytic foci in order to gain a fuller understanding of the complex processes involved is supported by researchers such as Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2005) or Traverso (1999), who plead for a more eclectic and fruitfully combinable choice of research methods in the study of interaction. The book is organised as follows: Chapters 2, 3, and 6 cover the theoretical and methodological framework within which this study is situated, providing more detailed discussions of many of the points made above. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to an in-depth description of the data, including aspects such as the type of discourse and discourse community involved. The main part of the book — chapter 7 — presents the results of the linguistic interaction analysis, focusing on four aspects of identity construction in academic discussions that emerged from the data: doing being expert; doing being a member of the research community; doing being entertaining, and performing multiple professional identities.

Chapter 2 Researching talk-in-interaction

The methodological and theoretical core of this study consists of an originally sociological approach whose perspective and principles have been adopted by many linguists studying language in interaction. The slightly misleading name of this approach is conversation analysis (usually referred to as CA). This is a less than felicitous term for two reasons: one, because it sounds very specific, suggesting that CA studies only conversations (which is not the case, for instance not in this book) and second, because it sounds very general, suggesting that the term refers to any type of analysing conversations. In reality, CA is both more general – in its object of study – and more specific – in the analytic perspective it takes – than the name implies. In fact, rather than being a way of analysing conversations, CA is above all a way of conceptualising and describing social actions in interaction, the focus on verbal exchanges being only secondary and almost coincidental. It is a qualitative research method and provides in-depth, detailed analyses of real language in order to reveal patterns and mechanisms of talk-in-interaction that language users employ on a daily basis but are not normally aware of. Despite this qualitative perspective focusing on relatively small data sets, the regularities that many individual CA studies have observed in many different types of interaction have led to a wealth of valuable and generalisable insights about how (verbal) social interaction works. Considering that CA is still relatively little known and/or misunderstood by many linguists, it seems useful to precede the empirical analyses with a brief outline of this research field and its main principles of analysis.

2.1 Looking through the participants’ eyes Conversation analysis emerged not as an area of linguistics but as a way of doing research in the interpretative paradigm of sociology, represented by scholars such as George Herbert Mead (1910a, 1910b, 1913, 1922) and Herbert Blumer (1969). One of the basic claims of interpretative sociology is that social interactants themselves constantly define and interpret the meaning(s) of their (inter)action(s) and demonstrate this interpretation to each other (cf.

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Abels 2007: 184ff.), and that it is the sociologist’s task to investigate and theorize on this interpretation process. One of the branches in this interpretative paradigm is a sociological school called ethnomethodology. It was developed in the 1950s by the American scholar Harold Garfinkel, who for a while worked closely with Harvey Sacks, the founder of conversation analysis. Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology was a radically new way of doing sociology as well as an important theoretical starting point for conversation analysis (Heritage 1998b), which is hence also known as ethnomethodological conversation analysis. As part of the interpretative paradigm, the ethnomethodological approach is an interpretative way of thinking and researching, that is, its goal is to describe and understand how individuals see and comprehend the world, rather than creating (and imposing) external, scientifically adequate categories into which individuals are then fitted. Ethnomethodologists try to see the world through the individuals’ eyes and find out how they categorise and analyse the world themselves. The term interpretative also refers to the behaviour of the social individuals themselves: according to ethnomethodology, people constantly interpret each other’s actions in order to understand each other and the world. Moreover, we display this understanding to each other at all times during social interaction. Classical sociology describes social groups and social actions by taking into account factors such as the prevailing social order (i.e. the social institutions and social practices of a society) and the social reality those groups move in and in which they carry out their social actions. Ethnomethodology goes one step further – or backwards, really, to the basis – and explores elements that are usually given as factors in classical sociological studies (e.g. social reality) by treating them as research objects in their own right (Schegloff 2007b: 475). Ethnomethodologists are interested in the practices of individuals to create social order and construct social objects, in other words, the social reality within which and towards whom they then act. Ethnomethodology studies the “background expectancies” (Garfinkel 1967: 37 et passim) that members of a society must have in order for social interaction to function in the “common sense world of everyday life” (Garfinkel 1967: 36). These expectancies, however, are not stable facts that exist independently of interaction but social objects created by members through an ongoing process of interpretation. The social science researcher attempting to study members’ (i.e. members of society / individuals) construction of social reality must possess two seem-

Looking through the participants’ eyes

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ingly diametrically opposed qualities: on the one hand, they have to revert to the same common sense knowledge the members themselves have in order to understand the members’ practices; on the other hand, the researchers have to “become estranged” (Garfinkel 1967: 37) from those practices in order to uncover structures that are usually invisible because the members take them for granted (cf. Garfinkel’s famous “breaching experiments” (Garfinkel 1967: 42–44). Close observation of (verbal and non-verbal) real social interaction is one of the main issues of ethnomethodology. The second aspect to be noticed is ethnomethodology’s focus on everyday activities, most often in the researcher’s own culture. But since the creation of social order is a constant concern of social interaction, it should not matter in which social situation it is observed and studied: indeed, all social practices are of interest to the ethnomethodologist, even the most trivial ones (Garfinkel 1967: 32). Harvey Sacks once highlighted this aspect when he described ethnomethodology as a “sociology of nothing happened today” (Auer 1999: 129). From the perspective of conversation analysis this means that it is irrelevant which kind of interaction is studied and at which point of the interaction one begins to observe it, since the basic principles of interaction order and creating meaning are present at any stage of any interaction. The central question ethnomethodology tries to answer is how people understand each other, in other words, how they make sense of each other’s social actions. Why this is not always as self-evident as one might think can best be illustrated with an example from a linguistic interaction. In principle, we should be able to choose any random stretch of natural interaction for this. However, because we want to illustrate a particular point here, we will use an invented example (actually, even Garfinkel himself did not rely on recorded authentic data for his theory). An interaction such as the following might occur in a similar way at any academic conference, for example during an informal get-together on the first evening of the conference: Example 2.1 A:

Et qu’est-ce que vous faites? And what do you do?

B:

Je suis a` Bordeaux et je fais de l’analyse du discours. I’m at Bordeaux and I work in discourse analysis.

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A:

Ah bon, vous travaillez avec Mme X alors? Ah I see, so you work with Ms X then?

This is quite a typical pattern for an informal introductory sequence between two researchers. It seems normal enough and not particularly problematic. However, if we look at it from an ethnomethodological perspective (by distancing ourselves from a commonsense interpretation), we discover that there are a number of elements whose meaning is actually not clear at all: For example, what is meant by speaker A’s question? Faire ‘do’ could refer to what the person is doing at the moment of speaking as well as generally; it could refer to their profession or their research subject. Speaker B’s response is equally polysemic: eˆ tre a` Bordeaux ‘being at Bordeaux’ can mean that she lives there or that she works there; faire de l’analyse du discours ‘do discourse analysis’ could theoretically mean that she studies the subject as a student, teaches or researches it. According to Garfinkel’s theory, A and B’s utterances are “indexical” in a sense far broader than the way traditional linguistics understands it. Not only the deictic elements such as personal pronouns (vous, je) or the tenses of the verb, but almost everything in A and B’s utterances is indexical, i.e. more information (a context) is needed in order to determine the actual meaning of the element in this particular situation. Bordeaux, for instance, is used as a metonymy in this example, since it refers to the University of Bordeaux rather than the town itself. But we are only able to assume that the term refers to the university here, because as competent members of the community in question (academics who go to conferences) we know what to expect in this kind of situation. Neither A nor B are making any of these ambiguities explicit, nor are they asking for clarification. And yet, they are able to work out the meaning perfectly well. In fact, they are constructing meaning, e.g. when B responds to A’s question. It is only through B interpreting A’s utterance as a question asking about her research that A’s turn fully gains that meaning in the interaction. Similarly, A’s third turn, in which she does not indicate any problem of comprehension, signals to B that her response was considered adequate and perfectly acceptable by A as an answer to her question. The issue at the centre of ethnomethodological research is how members manage to understand each other despite such imprecise utterances, in other words, how members manage to attribute meaning to each other’s social actions. Garfinkel says that it is first and foremost the orderliness of social in-

Looking through the participants’ eyes

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teraction that helps us understand each other. The members themselves are responsible for this orderliness and permanently (re-)construct it. This principle of (interaction) order is the essence of a shared agreement that exists between participants. According to Garfinkel, the term agreement here refers to an agreement on [. . .]various social methods for accomplishing the members’ recognition that something was said-according-to-a-rule and not the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. The appropriate image of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than a common intersection of overlapping sets (Garfinkel 1967: 30).

In other words, what the participants share on a very basic level is not only a common set of things they know about the world or about how it works, but – even more fundamental than that – the knowledge and certainty that interaction will always be orderly. This is a similar thought to Grice’s assumption of a cooperative principle, although Garfinkel’s notion is much less specific. The theory of ethnomethodology can best be described by listing some of their key concepts. The following synopsis follows Flynn’s (1991: 27ff.) very useful overview: First, the concept of indexicality: any social action can only be understood by others by reverting to shared knowledge and a shared agreement about the orderliness of interaction. Considering our example above, we can see that indexical elements are widespread and not only restricted to deixis (e.g. vous faites ‘you do’, Bordeaux, je fais ‘I do’). But A and B understand each other because they do not only have shared knowledge of the world and the community; they can also rely on the fact that their interlocutor is going to say something that is connected to their own utterance and makes sense. Second, the concept of accountability: members constantly explain, contextualise and justify their actions to each other. Going back to our example, B demonstrates to A that she has understood her question by providing an answer. She does not signal any difficulty concerning the indexicality of A’s utterance. A displays through her reaction to B’s utterance that she accepts B’s reading of A’s first utterance and considers her response appropriate. With the use of the polite form of the pronoun vous A contextualises the exchange as one between people who do not know each other very well or who have a professional relationship.

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Third, the concept of reflexivity: refers to the fact that members perform practices of accountability (see above) for each other. Fourth, the concept of membership: ethnomethodology is interested in how membership (of a group) is achieved, e.g. how being a member of the research community is achieved. One way of achieving membership is behaving in a way that a competent member would, e.g. making small talk about one’s research during the informal part of a conference. Another way is making an explicit claim to membership, e.g. by displaying knowledge relevant to a competent member (e.g. knowing (of) other academics work in the field of one’s research area). Fifth, the concepts of local practices and social order: ethnomethodology studies local practices (e.g. in an interaction) by which members accomplish knowledge, structures, social objects and social order, e.g. in an academic discussion. The specific details of the dialogue in our example together make up a pattern of interactional behaviour that is not simply typical of being an academic – it is being an academic. That is, the social object being an academic is actually constructed through the interactional behaviour displayed by members, in other words it is performed like this. Sixth, the concept of situatedness: social practices of communicating meaning are always dependent on an immediate and wider linguistic and social context. The immediate social context of the dialogue in the example above is the conference, and the get-together organised by the conference committee. The larger social context is the scientific community of which this conference is a part and to which the participants of the interaction belong. The immediate linguistic context of utterance B consists of syntactic rules and semantic constraints as well as its position after A’s first utterance and preceding A’s next utterance. The wider linguistic (and connected socio-cultural) context is provided by the language the interactants have in common: French. Seventh, the concepts of the unique adequacy of methods and becoming the phenomenon: not only do ethnomethodological research methods have to be adapted to the subject they are investigating; the investigator should ideally become a fully competent member of the group he/she is researching, i.e. become the phenomenon (while at the same time remain estranged, i.e. distanced, for the purpose of objectivity) in order to study them properly. Eighth, the concept of scenic display: refers to what members do when they perform membership, or being a member, i.e. they carry out local social practices and make these practices accountable As described in chapter 3.2, membership is not something that is stable and fixed but something that

Doing CA

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needs to be constantly performed. Someone’s membership to a social group can only be claimed and evaluated by means of their social (e.g. interactional) behaviour. For instance, by doing name-dropping, that is, by using names of experts in the field of discourse analysis, A performs her membership of the group competent academic in the field of (French) discourse analysis. Ethnomethodology provides much of the theoretical undercurrent for conversation analysis. Many of CA’s postulates and practical guidelines cannot be properly understood without being aware of the ethnomethodological background against which it is set. Moreover, ethnomethodological principles will also be useful in developing a concept of identity or self compatible with conversation analysis (cf. chapter 3.2). But first we will give a brief overview of CA’s more practical, methodological side and of how the empirical work on the data is carried out.

2.2 Doing CA G¨ulich and Mondada write that “la particularit´e de l’approche ethnom´ethodologique est que la m´ethodologie n’est jamais autonome par rapport a` l’analyse de cas concrets” [the particularity of the ethnomethodological approach is that the methodology is never autonomous with respect to the analysis of concrete cases] 1 (2001: 201), in other words, that there is no standard methodology for CA, independent from individual case studies. Indeed, unlike many other kinds of researching language, conversation analysis does not provide a methodological grid or framework with which all data could be analysed using the same procedure and categories (but cf. introductory texts such as G¨ulich and Mondada 2008; Traverso 1999; Deppermann 2001; Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998 for descriptions of general analytic principles). One reason for this is that, as described above, ethnomethodological research methods have to be adapted to the object they are researching (Garfinkel 1967) because their goal is to uncover members’ methods of displaying and understanding the meaning of their social actions from within their social environment. It is important that the analysis focuses on members’ perspectives and methods (and categories) rather than the researcher’s point of view. Moreover, it is essential for CA studies that the data are approached with as few pre-formed hypotheses as possible. Ideally, the analysis would begin 1. All translations of French or German quotations in this book are mine.

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with an unmotivated examination of the data, i.e. the phenomena and structures worth investigating in detail would only emerge in the course of the careful study of the data. Such a procedure would prevent the temptation to project external analyst’s interpretations on the data and would thus ensure that the categories found are actually members’ (and not analyst’s) categories. Most importantly, this approach would make it possible to discover phenomena that are “observable mais non imaginable” (G¨ulich and Mondada 2001: 201) that is, structures and particularities that a researcher might never have thought of otherwise, or might have overlooked if their mind had already been focused on a particular item they wanted to find. Unfortunately, the structure of most modern research projects does not allow for this kind of approach: detailed project descriptions, work plans and outlines of hypotheses make it necessary to have a fairly good idea of one’s expected phenomena in mind. However, it is still possible to stick to a CA perspective when doing detailed and structured data analysis. Schegloff illustrates this perspective vividly when he contrasts it with speech act theory. While Austin, Searle & Co’s starting point were abstract categories of actions (i.e. speech acts) which they then found examples for, CA researchers start from the other end, from “singular bits of data, each in its embedding context, and seek out what – in that instance – the speaker appeared to be doing, and what in the talk and other conduct underwrote or conveyed that that was what was being done” (Schegloff 2007a: 8). There are two elements making up what may be considered a methodology of CA, although it is not explicitly called that (cf. G¨ulich and Mondada 2008: 16–19). The first of these elements is CA’s particular view of how conversation (and social interaction generally) works. One of its principles is that “there is order at all points” (Sacks 1984b: 22), and that it is the detailed analysis of local structures that will make us discover this order. Just as important is the concept of the members’ perspective, which leads us to the necessity of sequential analysis, i.e. a step-by-step analysis of interaction retracing it exactly as it evolved and developed in reality, and as the participants experienced and constructed it, always considering the before and after of each utterance and considering each (verbal or non-verbal) action as part of a coconstructed activity. In the end, a good CA analysis should always produce results that are comprehensible to other individuals looking at the same data (Sacks 1984b: 26). The second element of CA methodology is the wealth of CA studies that have already been carried out, revealing regularities and patterns that seem to be highly generalisable if not universal. We shall outline

Investigating institutional talk

17

the most important of these phenomena that have become analytic tools in the following sections. 2.3 Investigating institutional talk Academic discourse emerges and takes place in an institutional context, namely that of universities and other research facilities. In conversation analysis there is a strong current of research into interactions in such a context. But institutional talk is not simply a type of interaction; it is a sub-domain of CA, which, besides incorporating CA’s general methodological procedures, relies on a few additional methodological premises, which will be outlined in this chapter. The study of institutional talk (or institutional dialogue / institutional interaction) from a CA perspective investigates the way interactions are constructed in an institutional context. But this context is not simply a given in the sense of an external factor which influences the way people construct their interactions. It is a much more complex relationship than that, and not merely unidirectional. In fact, one of the most important basic concepts underlying institutional talk research concerns precisely the nature of the relationship between the interactants and their institutional context. Consider the definition by Drew and Sorjonen (1997: 94): The institutionality of dialogue is constituted by participants through their orientation to relevant institutional roles and identities, and the particular responsibilities and duties associated with these roles; and through their production and management of institutionally relevant tasks and activities. [. . .] Analysing institutional dialogue involves investigating how their orientation to and engagement in their institutional roles and identities is manifest in the details of participants’ language, and their use of language to pursue institutional goals.

Rather than assuming that the context of an institutional environment shapes the interactional behaviour of the participants, CA researchers believe that members themselves display institutionality by organizing their talk in such a way that orients towards it. Since the study of institutional talk developed as a branch of a research field that originally focused on everyday conversation, institutional interactions are seen as specialised forms of ordinary conversation. Thus, studies on

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institutional dialogue often contain a comparative viewpoint, namely to investigate similarities and differences between interaction in everyday and in institutional (e.g. professional or educational) contexts (Drew and Sorjonen 1997: 6). This method has also led to the revelation of differences between different types of institutional interaction. Heritage and Greatbach 1991 distinguish between formal and non-formal types, according to the level of freedom the participants have in their talk (e.g. job interview = more formal vs. service encounter in a shop = less formal). As mentioned above, research on institutional talk is based on the assumption that the factor institutionality is not (just) present as an aspect of the extra-linguistic environment but is co-constructed in the talk by the participants themselves. Researchers try to show that a particular social (institutional) role (e.g. teacher, doctor, client, salesman, customer, etc.) is actually salient for the interaction at hand. Participants can make these roles locally relevant by orienting to them in their talk, e.g. a conference delegate by asking a question. It is also important for the analyst to point out how the institutional context (i.e. the fact that the interaction takes place in a school, a hospital, an office, etc.) is “procedurally relevant” or “procedurally consequential” (Schegloff 1992) for the interaction, e.g. in the way the turn-taking system works. By that he means that we need to show how the fact that an interaction is situated in an institutional environment influences the structure and organization of the talk, e.g. the turn-taking system. As far as turn-taking is concerned, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1978) [1974] already outlined differences in turn-taking depending on the type of interaction. Heritage (1998: 8) shows in more detail how institutional talk displays its own distinctive turn-taking system, most often in the shape of a question-answer chain. He claims that special turn-taking organisations can be distinguished from ordinary ones because they allow explicit sanctions of departures from the rules (e.g. the order of speakers or the type of contribution). In return, the sanctions themselves indicate to the analyst that there are some unspoken rules about the organization of the interaction at play. Drew and Sorjonen (1997: 97–106) list some ways in which participants can orient towards their institutional identities. They include person reference (e.g. a speaker’s use of the personal pronoun we to refer to himself as representative of an institution), lexical choices (e.g. particular words appropriate for a certain professional procedure = terminology), grammatical constructions (that is, ones that are more common in a particular kind of institutional interaction than in ordinary conversation, e.g. nominalisations or passive con-

Investigating institutional talk

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structions in scientific discourse), and inferences (e.g. different inferences are made depending on whether the question how are you is asked by a doctor in a medical consultation or by a friend one has just met in the street). Atkinson and Drew (1979) describe an interesting phenomenon regarding turn-taking in institutional interaction. They show that in institutional settings, particularly in formal types, there are often restrictions as to what kind of turn a participant can produce, e.g. in their case – a courtroom setting – questions (the lawyers) or answers (the defendant, the witnesses). Despite these constraints, the participants were still able to perform actions other than questions with their turns (e.g. to get somebody to admit something), as long as they are designed as questions (e.g. during cross-examination of witnesses). This is how participants are able to maintain the institutionally appropriate form of the interaction while producing critical remarks or personal opinions that would otherwise not be allowed. Institutional talk thus has its own relevant, distinctive aspects, which – for academic discussions – will be investigated in this study.

Chapter 3 The dynamic discursive nature of identity

The subtitle of this book is Identity Construction in Academic Conference Discussions, but what do we mean by identity? The term is used quite frequently to mean something that seems obvious to lay users: it basically refers to “who a person is” (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary 2005), as for instance in the words identity card or identity crisis. However, those two compound nouns already indicate that identity does clearly not always refer to the same extralinguistic entity. In identity card it is a reference to a collection of physical data about a person (their name, when and where they were born, where they live, how tall they are, what colour their eyes are, etc.), using language as well as images (a photo). In identity crisis, identity points to a more emotional, psychological conception of identity that includes someone’s feelings, how they see themselves and what they consider their self-worth to be. Sometimes identity is used as a synonym of self. In the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary (2005), identity and self are described in almost exactly the same words, as collections of characteristics or qualities that “make” a person or determine “who a person is”. It is also pointed out that these features “make that person different from other people” (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary 2005: s.v. identity). There are a number of reasons why these lay definitions of identity and self are insufficient for our purposes: firstly, they do not clearly distinguish between the two terms. Secondly, they describe identity and self as static entities that are an inherent part of a person. That, however, is the realm of psychology rather than linguistics or sociolinguistics. Thirdly, they suggest that a person is made different by possessing certain qualities and not others, i.e. the individual is given a passive rather than an active role. This view is not compatible with our perspective of a co-constructed, negotiated social reality in interaction. Let us now have a look at what different fields of research have to offer in terms of academic meanings of identity and self. In philosophy, identity is generally closely linked with the adjective identical and is often defined in mathematical terms as the relationship between two things that are made up of exactly the same components and are therefore identical. Classical

Identity as a social construct

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philosophy is mainly concerned with questions about the degree of change an entity may undergo in order for it still to be considered the same entity. In psychology, the concept of identity is often connected with the verb to identify with and is connected with the theory that human beings develop individual identities by identifying with certain groups, whose characteristics they assume and then incorporate in their personal identity. According to psychological models, this kind of identity construction means that people categorise a person according to the groups they identify with, which can cause problems when this person changes their identity or simply differs from the mainstream identity of a group. Sociologists and sociolinguists define a person’s identity very broadly as a bundle of social roles that people play and bring about in interaction with others. This “social identity” includes “participant roles, positions, relationships, reputations, and other dimensions of social personae” (Ochs 1996: 424). In this view, identity is considered a dynamic and flexible concept, which is created or constructed while involving in social interaction. This is the concept that comes closest to our conception of the self and identity, which is not surprising, since ethnomethodology and conversation analysis emerged from sociology. The following chapters present a brief overview of some important sociological theories that deal with the concept of identity. We will be outlining particularly those ideas that are relevant for our analysis of the interactional data. We will then go on to describe the specific ways in which conversation analysis relates to issues of identity construction in interaction. In a third step we will look at identity time from the perspective of interactional rhetoric and stylistics, and in the fourth section we shall link the concept of face with identity construction.

3.1 Identity as a social construct 3.1.1 Symbolic interactionism George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is considered the founder of symbolic interactionism, a particularly influential branch of sociology. His status as its founder is not disputed despite the fact that the term symbolic interactionism itself was not coined by Mead but by his student Herbert Blumer (Blumer 1969; Kresic

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

2006: 77). Mead’s ideas were inspired by a number of different sources, which Charon (1998: 29–33) summarises as three main ones: pragmatism, Darwinism and behaviourism: The philosophical school of pragmatism maintains that in order to create meaning, human beings have to interpret the world, since the world does not speak to them. In the course of this interpretation process humans define the objects of the world by saying in what way they are useful to them. In return, this means that only those objects are defined that are of some use for humans, and the perspective of what is useful or not changes according to the situation. A reflection of this idea is noticeable in the CA concept that participants orient to certain aspects of context in the interaction in order to construct that context as locally relevant. Darwin’s theory taught Mead to look at what is physically present rather than what cannot be grasped. For the natural scientist Darwin, this meant abstaining from – in his opinion pointless – attempts to investigate supernatural phenomena; for the sociologist Mead this principle served as justification to study human beings’ actual, visible actions rather than forming hypotheses about undefined societal powers and forces. Moreover, Darwin’s theory of evolution had shown that everything in nature is dynamic. Mead included this perspective in his conception of the self, which he similarly conceptualises as a dynamic, ongoing process. The third influence on Mead was behaviourism (Charon 1998: 30). Although Mead disagreed with the behaviourists’ principle to only study physical, tangible actions (his theory also includes actions of the mind and symbolic action), he strongly supported their view that an attempt to understand and describe the human being would necessarily mean studying what individual human beings actively do. One of the major innovations with respect to traditional sociology is indeed that symbolic interactionism studies the human being through what they are doing, i.e. in the social interaction they are involved in. In contrast to traditional sociology, human beings are seen as actors who influence each other (and society) in a dynamic way rather than as passive individuals simply controlled by society. Moreover, humans do not only influence each other but reality in general; more precisely, they define reality and then act according to how they have defined it. From the perspective of symbolic interactionism, humans live in a physical, objective reality as well as in a social reality. The latter is what sociologists are concerned with. Social reality is the reality we know, which we talk

Identity as a social construct

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about, think about, discuss, critically analyse and constantly change and modify. Social reality is constructed by humans naming the objects that are relevant to them in a particular situation and by defining what these objects are used for (Charon 1998: 46). By naming and defining objects we bring them into our social reality, i.e. we bring them into existence. We transfer them into what Mead calls social objects. This interpretative, definitorial process is not carried out by individuals on their own, but is a construction emerging from social interaction. It begins with the socialisation process when we are children, when we learn what other humans call social objects and how they use them. According to Mead, we do not simply imitate others but actively create our own understanding of these objects, which we can then use to change their meaning to us at a particular moment. If we accept that the meaning of an object consists of what the object is used for, then a change of use also means a change of meaning. For example, the social object a child’s bed can become a secret hiding place for the child if it uses the object to hide underneath rather than sleep in it. Some social objects are symbolic, i.e. they represent something else. A cross, for instance, is a symbol for the religious group of Christians. The most important symbol – or rather, symbolic system – is language, because it works as a kind of meta-system through which all other symbols can be interpreted. Symbols are used by people in order to communicate, i.e. to pass on meaning to other human beings. For example, a person might signal the wish to find out how much something costs by rubbing together thumb and forefinger of their right hand (and by doing so in a manner that suggests it is not a coincidental gesture). According to symbolic interactionism, symbols are conventional, i.e. in order to function, their form and meaning have to be agreed on by everyone that uses them. This leads to the fact that most symbols are culturally specific, e.g. the act of rubbing together thumb and forefinger may not mean ‘money’ and ‘expensive’ in all cultures (but it does, for instance, in French, Italian or German). The symbolic system of language shows this even more clearly: the same string of sounds /etablismE´ `I/ in German refers to a public place of entertainment, such as a theatre or nightclub, while in French it has a much larger meaning and can be used to denote any company or institute, e.g. a bank. Moreover, symbols are arbitrary, i.e. there is no natural connection between them and what they represent. This distinguishes symbols (such as the finger-rubbing gesture) from signs, e.g. the darkening sky that points to a

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storm. While the sign is naturally – in this case causally – connected to the event it indicates (rather than represents), the symbol, e.g. the finger-rubbing gesture, has no logical connection with its referent. Although there may be a transparent link between symbol and referent (rubbing fingers as if counting a handful of banknotes), it is by no means logical or natural that it should be this gesture rather than another one that is used to refer to money. In addition, symbols are meaningful, i.e. the user understands the relationship between the symbol and what it represents. Lastly, symbols are significant, i.e. they are used intentionally and purposefully to convey a certain meaning (Charon 1998: 49). Since symbols are used for communication, social interaction is necessarily always symbolic, hence symbolic interactionism. For Mead, the self is also a kind of social object. It is a very important distinguishing feature of the human being in contrast to other animals that we have a self that can be the object of our own action. It might also be called “our internal environment” (Charon 1998: 73) with which we are in constant interaction. Just like other social objects, the self is defined and shaped in social interaction. This happens in a process of socialisation, in which others label and define the self and so help the individual to develop their own perspective of the self. A child, for instance, might be labelled as my boy, son, good/bad boy, pupil, younger brother, etc. Unlike most animals, humans have the ability to step outside themselves and look at themselves objectively (i.e. as a (social) object), in other words, they are capable of looking at their self from a distance. They become aware of the fact that they have a self and can then act on it. One can observe this process in the growing-up of children: small children develop a sense of themselves, i.e. a self-concept, through imitating “significant others” (Charon 1998: 76), for example parents, teachers, film heroes, etc., which makes them act towards others and their own selves in a particular way and makes them experience and recognise their own selves as social objects. Over time this develops into a proper concept of the self. Not just children’s imitations but all forms of taking the perspective of others – what Mead calls “role taking” (Charon 1998: 111) – are extremely important for human beings, because this is how we build up our perspective(s) of our selves and gradually create a more and more complex self-concept. This does not mean, however, that the self becomes stable. It will always be subject to change according to individual situations, i.e. people will define themselves differently in different situations.

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Like any other social object, the self is named and thus given (a) meaning(s). These names or meanings given to the self are called identities. Burke (1980) defines them as follows: “Identities are meanings a person attributes to the self. They are relational, social, placed in a context of interaction, [and they] are a source of motivation [to act]” (quoted in Charon 1998: 87). Since these meanings emerge from an ongoing process of negotiation between the participants of social interaction, they are constantly changing and do not remain stable. Negotiation means that interactants label each other and define each other as social objects while at the same time labelling themselves, i.e. signalling to each other what they believe their own selves are. In other words, they negotiate the names – or identities – they give to their and each other’s selves. They carry out this negotiation process by using symbols (e.g. language). An individual is not labelled in the same way (or labels him/herself in the same way) in every interaction; on the contrary, each individual has a pool of different identities whose level of importance varies according to the situation (Charon 1998: 88). For instance, at an academic conference person X is likely to focus mainly on her identity as linguist and as specialist in Indo-European languages, whereas at home her main identities might include labels such as wife, mother and amateur gardener. To summarise, symbolic interactionism’s view on the construction of self and identity is that of a primarily active human being developing a sense of the self through social, symbolic interaction. The self is seen as a social object, which is defined through interaction in a process of constant negotiation. It is a dynamic object rather than a stable one, its meaning changing according to the specific needs of a situation. The meaning(s), or name(s), of the social object called self are referred to as identity. An individual can have several identities that are not all equally important in any given situation or interaction. The individual chooses which identity they are focusing on at a given moment depending on their perspective and interpretation of the communication / interaction situation.

3.1.2 Impression management theory When looking at academic discourse, particularly interactive spoken academic discourse, e.g. discussions, question-answer sessions or debates, we notice very soon that there is a kind of double layer in these interactions. In a satirical article on academic discussions the biochemist Tim Skern, who also

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teaches a course entitled “Writing and Speaking Scientific English” at the University of Vienna, claims that [...] auf Uneingeweihte wirkt eine auf Englisch gef¨uhrte wis¨ senschaftliche Diskussion wie eine Ubungseinheit an einer Diplomatenakademie. Es gibt nur wenige direkte Fragen; Zweifel oder Unglaube werden in barock anmutenden Satzkonstruktionen versteckt, einfache Feststellungen und offene Kritik nur selten ge¨außert (Skern 2004: 10). [to the uninitiated a scientific discussion in English seems like a training session at a diplomatic academy. There are only few direct questions; doubt or disbelief are hidden behind baroque sentence constructions, simple statements and open criticism are only rarely uttered]

Of course, this is not only true for English, but to a certain extent for academic discourse in all languages from a Western cultural background (cf. for instance Baßler 2007 for differences between European academic cultures). Newcomers to the field might indeed have trouble finding their way around this kind of discourse and might need some instructions, such as the ones Skern tries to give in his not entirely serious list of typical discussion questions and what they really mean. He presents a series of question-answer pairs taken from an (imaginary) discussion following a researcher’s oral presentation, each containing the utterance produced and in brackets what – according to Skern – the speaker really thinks: Example 3.1 (Skern 2004: 10) Questioner: Presenter:

Wouldn’t you expect that . . . ? (You are wrong!) That’s a good question! (I had hoped someone would ask this question, now I can talk for another five minutes.)

Although the example is invented and clearly exaggerated for the purposes of the satirical text, it seems to us not too far from what academic discussions often feel like. What we are witnessing here is almost like a kind of game or theatre performance in which individuals play roles and play with each other according to certain unspoken rules (which an outsider might not know). This may remind us of Erving Goffman (1959) who famously claimed that in social interaction participants are constantly performing. For Goffman, the theatre metaphor served to describe processes of self-presentation, which he considered a central element of social interaction. Let’s consider the per-

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formance enacted in the example above: on the surface, the questioner is presenting him/herself as a person who requests the presenter’s opinion on a new perspective of the matter they had talked about; they are at the same time constructing the presenter as a knowledgeable person who will be able to answer her question (because otherwise they would not have asked the question). The presenter, on the other hand, expresses gratefulness for the question and presents him/herself as a modest person; they praise the questioner for the quality of their question and so construct him/her as a competent individual. The two interactants are performing these roles on one level while we can assume that they are also very much aware of what goes on on another level of their talk, behind the scenes, so to speak. In brackets, Skern translates for us what goes on behind those scenes and we feel inclined to accept his interpretation. Although it might seem as if such double-layered behaviour was cynical, morally unacceptable and merely a tool used by diplomats and – apparently – scientists, the opposite is true. Goffman and others have shown that this kind of behaviour is part of our everyday lives and even vitally necessary for social interaction to function. Erving Goffman (1922–1982), a professor of sociology at Berkeley University and Pennsylvania University, had an enormous influence on many sociological researchers, most importantly on the founders of conversation analysis. However, his theories are difficult to locate in relation to other schools of thought. Goffman is often categorised as a symbolic interactionist although he refused to be labelled as such (Charon 1998: 191). Despite the close link of his work with symbolic interactionism, he was also strongly influenced by other branches of research, notably by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who inspired his theory of the ritual order of interaction. Goffman’s research focused particularly on the description of the structure and unspoken rules of natural interaction, which he called the “interaction order” (Goffman 1983). He adopts two main points of view of interaction in his study of social life: that of interaction as a theatrical performance and that of interaction as a ritual performance. In both cases the individual is considered playing a very active role in their interaction with other members of society. One of Goffman’s central concerns is the concept of self . Similar to Mead, his idea of the self is that of a socially situated and constructed object rather than a quality or a feature permanently attached to the individual. The self is understood as a dynamic concept that is subject to adjustments and modifications brought about by social interaction. Indeed, it is not something over

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which the individual has absolute control. On the contrary, the self is only lent to an individual by others and can also be taken away again. This is simply another way of saying that the self is socially constructed and that its existence and shape are dependent on the involvement of social interactants. In any interaction, each individual fulfils the role of performer and audience at the same time, trying to convince their interaction partner to see and accept them as whatever or whoever they would like to be seen as, and interpreting the other’s actions as expressions of what they wants to be seen as. Even if these demonstrations of the self do not coincide with the impressions the interactants have of each other, they will usually agree on a “working acceptance” (Goffman 1967: 11) of how they see each other for the duration of a particular interaction. Goffman takes this performance metaphor a step further: just like in a stage production, where what the audience are given to see is not the same as what is beneath the costume or what happens backstage, the impressions an individual gives of their self does not have to coincide with who they really are. Both the performers and the audience in social interaction are aware of this fact and even exploit it for manipulation purposes, e.g. by showing apparent glimpses of the real self, which are actually well-planned and choreographed behaviour. Individuals may also switch between different roles or identities, sometimes ostensibly within an interaction (change of “footing”, cf. Goffman 1979), in order to communicate a particular meaning. For instance, a presenter at a conference might start her presentation by recalling an incident that happened to her on the way to the conference that morning, using it as an illustration for her main thesis. She might be doing that to display her identity as a fellow conference delegate and thus create a bond of solidarity with the audience. This in turn might relax the atmosphere and make it easier for her to start her talk in front of a room full of critical colleagues. Interactants constantly try to establish and keep up certain impressions they want others to have of them, whether these impressions are anything to do with their true selves (or rather: with who they think they are) or not. Sometimes interactants are even performing in teams, e.g. a conference organising committee might be demonstrating unity and team spirit in front of the delegates, even if they have been fighting over the smallest detail and making decisions behind each other’s backs all along during the preparatory phase. In these situations it is important that all members of such a team

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performance continue playing their part; otherwise the performance falls apart (Charon 1998: 94–95). It is important to stress that Goffman did not intend to evoke a completely cynical view of human beings as essentially false and untrustworthy. Perhaps very reasonably, he simply accepted that in social interaction there is no way of looking into an individual’s mind other than through their own actions, that is, through how they choose to present themselves. Moreover, in his view, the self is considered a social construction, dependent on the collaborative effort of members of an interaction, rather than being an imminent quality of the individual. This means that the self is always in a process of negotiation, regardless of whether the elements used in that negotiation reflect a sincere belief in their representation of the/a true self or whether they are conscious manipulations by the interactants. Over time, an individual becomes emotionally attached to the self they present to others (and which they initially co-constructed with the help of the perspective and interpretation of those others), and individuals are eager to keep in line with how they now want to be seen. Goffman calls this impression (or image) individuals have and give of themselves “face”: For him, the term face is defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for themselves by the line others assume they have taken during a particular contact situation (Goffman 1967: 5). Individuals want to avoid being “in the wrong face” (e.g. a well-known researcher and authority in her field would not want to be in a situation where she does not know the answer to a very easy question relating to her field) because that would mean being exposed as a “dishonest performer” (1967: 197), as having given the wrong impression of self up to that point. Since individuals share the desire not to be exposed, participants of normal interaction generally try to be supportive of the maintenance of each other’s impressions of self. The measures they apply to this end are called “facework” (e.g. the avoidance of topics that might cause embarrassment or the hedging of a potentially tricky question, cf. also chapter 2.4.). In Goffman’s own words, the term face work is meant “to designate the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face” (1967: 12), that is, with the image or impression of an individual constructed collaboratively in a particular interaction. Face work is inextricably linked with the interaction order (= the structure of interaction, cf. Goffman 1983). Indeed, it is a vital prerequisite for any interaction to work. If no facework is carried out, in other words, if participants’ faces are not maintained, the interaction might break down and everyone’s

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faces and selves would consequently be threatened (Charon 1998: 198). This self-regulatory device ensures that in normal social interaction everyone follows the principles of facework. Goffman proposes a further definition of self, which makes the importance of facework stand out even more clearly. He explains that the self is a sacred object whose maintenance is dependent on the performance of interpersonal rituals. It is only because of the individual’s continuing display of respect and regard for his/her own self and that of others that society can function at all. This perspective resembles that of Mead, according to whom the individual consciously and unconsciously influences both his own self (considered a social object) and that of others. Goffman underlines the important distinction between the individual and the object acted upon (similarly referred to as I and me by symbolic interactionists) by introducing the metaphor of a card player (= the individual) playing a hand of cards (= the self) (1967: 32). The hand of cards possesses different values, depending on the individual game (i.e. the cards that have been distributed) and the stage at which the game is. In just the same way, the self is an image of (or a perspective of) the individual that is constructed collaboratively by the members of an interaction, and whose various aspects can be played by the individual at different times in the game. Since the self is a sacred object, it can be slighted and profaned but also honoured and revered. Goffman’s categorisation of types of behaviour as deference and demeanour is linked with this sacredness of the self. Sacred objects are usually attended to in form of rituals, and that is exactly what happens in social interaction, particularly in spoken discourse. Indeed, “there is no occasion of talk so trivial as not to require each participant to show serious concern with the way in which he handles himself and the others present” (Goffman 1967: 33). These ways of handling the self – or rules of interpersonal conduct, or facework – are referred to by Goffman as “rituals”: firstly because their function is directed at a sacred object, and secondly, because they are very often expressed as automatised formulas or routines of a given culture or society. To summarise, Goffman’s thoughts on impression management express a view of the self as face, that is, as a certain positive social value of an individual that is given to it by other social actors who judge him/her on the basis of how they have acted before. However, the individual does not receive face to keep it once and for all. Face is only lent to them by the social interactants and they have to make a constant effort to maintain and re-negotiate this face in interaction (e.g. by acting in line with their face). At the same time, the

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self is also a sacred social object that needs to be attended to and oriented to through certain verbal or non-verbal ritual behaviour. The notion of face is a useful device in describing processes of identity construction in interaction. However, due to the psychological notions underlying the concept in Goffman’s own writing (cf. Schegloff 1988) and in particular the development of the term post-Goffman (in particular in politeness research) with its application to speech acts, it is a controversial concept to be included in a CA study. In chapter 3.3 we will discuss in more detail how facework can and will be incorporated in our analysis.

3.2 Identity as a members’ category 3.2.1 Indexicality and members’ construction of reality In their introduction to Discourse and Identity, De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg (2006) provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of identity theories. They explain that, following the social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann (1969) and Kroskrity (2000), most contemporary discourse and interaction researchers now see identity as products of social action rather than psychological constructs. They acknowledge the locally accomplished nature of identity claims and the active employment of linguistic and non-linguistic means by interaction participants to construct such claims. The mutual understanding and management of those claims is only possible due to the concept of a “shared cultural model” (De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006: 13) within whose frame these claims can be interpreted. There is also a tendency among researchers towards an “anti-essentialist vision of the self”, i.e. a self that consists of “polyphonous identities” that each have a different degree of importance or relevance according to the locally constructed social situation, and together make up the self without there necessarily being some kind of core of the self beyond these identities. A further point that most discourse researchers agree on and which De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg stress in particular, is the emphasis they put on indexicality, which goes beyond what is traditionally known in linguistics as deixis.

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity By carrying out acts of reference, interactants continuously constitute and reconstitute their positions with respect to each other, to objects, places and times. Thus, indexing aspects of the context can never be reduced to a simple act of orientation in physical space or to the mere signalling of alternations in speech roles. (De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006: 4)

Indexicality in this broad meaning refers to the fact that participants construct their identities by orienting towards and aligning themselves with certain conceptualisations, ideologies, social representations about certain social roles, presuppositions about social reality, etc. In this way interaction participants locally construct the very context in which they position themselves, in which they (and others) then interpret the conceptualisations and social roles they orient to. In other words, indexical actions are not simply acts of pointing at a pre-existing referent; rather, they are creative acts of constructing these referents by making them available for the on-going interaction. The concept of indexicality described above was first coined in its broader sense by Harold Garfinkel in his theory of ethnomethodology. We saw in 3.2.1 that, according to Garfinkel, indexicality refers to the fact that the comprehension of social actions (= their sense) relies on an assumption of shared knowledge and shared agreement about the orderly structure of interaction. Basically, the language we use is not precise enough to work without context. Yet, we do understand each other, but the question is: how exactly do we manage to do this? What are the devices members employ to make sense of each others’ actions? Conversation analysis is one attempt to find out more about these devices and to discover the procedures by which members signal to each other – and thus produce – order and understanding. In many cases, these procedures are synonymous with interpretations of indexical elements. The concept of indexicalisation is closely linked with CA’s notion of context, which can broadly defined as follows: [C]ontextualization therefore comprises all activities by participants which make relevant, maintain, revise, cancel. . . any aspect of context which, in turn, is responsible for the interpretation of an utterance in its particular locus of occurrence. (Auer 1992: 4)

In contrast to the notion of context, the term contextualisation conveys the idea of a dynamic and flexible process rather than a finished product. Moreover, contextualisation is a reflexive construct: this means that interaction is

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not only shaped by its context, but it actually creates this context in its ongoing development (Auer 1992: 21). This also includes aspects often considered as extra-linguistic, given facts, for example social roles. As long as a particular role is not “made available” (Auer 1992: 22), in and for the interaction by the participants, i.e. as long as it is not brought into the sphere of the talk, it is not part of the (relevant) context of the interaction and can not be used for the interpretation of the talk. This is particularly important to keep in mind for us as analysts and outsiders to the interaction. The more specific definition of contextualisation according to Gumperz can best be explained by describing his understanding of contextualisation cues. In Auer’s words, “contextualisation cues are used by speakers in order to enact a context for the interpretation of a particular utterance” (1992: 25). This can be anything from the tone of voice to the loudness of the utterance, to a gesture or code-switch. However, these must not be explicit nor referential. An utterance such as “I’m going to tell you a joke” is not a contextualisation cue, nor is a deictic element referring to a specific extra-linguistic referent. A contextualisation cue according to Gumperz has no referential meaning of its own. It only gains (or indexes) this meaning within a locally produced, co-constructed sequence of interaction. This meaning itself then has to be interpreted and co-constructed by the participants. In many cases, contextualisation cues simply indicate a contrast, i.e. some kind of change in the interaction, while their actual specific meaning has to be inferred from the local interaction situation. But sometimes, the cues themselves limit the possible interpretations of their meaning (Auer 1992: 32), either because it is conventionalized (i.e. part of the shared knowledge of the participants) or because it is part of the cue’s “inherent meaning base” (Auer 1992: 33). The best example Auer gives for that is gaze: in many cultures, mutual gaze is a signal for “more focused interaction” (Auer 1992: 34), i.e. a contextualisation cue indicating not only a new section but also a more intense (and probably more important) part of the interaction.

3.2.2 Membership categorization Indexicality and shared cultural models, a shared agreement about the orderliness of talk-in-interaction and a dynamic view of context are all basic concepts underlying the conversation analysis theory about membership categorization devices (MCD). This term was introduced by Harvey Sacks at

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an early stage in his lectures. It is based on the observation that people categorize objects in the world in order to structure the world and give meaning to it (cf. Hausendorf 2000: 4). This thought has links with Mead’s symbolic interactionism, which claims that meaning is attributed to social objects by a process of naming them (cf. 3.1.1). And like in Mead’s theory, this categorisation or naming process includes the social object self as well as the co-interactants’ selves and is negotiated in social interaction. Interestingly, categorizing people seems to be different from they way other social objects are categorised. This concerns in particular processes of other-categorisation (cf. Franceschini 1995). According to Franceschini, there is a preference for categorising absent rather than present others, and indirect, implicit means of categorisation are preferred. Not surprisingly, Sacks was most interested in the mechanisms underlying these processes of categorization in interaction. He labelled the conversational tool used to achieve such processes “membership categorization device” (Sacks 1995,Vol.1: 40). The device consists of two parts: collections of categories and rules of application (Sacks 1995,Vol.1: 238; Schegloff 2007b: 466). The term category refers to concepts such as man, woman, singer, scientist, chocoholic, extreme sports fan, etc. These are organised in larger units, so-called “collections of categories”, e.g. man/woman, singer/guitar player/drums player, scientist/manager/doctor etc. and can sometimes – but not always – be designated with a specific lexical item (e.g. gender or sex for man/woman or pop band for singer/guitar player/drums player). An MCD may also contain alternative category collections: for example the MCD age contains the category collection 1-year old/2-year old/40-year old. . . but also the collection infant/baby/child/adolescent. . . and the collection young/middle-aged/old. . . , each group referring to the same extralinguistic concepts (Schegloff 2007b: 467). Some of these category collections are objective, i.e. they are not dependent on the speaker’s perspective (e.g. the cardinal numbers), whereas others (e.g. young, old) may depend on the category the speaker belongs to (e.g. very young children frequently categorise anyone over 20 as old). In addition, there are several “Pn-adequate categories” (Schegloff 2007b: 467) which can be applied to any person in any culture, for example the collections sex, age, religion, nationality (cf. Hausendorf 2000: 4). Obviously, each individual can be categorized in several alternative ways, at least for one of each Pn-adequate category. In other words, by default, when it comes to categorising someone, speakers always have a choice of at least two op-

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tions. However, the mere fact that a person is a member of a certain category is not enough for them to be actually categorized as such in an interaction (Schegloff 2007b: 468). Moreover, categorizations are not obligatory; a person does not have to be categorized at all, at least not explicitly. We can deduce from these observations that if categorisations occur in interaction, they are unlikely to be random or superfluous, but, on the contrary, carefully selected and applied in order to construct (interactional) meaning. Another special kind of category collections is one that makes up a larger unit which itself constitutes a delimitable social object. These collections are called team-type MCDs and can take shapes such as sports teams (e.g. soccer team includes the categories goalkeeper, striker, forward etc.) or concepts such as family or school class. One of the specific features of this type of category collection is the restriction concerning the number of items of one category. A soccer team, for instance, cannot have more than one goalkeeper or more than 11 players. Another specificity is that when such collections are used in interaction, categorisations in the same local environment (of the interaction) that put several people into categories from the same collection are generally understood as belonging to the same extralinguistic unit. For example, if a narrative features a school class and the narrator says that the teacher and the headmaster came in, it will be assumed that the people entering the room were the teacher of this particular class and not of another class, and the headmaster of their school rather than from a different school. From a linguistic perspective, the use of the definite article is also interesting in this case, since it reinforces this interpretation of our example. A further particularity of some MCDs in some situations is a phenomenon called “partitioning constancy” (Schegloff 2007b: 468). This refers to the fact that sometimes the members of a group may be categorised and then re-categorised with categories from a different collection while the distribution of members belonging to one category or the other stays the same. For example, a school class and their teacher may be categorised as discussion members and chairperson during a class discussion about where to go on their next school trip. At another occasion, maybe during the performance of the school play, the class may be categorised as actors and the teacher as a member of the audience or as a critic. The class is always categorised as a whole and remains the same group, whereas the teacher always remains in a category different from that of the class. However, partitioning can also be inconstant. Taking the example of the school class,

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the two groups (teacher and class) may be placed in the same category in certain situations: e.g. if they are all watching a film together, they are all viewers. We said earlier that membership categorizations are used to create meaning in interaction. They can do that because categories are “inference-rich” (Schegloff 2007b: 468), in other words, because the application of a category evokes a whole set of features connected with it. Any member who is attributed membership to a certain category will be seen as a representative of this category and as having all the qualities assumed about the category. Sometimes people explicitly refuse that this link should be made, e.g. in one of Sacks’ examples: Example 3.2 (Schegloff 2007b: 469) A:

How old are you Mr. Bergstein?

B:

I’m 48, I look much younger. I look about 35 and I’m quite ambitious and quite idealistic and very inventive and conscientious and responsible.

Mr Bergstein realizes that his self-categorization as 48 years old may lead to certain conclusions being drawn about what he is like and he immediately tries to cancel out what he thinks these assumptions will be. Categories are also protected against induction, i.e. if a member of a category behaves differently from what would be expected, interactants prefer treating the member as an exception rather than changing the way they see the category. The way a member behaves plays an important role in the categorisation process, particularly if it is category-bound behaviour. Category-bound activities are those that are seen as typical of a certain category and allow one to “allude to the category membership of a person” (Schegloff 2007b: 470), for example by reporting that someone carried out such an activity. But category-bound activities do not only appear as reports in talk. The way the talk itself is done can be a form of category-bound behaviour, too. So, both talking about and performing a category-bound action can make this category relevant for the ongoing interaction. In other words, “not only do categories imply features, but features imply categories” (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 4). This construct only works, however, if it is based on the assumption that interactants share a common ground, i.e. some cultural knowledge and knowledge about the functioning of society in general and interactions in particular (cf. Garfinkel’s idea of the interaction order).

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As mentioned above, the MCD consists of categories and rules about how to apply them. We have seen what kind of categories these are. Now we will look at the rules. There are two rules of application that, together with the collections of categories, make up the mempership categorization device. The first one is the rule of economy: although interactants can choose to describe a person by attributing to them as many categories as they like, it is usually enough to just use one, namely the one they want to make relevant in the talk. This is because categorisations in interaction are not employed to give exact, objective descriptions of members (cf. also Mondada 1999: 24) but rather to point out what is relevant for the structure of the conversation at hand: Entscheidend ist dann nicht, wer oder was die Interaktionsteilnehmer ihren pers¨onlichen Daten nach ‘sind’ (Deutscher, Mann, Protestant, Hamburger), sondern ob und auf welche Weise eine dieser kategoriellen Zugeh¨origkeiten in der Interaktion ausgew¨ahlt, als bedeutsam erwiesen und in diesem Sinn lokal im Mikrokosmos der Augenblickskommunikation hergestellt wird. [It is not decisive who or what the interaction participants ‘are’ according to their personal data (German, man, protestant, person from Hamburg. . . ), but if and in which way one of these categorical memberships is selected and oriented to as relevant in the interaction and in that sense locally achieved in the micro-cosmos of in-the-moment-communication] (Hausendorf 2000: 9)

The second rule refers to consistency and states that once a member has been categorised with an element from a certain collection, other members can (and usually will) be categorised along the same lines. For instance, in our data we have a recording where researchers introduce themselves to others sitting around a conference dinner table. The first person begins by giving her name, nationality, the languages she speaks and the institution she is affiliated with. Without having explicitly stated this procedure, all the other people who introduce themselves after her, follow the same pattern and categorise themselves according to the same categories. Again, this has to do with relevance and the coherent – and thus meaningful – construction of talk (cf. Greco 2006). The rules and definitions outlined above have an immediate consequence for our analysis of strategies for identity construction. Most of all, we have

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

to make sure that we are analyzing members’ categories rather than analysts’ ones: If we want to characterize the parties to some interaction with some category terms, we need in principle to show that the parties were oriented to that categorization device in producing and understanding – moment by moment – the conduct that composed its progressive realization. In doing so, we will need to be alert to the ways in which the parties make accessible to one another these orientations, because that is the most serious and compelling evidence of their indigenous-to-the-interaction status. If we can show that, we neutralize the equivocality that otherwise subverts category-based inquiries. (Schegloff 2007b: 475)

Similarly, an analyst cannot simply assume a connection between an activity and a category, but has to prove that the activity in question is indeed, for the participants, a category-bound activity (cf. Schegloff 2007b: 476). This is particularly difficult to show for the phenomenon of doing being, (cf. 3.2.3) Analysts must show that and how participants make certain activities and categories relevant and how they orient to them in their talk. They also have to demonstrate that the categorisations they analyse are consequential for the talk at hand (cf. Antaki and Widdicombe 1998: 5). This can only be done by looking for clues in the local environment of an utterance, i.e. in the sequential structure of interaction. Heiko Hausendorf, in his study of interactions between East and West Germans (2000) is interested in the phenomenon of belonging to a group as one aspect of identity and belonging as a communicatively constructed phenomenon. He critically discusses Sacks’ membership categorization model and refines it, pointing out that Sack’s original model contains aspects that are difficult to integrate with CA’s claim to describing only what is made evident in the talk (e.g. the inference richness of categories is not something participants normally display). Hausendorf is also critical of the fact that Sacks’ analysis of membership categorization is essentially non-linguistic and therefore not very detailed in this respect, at least compared to modern conversation analysis. He sees his own study as a further development of the theories and methodology on memberhip categories with a particular focus on the linguistic aspect of interaction (Hausendorf 2000: 7, 15–16). Hausendorf describes the categorization process (when categorising people) as a combination of three aspects: attributing individuals to groups, attributing certain qualities or behavioural patterns to these groups and con-

Identity as a members’ category

39

sequently the individuals themselves, and, finally, evaluating these qualities (Hausendorf 2000: 5). The first two elements are also part of Sacks’ definition, whereas the evaluation stage is new in Hausendorf. But social categorization is not necessarily verbalised: according to Hausendorf, the simple (non-verbalised) perception and recognition of somebody as a woman, a child, etc. is already an act of categorization (2000: 6), even if this may be difficult to describe by the analyst. But there are still a vast number of ways in which categorizations may be carried out linguistically, e.g. through mentioning names of categories, through various deictic elements such as temporal indicators, personal pronouns, demonstratives, by describing behaviour as typical of a group, by reconstructing narratives etc. The linguistic aspect of the construction of belonging is the focus of Hausendorf’s study, and he explains in detail that his research interest lies in the phenomenon of categorising as a social rather than a psychic/cognitive phenomenon. He claims that communication “represents an independent level of social reality and thus a research object of its own” (Hausendorf 2000: 17) and consequently, that belonging is an observable construction of social interaction that can be analysed and interpreted on its own as having emerged from communication despite the (existing yet non-observable) link with mental representations. Hausendorf thus provides a justification for studying belonging and identity solely through the analysis of communication. This is particularly important for the study of the linguistic production of categorisations and can also serve as methodical justification for our own study. For our analysis we have to explicate in more concrete terms what categorising means in practical interactions. Social categorisation in the sense in which interaction analysis uses it can be achieved in two different but interrelated ways. A more obvious method is to refer to a social category in talk, either explicitly, i.e. by naming it (e.g. as an Indian you) or implicitly, i.e. by activating the category through various linguistic means in the talk, for example by referring to an activity usually associated with a member of a particular category (i been teaching I mean doing workshops). These categories do not necessarily coincide with pre-existing social categories that already have an established linguistic sign to label them (e.g. man/woman/researcher/native French speaker); they may be ad-hoc categories that emerge from and are made relevant in the on-going interaction (e.g. person who once worked as an assessor at a prestigious French national exam). The categories thus introduced are then subject to modification by interaction participants as the talk goes on.

40

The dynamic discursive nature of identity

Categories can be applied to self and other participants in the current talk, but also to third parties, who may or may not be present at the time of the interaction. Categorisations of other and of third parties are often used to achieve self-categorisation, for instance by affiliating or disaffiliating self with them. This does not even have to be done explicitly, but can be implied, depending on the type of category collection. If it is a collection with two mutually excluding categories (e.g. gender), then the mention of one (e.g. c’est typique pour les hommes) automatically evokes the other (cf. discussion of membership categorisation in 3.2.2) and the contrastive effect can be used to categorise self (cf. Auer 2007: 13). Within the categorisation process (at least of this first kind in which categories are implicitly or explicitly referred to) we can distinguish with Hausendorf (2000) between three acts of categorisation that can be carried out separately or simultaneously: assignment (of a member to a category), attribution (of qualities to a category, and by extension, to the member in that category) and evaluation (of these qualities, and by extension, the category, and its member(s)). In example 3.3, taken from our corpus, we can observe a particularly clear illustration of this phenomenon: Example 3.3 [1] DF1 [en/ben] PF1 [en/hin] [2] DF1 [en/ben] PF1 [en/hin] [3] PF1 [en/hin] [4] PF1 [en/hin] [5] PF1 [en/hin] [6] PF1 [en/hin] [7] PF1 [en/hin] [8] PF1 [en/hin]

so beh there there are two points in my (.) okay observation (really) (1.2) no i think i’m i’m intrigued by that and i think that’s where the two hats come in as an academic you try to: (..) ahm (.) communicate and ahm (.) uhm negotiate as a writer you go you get to go into conflictand you try to be conf- you know that that’s wthat’s w- where i like that space as a writer and you were right for me mun as my primary (xxx) i (invented)

Identity as a members’ category [9] PF1 [en/hin] [10] PF1 [en/hin] [11] PF1 [en/hin]

41

it for myself is precisely that i don’t think it’s a question of NEGAting (.) uhm the conflict or th- th- the (xx) but i think (1.7)

PF1 goes through each of the steps outlined above. She first explicitly assigns herself to two categories, which she calls academic and writer (lines 4–5). Then she describes one of these categories (writer) further by attributing a quality to them: you get to go into conflict (lines 5–6). Finally, she positively evaluates this quality: i like that space as a writer (lines 7). This three-step process allows PF1 to construct herself as a person with a choice of two identities (the two hats she can put on or take off), that of the academic and that of the writer. Her positive evaluation displays herself as satisfied with that choice. Since the other discussion participants (and specifically the person who had just been addressing her) are all but one non-writers, this categorisation also serves to establish a contrast between pure academics and people who are academics and writers. 3.2.3 Doing being X Naming categories and describing category-bound behaviour or categorybound features are not the only possibilities participants have to categorise themselves or others. Particularly when it comes to categorising self , one very important – and arguably the most common – way of demonstrating or claiming membership to a category is to perform what we called above a category-bound activity (Schegloff 2007b: 410), in other words to act like a member of that category. Note that the underlying assumption here is that identity is not something that somebody simply has (and which then becomes visible through the way they behave) but something that is actively constructed by doing something, more specifically, by behaving in a way that is interpretable as representative of a certain category. The idea of constructing identity in interaction by engaging in a certain behaviour first appeared in Goffman’s impression management theory, where he describes the performance of the self. Performing the self is not to be understood as putting up a show or as intentional decep-

42

The dynamic discursive nature of identity

tion of the other (or oneself). Indeed, it is not to be understood as intentional (in the sense of conscious, strategic) at all, but as a natural element of identity construction. Goffman even goes as far as saying that it is a necessary feature of social interaction that we constantly display to the other who we are (or who we want to be seen as) and whom we believe the other is (or wants to be seen as) (Goffman 1967). Just as we cannot not communicate (Watzlawick et al. 1967), it is impossible not to initiate processes of self- and othercategorisations through the way we act and interact with each other. In his paper “Doing being ordinary” (1984a, based on a lecture from 1970), Harvey Sacks famously put this idea into analytic practice. His analysis shows that the participants of an interaction are constantly preoccupied with coming across as being ordinary and that they achieve this, by doing something – namely telling a story – in a demonstratively ordinary way. Sacks also explains that we have to rethink our conception of identity to grasp his concept: “An initial shift is not to think of ‘an ordinary person’ as some person but as somebody having as one’s job, as one’s constant preoccupation or task, doing ‘being ordinary”’ (Sacks 1984a: 414). Sacks himself does not actually explicitly link the phenomenon of doing being with categorisation, but if we logically develop his notion of category-bound behaviour as behaviour indicative of a membership category, then doing being has to be analysed as displaying category membership. The expression doing being underlines the fact that, from a social perspective, being someone actually means doing someone in the sense of actively constructing the being. In other words, just like West and Zimmerman describe it for doing gender, any feature of someone’s identity can in social terms be seen as “a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment” (West and Zimmerman 1987: 126). This is only logical if identity is seen as a social and dynamic as well as an emergent feature. The concept of doing being has been particularly useful for research into institutional talk. There, it is assumed that individuals cannot simply be analyzed as belonging to a certain category, e.g. doctor or patient, by virtue of the fact that this is what their employment contract says or what the institution or other external factors (e.g. their clothes) suggest. It is at least equally if not more important, and certainly more relevant in analytic terms, that individuals are categorised as doctors or patients because they behave like doctors or patients. It is not enough for social categories to be allocated to someone from outside (e.g. the institution) for them to come into existence; they constantly

Identity as a members’ category

43

have to be (re-) negotiated in the interaction. The best proof of this is when there is discrepancy between a member’s performance of a category and the projected expectations of co-members. This does usually not go unnoticed, as demonstrated by Garfinkel in his breaching experiments (cf. 3.1.2). It is also something that distinguishes novices from experts: novices are often much more aware of doing being X (e.g. a conscientious researcher) than more experienced members of a community, for whom a lot of ways of doing have become natural (cf. also West and Zimmerman 1987 on how this strongly affects the most basic identity categories, such as gender). Not just social identities, but discourse identities, too, have to be enacted in order to come into existence (e.g. interviewer, presenter or chairperson). This becomes evident when these roles are not pre-allocated, e.g. in an informal meeting. If one person starts introducing others or allocating turns or producing formulations (summaries of what has been said), then they become the chair, in other words they do being the chair by performing that discursive role. The practical consequence of this theoretical observation is that in our study we are not going to simply categorise people from an analyst’s etic perspective as presenter, chairperson, conference organiser, but we are going to investigate from an emic perspective how – and if – the members themselves actually fulfil these roles by performing them. If is an important word here, because analysts must take care not to impose their own categories, which they may know the participants to be members of (e.g. regarding basic category collections such as gender, age, profession, etc.), but which are not necessarily performed, in other words, not made relevant, in the particular interaction to be analysed. Of course, doing being works in both directions, i.e. categories evoke certain category-bound activities, and those activities in return evoke the categories. For example, a doctor may enact his being a doctor by asking the patient a certain kind of questions (to enquire about symptoms, for example), by making a diagnosis or by making suggestions for remedies or therapeutic measures. The patient may enact his being a patient by describing his symptoms, by requiring the doctor’s opinion on a hypothetical diagnosis or by asking for the prescription of a remedy. The patient and the doctor share a certain social knowledge about the frame visit to a doctor’s surgery and thus expect a certain kind of behaviour from the other. The patient will expect the man or woman in the white coat sitting behind the desk in a surgery to

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

behave according to the category doctor and the doctor will expect patientlike behaviour from the person called in from the waiting room. To give an example for the process in the reverse direction, imagine a private party with lots of guests, and one of them suddenly feels ill. If now one of the other guests turns to the sick person and asks them questions about their symptoms, feels their pulse, takes their temperature, makes a diagnosis and gives them some medicine, while the other person responds to the questions, asks what the problem could be or asks for medicine, they would be acting out being a doctor and being a patient, even though they are not in an institutional setting and the guest who helps the other may not even be a person with a medical degree. Their behaviour still evokes those categories. The difficulty for the analyst lies in the identification of category-bound activities and in their correct assignment to their respective categories, especially as it is not always observable (and thus, describable) what the participants themselves deduce from a certain type of behaviour. One way in which participants do show their analysis of the situation (and they do this in order to display their understanding to their co-participants, of course, rather than to the analyst!) is by affiliating or disaffiliating with a certain kind of behaviour, e.g. by acting in a similar or contrasting way, modelled on the co-participant’s behaviour. Another observable phenomenon is meta-linguistic talk about members’ categories and the related category-bound activities. This is probably rare in everyday conversation, but in institutional talk, particularly in a community of practice with a high level of self-awareness and awareness of their own ways of doing, including a habit of talking or writing about how they do and how they define themselves and their ways of doing (cf. introductions to academic research or books on rules of conduct for managers), these phenomena do occur quite regularly. These texts are resources that are available to the members themselves and can therefore justifiably be used by the analyst to identify category-bound behaviour. However, we must also be aware of the fact that interaction participants are creative language users and that they may perform a certain categorybound activity to point to the exact opposite of the category usually evoked (e.g. when being ironic). Generally, these uses can be identified by studying them in the context, i.e. in the actual interactional sequence in which they occur. Moreover, we are not only interested in the kind of activities that are performed but also in how these are performed, in other words, which linguistic

Identity, self, and, face

45

devices are used to add to their indexical value (of pointing to a category). Interaction researchers call this the style of the talk, which can include lexical choices, phonetic aspects (e.g. regional accents), register (e.g. dialect or standard language) etc. This “symbolic” kind of categorisation (Auer 2007: 3), which is another way of doing being someone, is also indexical, i.e. there is no natural or even necessarily socially established link between a certain stylistic feature and a certain category. On the contrary, “their meaning is always open to situational revision, transformation and refinement” (Auer 2007: 6).

3.3 Identity, self, and, face Despite conversation analysis’ understandable reluctance to be combined with other methodological approaches, usually because they are not compatible with the strictly social, empirical and constructivist view CA adopts, we agree with Schwitalla (1996: 284) and Poro (1999: 54) that the concept of face should prove an exception to this rule. Not only can face be useful to grasp and more concretely describe processes of identity work, but it can also serve to better understand some basic procedures of interactional management.

3.3.1 Goffman’s notions of face and facework Goffman’s thoughts on social interaction were the inspiring basis for Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology as well as the sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, who developed the school of conversation analysis (cf. Heritage 1998: 3). Furthermore, Goffman’s ideas on face and facework were adopted by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987 [1978]) to provide the core of their highly influential theory of politeness. However, Brown and Levinson’s concept of face does not exactly correspond with Goffman’s version. In their theory, face is a stable entity that forms part of a person’s identity, which is not the way we view the concept in this study. Goffman (1967: 7), on the other hand, says that “ the person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter appraisals expressed in them”. According to this definition, face is first and foremost a social concept, and social concepts need to be constructed by at least two

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

people in some kind of social interaction. But what does it mean ‘to construct face’? In Goffman’s view, face or image is an idea of ourselves that we can only communicate to others through the social actions we carry out: “ A person may be said to have, or be in, or maintain face when the line he effectively takes presents an image of him that is internally consistent, that is supported by judgments and evidence conveyed by other participants” (Goffman 1967: 6). This quote exhibits a second aspect of Goffman’s definition of face: we do not only communicate our image; we also put it to a test in every social interaction and expose it to potential changes. In other words, we try to act along the lines of the face or image we see ourselves as having, and the other participants show through their actions that they recognise and accept our actions as being in agreement – or disagreement – with what they think our image is and with what they assume that we think our image is. Constructing face thus refers to a complex process of interaction participants attributing face to themselves and each other or taking face away from themselves and each other. Depending on the way we behave in social interaction, a certain kind of image will be lent to us, at first just for that particular interaction. If we have further interactions with the same participants, our consistent behaviour will lead to a certain expectation of what our image is, which might in turn create situations where other participants challenge our behaviour with reference to our expected image. In more recent interactionally oriented facework research, Poro (1999) discusses this terminology and makes a more refined distinction between self-image (Selbstbild) and other-image (Fremdbild). She also extends the term to include we-image (Wir-Bild) as the co-constructed face of a whole group of people. This image or face, this view of the self that we construct through interaction, may be changeable and hard to grasp from an analyst’s point of view, but from the perspective of the interactant it is stable enough to be in need of attention, protection and defence. Goffman speaks of a “working acceptance” (1967: 11) that interaction participants follow. This means that each participant tries to support both faces: his/her own and that of his/her partner. There are all kinds of social practices – some of them conventionalised – that participants use to carry out supportive (and sometimes non-supportive) strategies, i.e. facework. In small talk at academic conference dinners, for instance, strangers (of European cultures at least) do typically not talk about certain topics such as politics or religion that have face-threatening potential or might lead to conflicts. Instead, the food in front of them, the delegates’

Identity, self, and, face

47

research or the topics of some of the conference presentations are popular and safe topics for making conversation. Goffman does not list linguistic strategies associated with certain kinds of facework, but he mentions some general principles of linguistic interaction and how they are related to face, e.g. the need to negotiate openings and closings of interaction, the need to fine-tune the system of turn-taking, the obligation to utter hearer signals and the necessity to agree on topic change (Goffman 1967: 33ff.). However, although Goffman describes all of these principles, much of the terminology was only introduced later, mainly by Harvey Sacks in his lectures (Sacks 1995). Goffman also uses the term “interchange” (1967: 19) to refer to the relationship between interactants when it comes to face. Like in economics, symbolic objects (language in social interaction, money in economics) are exchanged in order to obtain something desirable (support of face in social interaction, goods or services in economics). In analogy to this picture, someone who has behaved in contradiction to what is expected in a particular interaction, and has offended either his own or somebody else’s face, has to make up for this offence in order to “re-establish the equilibrium” (Goffman 1967: 19) by carrying out a corrective process (Goffman 1967: 19). Again, the interactionist cannot do this alone, but needs the other participants to construct the payment together. If someone has committed a faux pas, for instance, they can offer an apology. But without acceptance, the apology does not work. Only when the interaction partner(s) have accepted it, can the corrective process be considered a success. To summarise, Goffman’s conception of face is that of a social entity which does not simply exist per se but needs to be constructed in linguistic or non-linguistic interaction. Constructing a particular face means a joint effort of all participants of an interaction to display alignment or disalignment with the values they consider this (their own or somebody else’s) face to consist of.

3.3.2

Face in Watts’ social theory of politeness

In saying that politeness is a matter of interpretation, Watts 2003 aligns himself with Goffman, whose ideas he also incorporates elsewhere, for example in his conception of face. Watts adopts the term face and, like Goffman, sees

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

it as an image of the self that is constructed through social actions and is mutually attributed by the speaker and their co-participants to each other. Watts’ understanding of the concept of face is closely related to Goffman’s in that it is considered a social construction, which means that it is subject to as well as the result of an interactive process. It is an “image of the self” (Goffman) that does not reside in an individual per se but only comes into existence in social interaction. In other words, one’s face is closely linked to individual interactive situations and to the (sometimes institutionalised) role or roles a participant is expected to take in a particular social activity. Following from that, any kind of facework (= here, work on constructing face, or image(s) of the self) will necessarily also be connected with these roles or lines: “Facework involves the reciprocal social attribution of face to the participants in social interaction in accordance with the line or lines the participants can be assumed to be taking in the interaction” (Watts 2003: 131). In other words, the term facework encloses all actions (verbal or non-verbal) that contribute towards the maintenance or deconstruction of each other’s face. Watts gives the example of a radio moderator who takes phone-in calls from his listeners. He characterises the typical verbal behaviour of the participants of a phone-in call (on British radio) in the following six brief statements (Watts 2003: 131): a.

The moderator of an open-line phone-in programme takes calls from members of the general public and chats with them on a subject of the caller’s choice.

b.

The moderator generally only deals with one topic per caller.

c.

The audience that have tuned in to the programme want to be entertained, not bored or intimidated.

d.

Callers expect to be addressed by their first names and expect to be able to address the moderator by hers/his.

e.

Callers and audience expect the moderator to be friendly, sympathetic and helpful, to be able to share a joke, to be in a sense one of them etc.

f.

Callers must accept the completion of the conversation when the moderator signals the preclosing and closing conversational moves.

This is the behaviour likely to be constructed as appropriate in the social activity radio phone-in call and is part of the knowledge (or habitus, a term

Identity, self, and, face

49

Watts takes from Bourdieu (1967)) both the radio host and regular listeners have acquired through experience (or socialisation). Actions that do not fit within this framework, for instance, a host who is unnecessarily polite (in the sense of formal) with a caller, might actually come across as rude because he is not behaving in line with the faces attributed to him and the caller (cf. statements d) and e) above). Similarly, a caller who does not accept the moderator’s privilege to close the conversation and does not stop talking or drops out of the interaction by hanging up takes away face from the moderator. In other words, if a participant falls out of line, they are committing a facethreatening act because they are not respecting the general principle of mutual face maintenance and construction. However, the participant will usually try to make up for this. Their efforts to show through conciliatory behaviour that they are still respecting face maintenance are described by Watts as “supportive facework” (2003: 132). However, it depends very much on the type of interaction whether a particular kind of linguistic or non-linguistic behaviour is considered face threatening or not. In interactions with close family members, for example, or in political discussions, a lot more face threatening acts (i.e. behaviour out of line) are permitted than in a conversation with a stranger, while the behaviour is still considered to be in accordance with the lines of the participants. Consequently, we find varying amounts of facework in different types of interaction. In social activities involving strangers or those intended to appear conflictual (e.g. news interviews with politicians, TV debates) there is generally only little facework, whereas we have found that in our data (academic discussions at conferences) facework is frequently undertaken, firstly because the participants do not know each other at all or not very well and secondly, because the general line is one of cooperation rather than confrontation. On the other hand, there are many typical sequences in interaction with ritualised strategies of facework “whose purpose is to regulate the lines taken in the interaction order and to ensure overall face maintenance” (Watts 2003: 132), e.g. greetings, requests, apologies etc. Watts argues that there are two kinds of behaviour that in traditional politeness theories are subsumed under the same name. Firstly, there is the normal kind of social behaviour, i.e. the behaviour that we expect of each other in a particular situation, which Watts calls non-salient or politic behaviour and which corresponds more or less with Goffman’s idea of the ritualised organisation of social encounters (1967: 53). Goffman says that under normal circumstances all interaction participants follow certain rules, for example re-

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

garding facework, in order to keep up an orderly form of interaction. Without these unspoken rules interactions would not work: A person’s performance of face-work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. [...] And as I shall suggest, if the person were not a ritually delicate object, occasions of talk could not be organized in the way they usually are (Goffman 1967: 31).

Moreover, “ordinarily, maintenance of face is a condition of interaction, not its objective” (Goffman 1967: 12). In Watts’ definition, “politic behaviour is that behaviour, linguistic and non-linguistic, which the participants construct as being appropriate to the ongoing social interaction” (2003: 20). Participants (= members of society) construct certain forms of behaviour as appropriate by reproducing these forms of behaviour in social interaction, and by making them relevant to a particular type of interaction. The process of learning about different kinds of appropriate behaviour is called socialisation and is both culture and language specific Again, the rules of what is constructed as appropriate are often most visible when they are violated. Watts gives a very illustrative anecdotal example of non-linguistic social interaction in which he failed to reproduce the appropriate or politic behaviour because he had not yet been socialised into the culture in question. The anecdote is about him going to a local butcher’s in a small town in Switzerland. Unlike in Britain (Watts’ country of origin) the customers of this butcher’s do not form a queue when shopping, but they still construct an orderly kind of interaction with each other and the butcher. They achieve this by conducting themselves in the following way: each time the butcher asks for the next customer, the person who believes it is their turn (normally one of the people closest to the counter) looks around to check if the turn is not likely to be claimed by someone else and, if there is no such reaction, puts themselves forward as the next customer. When Watts went shopping at this butcher’s, he did not realise that this was the normal procedure. So, when the butcher asked who was next and Watts was standing close enough to the front to be potentially selected, he uttered his request without assuring himself that there was no one else who had been waiting for longer. As there was indeed a person who had been there for longer, Watts’ non-standard behaviour was met with indignant looks and even verbal reactions of disapproval by the other customers, who conse-

Identity, self, and, face

51

quently attributed to him the face of arrogant foreigner. Through damaging someone else’s face (that of the customer whose turn it would have been) and so literally stepping out of line, the ignorant customer damaged his own face, too (Watts 2003: 120–121). Apart from being a case of non-verbal deviation from politic behaviour, this anecdote illustrates two things: firstly, that appropriate social behaviour is culture specific and secondly, that face is dependent on mutual attention by the participants who display behaviour appropriate to it. Both of these aspects are also visible in our data: Academic discourse and – more specifically – academic discussions at conferences belong to that particular culture of the academic or scientific community into which one needs to be socialised in order to be able to behave appropriately. Academic discourse only works, i.e. runs smoothly, if everyone follows certain unwritten rules about what is expected. These expectations are also linked to the faces participants construct for themselves and others, e.g. a face claim of being an expert has to be displayed by behaving in line with this face. Both the person claiming expert status and his/her interactants have to display such behaviour in order to (re)construct this kind of face.

3.3.3 Integrating the concept of face in a CA approach Conversation analysis is not normally combined with facework research, despite their shared roots in Erving Goffman’s work. This is due to some fundamental differences in their research perspectives, for instance in the way communication is conceptualised (encoding and decoding information versus co-constructing meaning) and in the way it is analysed (etic versus emic perspective). However, if the bulk of psychologically oriented facework research is left aside and we concentrate only on Goffman’s original definition of face, enriched by more recent social theories of facework such as described in 3.3.2, it is possible and makes sense to include face in a CA study, particularly when the focus of analysis is on identity construction. In fact, Goffman saw facework as a basic interactional principle and said that it was a prerequisite for any interaction to work (Goffman 1967). While Goffman’s perspective was at least partly psychological and in that way not compatible with CA (cf. Schegloff 1988), the following interpretation of Goffman’s idea by Kerbrat-Orecchioni gives it a more social orientation: “ce n’est donc pas d’un principe moral qu’il s’agit ici, mais d’une condi-

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

tion r´egulatrice dont d´epend fondamentalement la viabilit´e de l’´echange” [it is therefore not a moral principle that we are dealing with here but a regulatory condition on which the viability of the exchange fundamentally depends] (1991: 56). This view comes very close to Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) description of an underlying order in social interaction that is part of an agreement shared by all members and that they permanently orient to. If facework is seen as part of such a shared agreement, it is not an aim of social interaction but one of its constitutive factors, an element that cannot be separated from interaction. In this study, face is conceptualised as interactively constructed, just like Goffman suggests in his original definition (1967). His idea that an individual’s face is something that emerges from the ongoing interaction and something that needs to be attended to by all participants is in line with CA’s conception of interaction as a collaborative achievement. Facework – like any other interactional behaviour – is seen as dependent on and carried out within the sequential order of the interaction. In other words, the analysis of face in this study does not simply aim to describe isolated utterances and categorise them under different strategies (which would be an etic approach). Instead, facework is understood and analysed as a process that consists of participants’ constant interpretation and negotiation of their – and each other’s – faces and of what is considered politic behaviour. This means that social actions such as face claims, face threats etc. are not analysed as simple performances (or speech acts) by individuals, but as one step in a whole facework process in which claims, threats, flatterings etc. are only potentials that need to be interpreted and treated as such by the coparticipants in order to develop this potential. With CA methods we cannot analyse the intention behind an individual’s action (that would be psychology) but what is visibly / hearably made of these actions in the course of the interaction. As far as facework terminology is concerned, I am aware of the sensitive ground I enter when trying to integrate it into a CA analysis. For practical reasons, however, I will continue to operate with the terms face and face threat, but using them in a decidedly social – rather than psychological – sense. I will also use Poro’s (1999) terms self-image, other-image and we-image as well as the terminology provided by Watts concerning politic behaviour (behaving in line with a certain face).

Identity construction as a means to an end

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3.4 Identity construction as a means to an end 3.4.1 Social positioning Conversational rhetoric (Gespr¨achsrhetorik), a branch of interaction studies developed by German scholars (e.g. Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996; SpranzFogasy 2002; Schmitt 2003), is interested in the conversational strategies interaction participants use to achieve goals in interaction. The research focus lies on the way in which basic activities to structure interactions are employed by participants ultimately to secure their own interests. Although conversation analysis methods are employed, the focus shifts from the general orderliness of interaction and the structure of the sequence to the individual participant’s perspective and their strategies to achieve certain aims (Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996: 10). From this point of view, the interaction order becomes a double-layered system: it provides both the framework within which participants operate and a tool they can use strategically to achieve their aims. Conversational rhetoric analyses participants’ rhetorical strategies, i.e. any verbal and non-verbal communicative strategies interaction participants use to secure their interests, by tracing their interactional development and by pointing out the risks and opportunities different interactional moves entail. The result is a description of the “rhetoric potential” of linguistic strategies in a certain context (Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996: 11). Despite the possibility to use these insights for a critical review of interactional methods and the appropriateness of linguistic devices, the primary aim of conversational rhetoric is descriptive rather than normative. One particular focus of conversational rhetoric is the constitution of social identities (Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996: 14). One of the rhetorical techniques interaction participants apply, and which is particularly relevant for identity construction, is described by Ricarda Wolf as “social positioning” (Wolf 1999). She shows how interactants attribute social categories to themselves (and others) in order to control the interaction and, ultimately, to pursue their own interests. As we have seen earlier, categorizing activities are part of the fundamental structure of interactions and contribute to the interaction order generally, but here the interest lies in their function as a measure to control the sequential development of an interaction and to enlarge the participant’s scope of action (Wolf 1999: 73). The ways in which participants perform social positioning stretch from explicit categorisations (As a linguist I would say . . .), descriptions of one’s

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

current situation or feelings, biographical categorisations and narratives about oneself to less obvious, and partly non-verbal, activities such as a particular way of behaving or the use of particular symbols. The last two strategies are particularly dependent on being analysed within the sequential context, as only the orientation of the participants and the specific constellation of the situation can tell if a particular behaviour is indicative of a certain categorization or not (cf. also the section on membership categorization devices, 3.2.2). Wolf also makes use of Goffman’s notion of face and facework, which, similar to the categorization/social positioning concept, is both constitutive and strategic in its interactional application (i.e. it is a necessary factor in the organisation of interaction and as such also constitutes a tool members can manipulate to achieve certain interactional effects). Social positioning is one such strategy, and participants employ it to secure their interests in interaction. This manoeuvre can be successful or unsuccessful, depending on the further sequential development and the co-interlocutors’ reactions and orientations to the positioning (Wolf 1999: 82). Wolf analyzes several examples of talk and lists a number of conditions that contribute to the success of social positioning. First of all, social positioning does not normally occur out of the blue. It is always embedded in a conversational context from which the other participants – as well as the analyst – can gather indications about its meaning and relevance in this sequence, i.e. about the conversational goal the participant intends with this strategy. The same interactional context will also influence the success of the strategy, which only works if it is appropriately placed in the sequence. Secondly, it is important that the social category and the moment chosen for its introduction are “socially compatible” (Wolf 1999: 80). According to Wolf, this is linked with the fact that social categorization has a stronger impact on face than other strategies and is therefore a particularly powerful tool, which can support or disrupt the interaction order. She gives the example of a discussion between a journalist and a group of people from an organisation for the improvement of East-West-relations in Germany (Wolf 1999: 77–80). The journalist wants to talk about the language situation and possible communication barriers between East and West Germans. At the beginning of the discussion she directly addresses one of the people from the group by categorizing her as a linguist and expert in the matter of discussion. When the addressee hesitates to answer and hedges her talk, the journalist takes the floor again and says that this hesitation is typical for a scientist and maybe

Identity construction as a means to an end

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it would be easier for somebody else to say something. The face-threatening potential of this utterance is inappropriately high. In other words, the facethreatening act does not fit in this context because there is no reason for it to occur: there is no imbalance of the interaction order, and the tone of the interaction is generally not aggressive. Hence, this behaviour is not “socially compatible” (Wolf 1999). Wolf goes on to describe a further problem in connection with the social compatibility of social positioning: because social categories are often organised in complementary pairs, the activation of one category may automatically evoke the other (Wolf 1999: 80). For instance, the categorisation of one person in a group as knowledgeable and the expert may cast the rest of the group in the category non-experts or not knowledgeable and have negative consequences for the development of the interaction. A third aspect that contributes to the success of social positioning is the interactional role of the person employing this strategy. The person in the more powerful role in a particular interaction situation (i.e. the person with wider scope of action) has a better chance to control the potential outcomes of social positioning than others. This is the case in one of Wolf’s examples, an instance of doctor-patient communication, in which the patient cannot use her self-positioning to her advantage, because the doctor (= the more powerful interactant due to her role of advice-giver and possessor of expert knowledge) uses the patient’s resources for her own interactional goals. Finally, the participants’ shared cultural knowledge is an integral part of the successful application of social positioning. The social categories that are used can only fulfil their potential if the interactants agree on the values and implications connected with these categories. Otherwise they are not meaningful and thus not relevant for the interactional development. To illustrate some of these points, Wolf gives the example of a conversation where social positioning is not successful. A mother and her daughter are arguing about whether the 20-year-old daughter should stay overnight with her boyfriend of one and a half months (M= mother; D= daughter): Example 3.4 (Wolf 1999: 81–82) 01 D:

... ich bin zwa”nzig jahr und da kannst du dich jetz nicht mehr ... I’m twenty years old and now you can no longer

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

02

ei”nmischen * ich find des als nix schlimmes und ich mach des interfere I don’t think this is bad and I’ll do this

03

so wie ich=s denk ↓ (. . . ) → ich muss gute erfahrungen machen und ich the way I think about it (. . . ) I have to have good experiences and I

04

muss schle”chte machen← un du kannst mich nich davor HOLT LUFT have to have bad ones and you can’t BREATHES IN

05

vor schlechten erfahrungen bewahrn ich muss die se”lber Machen protect me from bad experiences I have to make them myself

06 M:

sabine aber vergiss nicht deine mutter- deine mutter is f¨unfzich↑ sabine but don’t forget your mother- your mother is fifty

07

* und deine mutter * macht jugendarbeit und deine mutter * hat and your mother works as a youth worker and your mother works

08

mit se:hr vielen jugendlichen zu tun * und ich beobacht=es * with a lot of young people and I observe it

09

diese ga”nz schnellen * schlafbekanntschaften die ham noch nie these really quick sleep acquaintances they have never been

10

was getaugt ↓ any good

11

(...) (...)

12 M:

ich wei”ß es nich ich als m¨adel- * t¨at im lebta:g nich * mich so I don’t know I as a girl- I would never in my life give myself

13

preisgeben↑ away like this

14 D:

des w¨arst du” un des hast du vielleicht nie gemacht↑ * aber wenn you’d be like this and you have maybe never done this but if

15

ich die erfahrung mach des ich muss se”lber meine erfahrungen I have the experience that I have to have my own experiences

Identity construction as a means to an end 16

57

machen du kannst mich doch nich- * und mit zwa”nzig schon ga”r you cannot and certainly not at twenty

17

nich mehr (. . . ) du kannst mich einfach nich davor bewahrn dass ich not anymore (. . . ) you can simply not protect me from

18

auch mal ne schle”chte erfah/ des muss ich selber machen des is having bad experiences too I have to have them myself it’s

19

mei”n leben my life

The mother performs an act of social positioning in lines 6–8 when she categorises herself as a) Sabine’s mother, b) someone quite a lot older than her daughter (fifty) and c) someone who works with young people and therefore has a lot of experience. However, the categorization comes at a bad time in the sequence because the daughter has already made it clear that her own age forbids that the previous mother-daughter relationship still works on the same level. The categorization of mother as someone who can tell Sabine what to do and what not to do is rejected before the mother even starts positioning herself. The categorization as someone with experience does not work, either, because, as the daughter repeats in a later turn (lines 15–19) she has to learn from her own experiences, and she has to experience good as well as bad things in order to learn from them. The mother then tries a different strategy and positions herself on the same level as Sabine (I as a girl, line 12), but that, too, is unsuccessful, and does not bring her and her daughter any closer in this matter. To summarise, the social positioning of the mother does not fall on fertile ground because the daughter has already blocked it. Therefore, the strategy does not bear fruit and does not manage to ease the conflict. Social positioning as a conversation rhetorical strategy is an important device to consider when studying self-presentation and identity construction. If we define identity as socially constructed images of self and other that we display to and negotiate with others, it is essential to study what we do with these images and how we use them for our purposes in interaction. 3.4.2 Stylization of self and other Concepts of style and stylization such as those described in this section allow us to integrate a more form-oriented linguistic analysis into our study

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The dynamic discursive nature of identity

of social interaction. Linguistic research on styles and stylization studies the ways in which variations of language use are actively employed by speakers in order to achieve certain interactional tasks, among them the constitution of self. In this sense, (speech) style could be seen as a rhetorical device and is therefore part of this chapter on conversational rhetorics. We follow Selting and Hinnenkamp (1989) and Selting and Sandig (1997) in their perception of style as an interactional mechanism that should be studied from the viewpoint of “interpretative sociolinguistics”, a concept they trace back to John Gumperz (Selting and Hinnenkamp 1989: 1). According to them, the term “Gespr¨achsstil” (‘interaction style’) denotes a members’ category, namely the specific, meaningful way in which an interaction, or a part of it, is constructed (Selting and Sandig 1997: 2). Interaction styles are used by interactants to display their orientation towards (and re-construction of) the conventional requirements of a particular activity type, which are understood as a “fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions” (Levinson 1992: 69). Levinson’s definition is adopted here, although with the modification that participants are not passively subjected to these constraints, but are actively producing their talk in such a way that it constitutes a certain activity type (in the sense of doing being), including categorybound activities. If members are considered active subjects, it must be possible to use interaction styles to achieve certain interactional goals. A foreign language teacher, for instance, might normally use a fairly authoritative style in interacting with her students, but switch to a more informal interaction style in order to change the learning situation, for instance to practise small talk with the group. Interaction style is not seen as a pre-determined conditional requirement or feature of a particular role or of an activity type, but as a flexible and dynamic tool interactants make creative use of in order to constitute certain roles or activities. A typical use of style for interactional purposes is a change of style to indicate the transition to a new interactional sequence, for instance when a speaker at a formal opening lecture at a conference moves on to a more informal announcement about where the delegates could meet up for dinner. Stylistic changes indicate to the interaction partner that the talk is now changing direction, and that the new part is supposed to be interpreted as different from the previous one. This view of style coincides largely with the notion of contextualisation, developed by Gumperz (1982), and is similar to Goffman’s

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(1979) concept of footing. One of the means for contextualising language is “linguistic variation” (Auer 1992: 7), and, as we have seen earlier, that is one possible definition of interactional style. Contextualisation, however, encompasses not only the whole range of prosody but also non-linguistic behaviour such as gaze, gesture, mimics, and posture. Whether style is seen as a contextualisation device or as a rhetorical strategy, interpretation is certainly a vital element of an interactional conception of style. Participants co-construct style by producing and interpreting it; they can either collaborate to negotiate and create a common style, or they can use opposing styles to distinguish themselves from each other (Selting and Sandig 1997: 4). A wide range of stylistic features is available to speakers: prosodic, morphological, lexical and syntactical phenomena, rhetorical devices (metaphors, irony, etc.) as well as elements such as stereotypes and categorisations, but also more global strategies such as the organisation of the interaction (or the sequence) as a whole (Selting and Sandig 1997: 3–4). Moreover, style is not only a question of how talk is produced, but also of what is said in the talk, in other words, which contents are selected (and which left out), and in what way they are employed to constitute social meaning (Spiegel 1997: 288). A further term in connection with language styles – stylization – refers to “the (re)production or (re)presentation of socially conventionalised images and patterns that were acquired in the socialisation process” (Spiegel 1997: 288). In other words, certain speech styles (i.e. recognizable and distinguishable ways of talking), often ones that are typically associated with a certain social category (e.g. a certain profession), are employed co-occuringly (G¨unthner 1996: 95) to form a coherent stylization of an indidvidual’s self. This usually involves a whole number of stylistic devices. Prosodic features, for instance, are a particularly fruitful area for style and stylization research. Interactants can produce several stylizations in one interaction, which all contribute to a global presentation of their selves. Stylizations can also be used to characterise another speaker in one’s own talk (cf. also Bakhtin’s (1969) concept of different voices in one speaker), e.g. when telling a story or a joke (Kotthoff 1997b). To summarise, and following Spiegel (1997: 287), one could describe style in interaction as a system of interrelated steps: interaction participants create styles by applying certain stylistic features (e.g. prosodic patterns or rhetorical devices) to their talk. A combination of styles commonly associated with a certain social category makes up the act of stylization of self or

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other. And the various stylizations in an interaction contribute to the interactants’ constructions of self and other.

Chapter 4 Ethnographic background

Conversation analysis does not normally include ethnographic research or fieldwork to support the analysis of interactions (Wooffitt 2005 :63). The deliberate choice not to rely on ethnographic data about the speakers whose talk is analysed is linked to CA’s view of interaction as a unit of analysis in its own right and, more importantly, as a display of context-orientation. In other words, from a CA perspective, the relevant context of an interaction is supposed to be made evident by participants’ talk and by their orientation to this context. Supplementary information about the context of the talk would not only be unnecessary; it might even disturb the analysis if external categories were superimposed on the interactants and their actions. Yet, we feel that institutional talk in particular benefits from a small amount of ethnographic detail (cf. also M¨uller 2002: 188–189; Mondada 2003: 34–35; Furchner 1997: 16; Deppermann 2000), in particular for two reasons: Firstly – and this is especially true for research in discourse communities with which we are not familiar – the practices of institutional talk can be highly cryptic for an outside. Many undertones may be lost to the analyst even though the interaction participants have clearly displayed their understanding to each other, for instance by assuming previously established, shared knowledge. In such cases, ethnographic knowledge about the way the community works can help to assume the perspective of a member – one of the postulates of ethnomethodology (cf. Garfinkel 1967). Secondly, and seemingly in opposition to the first reason, an ethnographic, methodical description of the institutional setting may help the analyst gain more distance and thus acquire a less biased view of the data, particularly if the institution is very familiar. It can prevent not being able to see the wood for trees, in other words, to avoid taking certain interactional phenomena for granted. In our case, both justifications of an ethnographic description are valid due to the specific constellation of the research project and myself, the researcher: the community whose discourse is analysed here is still relatively new to me as a junior researcher. Going to conferences has not yet become routine practice for me, and I still have to learn much of the savoir-faire of more experienced researchers. Conversely, I am familiar with the community because I

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myself am a member of it and have been observing and imitating their customs and behaviour for some time. A structured, ethnographic description of the way academics organise themselves and their community events will help to render explicit anything which is usually overlooked, taken for granted or even denied. This is where I enter this text as a social actor myself, stepping out of my role of impartial, objective observer and reporter. Although this may be unusual scientific practice, it is necessary here because the research object calls for it. Since academic researchers are usually socialised into their discourse community through studying at universities or similar higher education institutions and through practising the necessary skills in seminars, we might assume the textbooks used in these contexts (e.g. introductions to academic research skills or academic writing) to be reliable sources of information about some of the shared values and knowledge in the community, particularly concerning its “discoursal expectations” (Swales 1990:26) , that is, the way the members use language, which genres they employ, etc. However, these books on academic skills are generally limited to writing competences, while giving academic paper presentations and coping in discussions is hardly ever explicitly taught (cf. Ventola, Shalom, and Thompson 2002). This may be due to the fact that only few students from an undergraduate or even graduate programme will actually become scientists. Whatever the reason for it, it certainly contributes to the unwritten rules of the game of academia (cf. Kenway, Epstein, and Boden 2005: 3) that simply have to be acquired in practice. It also means that we will have to rely quite heavily on own knowledge as members of the community to describe the ethnographic profile of the community, particularly in chapter 4.

4.1 Structure of conferences When looking at encyclopedic definitions of the term academic conference (e.g. Wikipedia, Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary), we learn that it is an event in which a number of academics or other researchers take part. We are also told that it can vary in length and last up to several days. As to the activities taking place at the event, different reference books tell us different things. There are those that underline the presentation-aspect of conferences and others that stress the discussion-character. What they all point out, however, is the high level of

Structure of conferences

63

formality ruling at such events. Indeed, academic conferences generally follow tried and tested schemes that make it easy for established researchers to find their way around. Basically, their structure consists of a mixture of what the above-mentioned dictionaries describe: presentations and discussions. Although the different research disciplines each have their own ways of designing individual presentation sessions (cf. for example Shalom 1993; Ventola, Shalom, and Thompson 2002), they all include periods of just one person talking – which is when the researchers present their results – and periods during which all participants get the opportunity to speak: those are called discussions. At larger conferences, there are usually two kinds of presentations: plenary sessions and workshops. During plenary talks all conference delegates listen to one speaker, generally a well-established researcher in the field, at the same time. These sessions do not always provide the opportunity to ask questions afterwards. By contrast, workshops – also called paper presentation sessions – always include discussions. They focus on specific aspects of the main conference theme and are often held in parallel sessions, which forces conference participants to choose between them and therefore split up into smaller groups. The workshops themselves are organised according to a timetable put together by the conference organisers. Eija Ventola proposes the following outline of the structure of a standard paper presentation session at a conference: SECTION AT A CONFERENCE Chair

– Opening the Section

SECTION PAPER Chair

– Introducing the Speaker

Speaker

– Thanking for Introduction

Speaker

– Contextualising the Paper

Speaker

– The Paper and its generic structure (e.g. Introduction,

& Materials, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion) Speaker

– Thanking the Audience

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Ethnographic background

Audience

– Thanking the Speaker (non-verbal)

Chair

– Thanking the Speaker

ITS DISCUSSION Chair

– Opening the Discussion

Discussant

– Question / Comment

Speaker

– Answer / Response

Chair

– Closing the Discussion

→ Chair

– Closing the Section

Figure 1: Conference session structure (Ventola 2002: 29)

This scheme represents the overall structure of most of the sessions in our data. At one of the conferences in our corpus (Conference 2), however, the discussions of the papers did not immediately follow each presentation, but were all gathered together at the end of a section (morning / afternoon), the intention being that more connections between the presentations might be made, that therefore more semiotic spanning (= the intertextuality of conferences) could be created, – and that hence the discussion would become more lively and enriching. At the conferences in our data – and at most linguistics or literature conferences – conference organisers generally allow between 20 and 30 minutes for the presentation and another 5 to 10 minutes for a short discussion immediately following the talk, unless all discussions are postponed to the end of the section. The internal structure of these discussions generally consists of a number of questions for the presenter asked by various members of the audience. Turn allocation is usually managed by a chairperson who tries to make sure each questioner is allowed to speak at least once. Self-selection of a questioner is not normally allowed (apart from Conference 2), so follow-up questions are not easy to achieve. Moreover, a tight schedule and therefore strict time limit often mean that the individual contributions remain isolated and cannot develop into a proper discussion. However, since conferences usually stretch over several days, discussion topics can be carried over to the informal parts of the conference programme and debated further over lunch or dinner.

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An academic discussion does not necessarily end with the closing lecture of a conference, but often spreads beyond and is ideationally linked with other discourses in preceding and subsequent conferences, papers or other publications. According to Ventola, conferences should therefore be considered “multimodal events which have links to the past and to the future” (2002: 44). These include textual, visual, experimental and oral events. Ventola suggests describing the connection between all these activities and different discourses with the term “semiotic spanning”. She also points out that the more “semiotic spanning” exists at a conference and the more accessible the references to semiotic spanning are to all participants, the more likely the conference will be perceived as successful.

4.2 Types of contributions in conference discussions This chapter provides a general description of the interactions in our data, seeing discussions at academic conferences as a particular communicative genre (Luckmann 1986) or activity type (Levinson 1992) with a conventionalised structure that will be described in the following. Paper presentations during academic conferences in the humanities usually take place in relatively small groups of up to about 30 people. There are of course large conferences where some presentation sessions have a bigger audience, and there are small conferences where the group size of the individual workshops is smaller. In our data, the paper presentations are attended by approximately 10–20 people on average. The atmosphere is thus more intimate than in plenary sessions, and chairpersons can gain an overview of the discussants relatively easily. The small number of participants also encourages the development of discussions among the participants in addition to disconnected, individual question-answer sequences between the presenter and individual discussants. The more specialised the research field of a conference, the more homogeneous the groups of researchers. At a general conference on applied linguistics the backgrounds of the researchers will be much more diverse than those of the delegates at a conference on, for instance, French morphology. The participants of the latter are also more likely to know each other or at least to have read some of each other’s works. In some very closely-knit research communities, going to a conference is like a meeting of old friends and colleagues. Judging from the composition of the workshop group, expe-

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rienced delegates often know beforehand what they can most likely expect from a presenter’s talk as well as from the ensuing discussion. At larger conferences, they cannot know this, so there is always an element of surprise and a need to select carefully which presentation one wants to attend. At the more intimate conferences, on the other hand, the fact that everyone knows each other can sometimes lead to particularly combative discussions and heated arguments, because in some cases participants have been disagreeing about a particular issue for years. As for the spatial organisation of paper presentation sessions, there are two main forms of setup. One option is to arrange some tables in the shape of a horseshoe with the opening at the presenter’s end and to have the participants sit around the outside of these tables. Another option is to set up the chairs like in a lecture hall, with the rows all facing in the same direction. In both models the presenter stands or sits at the front and has a black/white board, a flipchart, an overhead projector or a digital projector and laptop/computer at their disposal. In the horseshoe version, the participants can all see each other, whereas in the lecture hall format, people’s gaze is always directed towards the front. This is why in this constellation questioners sometimes stand up to produce their contribution, so that everyone can see them. As a consequence of these setup formats, questions uttered in the horseshoe model feel like contributions to a discussion to which everyone is potentially invited (Conference II in our data): The person who asks a question faces the other participants as well as the presenter and can easily direct their gaze and body orientation towards everyone. Moreover, the presenters themselves – particularly if they are sitting down – are felt to be more part of the group in this setup. The communication in lecture hall constellations, on the other hand, creates the more regulated and less dynamic atmosphere of a string of individual question-answer sequences (Conferences I and III in our data). It is particularly the relative lack of visual connection between the participants in the latter type of setup that makes a chairperson absolutely necessary. In both setups described above, the contributions by the members of the audience can take a variety of forms. Although they are often labelled questions (as in question-answer session; The floor is open to questions now), they are not necessarily syntactically interrogatives and may not even be questions in a pragmatic sense (i.e. requests for information). And yet, the participants reliably identify all contributions from the audience as questions and expect the presenter to respond to them by giving an answer. Like in many insti-

Types of contributions in conference discussions

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tutional contexts, questions in academic conference discussions are simply “what occur in particular turn slots of the institutions’ interactional dance” (Tracy and Robles 2009: 134). This section presents possible ways of sorting the different kinds of such slot occurrences from our data into a limited number of categories. This provides a first glimpse of the complexities involved in something as seemingly straightforward as a question-answer session. It also serves as an overview of the different kinds of turns that will later be analysed mainly from the perspective of their identity construction potential. But the analyses in chapter 6 will also reveal that the categories gathered here are only crude instruments to grasp the meaning and function of a turn. Ultimately, the categorisation – or rather, interpretation – of a turn as a question, as criticism, as a suggestion, or as an answer, a defence or a counter-suggestion can only be done on a turn-by-turn basis in a co-constructive effort by the interaction participants and can be understood by them and by the analyst only within its sequential context. Webber (2002: 231) proposes the following classification of contributions in paper presentation discussions or question-answer sessions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Information-eliciting questions a) about facts, b) about opinions Criticism or attack Suggestions Comments Mixed comments + information-eliciting questions

Although we find examples for all of these contribution types in our data, Webber’s model is not entirely adequate for our purposes in several respects. Firstly, the categories – particularly the first one – are much too large to be analytically effective. The first category does not specify what kind of facts are requested (which proves to be an important distinction in our corpus, cf. below) whereas the second is an overarching principle that could be referring to more than one of the different kinds of contributions. For instance, it could be argued that suggestions are inherently a kind of criticism since they express the desire for a change or addition that the presenter has not considered. Secondly, the contributions in our corpus have revealed important features that are not covered by Webber’s model, while some of the distinctions in her model are not relevant in our data. Some of these incompatibilities are probably due to the fact that Webber’s classification is based on the analysis of

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discussions at medical conferences, which represents a way of doing and discussing research very different from the humanities’ discourse. The study of our corpus, for instance, has revealed that the difference between a fact and an opinion is often very small and even negligible, especially when one defines a fact as a piece of knowledge which is generally accepted as being true, while an opinion is a subjective view of a matter. The humanities with their interpretative research tradition and their multitude of different schools of thought rely much more on what Webber calls opinion, i.e. a particular research perspective, than on pure facts, because sometimes even the facts or the way these facts are presented are a matter of opinion and are influenced by a certain way of doing research (e.g. working with invented examples vs. doing corpus analyses). In order to provide a more in-depth view of our corpus we have thus refined Webber’s classification and ranked the various sub-categories according to their face-threatening potential. In terms of conversational rhetoric (cf. chapter 3.4) this amounts to the description of the interactional potential that can be generated by these types of contributions. Our categorisation takes into account that almost all contributions in a discussion phase have the potential to be interpreted as criticism, since in our interactional study what counts is what the participants co-construct. The impact of the contributions in terms of facework depends largely on the extent to which the question threatens the addressee’s academic competence. In the following list the types of information-eliciting questions, as they emerged from the study of our corpus, are arranged in order from the potentially most face-threatening to the potentially least face-threatening. Information-eliciting questions may concern 1. the research question (Is it worthwhile pursuing it?) 2. the research methodology / theory (Is the methodology adequate for the purpose? Has it been carried out correctly / adequately?) 3. the terminology / categories (Is the terminology appropriate / correct / consistent?) 4. the research results (corresponds more or less with Webber’s “facts”) 5. the researcher’s personal experience / view 6. the data (How is the corpus structured? Which phenomena appear in it?) 7. bibliographical information (Which literature could they recommend? Where did they find X?)

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More face-threatening questions are generally produced as markedly dispreferred: the turns are longer, the number of hedges is higher, and there are more repairs and reformulations than in other turns. The contributions that are constructed in such a way focus on aspects that are central to a researcher’s professional identity: an innovative and relevant research topic, a sound and comprehensible methodology, a clear and adequate terminology and the concise and logical presentation of the research results. Questions concerning these topics carry the highest risk of exposing the addressee, in other words, they are the most face-threatening. Questions regarding matters on which the presenter has limited or no influence, such as the actual data (e.g. recordings of talk or literary works), or the bibliographical references, on the other hand, are treated as less or non-threatening. Sometimes, they are even explicitly oriented to as less important and marginal. A similar categorisation of questions in academic conference discussions is described by Shalom (1993: 45), who ranks them on a scale from neutral to evaluative, according to the focus of the question, ranging from aim / problem / research parameters / assumptions etc. on the more neutral end of the scale to gaps in knowledge and new aims / further work on the more evaluative end. She also indicates that different kinds of questions are treated differently by their addressees, because she allocates different speech acts to the responses: for the “neutral key”, for instance, she lists “stating”, “describing”, and “indicating”, while the “evaluative key” encompasses “justifying”, “accepting” and “challenging”. The second group of discussion contributions, as they emerged from our analysis, is that of suggestions. Suggestions may propose 1. a different way to express a thought (presented, for instance, as a formulation, cf. 6.4.) 2. a different attitude towards a topic 3. a different / new description of a phenomenon 4. an additional factor to be considered 5. further research ideas / different ways to approach the phenomenon 6. possible phenomena in the data to be investigated In addition, it is relevant whether the suggestion is displayed as carefully planned and possibly even inspired by the questioner’s own research in the field or whether it is presented as a spontaneous idea. It may even be of interest if the utterance is phrased as referring to the past or the future

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The contributions categorised as suggestions in our corpus form a more complex category concerning their face-threatening potential. According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 65f), suggestions always imply a high face threat, since they put pressure on the addressee to perform or not perform certain actions and thus limit their freedom of action. In other words, suggestions can be glossed as appeals to somebody to do something, or criticism for not having done something already. In our data we observed three different factors involved in constituting the level of face-threat of a suggestion: the kind of content the suggestion aims at, the amount of planning involved in its construction, combined with the display of the questioner’s expertise in the field, and the temporal direction of the utterance. Questioners have different ways of justifying or authorising their suggestion: their contribution weighs more if it is presented as carefully planned and based on their own experience in the field rather than being a spontaneous idea emerging from the discussion at hand. In addition, we must remember that suggestions do not only point to the future (you should do / vous devriez faire) but also to the past (you should have done / vous auriez dˆu faire): if the latter perspective is foregrounded, they potentially indicate the shortcomings of a research paper or presentation and highlight aspects that were not – but should have been – included. The temporal perspective of a suggestion can not only be displayed by the tense of the verb and the clause type (e.g. interrogative/past tense: Avez-vous essay´e de. . . ? ‘Have you tried to. . . ?’ or declarative/modal verb with future reference: On pourrait peut-ˆetre essayer de. . . ‘One could maybe try to. . . ’), but also by the content of its proposition (e.g. focus on phenomena neglected by the researcher vs. focus on additional, possibly less-known resources useable for the research). Most importantly, the addressees also play a role in the construction of suggestions by treating them accordingly, and by responding more to their future or their past reference. Sometimes, suggestions are not formulated directly at all, but simply implied in the utterance, as in this example:

Types of contributions in conference discussions

Example 4.1 [1] CF[fr] CF

ah d’autres questions/ madame givenchy\ ah other questions madam

givenchy

DF2[v] DF2 [2] PF[fr]

donc con

cernant la

so as

for the transcription

PF DF2[v] DF2 [3] PF[fr]

oui\

oui\

yes

yes

transcription les danseurs ont beaucou:p

d´ecrit\

the dancers have much

described

PF

uh j’ai

j’ai(.) tent´e(.)

uh I’ve

I’ve

tried

DF2[v]

peut-ˆetre(xxx) on trouve (xxx)

et c¸a n’a pas

DF2

maybe

and that has

[nn] [4] PF[fr]

(...) nhHH c’est a` dire que euh on dans la

PF

that is to say

DF2[v]

(xx)/

DF2

not

[nn] [5] PF[fr]

one finds

hHUHUHUHUhh hUHUHUHU HUHUhuh chor´eographie non mais vous avez raison j’ai

PF [6] PF[fr]

choreography no but you are right I have

PF [7] PF[fr]

I have looked at in particular corpora well of

PF

one in the

j’ai euh regard´e euh notamment des corpus’fin des

chor´eographes des ann´ees vingt\ hein/

euh bon\ voil`a\ et le

choreographers of the twenties well okay there and the

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[8] PF[fr] PF

probl`eme c’est que nous avons des gestes tout a` fait diff´erents problem isthat we have completely different gestures

In this extract we can see that PF already detects the suggestion in DF2’s utterance when DF2 has not even finished uttering the predicate of her first main clause yet, let alone started the clause with the suggestion. Of course, the first sentence (concernant la transcription les danseurs ont beaucou:p d’´ecrit ‘as for the transcription the dancers have described a lot’, line 1-2), in combination with the previous talk, implies this suggestion, so it would not even need to be added. PF displays that she has grasped DF2’s point by producing a token of agreement with sentence final falling intonation (oui ‘yes’), before the TRP, and in two consecutive instances quickly following one another. These are not encouraging hearer signals but floor-claiming devices. This impression is further confirmed when PF is trying to get the floor in a more explicit way by beginning to formulate an utterance: uh j’ai ‘I’ve’ and j’ai (.) tent´e (.) ‘I’ve tried’ (line 3). Both attempts overlap with DF2’s ongoing talk and are unsuccessful. PF’s interactional behaviour is out of the ordinary and causes trouble, which is indicated by the noticeable gap at the end of the overlapped talk (line 3) and the ensuing laughter produced by the co-participants to relieve the tension built up by the unusual interactional situation of two persistently competing speakers. This is not only an example of a suggestion being recognised as such very early in the turn, and being treated as a suggestion by the addressee. It is also an example of how speakers in academic discussions may interpret suggestions as criticism and feel the urge to respond to this criticism as soon as possible. The impatience of PF to get the floor in order to display her expertise (in this case, to confirm that she had also considered the option suggested by DF2, and that she can justify its dismissal) is quite emblematic in this respect. If a suggestion is addressed directly to the presenter, rather than put forward to be discussed by the group as a whole, there are a number of strategies addressees of the suggestion use to respond. In most cases in our data the suggestion is actually treated as criticism, which confirms the findings by Brown/Levinson. However, the participants’ reactions are very diverse and make use of a number of linguistic and interactional strategies.

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73

Most often, participants try to make the suggestion their own, in other words, they seek to claim partial or full ownership of the idea(s) expressed in the suggestion. There are various ways in which they can do this, for instance by rephrasing the suggestion in their own words, which is often a kind of formulation: oui ben en fait l`a c’est l’hypoth`ese de mertens ‘yes well in fact that is mertens’ hypothesis’. Another typical way in which an addressee can claim epistemic rights over another speaker’s utterance is through candidate alternative wordings, such as in the following example: Example 4.2 [1] CF [fr]

l`a\

PF

there

DM2 [ge]

est

DM2 [2] PF [ge/fr]

-ce qu’on peut dire que (cat´egories) de noms/ euh sont en

can one say that (categories) of nouns

des des des syntagmes

PF DM2 [ge] DM2 [3] PF [ge/fr] PF

are at stake in

noun phrases jeu/ dans ces n´egotiations de du du du r´e(xxxx) these negotiations of of the of the

of the

nominaux c’est assez clair mais pas uniquement hein/ that is quite clear but not exclusively

In example (4.2), PF rephrases DM2’s (categories) de noms ‘categories of nouns’ as des syntagmes nominaux ‘noun phrases’, which is followed by an assessment – a further way of claiming epistemic rights over a subject matter. PF assessed DM2’s suggestion positively (c’est assez clair ‘it is quite clear’); but negative evaluations / assessments are also possible. Presenters can also throw in the weight of their epistemic authority by denying the usefulness or success of a particular research idea: il faudrait refaire la l’ex- je je pense pas . . . tel tel que je l’ai vu euh ‘the (experiment) would have to be redone I don’t think . . . as far as I’ve seen’. Recipients of a suggestion can also make suggestions their own by confirming it while displaying that they had had the same idea before, thus establishing their right to first access to a particular thought, e.g. responding to the suggestion that she might check the different meanings of a word, the

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presenter confirms that she has already done so: j’ai cher- je l’ai pas trouv´e ‘I have looked I have not found it’. In other instances we find affirmations that a topic or idea had already been covered in the presenter’s talk: I said something about that or j’ai dit que ces rˆoles ne sont pas euh ‘I said that these roles are not’. In a further example, the presenter claims knowledge of a particular book the questioner had talked about: mais je pense que tu parlais bien du west report . . . oui oui j’ai lu j’ai lu ‘but I think that you did speak of the west report . . . yes yes I’ve read I’ve read’ . Finally, making an idea one’s own can also mean qualifying and modifying it, for instance with a yes, but construction (oui sauf que ‘yes however’; mai:s l`a c’est ‘but there it is’; oui mˆeme si c¸a m’´etonnerait pas que ‘yes even if it would not surprise me that’) or by adding another factor to the suggestion: the problem is; l`a on tombe sur la question de ‘this leads us to the question of’; je pense que dans un deuxi`eme temps ‘I think as a second step’; oui c’est li´e puis la sanction c’est aussi dˆu au fait que ‘yes it’s connected and the sanction is also due to the fact that’). A second strategy that participants use to deal with suggestions that they interpret as criticism is to defend or justify themselves. The rejection of a suggested idea or formulation can be done explicitly, e.g. that’s NO:t what I’m saying. This is a dispreferred option, and is often marked with some kind of extraordinary reaction by the person who had made the suggestion, e.g. laughter. But participants can also apply hedging devices, generally directed at making their own positive face weaker: je l’ai v´ecu comme telle ‘I have experienced it as such’; si j’ai bien compris ‘if I have understood correctly’. The third strategy participants in our corpus use to respond to suggestions that are potentially face-threatening is to lessen the impact of the face threat. They do this by making the idea put forward in the suggestion look less special and less important: e.g. obviously; voil`a c’est toute la difference ‘there that’s all the difference’; ah oui justement ‘oh yes exactly’; Besides information-eliciting questions and suggestions, there is a third large group of contributions frequently made in academic discussions, which we would label ‘comments’. This is a rather large category and relatively difficult to define. Our data has shown that there are two main types of comment, depending on their content. Comments may be expressing 1. an opinion (a) referring to research at hand / the presenter’s talk (b) referring to a more general topic of interest in the discussion

Types of contributions in conference discussions

75

2. an association (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

results from own research quote personal experience spontaneous thought witticism, joke

Comments are different from the first two types of contribution in that the reaction they elicit is often of the type minimal / token response or takes the shape of a further comment loosely connected by an associative chain. Moreover, comments are often not directed specifically at the presenter, but at the whole group. They vary greatly in nature and content, but a very general classification could divide them into opinions and associations. Opinions are contributions that either refer directly to a prior contribution from another discussant or the presenter and evaluate it or present an evaluation of a more general topic connected to the discussion (e.g. a societal problem). Associations are more loosely linked, often introduce a completely new topical element and can have a very personal touch (e.g. in anecdotes). Our guess, supported by our findings, is that this latter kind of contribution is particular to those research fields that draw on introspection (e.g. philosophy) and practical experience (e.g. didactics or translation). To summarise, we can say that the common denominator of informationeliciting questions – in contrast to suggestions or comments – is that the questioner displays a lack of knowledge and/or need for information, in other words, they express some kind of request. Of course, this does not mean that the lack of knowledge really exists, only that the questioners construct their turns in such a way. If it becomes clear from the questioner’s turn that they do in fact know the answer themselves, we could say they were doing being teachers, which has implications for the further development and the identity constructions in a talk. Suggestions, on the other hand, do not only request something (namely at least a response from the addresses), they offer something as well. A suggestion could be defined as “an idea or plan that you offer for someone to consider” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners 2007). Even if it is not said explicitly, suggestions imply a certain course of action; they are appeals to consider a certain factor or strategy. Glosses for suggestions might be vous devriez ‘you should’, vous pourriez ‘you could’ or je vous propose ‘I suggest you. . . ’.

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Comments, lastly, are not necessarily directed at a particular person, nor do they make a particular response conditionally relevant, hence the frequent token or minimal responses. They feature more frequently in longer, less structured discussion phases, e.g. in our data from Conference 2. Their content is extremely varied, and they tend to have associative character.

4.3 Discursive roles in discussions Paper presentations at academic conferences are normally followed by brief discussion phases of 10-20 minutes in which the audience are allowed to ask the presenter questions. These discussions can either follow immediately after the talk or they can be organised collectively at the end of a group of presentations. In our corpus we have examples of each of these forms. They both have advantages and disadvantages, but the first one is certainly the most common procedure. If the discussions are immediately connected to the lecture, there might be more questions, and more precise ones, referring specifically to that talk. If, on the other hand, the discussion of all presentations is done at the same time, there might be more opportunities to create links between the different talks and to develop more substantial and livelier debates. Whatever the format of these discussion sessions, they all involve people asking questions (questioners) and people responding to those questions (answerers), who in most cases will be the presenters. Additionally, there is often a chairperson who manages these sessions but can also become a questioner themselves. These roles are pre-allocated for each session: the chair has been appointed beforehand by the conference organisers, the presenter is the person who has just given a talk, and the audience is made up of the rest of the participants. The kinds of contributions each participant can make to the talk is not completely free, but bound by turn-type pre-allocation (Atkinson and Drew 1979) , in other words, some people can only ask questions or make comments (the members of the audience), while others give answers or at least respond in some way (the presenters). The communicative tasks these interactants have to fulfil are related to issues regarding the level of content, the interpersonal level with the interlocutors and with the audience and the situational requirements (cf. Br¨unner 1997: 255–258) The following chapter describes what the participants’ behaviour in line with their institutional face (cf. Watts 2003) is like.

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77

4.3.1 What questioners do Participants at academic conference presentations know from experience that the way these question-answer sessions are run is more or less the same everywhere. The delegates have been socialised into a professional culture that consists of experts when it comes to asking questions. Whether in teaching or examining or when writing research project applications, formulating questions is one of the core activities of an academic researcher, particularly a university teacher. Discussions at conferences are yet another type in this range of communicative activities in which asking questions plays an important role. The way these questions are asked is specific to academic discussions and is a skill novice researchers acquire through a socialisation process in the scientific community. It is part of the special knowledge they acquire while ˜ 1 ller 2002: 187). When asking questions, practising their profession (cf. MA 4 conference participants have to act in accordance with what is considered appropriate. Only certain kinds of questions can be asked within a question/answer session in a workshop. For instance, members of the audience are expected to raise relevant questions, that is, relevant to the topics dealt with in the preceding presentation rather than another area the presenter is known to be knowledgeable in. If the addressee or the chairperson does not consider this to be the case, they might express their wish to postpone the question until later or to respond to it outside the frame of the discussion session. The same goes for questions that are not in some way relevant for the other members of the audience. Questioners are also expected to ask the presenter about very specific details or non-presentation related questions in private after the discussion phase. Participants themselves display their understanding of these rules both by adhering to them and by pointing out their awareness in cases where they feel they are transgressing them (line 1 in the example below, where DF4 hedges her question): Example 4.3 [1] DF4 [fr] DF4 [2] PF [fr] PF

oui c’est juste une toute petite l- f z´ero c¸a veut dire quoi/ yes it’s only a very small

f z´ero that means what

c’est la fr´equence fondamentale de la voix it’s the fundamental frequency of the voice

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Ethnographic background

Moreover, it seems that questions pertaining to the content of the presentation are preferred over those that relate to bibliographical references, data collection or other background issues. Again, this is visible through the way participants display their awareness of deviating from an assumed shared norm: e.g. just a question about the bibliography. Judging from hedges in our data such as this is only an information question, and supported by the distinction Tracy makes between “easy” and “substantial” questions (1997: 35), we can conclude that questioners are supposed to ask questions in which they express an opinion rather than one in which they simply want to know or find out about something. Questioners are also expected to explicitly relate their question to the immediately preceding talk. This is often done by repeating a point made in the presentation or by describing the questioner’s personal relationship with the topic, e.g. their academic research background: Example 4.4 [1] CF [fr]

(23.0) questions/ ben euh (...) je vais en poser une alors/ c’est

CF [2] CF [fr]

questions

CF [3] CF [fr]

specific question

CF [4] CF [fr] CF [5] PF [ge]

well I will ask one then

it is a

une question de d´etail/ a` l’int´erieur de votre expos´e vous avez within your talk you mentioned

mentionn´e a` un certain moment/ qu’il y avait des EXceptions at a certain moment that there were exceptions of the (de la) liaision obligatoire/ est-ce qu’on (a eu) pouvez-vous obligatory liaison

have we had

can you

(xxxx) je apr`es je peux nhhn

PF

I afterwards I can

CF [fr]

en donner un ou deux exemples/

CF

give one or two examples

Discursive roles in discussions [6] PF [ge]

79

contrˆoler le(h)s nh enreg(h)istre(h)ments

PF

check the recordings

CF [fr]

(non) parce que

CF

no because

In the example above, CF links her question (est-ce qu’on (a eu) pouvezvous en donner un ou deux exemples/ ‘have we had can you give one or two examples of that’) to CF’s talk by paraphrasing what CF said (`a l’int´erieur de votre expos´e vous avez mentionn´e ‘within your talk you mentioned’). Finally, questioners are expected to appear objective and to separate between what they construct as facts and their personal opinion or merely a hypothesis. This basic rule of academic or scientific behaviour is valid for presentations as well as for questions and answers. According to Tracy 1997, questioners also have to consider whether the question is fair in terms of what can be expected from a researcher depending on their experience (junior versus senior researcher). When working out the difficulty of a question, participants have to find a balance between the general desire to avoid face threatening situations (e.g. embarrassing a presenter) and the wish to generate a stimulating and critical discussion.

4.3.2 What answerers do In most cases it is the presenter who first responds to a question brought up by the audience, although it is theoretically possible for the chairperson to intervene, e.g. in order to postpone the question until later, or for another member of the audience to take the turn, because the presenter is not able to/willing to respond and the other participant feels especially competent in the area and thus entitled to respond (e.g. if it concerns a question touching on the organisation of the session or the conference, the conference organiser might intervene). However, the norm is that all members of the audience are allowed to ask questions and the presenter responds to those questions. Presenters are not supposed to bring up any questions themselves, at least no topic initiating ones. Sometimes they might ask for clarification or confirmation of a comment, but generally they should stick to responding to questions. Every now and again it happens that a strict question-answer session

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Ethnographic background

develops into something more, with other members of the audience commenting on the topic or even taking over the presenter’s job and providing a response to a question. This is when the interview-character of the interaction disappears and the interaction turns into a proper discussion. Interestingly, however, even in these cases the presenter still acts as presenter in the sense of response-provider. Although they participate by commenting and occasionally answering questions, they do not normally ask any topic-initiating or topic-shifting questions. They keep their role and discourse identity (Th¨orle 2005: 221) as experts – a role enforced by their position at the front of the room, set apart from and facing the audience. When responding to questions, presenters are expected to give an answer to the question. If this is not possible, they can offer to provide the answer at a later stage (e.g. in an email to the questioner), delegate the question to someone else (e.g. a member of the audience, the chairperson), indicate a bibliographical reference in which one might find the answer or simply not answer it, in which case they generally provide a) an apology and b) a justification or explanation for the inability to answer the question. Furthermore, presenters – just like questioners – are supposed to retain an objective, impersonal and factual stance towards the topic and the question. Their response should focus on the content of the question rather than possible personal issues with the participant. This can be difficult in very close-knit academic communities. In contrast to the members of the audience, whose speaking time is determined by the chairperson and which is generally quite short, presenters can usually talk for much longer and sometimes for as long as they want. Of course, the chairperson will sometimes need to intervene, or at least remind the presenter to keep the response short. One of the most important motivations for researchers to go to a conference is the opportunity to present their latest research and to have their results and interpretations critically reviewed by colleagues (cf. chapter 4.5). Conferences are a particularly good forum to discuss research projects that are still considered work-in-progress and have only yielded preliminary results. The feedback that scholars gain from the discussions with fellow researchers can then feed into reorientations and improvements of the research project or serve as a confirmation of the researcher’s own hypotheses and strategies. Critical feedback usually plays a vital role in the research process, may it be in form of a supervisor’s comments or a journal article’s review or indeed a stimulating discussion at a conference: they all contribute to the de-

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81

velopment and progress of a research project. In principle, then, criticism is a very positive and even necessary element of an academic discussion. In practice, however, critical remarks basically mean a face threat to the person whose work is criticised and – particularly in a non-hierarchical environment – also to the person who has produced the criticism because they are constructing themselves as someone who creates disharmony and is not cooperative. Cross-cultural studies have revealed that perceptions of appropriate levels of criticism vary widely between cultures, and not only between those that are far apart (e.g. Western and Asian cultures) but also within what is often classified as a homogenous group, e.g. the so-called Western culture. A comparative analysis of Spanish and German business culture has found that in Spain it is considered rude to ask critical questions after a presentation because the presenter is perceived as a person in need of sympathy in a situation where they are exposed and under pressure. In Germany, by contrast, critical questions are seen as helpful and beneficial to a lively discussion, particularly amongst peers (cf. Dunkel 2001). In our data, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the distribution of structural authority changes from one interaction activity to the next. During the presentation itself, the presenter alone fulfils the role of the expert by passing on his/her knowledge to the audience. In the discussion phase the presenter is still considered the expert as regards the particular topic of his/her presentation and possibly related research areas, but they can also be challenged by the audience. The general interaction structure (question/answer) supports this reading of the role of the presenter, since the audience ask the questions (i.e. they are requesting information, but they are also in control of the topics) whereas the presenter provides the answers (i.e. they are in possession of the information the audience requires). Of course, so-called questions in paper presentation session discussions do not always, in fact only rarely, convey a pure desire for information. Many of the discussion contributions are actually expressions of criticism, even if they are usually wrapped up in a syntactical format similar to a question. The presenter is thus faced with a dilemma: on the one hand, their role is that of an expert (in the particular research project or area they have talked about), but on the other hand, they also find themselves in the position of a person in the hot seat, who is being challenged and whose ideas are being put to the test. Because of the way the interaction activity is structured, the presenter is usually obliged to respond to all contributions made by members of the audience. Unlike in situations such as press conferences (cf. Clayman 2006) they

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cannot select only certain questioners. Moreover, it is difficult to intentionally overlook or even pretend not to hear a person, since most discussions are managed by a chairperson, who will ensure that everyone signalling that they would like to make a contribution will get their turn. Therefore, there is a strong need for developing strategies to deal with critical remarks so that both parties’ faces are being maintained. Among the various ways in which presenters are treating critical remarks, the analysis of our data revealed three main strategies that go from one extreme end of the spectrum of possibilities to the other: defending, evading and ignoring.

4.3.3 What chairpersons do Chairs in an academic discussion have to fulfil a double role of organisers and participants. They are supposed to manage and guide the discussion but also to be involved in the academic content of the session. Given this constellation of tasks it is not surprising that the requirements for asking questions are different for a chair than for other participants: chairs are supposed to ask socalled friendly questions and to give general support to encourage discussion (cf. Webber 2002) and create a constructive atmosphere (Shalom 1993: 41). The following list summarises some important elements of what Watts (2003) would call the “politic behaviour”, in other words the unmarked behaviour of academics during conference discussions. This list is interesting for our analyses, because it helps us understand why certain behaviour is sanctioned or marked as dispreferred in the discussions. Generally, this is because it is not in line with the face of discussion participants as described below. 1. The chair of the paper presentation session, or the presenters themselves open the floor to questions. The chair often sets a time limit or announces that only a limited number of questions will be allowed. 2. The chair allocates permission to speak to one participant at a time. 3. The chair is expected to ask at least one question if nobody else volunteers 4. The chair is in charge of time limits, and, if necessary, cuts a participant or (more rarely) presenter short.

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5. In some cases, participants self-select as speakers. 6. If no other recipient is specified, participants’ questions are addressed to the presenter of the preceding talk. 7. In classic question-answer sessions participants usually only asks one question or make one comment per session. 8. Participants are expected to be friendly and polite in tone but critical in the substance of their talk. 9. Participants are expected to ask “challenging” (cf. Tracy 1997) questions. 10. Participants are expected to add something new to the discussion. 11. In classic question-answer sessions participants do not normally get another turn once they have asked their question. 12. Presenters are expected to respond to the questions. 13. Presenters are expected to know the answers to questions. 14. Presenters are allowed to ask for clarification. The knowledge about how to behave appropriately in academic conference discussions is part of the habitus of conference-goers, and, by virtue of the fact that going to conferences is a major part of academic work, it is part of being an academic. People at conferences display their membership to the category academic researcher by behaving in line with what is expected. The knowledge – and the practice – of what is expected, does not usually come naturally, however. Junior researchers have to be socialised into the world of conference-going and, just like novices in other fields, will sometimes find this part of their work quite daunting. My own experience, and that of many of my young colleagues, confirms that among the most challenging tasks for us is the presentation of our research in front of peers at conferences. The presentation itself can be carefully prepared in advance, but the question-answer session that follows is never entirely predictable. This means that face-threatening situations cannot be completely avoided, and less experienced researchers may find it difficult to remove the face threat from a question in their response.

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The following sections show some strategies that questioners at academic conferences apply in order to elicit agreement with their proposition, while the subsequent sections present examples of how presenters deal with criticism they are faced with.

4.4 Asking questions 4.4.1 What is a question? Questions are first and foremost associated – and sometimes equated – with the interrogative clause, which can be sub-classified according to its syntactic form (e.g. in French into inversion, periphrastic or intonation interrogatives), according to the type of response it aims at into total, partial or alternative interrogatives, according to its functional-syntactic status into direct, indirect or tag-questions, etc. (cf. Gr´evisse 1997, Carter and McCarthy 2006). Interrogatives are a classic subject of grammar and syntax studies. In French, for instance, the same propositional content can be expressed via a number of syntactic structures: interrogatives can be formed by uttering a declarative phrase with sentence-final rising intonation (intonation question), by reversing the order of subject and verb (inversion question), or by adding the interrogation marker est-ce que (periphrastic question): ‘Are you going to school?’

‘When are you going to school?’

Tu vas a` l’´ecole?

Tu vas a` l’´ecole quand?

Vas-tu a` l’´ecole?

Quand vas-tu a` l’´ecole?

Est-ce que tu vas a` l’´ecole?

Quand est-ce que tu vas a` l’´ecole?

In principle, all of the three options listed above are possible for total (polar) and partial (wh-) interrogatives in French, although there are some syntactic restrictions for certain wh-interrogatives (cf. Riegel, Pellat, and Rioul 2009: 672–678). However, as far as their function and effect in discourse is concerned, the three types are not equivalent. First, in terms of numbers: in spoken language the intonation interrogative is clearly the most frequent type, while written discourse mostly prefers inversion questions (cf. already Sauvageot 1962, but also S¨oll 1974; Krassin 1994). By contrast, interrogatives with est-ce que are the least frequently used form of interrogatives in French, in both spoken and

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written language. They are thus clearly not a neutral way of forming an interrogative (S¨oll 1974). Some researchers from the field of pragmatics claim that this markedness stems from the fact that est-ce que intensifies the question by explicitly announcing it (S¨oll 1974; Fuchs and Meleuc 2003). From a more argumentative-semantic perspective, Anscombre and Ducrot (1981: 5) also confirm that interrogatives with est-ce que are not neutral, stressing in particular their dissymmetrical argumentative value, oriented towards a negative response (negating the question’s proposition). Intonation interrogatives, conversely, are sometimes described as forms projecting a positive answer and as a means of advancing the interaction (Krassin 1994: 30). From a pragmatic perspective, questions are not uniquely linked to the syntactic type interrogative at all, but can be seen as a particular kind of speech act that could also be fulfilled by a declarative and whose illocutionary meaning is a knowledge or information gap in the hearer or speaker and a desire or even implicit request to close this gap (Reis and Rosengren 1991: 6; Hintikka 1981: 56). From a cognitive point of view, Bolinger (1957: 4) states that “a question is fundamentally an attitude, which might be called ‘craving’ – it is an utterance that ‘craves’ a verbal or other semiotic (e.g. a nod) response. The attitude is characterized by the speaker’s subordinating himself to his hearer”. In a similar vein, but looking beyond the perspective of the speaker, Charaudeau 1992 describes (information-seeking) questions from the point of view of the cognitive processes that both interlocutors are involved in when a question is produced. Some of these processes are linked with aspects of identity construction, for instance the fact that by asking a question, speakers reveal their ignorance of a certain matter and therefore make themselves vulnerable to face threats. Or the fact that by asking a question speakers also display their entitlement to do so (cf. Riegel et al. 2009: 680). In addition, questions have a certain coercive power, as they force their co-interlocutor to respond in some way or other (cf. Charaudeau 1992: 591; also, particularly for polar questions, Heritage and Raymond forthcoming: 3). For the interlocutor, on the other hand, being asked a question means that they are trusted to have the relevant information, in other words, that it is assumed that they are capable of answering the question; it also puts them under pressure because it means they have to come up with an answer, unless they want to admit their ignorance (cf. Charaudeau 1992: 591; also Heritage and Raymond forthcoming: 3).

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The conceptualization of questions in this study does not start with their linguistic form, even though interrogatives are clearly an important part of asking questions (Tracy and Robles 2009: 133). Instead, questions are primarily investigated as an interactional achievement. This perspective assumes that questions have to be defined as such by both speaker and hearer of an utterance, or, more accurately, that they are subject to interpretation by all participants in the interaction. In conversation analysis, a question is at its most basic level defined as a turn constituting the first pair part of an adjacency pair that makes a particular type of second pair part conditionally relevant, namely, an answer (Schegloff 1984; Selting 1991: 264). In other words, a question is a turn-at-talk that has to be treated as a question by the co-participant(s) in order to become one (cf. Freed and Ehrlich 2010: 6). In fact, from an interactional viewpoint, questions cannot usefully be analysed without considering their respective answers (cf. L´eon 2004: 1889; Bucher 1994; Selting 1991). That questions are indeed a first pair part becomes evident when there is no answer. This is because – in ordinary conversations – participants usually orient to no answer as a noticeable absence, namely that of a missing second pair part. In other words, they fact that no answer is given is treated as an accountable matter, i.e. as something that needs to be justified or explained or apologised for when it is done. However, not all questions exert the same amount of pressure on the co-participants to account for their answer (or lack of one). In some institutional contexts, for instance, e.g. in journalistic interviews, questions are designed to set agendas that interviewees have to orient to (Clayman 2010) while in others, e.g. in interactions with distressed callers on a child protection helpline (Hepburn and Potter 2010), some question formats (e.g. tag questions) do not make responses strongly accountable. But questions do not just make any answer conditionally relevant. Rather, they exhibit assumptions about what kind of answer is expected (cf. Bucher 1994: 251). These expectations emerge from the interactional situation and are linked to the relationship between questioner and recipient. For instance, Heritage and Raymond (forthcoming) show for polar questions that the way the question is designed establishes the size of the information or knowledge gap and in that way the “epistemic gradient”, that is, the difference in knowledge between questioner (who wants to know) and answerer (who knows/is expected to know) (4). These assumptions are often displayed in the way the question is phrased, for instance by negating the interrogative, adding tags or particles to make a

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question biased (cf. L´eon 2004; Bucher 1994, cf. also section 4.4.2 on yes/noquestions). But the semantic bias of a question is not necessarily in line with its grammatical form and the bias expressed by that (i.e. that a positive interrogative would expect a positive response, a negative interrogative a negative one). It is possible – and frequent in our data – that a question’s grammatical polarity is reversed (Koshik 2005), and the opposite answer is expected. The reversal can be achieved by adding elements such as the qualifying adverb vraiment ‘really’ (Est-ce que tu as vraiment fait tes devoirs? ‘Have you really done your homework?’) and, most importantly, by its position in the turn and in the interactional sequence (e.g. immediately adjacent to an assertion that is challenged by the question). In some cases, questioners might even indicate that they do not expect any answer at all to their question or that they do not think it possible to give an adequate answer to their question: these are what we commonly call rhetorical questions. However, such questions often do get a response, but it is a response to an implicit statement underlying the question rather than the question itself (Koshik 2005: 2). There are no formal criteria to identify rhetorical questions (L´eon 1997: 14). Instead it is the recipient’s interpretation that makes it rhetorical (L´eon 1997: 13). This interpretation is displayed in the response, which is often based on an inferred negative statement (Frank 1990). From a conversational rhetorics perspective, rhetorical questions could be seen as an attempt to force the co-interlocutor to accept some presupposed shared knowledge (Anscombre and Ducrot 1981: 14; Bucher 1994: 252). If questions are defined as a particular kind of social-interactional turn, we can also analyse them similarly to other turns-at-talk as sequentially positioned elements that are connected with both prior and subsequent turns on a semantic, syntactic and interactional level. Question turns as social actions can be used to achieve a number of interactional activities, for example initiating speaker change, selecting a new speaker, managing topic development (e.g. initiating a new topic, continuing a prior topic) and generally influencing the further development of an interaction by establishing certain aspects as relevant, by limiting or extending spaces for action (cf. Bucher 1994: 249).

4.4.2 Yes/No interrogatives An interesting connection between the grammatical form and the interactional application of questions is made by Raymond 2003, who studies total

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or yes/no interrogatives, particularly focusing on the response turns they generate, the constraints their design puts on next speaker, and the ways in which next speakers can reject these constraints. According to Raymond, yes/no interrogatives (YNI) can be considered as a first pair part initiating an adjacency pair and putting a type-constraint on the second pair part, namely that the response should be of the type yes/no, and not something completely different such as that is a good question. In addition, YNI exhibit polarity, that is, depending on the way the interrogative is designed (positive, e.g. Is this your brother in the photo? or negative, e.g. Is this not your brother in the photo?) either yes or no, is preferred. As expected, Raymond 2003 confirms that in ordinary conversations, type-conforming responses (yes/no) are the preferred (and the most frequent) response to YNI. Non-type-conforming responses are dispreferred, a fact that is visible for the analyst in the way participants construct the response (e.g. hedged) and in the consequence this kind of response has for the sequential development of the talk (orientation to the dispreference). This is because a YNI establishes an interpretative frame in whose light any given response will be evaluated. Non-preferred responses are second pair parts that somehow do not meet the conditions set by the first pair part. In practice, this means that if a response is dispreferred, it will be interpreted as indicating and possibly attempting to manage some kind of trouble (Raymond 2003: 948), for instance with the perceived adequacy of the question. In our data, almost all of the YNI are followed by a dispreferred answer, which might sound paradoxical at first. But it is of course the specific interactional situation that leads to this phenomenon, especially the fact that, in contrast to everyday interactions, participants at academic conference discussions expect the recipient of their question (in general, the presenter) to provide explanations, detail, illustrations and other support for their argumentation. Moreover, as we will see in section 4.5.2, discussion contributions are supposed to be stimulating and challenging, and simple yes/no responses do not meet these requirements. The only times where YNI are regularly responded to with type-conforming answers is in a discussion that is characterised by a marked level of confrontation and antagonism between audience and presenter. In the following two examples, taken from the same discussion, it is also interesting to notice the content and sequential position of the YNI: they are all either part of a whole chain of questions (example 4.5, lines 1, 2, 4, 5) or a follow-up question (example 4.6, line 4), and are used in both extracts to confirm a fact.

Asking questions

Example 4.5 [1] DF4 [fr] DF4 [2] PF [ge]

euh si si j’ai bien compris/ euh vous aviez un projet de lecteurs(..) if if I’ve understood well

you had a project of readers

oui/

PF

yes

DF4 [fr]

(de la presse quotidienne) et (xxxx propos´e) donc euh (xxx) des

DF4 [3] PF [ge]

of the daily press and (xxxx) proposed thus (xxx)

of the

voil`a tout a` fait mhm

PF

yes that’s it e´ l´ements que vous avez e´ tudi´es (xxxxxxxxxxxx)

eu:hm est-

DF4 [4] DF4 [fr]

elements that you studied

did you give

DF4 [5] PF [ge]

them isolated words

DF4 [fr]

ce que vous leur avez propos´e des mots isol´es/(..) ou des mots or words in the dans le cadre de l’article

PF DF4 [fr] DF4 [6] PF [ge]

in the context of the article dans le cadre de l’article dans (xx)

ah bon donc

context of the article

ah well so it

non

PF DF4 [fr] DF4 [7] PF [ge]

in (xx)

no c’est pas des mots isol´es

(xxxx) le contexte (xxx) une citation/

is not isolated words

(xxx) the context xxx) a quotation non non c’´etait dans le c’´etait dans le

PF

no no it was in the it was in the

DF4 [fr]

une interview ou si c’e:st

DF4

an interview or if it is

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[8] PF [ge] PF

cadre de l’article context of the article

DF4 [fr]

e- e:t vous avez in- interrog´e combien de

DF4 [9] PF [ge]

and and so you have asked how many people

PF DF4 [fr]

personnes alors/

DF4

quarante

oui

forty

yes quarante personnes/

(.) merci

forty people

thank you

Example 4.6 [1] PF [ge]

mais c’est pas le cas dans les journaux r´egionaux (.) alors ils

PF but that’s not the case in r´egional newspapers that is they do not [2] PF [ge] n’ont pas c¸a ils o:nt euh euh ils o:nt euh des r`egles pour la PF [3] PF [ge]

have that

PF [4] PF [ge]

page numbering for the titles how to treat the titles

PF [5] PF [ge] PF

pagination/

DF5

pour les titres/ comment traiter les titl- les titres/

des choses comme c¸a/ mai:s RIEn concernant le lexique/ euh things like that

but nothing concerning the lexicon

rien concernant les anglicismes/

non

nothing concerning anglicisms

DF5 [fr] DF5 [6] DF5 [fr]

they have euh euh they have rules for the

no rien d’explicite (donc) nothing explicit then

d’accord okay

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Example 4.7 [1] CF [fr]

donc euh si je fais un euh est-ce qu’on pourrait dire comme

CF

so

PM1 [fr]

ok/

PM1 [2] CF [fr] CF [3] CF [fr] CF

if I do a

could one say as a comment that

okay commentaire que:/ c’est une opposition entre les d´emarches (du it is an opposition between the approaches of the type) phon´etique et phonologique/ phonetic and phonological type

PM1 [fr] PM1 [4] CF [fr] PM1 [fr] PM1 [5]

.hh c:’est un peu .hHHuHUh that’s a bit uhHUh e(h)t c’(H)est et c’est (y’est) c’est un peu paradoxale pour (.) ptand it’s

it’s it’s a bit paradoxical (xx)

CF [fr] PM1 [fr]

for for me

pour moi (mˆeme) .hHnHnHH fin toi tu (xxxxxx) mais c’est pas si

PM1 [6] PM1 [fr]

myself

PM1 [7] PM1 [fr]

paradoxical after all but to try to show that

PM1 [8] PM1 [fr] PM1 [9] PM1 [fr] PM1

well you you (xxxxx) but it’s not as

paradoxale que c¸a

mais uh d’essayer d’montrer que: euh en ce at the

moment il y a une MOde diso:ns de:s la phonologie d’ moment there is a fashion let’s say of the the laboratory phonology laboraTOI:re euh et puis euh c- c’est un peu norMAL euh c:: qu’ and then it it’s a bit normal that on se sert d’outils qui ont qui aparaissent (x) tr`es performants one uses tools that have that appear

(x) very powerful very nice

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[10] PM1 [fr] PM1

euh tr`es sympathiques/ e:t euh sans trop se m´efier/ donc euh and without being overly cautious so euh

Although CF asks an apparently simple YNI (lines 1–2), PM1 orients to it as troublesome. He does not respond with either yes or no, but gives a very clearly dispreferred response, initiating his turn with an inbreath, followed by a clause with a mitigator (un peu ‘a little’) which he breaks off, then starts laughing (lines 2–3). All of these elements are indicators of interactional trouble. PM1 is delaying the task of answering the question because he is faced with a dilemma: If he gave a preferred response, namely yes or no, he would not only be responding to the propositional content, but also expressing his agreement with the underlying assumptions (cf. Heritage and Raymond forthcoming: 6), in this case, for example, that phonetics and phonology are fundamentally different or that the subject matter can be summarised by such a simple opposition. But PM1 does not do this. Instead he initiates a lengthy turn describing, explaining and justifying things and never providing the yes or no that the adjacency pair structure would have required. We can also see some of the first speaker’s reaction to this response. In line 3, he accepts PM1’s invitation to laughter and so displays his understanding of PM1’s dilemmatic situation. This is one – if only a minimal – form of dealing with a dispreferred response to a YNI question. Although YNI questions establish an epistemic gradient favourable to the answerer (in the sense that they are expected to know the answer), they also limit the options for next speakers to respond, and they put pressure on them to agree with their own view of events (Heritage and Raymond forthcoming: 5). However, by way of a dispreferred response, the recipient can resist these constraints, refuse the presuppositions and initiate re-evaluation of the troublesome question. YNI questions and answers are thus conversational moves that have implications for self- and other-presentation because they have the potential of attributing, denying, claiming or refusing epistemic authority or expertise in self and other.

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4.4.3 Constructing questions to achieve agreement In contrast to everyday conversations, Sacks’ rule that “a person who asks a question has a right to talk again” (1995,Vol.1: 49) does not apply in conference discussions. Several factors are responsible for this situation: firstly, members of the audience do not normally self-select as speakers; they have to wait for the chairperson to allocate them a turn. The chair’s task is to allow those who have a question to put this question forward. Participants signal their wish to ask a question by lifting their hand. As the length of time a group can spend discussing is determined by the conference organisers and is usually very limited, the chairperson has to make sure that the time is distributed fairly between the questioners. In order to give everybody a chance to speak, questioners are encouraged to keep their contributions short; moreover, they cannot expect to be getting more than one speaking slot in a discussion (cf. Baßler 2007: 136). Experienced conference goers know this and have developed strategies to cope with the situation, for example by asking complex, two- or multi-part questions (cf. Sacks 1995,Vol.1: 52) or “multi-unit turns” (Th¨orle 2005: 31), that is, they ask two or more questions in one single contribution. Such contributions are naturally much longer than what one would expect from a question in ordinary conversation. Not only might they incorporate several sub-questions, but there is also an increased need for contextualising a question that is not integrated in the normal flow and sequentiality of a conversation. Any possible problems the addressee might have with the question, any ambiguities, must be anticipated and best cleared up before they even arise. Finally, since questioners are likely to only be getting the floor once, they often try to speak for as long as possible. All speaking time is potential getting-known time and can work in their interest as far as self-presentation and networking are concerned. Not only that, but asking questions is, rhetorically and interactionally speaking, a powerful interactional move. Sacks (1995,Vol.1: 55) finds that in everyday conversations “as long as one is in the position of doing the questions, then in part they have control of the situation”. This is because questions can be used to e.g. initiate a topic and so steer the talk into a direction that is favourable to the speaker’s interests. Questions are also an opportunity for members of the audience to take on an active role in the discussion and a way to “position themselves as holders of knowledge or expertise” (Ford 2010: 220).

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Another characteristic aspect of conference discussions is the principle of preference for agreement. Sacks (1987) and Pomerantz (1984) among others have found that answers expressing agreement with the question’s proposition are the preferred reactions in ordinary conversations. Questioners specifically design their questions in such a way that an agreeing answer is produced (Sacks 1987: 58). As with the general notion of preference in conversation analysis (cf. chapter 6.5), preference for agreement does not mean a psychological phenomenon or refer to individual preferences of conversation participants. It is a way of describing a sequential phenomenon that is noticeable in adjacency pairs, namely that some second pair parts are shorter, produced faster, and with less hesitation. This constitutes them from a CA perspective as preferred. Preference can also be explained by facework theories. Disagreeing with someone means questioning their authority on a matter or their judgment of a situation. It is not cooperative behaviour and thus potentially a facethreatening act (for hearer AND speaker). Hence, in an interactional environment where the general line is one of cooperation, such acts will either be avoided or presented in such a way that the disagreement is mitigated or not noticeable at all. Both hearer and speaker will try to create sequences of agreement. If a questioner is not sure whether they will receive an agreeing answer to their question, they can design a pre-sequence (cf. chapter 6.3) to test the ground and change their strategy if it looks like there might not be agreement. This is typical for invitation sequences. Sometimes, however, a questioner cannot realistically expect an agreeing answer, but asks the question anyway. This is the case in institutionalised confrontational settings such as press conference interviews (Clayman 2006), news interviews (cf. Clayman, Steven and Heritage 2002; L´eon 1997, 2004) or academic conference discussions such as in our data. A brief example will make clear what kind of questions we are talking about. The following extract is taken from a French news interview and features a journalist (J) and Jack Lang (JL), who had been, but at the time of the interview was no longer, French minister of culture:

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Example 4.8 (L´eon 2004: 1898) J

alors vos successeurs vous les couvrez de fleurs/ j’oserai dire euh [. . . ] est-ce que de temps en temps il ne vous arrive pas encore euh de vous prendre pour le ministre de la culture so your successors you praise them/ I would dare say [. . . ] does it not every now and again happen to you that you still think you are the minister of culture JL non je crois que vis-`a-vis de . . . no I think that faced with. . .

The interviewee JL could not possibly have responded to this question with a positive answer; it would have meant admitting being so arrogant as to believe he was still running the ministry of culture. Questions of this kind are typical of interviews with politicians, where journalists are being expressly provocative and antagonistic, one of the reasons for this being the need to provide an exciting interview for the audience. L´eon studies such questions in depth and calls them “biased questions”, that is, questions that are evidently “oriented to a preference for the answer which the interviewee cannot give” (2004: 1894). In news interviews, such questions are usually responded to with dispreferred answer turns that oppose the orientation of the question. In academic conferences, question-answer sequences are generally much less marked by antagonism. They share with interview settings, however, the fact that questioners go to a lot of trouble to design their questions in such a way that a preferred response is elicited. This does not mean that they actually obtain a preferred answer, but it indicates that the questioners anticipate problems: “[P]reference for agreement mobilizes many semantic features [...] while a single one would be sufficient, were preference not challenged” (L´eon 2004: 1894). The challenge arises from the fact that questionanswer sequences in conference discussions often accomplish much more than discussing research matters on a purely objective level. They also negotiate claims, attributions and denials of levels of professionalism, expertise, knowledge, intellect, etc. These identity construction processes are rarely carried out on the surface of explicit propositions but are developed, for instance, through presuppositions in questions and reactions to these.

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4.4.4 Contrasting academic question-answer sessions with interviews There is a certain similarity between such questions as we find them in our data and questions asked in news interview situations. News interviews are a genre that has already been studied extensively in interaction research (e.g. Heritage 2002; Clayman, Steven and Heritage 2002; L´eon 2004, Clayman, Steven 2010). A typical feature of an interview is that interviewer and interviewee do not normally swap roles during an interview, that is, “interviewers restrict themselves to questioning and interviewees restrict themselves to answering interviewer questions, or at least responding to them” (Clayman, Steven and Heritage 2002: 97). It is a vital point that the participants do actually stick to this rule, since an interview in which both parties are allowed to ask questions is no longer an interview. The form interview is thus constituted by the fact that both interview partners work together to follow a particular scheme of turn-allocation and turn type. In academic conference discussions, similar rules are at work. In a way, discussions at paper presentation sessions are probably most similar to press conference interviews: in both activity types several people are asking questions addressed to one person (or to a team). The questions are asked in an orderly fashion, usually organized by a chairperson / press officer etc. In addition, the situation of the questioner is structurally very similar. In both cases questioners are only allowed a limited number of questions, often only one. The most striking difference between (news) interview situations and paper presentation discussions is probably the relationship between the two parties. In the environment of an academic conference, presenters and members of the audience are – at least theoretically – on the same hierarchical level. Although the fact that somebody is presenting a paper makes them the expert for the time of the paper presentation session, whereas the listeners are the seekers of information, this role may change immediately at the end of the discussion when the presenter steps down to take a seat among the audience and a member of them is taking over as next presenter. Moreover, it is only ever in a small subsection of an academic field that a paper presenter is the expert, while there might be academics in the audience who are equally knowledgeable in the wider subject area, if not the same subsection. A presenter can therefore rarely act as if he were the only provider of information or as if he were (as in an old-fashioned understanding of pedagogy) the teacher and his audience the students. In a news interview, by contrast, the politician or celebrity interviewed is always the one who has

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97

all the information and the journalist is the one who wishes to have this information, or at least this is how they display their institutional selves. This does not mean that the interviewer is necessarily in a more difficult position; on the contrary, sometimes it is very hard for interviewees to hold back information or to react appropriately to accusations or insinuations the interviewer may express. Another essential aspect that distinguishes conference discussions from news interviews is the degree of publicness. Although paper presentation discussions are carried out in front of an audience (the other listeners of the presentation session), they are not normally open to the general public. The oral contributions of discussion participants are only rarely recorded and published, and if so, they are edited down to a presentable format for a written medium, i.e. with complete sentences, no discourse/hesitation markers, etc. And even then they are still only interesting for a relatively small circle of researchers. In addition, we must consider that news interviews are done to inform the public of a) what is happening and b) what politicians or celebrities think about what is happening, whereas conferences are organised in order to promote and discuss research. Moreover, academics at conferences are dependent on their audiences in a way very different from politicians. In contrast to politicians, and to a certain extent also to other celebrities, their professional existence is not directly linked with the impression they make on their audience. All of these factors contribute to the phenomenon that there is a lot less explicit and immediately obvious self-presentation in an academic questionanswer session than in a news interview on radio or TV.

4.5 Self-presentation – a key feature of conference participation 4.5.1 Members’ reasons for organising and participating in conferences Academic conferences play a vital role in all research disciplines (cf. R¨ais¨anen 1999 and 2002; Swales 1990). Besides written publications (research papers, books) they are the best opportunity for researchers to connect with the academic world outside their own research institution or project. Nevertheless, not many linguistic or interactional studies are available that treat academic conferences as a subject. Research into conferences as instances of social practice and into conference language as a way of communicating

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within a particular discourse community has started only relatively recently. The first language-oriented publications dealing with conferences appeared in the 1980s and 90s (cf. Ventola 2002). Most of those studies were concerned with scientific conferences (that is, the natural sciences, e.g. R¨aisanen 1999; Dubois 1980; Rowley-Jolivet 1998). In our study, we analyse data recorded at three conferences which all belong to the humanities, which feature very different presentation practices from those in the research fields of scientific subjects (Swales 2004). Despite some differences in size and the way they are organised, conferences of all disciplines share certain core aspects, particularly regarding the purpose they fulfil. But what is the purpose of conferences? Why do researchers make the effort to organise such – often huge – events? Why invest valuable time in planning them, usually without the help of professional event managers? Why deal with the difficulties of a limited budget and lack of time beside one’s everyday academic duties? There is obviously something to be gained from these encounters of researchers. Let us look at conferences from the perspective of an individual researcher to establish their purpose. In principle, researchers have two options when going to a conference: either they present some of their own studies/results or they simply take part as listeners and discussion participants. Both of these options have advantages, depending on the specific situation and the needs of the researcher. If the personal aim for the conference visit is to gain insights into a new research domain in which the researcher has not worked before, participation without presentation is the better choice, because one does not need to be competent in the subject. If, however, the goal is to become known among other researchers and to forge links for future cooperations, it is best to offer a paper presentation as well, since this increases speaking time and hence selfpresentation opportunities. But there are other aims to consider, both on an interpersonal and on a professional level. Webber, for instance, mentions the important function of feedback (2003: 228). Researchers can use conferences as an opportunity to ‘test’ their hypotheses by getting reactions from other conference participants. All of these aims are connected with the personal interests of individual researchers. There is, of course, also a more overarching reason for academic conferences which is – at least ideally – behind all research: the exchange and the pooling of information which will ultimately lead to an advancement of knowledge or, in more applied disciplines, to the solution of a specific problem.

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Conferences are part of the academic landscape and represent one building brick in the conglomerate of discourses that make up academic research. The links between these discourses form a kind of hypertextual network and can be described with Ventola’s (2002) term semiotic spanning. It is within and with the help of such networks that research functions and that knowledge is constructed. Coming back to our corpora, we noticed that apart from being linked to previous and following discourses, conferences also have an internal structure that resembles a network. Opening and closing talks, plenary sessions, paper presentations, discussions and informal conversations in the breaks are all connected in various ways. In this study we are only looking at one particular type of this range of activities, namely the paper presentation sessions that include discussions. Yet, we found that even within these sessions participants display an awareness of close links between paper presentations and their ensuing discussions, between presentations at the same conference, between discussions at the same conference and with discourses outside this immediate context. Rowley-Jolivet (2002) describes where these presentation sessions can be placed in the larger framework of knowledge construction in the research landscape: “the position of conference presentations in the life of a fact [is] midway between oral laboratory discussions and different written forms of research” (102). She uses the term “proto-claims”, which are made because they are still a kind of work in progress (102–103). According to her, what presenters do in their talks is make claims about certain scientific facts, and these claims can be challenged – which happens first of all in the question/answer sessions. But how is this done in detail? Mondada 2003 describes some interactionoriented research on the construction of knowledge in research meetings, in which she looks at concrete linguistic and interactional strategies and methods interaction participants use in order to introduce objects of knowledge (“objets de savoir”, 31), to define and shape them, and to arrive at a common established object at the end. She describes knowledge construction as a continuous, progressive process and as something that “emerges” from discourse (2003: 33) rather than pre-existing and only being modified or treated. Moreover, in research meetings knowledge is co-constructed by several participants, which becomes visible in the sequential analysis of their talk. One of the main tasks researchers have to achieve when constructing knowledge

100 Ethnographic background is to establish models or definitions that are true to the extra-linguistic world they refer to, yet still represent useful tools for the researchers’ analyses. To summarise, we can say that members’ reasons for going to academic conferences, in other words, the purpose of a conference, encompasses a wide range of aspects: an academic might consider a trip to a conference to gain information about a research area, to present themselves in a larger forum, to engage in networking, to make self – and one’s own research – known and respected in the scientific community, to learn about and get to know fellow researchers, to get feedback, to discuss ideas and create knowledge, and to be inspired for further research projects. In short, it is a combination of individual and professional, of local and global goals that make researchers go to conferences. But how do they go about achieving these goals? There are various strategies, of verbal and non-verbal nature, but many of them involve elements of self- and other presentation, which we will discuss in the next chapter.

4.5.2 Self-presenting in the community Twenty-first century scholars, even those in the humanities, no longer carry out their research exclusively by spending all their time thinking and theorizing on their own. There is a strong need for networking with other colleagues in order to make progress with one’s own projects and one’s career (cf. Kenway et al. 2005: 14). Resources – financial as well as intellectual – need to be put together and networks must be created which will permit collaboration and feedback. Of course, such networks cannot be initiated without anyone knowing about one’s research. Therefore, researchers must make themselves known in the scientific community outside their own institution. One way of doing this is by publishing research articles or books. Another, more instantly accessible way, is to go to academic conferences and either to participate actively in the discussions or even to present a research paper of one’s own. However, it is not only important to become known but also to remain visible in the academic world and, most crucially, to have a good reputation. In Bourdieu’s (1970) terms, reputation is one of the most important forms of symbolic capital in the social field of science. It is both a form of power and at the same time a tool to win power in the field because those who have a reputation can use it to gain influence and more reputation (cf. the “Matthew

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effect”, Merton 1968) for themselves but also for others, e.g. well-known professors for their students. A scientist’s reputation will naturally depend mostly on the actual good quality results of one’s research (at least this is largely believed in the community), but also relies heavily on the way these results and one’s general academic competence are perceived in publications and at conferences. In fact, some would argue that, since reputation is based on appreciation by the community, it is inevitably the outcome of an interactive exchange (Beaufa¨ys 2003: 175; Kenway et al. 2005: 3) and cannot be self-attributed. To put it bluntly (and slightly provocatively), researchers become good scientists because the community attributes this quality to them (Beaufa¨ys 2003: 18). However, it is not a one-way-process like in a teacher-student situation but to a certain extent a matter of negotiation (Beaufa¨ys 2003: 34), which is achieved in interaction. This in turn underlines the importance of conferences where the interactivity of the process is most immediate and evident. The worst thing that can happen to a researcher in the scientific community is that they are neither appreciated nor criticized but simply ignored. What exactly is needed in order to receive the community’s appreciation is not very transparent in academia, and explicit criteria for good scientific work are rarely given or differ considerably from one supervisor or experienced researcher to the next. In search for an answer we can again turn to Bourdieu (1970), who described the illusio of the social field, i.e. the belief in what counts and what is taken for granted, as embodied by the practices of its actors. In other words, it is the social actors (the researchers) who through their practices construct, uphold and develop the illusio of the field. This is similar to CA’s concept of doing being (cf. chapter 3.2.3.) by which interaction participants embody an aspect of their identity by (inter)acting in a particular manner. Aspects of the illusio of the scientific field are the belief in objective truth (Beaufa¨ys 2003: 56), the belief that science is only about objective, measurable success and truth, and the belief in scientific achievement as the only criterion to advance one’s career. Other aspects include Merton’s four imperatives of science: universalism, disinterestedness, communism, organised scepticism (quoted in (Breithecker-Amend 1992: 156). It is important to remember that these are part of the illusio, i.e. the shared belief in what is important, and do not necessarily coincide with what is important in reality. Moreover, the exhibition of knowledge of the illusio is also an important aspect in the practices of science: by demonstrating through one’s practices that

102 Ethnographic background one is aware of the illusio (e.g. the belief in objective truth as the only goal) one becomes part of the field. Despite the fact that only the analysis of actual practices in our corpus will ultimately reveal which aspects of the illusio the interaction participants display and construct, we would like to start off by presenting some general observations about the scientific community gathered from the secondary literature. In brief, we would like to name some concrete aspects of being a good researcher, worthy of appreciation, in order to pinpoint more clearly what we refer to when we say that participants in academic discussions orient to academic competence or that aspects of their behaviour and their talk display being competent. In our view, being competent means conforming to a certain norm, certain expectations (the rules of the field in Bourdieu’s (1970) terminology). The following provides a brief overview of the most commonly held and explicitly expressed beliefs in the academic community on what it means to be a (good) academic. This is equivalent to the common ground or shared knowledge in the academic / scientific community; it is a description of the views and values the community shares and of what they are likely to consider as politic behaviour (Watts 2003), that is, behaviour in line with the illusio of the field in the context of a conference discussion. In other words, it is a summary of the values and issues that academics at conferences construct as relevant and appropriate for the context of academic conference discussions. Our own experience as a member of the community and a teacher of research practices, in combination with practical guidelines for students in the form of written documents that make a number of rules and habits explicit (e.g. ? ?), will serve as the basis for our description. In addition, we can already give a hint of what the data allows us to infer: there are a number of aspects of a academic behaviour the participants in our corpus clearly orient to by making them a topic or explicitly referring to them, thus showing us as analysts what they themselves consider typical of being an academic and of going to conferences. Among these aspects are: – the way the data for an empirical analysis was collected – the reliability of the data and consequently the results of an empirical analysis – the danger of oversimplifying descriptions of phenomena – the development of precise criteria for labelling phenomena

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– the danger of using research tools (e.g. computer software) naively – the length and structure of a presentation – the application of adequate methods for a research purpose – the documentation of sources (quoting) – the logical development of an argument Moreover, the questions that participants ask in the discussion sessions also indicate the norms of the academic community (cf. also above). Not all questions by participants are of equal value, depending on their challenge factor; the most important ones (as far as self-promotion is concerned) are questions criticising fundamental aspects of the other’s research, whereas the least important ones are questions requiring factual information. Other features of academic (discussion) talk have become apparent due to their frequency of occurrence in our corpus, but they have also been described in publications on scientific discourse (e.g. Techtmeier 1998a: 507). Among these features are the following: – quoting – referring to handouts or other visual aids – using exact terminology and precise wording – passive constructions and other impersonal/detached styles – using terminology – (re)formulating – evaluating – meta-communicative activities These lists of practices serve to reconstruct the habitus (Bourdieu 1970) of academics, in other words, what the participants themselves see as doing being an academic and doing being an academic at conferences. This approach to complement a CA-guided analysis was inspired by the principles of conversational rhetorics (cf. Kallmeyer and Schmitt 1996).

104 Ethnographic background There is a need for doing this since Conversation Analysis and the methods of sequential, structural analysis are not sufficient to explain the link between someone’s actions and a particular membership category if there is no trouble or the category is otherwise becoming the topic of the interaction. For instance, it is not possible to describe someone’s talk as that of someone who is competent if we cannot say what competence means in a particular community and a particular context. This is especially difficult to establish in communication between peers, as in the case of academic conferences. Compared to more commonly studied settings of doing expert, such as layexpert interactions (e.g. Furchner 1997), the institutionally defined roles in our data are less clear and the differences are less emphasised in the interaction. Similarly, the assignment of category-bound behaviour to a certain role (e.g. that of chairperson), is not explicable by CA methods alone. However, as we have seen in our data, the participants do make these links, and they do share certain knowledge and expectations about co-participants’ behaviour. Sometimes they render this shared knowledge explicit, e.g. through the way they react to certain interactional behaviour (e.g. by sanctioning it as nonappropriate), or by meta-communicatively referring to it (e.g. c’est une question d’information justement), a strategy that Kallmeyer and Schmitt (1996: 36) call programmatic explications (“programmatische Explizierungen”). If we try to summarise these concrete practices in more abstract terms we can say with Tracy (1997: 52) that the essence of being a good researcher can be defined as “intellectual competence” and divided into three aspects: knowledgeability, original thinking and intellectual sophistication. An academic’s intellectual ability can be demonstrated, appreciated or dismissed, in short, (de)constructed, in many ways and, beside paper presentations, it might be done most effectively in the discussions that follow the presentations, since they have a large audience there. In terms of interactional resources discussion participants have a wide range of options, e.g. asking critical questions, presenting complex arguments, producing witticisms, describing one’s own research, etc. On a more detailed level we can observe strategies connected with topic management (e.g. topic initiation and domination), question design (simply by being in the questioner role a speaker might extend their scope of action and be in an interactionally strong role, cf. Sacks 1995,Vol.1: 55) and formulations. These are ways in which participants can claim epistemic authority, in other words, how they can present themselves and/or others as (not) knowledgeable and (in)competent (e.g. Heritage and Raymond 2005). The process is reciprocal, i.e. in the course of the

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interaction, participants’ self-presentation will be commented on, modified, maybe rejected and maybe accepted by the co-participants, who in return make claims on the image of their own selves and also engage in producing an image of the other. We can imagine that if all participants at a conference have the same desire to self-promote and to be appreciated (Broad and Wade 1984; von Aretin and Wess 2005: 7–8; Beaufa¨ys 2003: 29), there might be clashes. Indeed, some think that the pattern identity claim vs. challenge is in some ways similar to a battle or, rather, tournament situation, where participants fight according to a ritual. This is at least Deborah Tannen’s (2002) view of academic discourse, which according to her is based on “agonism”, a term used in anthropology and meaning “survivalist animal behaviour that includes aggression, defence, and avoidance. In societies where verbal explanation is possible, agonistic behaviour can serve as a tool to bring about constructive activity as well as distinct antisocial, destructive acts” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Tannen (2002) shows many examples of this kind of ritualized contrariness in written academic discourse and also puts forward some memories of oral discourse which her experience as a researcher has allowed her to collect. The same direction is pursued by Rowley-Jolivet (2002) in an article that looks at the construction of facts from the experiment to the final publication. One section of her paper deals with the feedback researchers get in the course of their research, for example at academic conferences. She finds that there is a certain amount of criticism of other researchers or projects going on as part of presentations, but it does not appear too frequently. RowleyJolivet argues that, although speakers have more liberties in presentations than written papers, “the presence of a live audience which can fight back in the discussion phase asking questions and criticising, enjoins prudence on the speaker” (Rowley-Jolivet 2002: 111). Again, strong metaphors are used to describe the communicative atmosphere of academic discourse. Apart from “fighting back”, Rowley-Jolivet also speaks of “bashing” other researchers. There actually seems to be a general tendency to describe academic writing with confrontational metaphors (Mauranen 2002: 117). Other researchers have considered in more detail the interactive aspect of critical questions in discussions. Shalom (1993: 46), for instance, refers to the fine-tuned interplay in the interaction between questioner and recipient in terms of their respective and relative competence when she describes her finding that questioners seem to ‘test’ the recipients of their questions, by first asking a less challenging one, and, if that is met with success (i.e. an ad-

106 Ethnographic background mission of the fault), they continue to make a more challenging contribution. The same phenomenon is apparently happening in the opposite situation: researchers tone down their challenges if they are faced with a strong defence. But there are also very different voices in research: Karen Tracy (1997) gives us an insight into the complexities of – particularly oral – academic discourse, which is less marked by aggressiveness. In her eyes, it is much more a dilemmatic than a battlefield situation, the dilemma existing between the desire to engage in a stimulating discussion (with eventual progression and generation of knowledge) and the wish to keep face threats low. Her study, which involved ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and recordings of interactions, describes strategies to display assessment of the “knowledgeability level” (1997: 52) of others, e.g. with ostensibly easy questions, strategies to give the recipient of a question more room for manoeuvring (mitigators such as I wondered if, 54), strategies to reject a participant’s claim to originality (by citing similar work, 57), or strategies to challenge somebody’s “intellectual framework” (1997: 65), thus displaying one’s own epistemic authority. In our data, we have not found the tone to be a particularly “agonist” one; on the contrary, most interactions are rather cooperative. Yet, criticism is prevalent and self- and other presentations are always part of the discussion. What exactly these strategies look like will be developed in the following chapters.

Chapter 5 The data

5.1 Data collection The data on which the present study is based was taken from a corpus of approximately 22 hours of audio recordings from two academic conferences in France and one conference in Austria, at which French was the lingua franca. Since most CA studies are now done on the basis of video recordings, there seems to be a need to justify working exclusively with audio-data. There are two reasons for this choice: First, it was difficult enough to obtain permission for audio-recordings at the conferences; video recording would have been impossible. This had to do with data protection issues which were enhanced by the special relationship between researcher and research object in our data: the set-up of the study (recording conferences in linguistics and translation research) meant that I as a researcher would be looking at my own scientific community’s interactional behaviour and that the results of the analyses – and simply the transcripts and recordings – would be circulating within this same community. As a result, the potential participants were sometimes not willing to be recorded, and even less on video. Second, the motivation for this study was an interest in language, which put the focus on the linguistic rather than the non-verbal behaviour of the participants. It was therefore not absolutely necessary to have video footage, particularly since I did most of the recordings myself and was thus able to take some notes. This was helpful when allocating the talk to the different speakers. Due to the limited time available at conferences it was not possible to carry out interviews with each speaker in order to collect more detailed ethnographic data. This means that there is no biographical information available beyond what was given by the presenters and discussants themselves or what I found out through personal contact. In particular, there is no precise information about the delegates’ languages competences. However, this is not necessarily a disadvantage, because it also means there is no temptation to interpret phenomena in the data on the basis of prior knowledge about the participants rather than seeing what they make relevant themselves. In addition, most participants of the recorded interactions would themselves not

108 The data have known these ethnographic details about their co-participants and could not rely on them in the interaction. I can thus reliably retrace the individual participant’s viewpoint. The three conferences at which the recordings were made belonged to field of the humanities. Conference 1 treated a phenomenon of linguistic interaction in natural spoken language as well as fictional dialogue. Conference 2 was concerned with a specific topic in translation studies and had invited translators, linguists, writers and academics doing literary studies. Conference 3 was a general Romance linguistics conference. The reason for choosing these particular conferences lay in their multilingual nature. At the beginning of this research project I was especially interested in issues of code choice and code switching and was thus looking for conferences at which these phenomena would occur quite frequently. Multilingual conferences were defined as those that would allow talks to be held in several languages, which would create a need for code choice and presumably lead to code switching situations. The institutional context of my research, that is, the department of Romance linguistics, and the focus on French, meant that the conferences had to be taking place in a French-speaking environment. As I soon realised, not only are multilingual conference events rare in France, but if they do occur, it is almost exclusively in the humanities, particularly in linguistics. Scientific conferences, in contrast, are generally French-only or, more often, English-only events. All of the conferences I chose for my recordings were open to an international audience and included speakers from several continents. Conference 1 officially allowed five languages for presentations (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian), at Conference 2, papers could be given in French and English and at Conference 3 all Romance languages were allowed. Not surprisingly, however, the predominant language choices were English (apart from Conference 3) and French, both in the formal and informal parts of the conference. Hardly any presentations were held in Spanish, German or Italian, and the lingua francas in the informal situations also seemed to be mainly French and English (except at Conference 3, where no English was used).

5.2 Corpus structure The recordings were made with a minidisc-player and an external microphone. The communicative genres include plenary sessions, paper presen-

Transcription conventions

109

tations, discussions, and conversations during coffee breaks, over lunch, and at dinner. The present study focuses on one of these activity types, investigating the talk of academic researchers during discussion sessions in individual workshops or paper presentation sessions. The material selected for analysis comprises approximately four hours of discussion talk. The recordings consist of twenty-seven different discussions of which about 120 minutes are in English and 130 minutes in French. The recordings also contain many instances of chairperson’s talk, e.g. organisational remarks, introductions of presenters, closings of sessions etc. The presentations preceding the discussions will not be analysed but will be described in brief summaries where necessary so that any references in the discussions become clear to the reader.

Figure 2: Number and length of discussion extracts

5.3 Transcription conventions The in-depth analysis of interactional and linguistic phenomena requires a relatively detailed transcription of the data. There are some standards regarding transcription conventions, e.g. concerning the legibility of the transcript (it should be relatively easy to follow), the flexibility of the system (different levels of detail depending on the analytic needs should be possible), its consistency and its compatibility with other transcription systems and with computer software.

110 The data However, there are a number of different systems currently in use. Most countries or language communities and scientific cultures have their own way of transcribing, often based on, or at least loosely connected to, Gail Jefferson’s original CA transcription conventions (cf. Jefferson (2004). One of the reasons why there are different systems is that the analytic foci vary between research groups within interaction analysis. The transcription conventions GAT (= Gespr¨achsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem, Selting 1998), for instance, a system used widely in German interaction analysis, allow the transcriber to focus on prosodic phenomena, which is a main research interest in many studies using GAT. The conventions used in this study have been adapted from a number of sources (Mondada 2005; Traverso 1999; Schegloff 2007a; Selting 1998) in order to achieve high compatibility between French, German and English speaking research cultures and to comply with the needs of our analysis. The following special symbols are used in our transcripts: INTONATION /\

intonation rises or falls

↑↓

sharp intonation rises or falls or a shift in pitch register

PAUSES =

latching

(.), (..), (. . . )

short (micro-) pauses, medium and long pauses

(2.0)

pause measured in seconds or tenths of seconds

LOUDNESS & TEMPO

loud

very loud

quiet, soft

very quiet, soft

fast

slow

getting louder

becoming softer

Transcription conventions

rushed talk

slowing down

111

STRESS exTRA

stress or emphasis

: stretched syllable NON-VERBAL FEATURES so(h)o

speaking while laughing

.h, .hh, .hhh

in-breath

h, hh, hhh

out-breath

hHH huhuh

laughter

METALINGUISTIC COMMENTS AND DESCRIPTIONS ((chairs moved))

comments, non-verbal events

enclose the section of talk to which the comment refers

TRANSCRIBER’S UNCERTAINTY (il va)

uncertain transcription

(xxx)

unclear fragments, one x per syllable

(parce que; car ce que)

two possible transcriptions

OTHER par-

cut-off

[]

phonetic transcription

Figure 3: Transcription conventions

– Intonation: Intonation means the variation of pitch within a prosodic unit. The transcript conventions distinguish between falling and rising intonation and mark those instances where the pitch changes drastically, e.g. a very high rise or a pitch shift. – Pauses: Following the GAT conventions, only longer pauses (i.e. from one second upwards) are measured. Gaps in the talk of up to a second are generally estimated, since participants perceive their length as rel-

112 The data ative according to the situation and the general rhythm of the talk (cf. Selting (1998: 10). – Loudness and tempo: The prosodic features loudness and tempo of speech are described by using elements from music notation. It is assumed that the Italian terms are widely known through their use in music and that their customary abbreviations will support the transparency and legibility of the transcript. – Stress: Capital letters indicate a relative emphasis given to syllables/words either through loudness or intensity or both. Word stress by elongation of sounds is indicated with a colon following the elongated sound. Several colons are used to symbolise extended elongation. – Non-verbal features: Respiratory phenomena such as breathing and laughing are indicated with the small letter h. A difference is made between in- and out breath and laughter is transcribed as a chain of more or less intensive laugh particles. Greater intensity is signalled by a capital letter. – Metalinguistic comments and descriptions: Any verbal elements that are not part of what was said in the talk but represent the analyst’s voice in the transcript are put in round double brackets. The type of comment varies widely: it can range from descriptions of non-verbal events (e.g. coughing) to visual information (e.g. pointing to screen) to transcriber’s metalinguistic descriptions (e.g. sounds angry). – Transcriber’s uncertainty: All parts of the recording that are difficult or impossible to transcribe due to acoustic problems are marked in round single brackets. If the talk is incomprehensible but syllables are distinguishable, their number is indicated by one x per syllable. Multiple options for a transcription are divided by a semicolon. – Other: When talk stops abruptly in the middle of a morphological or syntactic unit, this is marked by a hyphen at the cut-off position. If a phonetic transcription is useful or necessary, it is given in square brackets (e.g. in cases where the spelling does not indicate if a word is French ˆ and where ` steE´ a En], or English, such as in the case of station [stasjE´ I; the speaker’s pronunciation deviates from what could be expected).

Transcription conventions

113

The transcripts for this study were created with the transcription editor EXMARaLDA, a software tool developed by the University of Hamburg specifically for the transcription, administration and analysis of interactional language data (Schmidt and W¨orner (2005). The data was entered directly into the transcription editor and exported as rtf-files for the purposes of analysis and visualisation on the printed page. EXMARaLDA produces transcripts which in their shape resemble a musical score sheet, with the different speakers’ lines arranged vertically one underneath another and parallel events (e.g. two people talking at the same time) represented by their vertical alignment on the horizontal timescale. The following screenshot visualises the transcript while entering the data:

Figure 4: Transcription editor

In this example the two speakers DF1 [fr] and PF [it] are overlapping in the third column visible on the screen. These columns or score areas are automatically labelled chronologically with numbers but can also be allocated with an absolute time indicator. The number and order of tiers can be chosen individually and changed at any point. This means that e.g. translations or morphological paraphrases can be added whenever and wherever necessary. The speaker abbreviations have been chosen according to practical requirements and follow a transparent pattern: The first letter of the abbreviation indicates the pre-allocated discursive role of the person (chairperson, presenter or discussion participant), the second letter points out if a man (M) or a woman (F) is speaking. In brackets, two letters mark the speaker’s L1 or L1s, if they are known. The language abbreviations are as follows:

114 The data fr = French

ben = Bengali

it = Italian

ge = German

hin = Hindi

po = Portuguese

en = English

sp = Spanish

ro = Roumanian

This system of speaker abbreviations permits a quick identification of the most important speaker features, allows to incorporate and systematically describe a large number of speakers and is representative of the fact that in a lot of the interactions the speakers do not know each other very well or at all (hence the symbolisation in a combination of letters and numbers rather than names).

Chapter 6 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences

6.1 TCU completion and assessment There are a number of factors and mechanisms that make turn-transition work smoothly in most cases in interaction. One of them is the close relationship between turn-taking, syntax and prosody. Turn-constructional units are also meaningful syntactical units. If turn-transition is smooth – and that is the case most of the time – participants must have a good knowledge of possible syntactic structures. At the same time they must be able to recognise intonation patterns that indicate certain syntactic units, e.g. sentence final falling intonation. In this way they can project the possible completion point of a TCU, a vital task for the whole turn taking system. The proper functioning of any interaction in which turn order is not fixed depends very much on the projection of turn completion. The projection of the completion of turn-constructional units leads to the emergence of two phenomena known as “turn-sharing” (or “choral co-production”, both Lerner 2002) and “pre-emptive TCU completion” (Lerner 2004). The second phenomenon can be observed in the following extract: Example 6.1: ADI e´ tudiants (from CLAPI, Universit´e Lyon) 01 CEC:

bon euh la loi m´ehaignerie/ qui e´ tait sur le choix c’´etait la well the m´ehaignerie law which was about choice that was the

02 CG:

oui oui yes yes

03 CEC:

volont´e c’est c¸a/ wish is that right

04 CG:

oui oui yes yes

05 CEC:

a e´ t´e un peu trop assimil´ee (.) a` mon avis a` la loi pasqua qui was a bit too much assimilated in my view to the pasqua law which

06

est plus la fermeture is more the stop

116 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences > 07 CG:

sur l’immigration [oui of immigration yes

> 08 CEC:

[sur l’immigration of immigration

09 CG:

hm hm

Speaker CG has projected the way CEC is going with her turn and offers a possible ending (an affiliating utterance) to finish it (sur l’immigration, line 7), thus pre-emptively completing the TCU. The original speaker of the turn that was pre-emptively completed then typically gets the opportunity to judge the addition of their co-interlocutor as a “candidate completion” which can be accepted or rejected. According to Lerner (2004), acceptance of a preemptive TCU completion can be displayed by the integration of the proposed element into the next speaker’s talk (the speaker whose turn it originally was). In the example above, CEC confirms or accepts CG’s candidate completion by repeating it, in other words, by now completing her turn in exactly the way that CG had predicted (line 8). In most cases, the speaker producing the pre-emptive completion (in our case CG) stops at the completion of the TCU and gives the original speaker a chance to acknowledge receipt and accept or refuse the suggestion (Lerner (2004: 227) in a third turn. So, pre-emptive turn completion is not normally an attempt to take the floor, but rather a way of mutually displaying understanding of each other’s talk. In the next example, pre-emptive TCU completion results in a “collaborative turn sequence” (Lerner (2004) in an overlap in lines 2 and 3. Again, we notice a third turn in which the producer of the first turn (CF2) accepts the candidate completion offered by DF1: eh voil`a (line 4). Example 6.2 01 DF1 [fr]:

donc on a un p’tit caf´e qui nous attend/ euh so we have some coffee waiting for us

>

02 CF2 [fr]:

un p’tit caf´e\ et une apr`es une PETITe [clˆoture some coffee and a after a short closing

>

03 DF1 [fr]:

[/sε sj˜o/ de clˆoture (.) closing session

TCU completion and assessment 04 CF2 [fr]:

117

eh voil`a\ that’s it

Another interesting phenomenon is that of speakers who pre-emptively complete an utterance and then claim authority over that completion. The assessment of the affiliating utterance is usually the right of the original speaker, whose turn space it remains even when another speaker pre-emptively completes the TCU. However, if the original speaker displays a feeling of uncertainty or when they trail off before the completion of their turn, then the speaker who produces an affiliating utterance is encouraged to produce an assessment of that utterance, too. Example 6.3 [1] PM2[fr]

qui

PM2 DM2[fr] DM2 [2] PM2[fr] PM2

that et il y a pas de fonction euh bon statistique disons/qui:(.) (xx) and there is no well statistical function let’s say that int`egre ce param`etre/

(.) vous voulez dire/non maisc¸a serait

integrates this parameter you

DM2[fr]

oui

DM2 [3] PM2[fr]

yes

PM2 DM2[fr]

mean no but that would maybe

peut-ˆetre int´eressant pour le franc¸ais en tout cas\ (1.4) en fait/ be interesting for french

in any case in fact (xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx)

In lines 1–2 of example (6.3), PM2 completes DM2’s question turn with preemptive turn completion, encouraged by DM2’s hesitation (elongated vowel and pause). Her utterance also includes a rhetorical confirmation-seeking element (vous voulez dire/ ‘you mean’) and is immediately followed by an assessment: non mais ‘no but’. PM2 thus claims authority over that turn and by extension the subject matter in question.

118 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences Assessment by second speaker can also occur when the first speaker produces a polar question (which is almost always biased towards an expected answer) and the answer is given in form of a pre-emptive turn completion, together with an assessment of the question, or rather, an assessment of the expected answer. Compare example (6.4) below: Example 6.4 [1] DF1[ge/fr]

est-ce que/est-ce qu’il y aurait p’t-ˆetre aussi une diff´erence uh

DF1 [2] DF1[ge/fr]

would there would there maybe also be a difference uh bec-

DF1 [3] DF1[ge/fr]

bec- because of the fact that each one in a sense has access

DF1

d-de par le fait que

(.) chacune dans un sens a

acc`es`ason grand-p`ere comme´etant une partie d’elle-mˆeme to her grandfather as if he was a

PF[fr]

part

of herself partie de soi\

PF [4] DF1[ge/fr]

part of self euh alors que/alors que si elle parlait de je n’sais pas

DF1

euh whereas whereas if she was talking about I don’t

PF[fr]

c’estc¸a\

PF [5] DF1[ge/fr]

that’s it

DF1 [6] DF1[ge/fr]

know jacques chirac that would be someone that the two

DF1

de jacques chirac ce serait quelqu’un que les deux

connaissent par les m´edias\ know through the media

PF[fr]

voil`ac’est toute la diff´erence\ (.)

PF [7] PF[fr]

yes that’s all the diff e´ rence with

PF

par rapport au (..) par rapport au d´ebut de leur interaction\ respect

with respect to the beginning of their

Speaker selection

119

[8] PF[fr] PF

interaction

Towards the end of a dialogue between DF1 and PF concerning the notion of confidence ‘intimate avowal’ and which phenomena can be classified under this category, DF1 asks a question which is clearly an expression of a statement requiring acceptance or rejection. PF responds to this request by pre-emptively completing DF1’s TCU and briefly overlapping with her (lines 3–4). She also immediately assesses her own candidate completion: c’est c¸a ‘that’s it’ (line 4) and so not only furnishes a pre-emptive response to DF1’s question but also expresses agreement with DF1’s implicit statement. Forms of turn completion by other speakers and choral co-productions of turns are certainly the most visible indicators of the co-constructed nature of interaction. They are probably more common in ordinary conversation where turn allocation and turn length are not restricted by any external factors, but also appear in a corpus of institutional dialogue such as the one in this study.

6.2 Speaker selection Among the central mechanisms of turn-taking in interaction is the preference for “speaker just prior to current speaker to be selected as next speaker” (Sacks et al. (1978: 18). The order in which the rules of turn taking a), b) and c) are applied makes this preference work because priority is given to rule a), which states that the current speaker may select the next speaker. In many cases, this will be the speaker they have addressed, and very likely because they were addressed (= selected) by them just before. In other words, speakers mutually select each other, e.g. by asking and responding to questions. Indeed, in ordinary interactions this preference mechanism is vital for speakers to be able to ask comprehension/clarification questions, or to address a problem of hearing or understanding immediately after the problematic turn has been completed (Sacks et al. (1978: 19). The lack of this turn-taking device is one aspect that distinguishes the structure of our data from question-answer sequences in everyday interaction, and that makes both the question and the answer turns much longer because they need to cater for the fact that they might not be allowed to produce a third turn.

120 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences As regards self-selection of a speaker, the most important rule in the turntaking system is that of first come, first served, in other words, the speaker that starts speaking first, gets the turn. The difficulty for the speaker lies not only in correctly predicting the next possible transitional relevance place, but also in being ready to begin a turn-constructional unit (Sacks et al. (1978: 32). The specific problem with the latter is that the beginning of such a unit should fit with the rest of it, and should contain some information as to its structure and direction and indicate its possible completion in order to guarantee its projectability (see above). This obviously needs some planning and planning needs time. This is why self-selected speakers often make use of particular turn-entry devices, e.g. appositional beginnings such as well, but, and, or so. Because these items give the speaker time to think and plan, they are also called planning signals. Interestingly, there are cases where a second starter rather than a first starter, i.e. the second rather than the first person to selfselect, gets the turn. This may happen when the second speaker addresses a problem with the turn, e.g. problems with understanding or with hearing. In our data, this can also happen when a chairperson wants to make an organisational remark, which overrules discussion-related talk. Speakers can also employ turn-exit devices if at a place of transitional relevance there is no self-selection, and they do not want to carry on talking, but have not selected another speaker yet. The addition of a tag question (e.g. you know? or n’est-ce-pas?) can then change their turn into a current-selectsnext construction and allow them to exit the floor (cf. Sacks et al. (1978: 30–31). In academic discussions, this is not normally necessary, since there is an overarching manager of the talk who will a) allocate the floor to speakers who indicate their desire for turn-entry by giving a visual sign (putting up their hand) and b) intervene by asking a question themselves or closing the discussion if nobody else wants the floor. 6.3 Sequential organisation One of the most powerful methodological principles in Conversation Analysis is the sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction. It is derived from the way interaction is perceived: It is intuitively evident that conversation, and other forms of talk-ininteraction, centrally involve people taking turns at talking.

Sequential organisation

121

But a key notion in CA is that those turns are not just serially ordered (that is, coming one after the other); they are sequentially ordered, which is to say that there are describable ways in which turns are linked together into definite sequences. (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 38)

In sequential analyses researchers try to render these links between the turns explicit. They do this by focusing on “next turns”, that is, on the reactions participants produce in response to previous talk. According to Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998: 38) any next turn displays how the interactant has interpreted the preceding turn as regards the length of the turn (i.e. its possible completion point), its topical content and its impact on the structure of the interaction sequence. Of course, this display is primarily addressed to the other interaction participants, but it also constitutes a helpful tool for the analyst. In other words, it is a “proof procedure for the analysis of turns” (Sacks et al. (1978: 44f) in which the participants’ display of their interpretation makes their actions accountable and describable: [L]e second locuteur rend ainsi observable la fac¸on dont il comprend ou il interpr`ete a` toutes fins pratiques le tour pr´ec´edent (en montrant qu’il s’y aligne, en montrant ce qu’il en retient comme e´ tant le topic, en montrant ce qu’il en a compris, etc.). [The second speaker thus makes observable the way in which he understands or interprets to all practical purposes the preceding turn (by showing that he aligns himself with it, by showing what he treats as being the topic, by showing what he has understood of it, etc.)] (G¨ulich and Mondada 2001: 203)

Similarly, in the next extract (6.5), we can see that although DF2’s turn is supposed to be a question – at least that is how CF introduces it in line 1 – this is not how PF treats it. She responds to DF’s turn as a suggestion, and moreover, an unnecessary suggestion. We can see that in her reaction, which consists of several short affirmative signals with falling intonation indicating comprehension but also impatience in anticipation of the end of DF2’s TCU, and a strong desire to take over the turn. In line 2 she interrupts DF2 at a non-TRP and claims the floor, foreclosing DF2’s question/suggestion. This rather uncooperative behaviour, which constitutes an interactional trouble (as indicated by the pause in line 2), is then addressed by the audience, who initiate laughter.

122 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences Example 6.5 [1] CF[fr] CF

ah d’autres questions/madame givenchy\ ah other questions madam

givenchy

DF2[v]

donc concernant la

DF2 [2] PF[fr]

so as for the

PF DF2[v] DF2 [3] PF[fr]

oui\

oui\

yes

yes

transcription les danseurs ont beaucou:p

d´ecrit\

transcription the dancers have much

described

PF

uh j’ai

j’ai(.) tent´e(.)

uh I’ve

I’ve

tried

DF2[v]

peut-ˆetre(xxx) on trouve (xxx)

et c¸a n’a pas

DF2

maybe

and that has

[nn] [4] PF[fr]

(...) nhHH c’est a` dire que euh on dans la

PF

that is to say

DF2[v]

(xx)/

DF2

not

[nn] [5] PF[fr] PF

one finds

one in the

hHUHUHUHUhh hUHUHUHU HUHUhuh chor´eographie non mais vous avez raison j’ai choreographyno but you are rightI have

Adjacency pairs can be used as a device for structuring interaction and for achieving one’s interactional goals. The “sequential implicativeness” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 296) or “conditional relevance” (Schegloff 2007a: 20) of first pair parts, i.e. the fact that they regularly set off a particular chain of events, makes it possible to steer the development of the interaction in a

Sequential organisation

123

certain direction. For instance, if a speaker desires to initiate a certain topic, they can ask a question referring to it and thus encourage their interlocutors to take it up (in their answer). As indicated above, adjacency pairs are also successfully used in selecting a next speaker (Sacks et al. (1978: 28–30): A speaker’s utterance is constructed in such a way as to become a first pairpart (e.g. a question), which then puts a constraint on possible next turns and, depending on the utterance, also on the choice of possible next speaker. Except in cases of speakers imitating two voices (Schegloff 2007a: 14), where a speaker provides both the first and second pair part of an adjacency pair (e.g. in a rhetorical question to which they provide the answer), the completion of a first pair part will always be followed by a next speaker, i.e. there is quasiautomatic selection of next speaker. The concept of conditional relevance also serves to explain the phenomenon of “noticeable absence” or “relevant absence” (Schegloff 2007a: 20). Because first pair parts carry the in-built feature of requiring a second pair part, the absence of such is treated as “relevant” and “noticeable” in interaction. In other words, it means something if there is no response to a first pair part, or if there is no relevant response, that is, no pair part from the same pair type. Situations such as these occur frequently in our data, because contributions by audience members require a response from the presenter, even if the presenter is not always in a position or willing to provide the desired answer (e.g. the admittance of a mistake).

6.3.1 Side-sequences Side sequences as defined by Jefferson (1972) are sidelines of the main interaction, or breaks in the flow of talk. However, they do not cause its termination but only a relatively short interception (in relation to the overall length of the interaction) after which the main string of talk carries on. The research question for the conversation analyst revolves around the edges of these side sequences: What resources do participants use to collaboratively achieve a break in the on-going activity which involves a) the accomplishment of the switch to another topic and b) the successful taking up of the activity again when the side sequence comes to an end. Jefferson (1972: 295–314) describes several resources available to participants for the co-construction of side sequences. A typical strategy is the repetition of a problematic element. The function of the repeat activity is to

124 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences initiate the recognition of the trouble and possibly a repair sequence by pointing to the element in question. Another possibility is the use of interrogative pronouns such as what or who, which can more precisely select the problematic element from the previous utterance. The mechanisms that initiate side sequences are regularly placed adjacent to the completed utterance rather than immediately after the problematic item. Jefferson (1972: 298) suggests that this may be because next speaker wants to give current speaker the chance to remedy the problem themselves, in other words (and the later terminology), to give them the opportunity for self-repair. And since the resource that starts a side sequence has a mechanism for selection of the problematic element anyway, it is not really necessary. However, the position of the repeat or interrogative immediately after the completion of the utterance containing the problematic element is important, because their indexical reference will not be discovered or wrongly attributed if it comes too late in the sequence. Jefferson also provides a more fine-grained classification of the resources described above, e.g. “questioning repeats” (1972: 299–300) and describes further phenomena, which do not always initiate repair, such as overlaps to introduce “competitive activities” (1972: 312) and typical first parts to initiate a time-out (e.g. by the way or oh incidentally) (314). Questioning repeats are generally uttered with a question-type-intonation (rising contour) and usually express disapproval of a previous – problematic – element. Example 6.6 [Jefferson 1972: 297] 01 Steven:

One, two, three ((pause)) four, five, six, ((pause))

02

eleven, eight, nine, ten.

03 Susan:

“Eleven”?— eight, nine, ten?

Competitive activities begin with an overlap of two utterances, of which one initiates the new sequence while the other one belongs to both the previous as well as the new sequence. Competitive activities may also cause the termination of the current sequence. Such sequences do not feature in our data. Time-out or insertion sequences (Deppermann 2001: 77; “insert expansions” in Schegloff 2007a: 97), on the other hand, which are introduced by specific introductory elements (e.g. English by the way, French en fait or a` propos), only briefly interrupt the on-going sequence which carries on after the break, and are relatively frequent in our data, generally concerning

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125

practical-technical or organisational issues. They can, however, sometimes stretch over quite a long period of talk, as in the next example: Example 6.7 [1] DM[fr]

il semble que vous mettiez(.) uh sur le mˆeme plan(.) une

DM [2] DM[fr]

it seems that you put

DM [3] DM[fr]

break

DM [4] PF[fr]

leaves the interaction

on the same level a negative

rupture n´egative(.) pleurs de la locutrice quatre(.) celle-ci quitte crying of speaker four

l’interaction\

that one

b-mmmh\ e:toute fac¸on je pense que actually I think it was je m’ suis tromp´e

PF DM[fr] DM [5] PF[fr] PF

I made a mistake in c’´etait la locutrice trois(.) et non pas quatre/ speaker three and not four dans mon powerpoint/

oui\ c’est la(.) c’est la

my powerpoint

yes it’s the it’s the

DM[fr]

je ne(.) je crois qu’ c’est la c’est la je crois

DM

I don’t I think that it’s the it’s the I think

[nn] [6] PF[fr]

hmh trois en fait\ c’est la p’tite sœur de la locutrice

PF

three in fact it’s the little sister of the speaker

DM[fr]

que c’est

(...) parce que le

DM

that it’s

because speaker

126 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences [7] PF[fr]

le locuteur quatre\ non en fait ils sont

PF DM[fr] DM [8] PF[fr] PF

speaker four locuteur cinq n’existe pas\ five does not exist quatre\

ouais\

four

yeah

DM[fr] DM [9] DM[fr] DM [10] PF[fr]

d’accord\

alors\ et vous mettez donc en relation(.)

okay

so

and so you put in relation on the

sur le mˆeme plan une rupture n´egative le point(pleurs) de la same level a negative break

the point crying of c’est la locutrice

PF DM[fr] DM [11] PF[fr]

no in fact they are

that’s speaker locutrice quatre/celle qui quitte l’interaction\

et en-dessous

speaker four the one that leaves the interaction and underneath trois\

PF

three

DM[fr]

vous mettez

DM

you put

Side sequences are not just a kind of interactional sequence; they are an interactional device themselves. Participants employ them to initiate repair, to start new topics, to terminate sequences (cf. laugh token repeats), to change the topic temporarily, etc. 6.3.2 Pre-sequences One of the most useful and distinctive concepts in CA is that of “pre-sequences” (pre being short for preliminary) and, more generally,

Sequential organisation

127

of the aspect of “pre-ness” (cf. Schegloff 2007a: 28). This is not an analyst’s category but one that members themselves apply. Interaction participants orient towards certain elements in the interaction as preliminaries for something else. A typical example is the utterance What are you doing tonight? said by one friend to another. The normal interpretation of such an utterance would not be to take it as a request for information but as a means of testing the ground before setting out to formulate an invitation to come to the cinema. The recipient of the question then has two options: either they encourage the invitation to go ahead or they can stop it before it is even produced and thus avoid having to reject the offer. Schegloff 2007a calls these two alternatives “go-ahead response” and “blocking response” (30). Thus, the preliminary element becomes a sequence of at least two utterances. In fact, pre-sequences are another kind of adjacency pair (Schegloff 2007a: 28). As such, they have a first pair part which requires a reaction in form of a second pair part. But beyond that, the first pair part also functions as a projection of a post-pre-sequence element, the “base sequence”, which is most frequently another adjacency pair (e.g. an invitation). Since pre-sequences can be considered as a way of extending this base sequence, Schegloff calls them “pre-expansions” and distinguishes between those that are “type-specific” (i.e. that project a certain kind of adjacency pair”) and those that are generic (2007a: 29). Sometimes, pres are used to point out that the sequence projected might be problematic (“pre-delicates”, Schegloff 2007a: 47, footnote 13). This happens frequently in our data, when participants make excuses for their question, as in the example below. However, the pre’s are not always verbally responded to by the co-participants. Often, the absence of an interfering response has to count as permission to carry on. Example 6.8 [1] DF2[ge] DF2 [2] DF2[ge] DF2

une petite question qui peut-ˆetre que la(xx) tr`es bˆete pour un a little question that is maybe that it(xx) very silly for a linguist linguiste/qui parle allemand/ est-ce qu’il y a des influences de who speaks German

are there influences from German

128 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences [3] DF2[ge]

l’allemand/peut-ˆetre/sur sur les langues romanes parce que

DF2 [4] DF2[ge]

maybe on on the Romance languages

DF2 [5] PM[ge]

German(xx) has no

l’allemand(xx) n’a pas de marcation morphologique de morphological marking of the non non mais c’est une c’est

PM DF2[ge] DF2 [6] PM[ge] PM

because

no no but that is

a that is a

l’adverbe\ je n’ai pas d’id´ee je demande commec¸a (xx) adverb

I don’t know I am

just asking like that

une tr`es bonne question very good question

DF2[ge]

A further type of pre’s are generic pre-sequences . They are employed to attract the co-participant’s attention (e.g. to involve somebody in an interaction) and frequently consist of the name of the target recipient, a courtesy term such as “excuse me” or physical contact such as the direction of the gaze. Inspired by Sacks’ first work on telephone calls, Schegloff (Schegloff) speaks of these generic sequences as “summons and answers”. In our data, these are represented by the discussion participant’s lifted hand and/or expectant gaze (= the summons) and the presenter’s (or, in a stand-in position, the chairperson’s) recognition and encouragement to utter their contribution (= the answer).

6.4 Formulations The last section in the chapter on sequential structures is devoted to the phenomenon of formulations. In conversation analysis, the term formulation designates a meta-conversational activity (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986), namely a very short summary or paraphrase of (generally, another speaker’s) previous talk. In everyday conversations, formulations are often inserted as very short

Formulations

129

insertion sequences (Heritage and Watson 1979), whereas in our data, they are usually part of the opening of a sequence, often at the beginning of a contribution from a discussion participant. The following extract provides an example of how formulations typically occur in our data: Example 6.9 [1] CF[fr] CF

la(toute derni`ere) question/ the very last question

DF4[v]

donc voil`ac¸a veut dire que(donc

DF4 [2] PF[ro]

so there that means that so you you

PF DF4[v] DF4 [3] PF[ro]

VOUs) vous avez du mal`asavoir/(.)

oui/

oui\

yes

yes (xx)

have trouble knowing

euh qui parle(au who speaks in

ouais

PF

yeah

DF4[v]

nom) de qui/

et`aquoi servent finalement ce:s

DF4 [4] DF4[v]

whose name

and what purpose actually these

DF4 [5] DF4[v]

reformulations have(which for some) who(xx remember) if I

DF4 [6] PF[ro]

have well recognised are sometimes insertions

reformulations (qui pour certaines) qui(xx souvenir) si j’ai bien

aperc¸u/

sont quelquefois des incises/

mais c’est c’est c-il y a(xx) c’est quand-

PF

but it’s it’s there are it’s

DF4[v]

une esp`ece de apart´e/

DF4

a kind of intimate talk

130 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences [7] PF[ro] PF [8] PF[ro] PF

mˆeme c’est tr`es charg´ed’un d’un sens et c’e:stc¸a c::c¸a PArle(je nevertheless very loaded with a meaning and it’s that which dirais)

il a euh il dit quelque chose a` (xxx) avec c-c-

speaks I would say he has he says something

DF4[v] DF4 [9] PF[ro]

(xxxxx)

DF4 [10] PF[ro]

une an

c-

PF DF4[v]

to(xxx) with

une impression mais on a quandan impression but we still all have

impression de ce qu’il dit\ enfin(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) impression of what he says actually mˆeme tous l’impression que:ce qui s-eu:h.hh ce qu’il veut dire

PF

the impression that

that which what

DF4[v] DF4 [11] PF[ro] PF

derri`ere euh c’est souvent ironique/ou mo

queur/

he wants to say behind is often ironic or der isive

DF4[v]

oui

oui on aperc¸ut

DF4 [12] DF4[v]

yes

yes one

DF4 [13] DF4[v] DF4

qu’il y a une intention/mais l’on est peut-ˆetre pas`amˆeme/de recognises that that there is an intention but one can maybe not (d´efinir) define it

Formulations can be neutral towards the content they summarise, or they can express a speaker’s evaluative stance. In the example above, the eval-

Formulations

131

uative/assessment aspect is quite strong (DF4 criticises PF’s research, vous avez du mal ‘you have trouble’, a` quoi servent finalement ‘what their actual purpose is’, lines 2-3), which triggers PF’s defensive reaction in line 6: mais c’est c’est c- il y a (xx) c’est quand-mˆeme ‘but it’s it’s there are nevertheless’. Considering the institutional context of our data, in which assessing each other’s research is almost an obligation, it is not surprising that many of the formulations in our corpus display an evaluative attitude. The bias is achieved by preserving, deleting, and transforming selected parts of the talk one is paraphrasing (Heritage and Watson 1979: 129). As far as content is concerned, there are two types of formulations: gist and upshot. Gist formulations express the general idea(s) of previous talk, while upshot formulations present the consequence or decision resulting from a(n) (stretch) of interaction. In our data, gist formulations are more common, since the interactions are not geared towards the achievement of a practical goal or outcome. As for the structure of the formulation, they routinely include turn-initial inference markers (e.g. donc ‘so’, cf. “so-prefaces” to indicate upshot, Barnes 2007) and pro-forms (e.g. demonstrative pronouns). Formulations are also interesting from a sequential point of view: according to Barnes, they often follow a slight gap in talk and are produced by speakers who self-selected (2007: 285). In our data, we found similar results in the less strictly regulated discussion periods, that is, when speakers were allowed to self-select. In the more structured question-answer sessions, most speakers could not self-select, and the chairs – who were allowed to auto-select – rarely intervened to manage the content of talk. Hence, there were no such gaps before the formulations. Another sequential aspect is that a formulation can be considered the first pair part of an adjacency pair, the appropriate second pair part being a response to the formulation which agrees or disagrees with its paraphrase and/or the course of action it projects. The preferred response to formulations is a confirmation of the proposed summary (Heritage and Watson 1979: 143). For reasons to do with facework and politeness (because dispreferred actions are often face-threatening), even disconfirmations of formulations usually contain some element that confirms – at least in parts – the suggestion’s proposition. Sometimes, it is only a “provisional acceptance token” (yes, but) that performs this function (Heritage and Watson 1979: 149). Inspired by conversational rhetoric (cf. 3.4), a research branch interested in the interactive potential that linguistic and interactional strategies carry, we are going to briefly discuss the most frequent functions of formulations,

132 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences as they appear in everyday and in institutional contexts. First, let us reconsider that formulations can be neutral or evaluative. Particularly in the latter case, they can be an instrument to exert power in interaction. By power we mean “the structurally provided ability to constrain the actions of others” (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 170). In other words, formulations can be used to control talk, its sequential and topical development. As Hutchby and Wooffitt point out, CA is not normally compatible with theoretical, analytically pre-defined concepts such as power or hierarchy (1998: 170). However, if power is seen as the ability to control (stretches of) talk, and as an interactive, dynamic phenomenon, to which at least two parties must contribute, it is possible to integrate the term in our methodology. Basically, and from a neutral perspective, formulations are a way of displaying one’s understanding of prior talk and a way of receiving ratification of this understanding (Heritage and Watson 1979: 138). On this basis, formulations can develop a range of additional or modified functions. First, they are used to do topic organizational work: formulations can represent “candidate pre-closings” of sections of talk, since summing-up and taking stock of what has been said so far is a common means to close down a particular topic and prepare for a new one (Heritage and Watson 1979: 151). The conditional relevance that formulations exert on next turn, namely that it should be a response, accepting or not accepting the paraphrase, means that the closing is a co-constructed, interactive achievement. Second, formulations also support and generate cohesion in an interaction, by linking disparate elements in one utterance (Barnes 2007: 291). Again, the request of ratification by the co-participants means that the cohesion is achieved locally and interactively. In that sense, formulations are a tool to do talk management, which explains why they are often employed by chairpersons in business meetings (Barnes 2007). Third, if we consider that formulations are subjective paraphrases of something another speaker said, we can imagine that they can serve as powerful instruments for argumentation purposes. Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998 describe analyses of radio call-in interactions, which revealed that radio show hosts who respond to callers’ talk use their position as second speaker to give formulations of the caller’s argument, thus changing the agenda. In other words, they rephrase the caller’s contribution in such a way that it is given a new direction, which in turn can be used e.g. to tie it in more smoothly with the general topic of the show or to make it more entertaining. The first speaker – the caller – is put in a defensive position, and the radio host is not required to

Preference

133

give their own opinion on the matter, which reflects the asymmetrical distribution of “argumentative resources” (1998: 169) in radio call-ins. But even if the radio hosts did want to give their own viewpoint, formulations would be a good starting point to base their own arguments on. Using formulations as prefaces to build argumentation lines has been described for interview situations (Heritage and Watson 1979), but this phenomenon is also common in our data. Finally, formulations can be studied from the perspective of identity construction. If a speaker produces an (unsolicited) formulation of another speaker’s talk, they are demonstrating that they have the right (Barnes 2007: 280) – and the competence – to do so. Condensing a stretch of talk to its essential elements is only possible if one is competent enough to distinguish between relevant and less relevant elements, between main points and additional detail. So, doing formulations also transports a certain identity claim: it means doing being authoritative and competent.

6.5 Preference The concept of preference in CA was developed from the observation that in many adjacency pairs there is a choice of second pair parts expressing opposite concepts (Sacks 1987 [1973]: 56). An invitation, for instance, can be accepted or declined, an offer can be accepted or rejected etc. The analysis of these different options in many interactions revealed that there seemed to be preferred and dispreferred second turns, judging by the frequency of their occurrence but also by their structure. The preferred choice consists of a turn uttered without delay or hesitation and is brief and concise. Dispreferred elements, in contrast, tend to be longer and are inhibited by hesitation and hedging phenomena. Preference in CA is thus not a psychological but a structural and interactionrelated concept. It refers to a mechanism in the system of conversational activity that seems to be “in-built” (Sacks 1987 [1973]: 56) and has more to do with the rules of the interaction order (and “design differences” in the turns, cf. Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 43) than the participants’ individual mindsets or personalities. Sacks 1987 discusses in more detail which options are the preferred ones. The ones that are marked as preferred (i.e. without hesitation, relatively short) are those that agree with the preference of response indicated by the first pair

134 The mechanics of discussions at academic conferences part. In a larger context, the preferred second pair part is that “which embodies or favours furthering or the accomplishment of the activity [at hand]” (Schegloff 2007a: 59). For example, if a question is constructed in such a way that the expected answer confirms the underlying proposition, then the preferred response would express such a confirmation. In other words, it would align itself with the first pair part (rather than distancing itself from it) (Schegloff 2007a: 59). This mechanism can be exploited as a resource to force co-participants to agree with one’s proposition or else elaborately construct a dispreferred response (cf. 4.4.3 “Constructing questions to achieve agreement”). Particularly interesting parallels can be drawn between an interactional, constructivist theory of facework such as the one outlined in 3.3.3 and a view of preference as an interactional device (e.g. Pomerantz 1984), since turns are specifically designed as preferred or dispreferred to achieve certain interactional goals. Accepting the offer of a second piece of cake might for instance be expressed as a dispreferred turn in order to maintain a certain image of the self (e.g. being polite). It seems that different preferences are valid for different types of interactions. Some researchers have found that in arguments or disputes the disagreeing turns are designed as preferred ones and the agreeing ones as dispreferred ones (cf. Kotthoff 1993).

Chapter 7 Results of the data analyses

Before presenting the results of my analyses, I would like to recapitulate the concept of identity construction as it applies to this study. First, identity work in interaction is seen essentially as processes of self- and other-presentation or as displays of images of the self and other (cf. Poro 1999). Second, we maintain that images of the self or other are always co-constructed, i.e. the image we present of ourselves in interaction is interpreted and re-presented by the other participants and vice versa. Moreover, each presentation of self implies an image of the other, while presentations of other imply images of the self. So, self- and other-presentation, even if analytically separable, are in practice inextricably linked. Third, in analytical terms, we take presenting self as somebody to mean displaying self as a member of a particular – possibly socially established – category or as having certain qualities. Sometimes these qualities are explicitly linked to a particular category and are attributed to self through the fact that self is displayed as a member of that category, but sometimes these qualities are simply applied to self directly. Fourth, there are a number of conceptually different verbal and non-verbal ways in which members can categorise themselves and each other: they can explicitly or implicitly categorise themselves by naming a category (e.g. academic) and affiliating or disaffiliating with this category. A similar strategy involves talking about category-bound behaviour (= behavior typical of a category, e.g. quoting from secondary literature) and affiliating or disaffiliating. Participants can also describe self or other in terms of qualities that are not category-specific (e.g. character traits such as honest, helpful, etc.). In many cases, particularly when identity is not a topic in the interaction, categorising is carried out implicitly by performing category-bound behaviour. These ways of categorising self and other involve a whole range of linguistic devices and interactional strategies that we will describe in the following chapters. Among them are the following activities: 1. naming a category explicitly (e.g. As teachers we know that. . . ) 2. describing a category-bound activity and affiliating/disaffiliating (e.g. describing the difficulties of empirical research)

136 Results of the data analyses 3. stylizing a category (e.g. mocking non-academics) 4. category-bound activities (= doing being) 5. referring to third parties (e.g. quoting, reporting) 6. producing challenging discussion contributions (e.g. questions that criticise the presenter’s ideas) 7. producing laughables and narratives 8. reflecting critically on research practices 9. displaying having the overview Some of the linguistic and interactional strategies participants use in order to carry out these activities are listed in the following collection of forms used to carry out these activities: 10. strategic use of pronouns 11. rhetorical strategies (hyperbole, litotes, antithesis, etc.) 12. contrasting syntactic / lexical styles (e.g. paratactic vs. hypotactic; vague references vs. precise terminology) 13. interaction structuring devices (e.g. formulations, pre-sequences, producing second laughables, lecturing) 14. syntactic strategies (e.g. paraphrastic interrogatives; negative interrogatives; YN interrogatives; left-dislocation; direct reported speech) 15. discourse markers (e.g. voil`a, justement, etc.) 16. prosodic techniques (e.g. intonation, rhythm) Although analytically separable such as in the list above, these forms and activities can not be unequivocally linked. Natural interaction does not work on one but on many different levels at a time. So, when participants are asking the presenter a question, they may be simultaneously requesting a response, demonstrating their own academic competence, performing being a conference delegate, presenting other as knowledgeable, etc. From the perspective of micro-phenomena, e.g. the discourse marker a presenter utters at the beginning of her response may serve as a planning device to buy more time, express insecurity or doubt about the question’s aim, be part of a hedge, etc. The potential of any linguistic or interactional device can only unfold – and be analysed reliably – in the context of and in connection with the rest of the talk in the interaction sequence. As a consequence, we cannot give exact lists of devices and their respective functions in the discussions. Instead, we will show ways in which participants can – and routinely do – employ combinations

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of strategies to construct selves and others as experts, researchers, entertainers or individuals with complex professional identities. To facilitate reading the transcripts in the following analyses, I would like to recall my general labelling principle. For instance, PF [fr] stands for female presenter with L1 French. The capital letters before the bracket are combinations of the following: P=presenter, M/F=male / female, D=discussant, C=chair Inside the square brackets, the following (one or several) L1 indications occur: fr = French; en = English; sp = Spanish; it = Italian; po = Portuguese; ge = German, hin = Hindi; ben = Bengali; sw = Swedish; ro = Roumanian

7.1 Doing being expert One of the interactional tasks conference delegates have to carry out in order to build their reputation is to show that they are knowledgeable and intellectually able (Tracy 1997), in other words, to show that they are experts. Expert is understood as in the everyday use of the term as “someone who has a particular skill or who knows a lot about a particular subject” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners 2007). The subject is not necessarily predefined; on the contrary, participants construct selves as experts in whatever area or on whatever subject they claim expertise for, and these do not have to coincide with any established scientific fields. Presenting self as expert works on at least two levels: it can be considered as the fulfilment / enactment of both a locally available and constructed discourse identity (“Beteiligungsrolle”, Th¨orle 2005: 87) and the membership to a more global social category (Th¨orle 2005: 221). To be precise, expertise emerges as a locally achieved phenomenon in the interaction and might have repercussions on the interactional development, but by doing being expert, interactants also index a person’s institutional role, their professional identity and their status in the community. However, the discussions in our data are characterized by the fact that all of the participants are members of the academic community who work in the same or closely related research fields. What we are dealing with in these interactions are essentially forms of expert-expert (Br¨unner 1997: 263) or “symmetrical” (Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson 1967: 68–69) communication, rather than asymmetrical

138 Results of the data analyses expert-lay discourse. In such a balanced group of more or less equally qualified members, it is a challenge to present self as more competent than others. One of the tasks participants have to perform in order to stand out, is to construct different levels of competence, and, ideally, to display that their own degree of competence is higher than that of other. This task is only achievable because research fields are not homogeneous; they are divided into innumerable sub-fields, down to each individual person’s research topic. Therefore, the group of conference delegates is entirely made up of experts, but each of them for a different sub-field or individual topic of a research field. Sometimes, their sub-fields will overlap, and in other cases, they might be quite far apart. In discussion sessions it is most likely that those people who have a larger degree of expertise in the particular subject at hand will ask the more challenging questions, while those who are experts in a different sub-field will be more prone to ask comprehension or clarification questions (cf. Webber (2002: 232), who describes a similar group structure for medical conferences). Conference delegates dispose of a number of resources with which they can display expertise or non-expertise (of self or others). The most obvious method is to give a paper presentation, which entails not only a long period of uninterrupted talking, but also a privileged position in the discussion phase (as far as speaking time is concerned, and from a sequential perspective, e.g. presenters can have the last word). Paper presentations, however, are essentially monologic in their structure (even if good presenters try to involve their audience in a (metaphorical) dialogue by asking rhetorical questions, providing handouts, playing audio recordings, etc), so we have not included them in our interaction-focused analysis. However, it is important to bear in mind that the presenters’ talk is basically a first turn making a claim of expertise. So when presenters are addressed in the question-answer session, the audience’s questions are reactions to that first turn, rather than initiations of a completely new interaction. In the discussion phase, when answering those questions, presenters thus produce third turns. That they construct this as their discursive role is also reflected by the fact that they hardly ever initiate sequences and only rarely give prompts, such as Des questions? ‘Any questions?’ In our analysis I will therefore proceed in the following manner: The first turn (= the paper presentation) will not be analysed in detail, but I will provide a short summary of it where necessary, in order to understand the ensuing question. The second turn (= the contribution by a member of the audience) and the third turn (= the

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presenter’s response) will be studied in depth. As far as the thematic structure of our empiric analyses is concerned, it makes sense to organize them around the specificities of the questioner’s turn, thus taking the perspective of the discussant as our starting point. Of course, the recipient’s (i.e. the presenter’s) response(s) and any follow-ups by the questioners themselves still form an equally important and integral part of my analysis.

7.1.1 Having the overview: doing formulations A very effective way of doing being expert for discussants is to do formulations. Formulations are paraphrases of somebody’s own or another speaker’s talk, or a whole stretch of interactive talk (cf. chapter 6.4). In contrast to everyday interactions, in our data they typically occur at the beginning of a questioner’s contribution, for example beginning with si j’ai bien compris vous avez dit que ‘if I’ve understood correctly you said that’ or alors pour vous il peut y avoir ‘so for you there can be’. Although formulations can simply be unbiased, objective reports of somebody else’s talk, they are rarely so in our data. In most cases, these paraphrases at the beginning of questioner’s turns clearly display the speaker’s stance towards the talk they formulate. This is due to the function formulations have in most of our data: when they are positioned at the beginning of participant contributions, they form the basis on which a speaker builds their argumentation. Hence, formulations are usually constructed in such a way that they prepare the ground for one’s own line of argument, either by supporting it or by providing the necessary counterpoint against which to argue. The questioner then responds to that paraphrase, rather than directly to the talk. So, formulations do not just serve to refresh the discussion participants’ memories; they also play a strong role in argumentation strategies. This is possible because, by formulating the presenter’s talk, questioners in academic discussions present their interpretation of the presenter’s ideas as a given fact. The assumptions and inferences they make in their paraphrase of the presenter’s talk can then become the new basis of discussion. Rhetorically, the combination of formulation and subsequent remark or question functions like the “focus oppositions” (Fokusoppositionen) described by Schmitt and Heidtmann (2002: 192), albeit on a more macroscopic level: Focus oppositions contain two parts: in the first part another participant’s position is taken up and described, while in the second part this position is modified

140 Results of the data analyses or rejected. Argumentatively speaking, the first part is downgraded in its relevance, while the second part is upgraded. If a presenter wants to avoid the questioner’s view to become an established fact, they have to react, and either accept or reject parts or all of the questioner’s interpretation. While the preferred response to a formulation is acceptance (Heritage and Watson 1979: 143), our data contains many instances where formulations are rejected or at least modified. This is not only due to the frequent cases in which formulations are unfavourable for the presenter, but also because formulations are strongly linked with issues of identity construction for questioners as well as presenters. Put simply, producing a formulation is a way of making a competence claim. Giving a concise (ad hoc) summary of a stretch of talk requires the ability to separate the essential from the marginal, which in turn depends on having a certain overview of the topic. So, speakers producing formulations are presenting self as having the overview, i.e. as being authoritative in the subject matter at hand. Since they are claiming overview – and thus expertise – on a topic the paper presenter has just claimed expert status for, this leads to a competitive situation. By commenting on the formulation, either by ratifying it or by denying its validity, presenters can reclaim independent access to the subject matter, thus re-confirming their expert identity. This may even be done by producing a counter-formulation.

7.1.1.1 Doing formulations to prepare the ground The following example is an extract from a discussion following a paper presentation by PF, who had been talking about different identities or roles taken on by confidants (= a person somebody confides in). In the ensuing discussion, the participant DF1 makes a contribution, beginning her turn with a mini-summary of PF’s main point(s) while concurrently evaluating them critically (lines 1–6). In other words, she presents a paraphrastic interpretation of the presenter’s first turn (i.e. her paper presentation). DF1 thus constructs a context for the subsequent question. At the same time, the paraphrase serves as preparation for her own argument, since she does not give an objective report but a subjective interpretation. DF1 then goes on to suggest a different approach to the topic PF has been researching (lines 6–15). Altogether, the questioner’s turn is critical of the presenter: in essence, PF is accused of having over-simplified (and thus misrepresented) a complex process. When

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PF responds to this contribution, she has to re-establish her authority before she answers the actual question. She does this by starting to challenge DF1’s formulation (lines 17–19). Example 7.1 [1] DF1[fr]

je j’aurais une question sur la vous uh vous d´egagez de:s(.) des

DF1 [2] DF1[fr]

I I’d have a question on the you uh you develop

DF1 [3] DF1[fr]

roles euh a little prototypical

DF1 [4] DF1[fr]

incarnating the the confidant in the situation with euh

DF1 [5] DF1[fr]

characteristics that are euh rather one confidant who will

DF1 [6] DF1[fr]

support euh a confidant who will adviseor a

DF1 [7] DF1[fr]

confidant who will disapprove

DF1 [8] DF1[fr]

ask myself if you have euh

DF1 [9] DF1[fr]

your corpus you have observed the temporal dimension

DF1

rˆoles euh un peu prototypiques/ ces trois types de mani`eres de these three types of ways of

d’incarner le:le confident dans la situation/(.) avec euh des

caract´eristiques qui sont euh (.) plutˆot (..) un confident (.) qui va

soutenir/ (.) euh un confident (.) qui va conseiller/ ou un

confident qui va s’opposer\

hein/ c’est un p’tit peu c¸a\ e:t uh je it’s a little bit that

me demande si vous avez euh(...) int´egr´e ou si dans dans integrated or if in in

vot’ corpus/ vous avez observ´e la dimension TEMporelle

dans la prise (..) de ces diff´erentes figures du confident/ in the consideration of these different forms of the confidant

and uh I

142 Results of the data analyses [10] DF1[fr]

c’est-`a-dire comme euh le confident/ (.) si une s´equence de

DF1 [11] DF1[fr]

that is how euh the confidant

DF1 [12] DF1[fr]

confidential talk develops the confidant euh can at the beginning

DF1 [13] DF1[fr]

euh adopt one of these three forms

DF1 [14] DF1[fr]

instance

DF1 [15] DF1[fr]

maybe lead him towards then orienting towards euh the

DF1 [16] DF1[fr]

incarnation of the advisor and then afterwards to disapprove

DF1 [17] DF1[fr]

have you observed this

DF1

confidence se d´eveloppe/ le confident euh peut au d´epart euh

(.)

adopter (.) une de ces trois figures/ le soutien// et puis eu:h ce qui se passe dans l’interaction va peut

-ˆetre

and then euh what happens in the interaction will

le conduire a` ensuite s’orienter vers euh(.) l’incarnation

du conseilleur/

(.) et puis ensuite euh s’opposer/

=est-ce que vous avez observ´e c¸a/ c’est-`a-dire une sorte de de that is a kind of of of

de glissement(.) d’un rˆole a` un autre\ gliding from one role to another

PF[it] PF [18] PF[it]

if a sequence of

(..) euhm (.) j’ai dit que euhm I’ve said that these ces rˆoles euh ne sont PA:s euh (...) euh (..) (exhib´es)\ il y a des roles are not euh euh displayed

there are

contaminations\ euhm euhm je pense euhm a` un des dialogues contaminations euhm euhm I’m thinking euhm of one of the

Doing being expert [20] PF[it]

examin´es

euh il y a euhm glissement un confident

PF [21] PF[it]

dialogues examined euh there is euhm gliding one confidant

PF [22] PF[it]

who euh expresses his support

PF

143

qui: (.) euh exprime son soutient/ euh puis euhm (.) il y a une euh then euhm there is a

progression euhm (..) progression euhm

Let us first look at the topical development and syntactic structure of DF1’s formulation. The topical organisation is characterised by a top-down movement: DF1 first produces a statement pointing out which aspect of PF’s talk she is concerned with and assessing it negatively, followed by a more extensive and more exact reformulation, followed by a simplified, reductionist outline of the main points. The simplified description of PF’s research results is mirrored by a simple, parallel syntactic structure: un confident (.) qui va soutenir/ (.) euh un confident (.) qui va conseiller/ ou un confident qui va s’opposer\ ‘a confidant who will support euh a confidant who will advise or a confidant who will disapprove’. When we look at the detailed development of the turn, we notice that the questioner starts her turn by announcing a question but cuts off her utterance before getting to the actual content of the question (line 1) and restarts it. In doing so, she switches from a “self-referencing frame” (je j’aurais une question ‘I I’d have a question’) (Clayman 2006) to addressing the presenter directly (vous uh vous d´egagez ‘you uh you develop’). Her use of the second person plural pronoun “vous” also indicates that she is distancing herself from, or at least not identifying with, the content she is about to report (cf. Lavric 1990 and 2001). This choice of turn beginning frames the formulation as a simple, potentially neutral report of what another person said. However, the restart also puts more focus on the ‘vous’, which highlights the personal involvement of the addressee and opens up ways for possible face implications. DF1’s turn is potentially highly face-threatening for two reasons: first, the fact that it is possible to summarise the presenter’s 20-minute-talk in one single turn is a threat because it implies that PF’s presentation was not very

144 Results of the data analyses complex and not very rich in content. Second, the designation of research results as prototypiques can be seen as a milder version of stereotyp´e, which is undesirable in all academic disciplines. Moreover, in the research field at hand – namely conversation or interaction analysis – it is a particularly strong criticism, since the aim in this discipline is to provide differentiated, detailed analyses of situation-specific sequential developments. There are several aspects in the questioner’s construction of the turn that indicate her awareness of the face-threatening potential of her formulation. She uses repairs, hesitation markers, pauses, and hedge words (de:s (.) des rˆoles euh un peu ‘roles that are euh a little’; ces trois types de mani`eres de ‘these three types of ways of’; des caract´eristiques qui sont euh (.) plutˆot ‘characteristics that are euh rather’). DF1’s display that she is aware of the face threat potential, by means of attempting to mitigate her report, actually contributes to the face threat of her formulation. In other words, had DF1 not hedged or attenuated her description, the interpretative work of her paraphrase might (more likely) have gone unnoticed. Even so, the evaluative aspect would still have been strong, with the use of the adjective prototypique, which in this context has to be understood as non-desirable and negatively evaluative. It is particularly the attenuating un peu ‘a little’ preceding the adjective which highlights that the function of the following word is not merely descriptive here, but (negatively) evaluative, and gives the whole turn a slightly condescending tone. Another interesting aspect is DF1’s use of the demonstrative pronoun ces ‘these’ (ces trois types de mani`eres de ‘these three types of ways of’). At first sight the combination of a proximity demonstrative and a numeral is a typical cataphoric signal (Lavric 2001: 838), announcing the description of the three types of confidants. There is even a slight pause after the cataphoric utterance (la situation/ ‘the situation’, line 3), which in written language would be expressed by a colon. But there is more to this demonstrative here. It also functions as a connivence marker and creates what Lavric (1996; 2001: 916) calls the “halo-effect”: ces is used here to refer to something which is constructed as a shared category. Although the three types are labelled thus by the discussant DF1, and do not necessarily reflect the presenter’s perspective, DF1’s use of ces implies that the three types do exist, that they are shared knowledge and that she can thus refer to them in this way. This contributes to the construction of her paraphrase as facts. Next, the questioner tries to receive confirmation of her interpretation of the presenter’s talk: she attaches the tag particle (or “marqueur de recherche

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d’approbation discursive” (Traverso 1996: 47) hein/ with final rising intonation. But there is no – at least no audible – response from the presenter. Of course, hein is a very common discourse marker rather than a fully-fledged question, so the absence of a response by other is not necessarily noticeable. More importantly, there is – at this point – no rejection of DF1’s formulation. This means DF1’s claim of epistemic authority is not challenged. But although the presenter does not react, there is actually a response to the request, only it is the questioner herself who provides it: c’est un p’tit peu c¸a ‘it’s a little bit that’ (line 6). This hedged auto-confirmation does two things here: first, it is a hedge applying retrospectively to the prior turn. In its function as a hedge it paradoxically increases the face threat of the turn because it affirms that it actually was a challenge. Second, the phrase serves as a closing device for the formulation and leads over to a new section. Together with the restart at the beginning, it frames the formulation as a preparatory phase of the turn. In lines 6-8 DF1 finally formulates the question she had announced at the beginning: je me demande si vous avez euh (. . . ) int´egr´e ou si dans dans vot’ corpus/ vous avez observ´e ‘I’m asking myself if you have euh integrated or if in in your corpus you have observed’. Again, she repairs it halfway through, replacing one past participle verb by another (observ´e ‘observed’ instead of integr´e ‘integrated’). This indicates that the questioner considered the first version as inappropriate, probably too much of a face-threat (against the fact of the conscientious researcher). The second verb, which puts the agent in a more passive position, certainly gives the presenter a much wider scope of action, because the responsibility for the lack of a certain research result is no longer attributed to the researcher herself but to the material (in which the phenomenon may simply not occur). As for the content of the question, DF1 is suggesting the study of the data under another, less taxonomic and more dynamic – hence more complex – aspect. By contrasting this with the formulation, the new aspect – the dimension TEMporelle ‘the temporal dimension’ – is presented implicitly as something that PF had neglected to include in her analysis. It is therefore potentially a face threat. The questioner then goes on to demonstrate her own competence in the field by giving a very detailed description of the phenomena she would expect in the data (beginning with c’est-`a-dire ‘that is’, line 10). When the questioner has finished her turn the presenter gets the floor. She does not use the face threat avoidance strategy offered to her by the questioner (namely, that the phenomenon does not appear in the corpus), but re-

146 Results of the data analyses acts directly to the underlying criticism. She does that by first responding to the formulation rather than the question itself. In a quite defensive statement (j’ai dit que ces rˆoles euh ne sont Pas euh (. . . ) euh (exhib´es) ‘I’ve said that these roles euh are not euh euh displayed’) she denies that she had been oversimplifying the matter, and she also implies that DF1 had misunderstood her or not been listening carefully and thus wrongly summarised her talk. This behaviour displays PF’s interpretation of DF1’s question as criticism and her rejection of the face attributed to her by DF1. But the presenter’s response does not stop at a simple rejection of the reproach. Her initial justification is followed by an elaborate comment in which she discusses the questioner’s suggestion regarding a more dynamic view of her categories and describes an example from her own data. What the participants are doing here is fighting a real battle of claims, in other words, they are each making claims about their own status as experts while denying the other person that status. The questioner does this by formulating the presenter’s talk as simplistic (hence inappropriate) and by contrasting this with her own expert description of additional, neglected phenomena. In return, the presenter denies the validity of the questioner’s formulation, which also cancels out the argument based on this formulation and restates her own claim to expertise by giving a detailed account of an example from her own data.

7.1.1.2 Responding to formulations by referring to data In the next extract, we can see a similar occurrence of the formulation strategy. But here, the participants’ behaviour is more cooperative despite the similarly strong evaluative aspect. Although the questioner originally formulates the presenter’s (PF) talk in such a way that it is in opposition with her own argument, the presenter manages to convince her that PF’s perspective is also valid.

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Example 7.2 [1] DF3[fr] DF3 [2] PF[fr]

moi j’ai une p’tite remarque juste linguistique purement i i have a small remark just linguistic purely oui/

PF DF3[fr] DF3 [3] PF[fr]

yes linguistique c’est sur ce TU(.)

qui m’intrigue e´ norm´ement\

linguistic it’s about that you

which intrigues me enormously

PF DF3[fr] DF3 [4] PF[fr]

DF3 [5] PF[fr]

so you said

yes

yeah

like one always says no

it’s a you a

oui yes tu g´en´erique/(.)

(elle parle alors d’une entit´e) abstraite et

generic you

(so she speaks of an) abstract and generic oui

PF DF3[fr]

ouais

alors vous avez dit(.) comme on dit toujours hein/ c’est un tu un

PF DF3[fr]

oui/

yes g´en´erique\

ce que j’ai remarqu´e moi on n’a pas fait d’´etudes

DF3 [6] DF3[fr]

(unit)\

what i’ve noticed

DF3 [7] DF3[fr]

systematic studies yet

DF3

me we have not done very

encore(.) tr`es syst´ematiques mais ce que j’ai remarqu´e c’est but what i’ve noticed

is that

que(x) le TU c’est un JE e´ tendu\ the you

in fact this you here

is an extended I

almost

148 Results of the data analyses [8] PF[fr] PF DF3[fr] DF3 [9] DF3[fr]

d’accord\ ouais\ okay yeah quasiment toujours\ c’est-`a- dire qu’on l’utilise presque toujours always that is

to say that one almost always uses

(..) pour d´ecrire justement des exp´eriences qui pour le moment

DF3 [10] DF3[fr]

it(..) to describe just such experiences that at that moment are

DF3 [11] DF3[fr]

not SHARed(.) by the other

DF3 [12] DF3[fr]

experiences from which the interlocutor is up until then

DF3 [13] PF[fr]

more or less excluded(xxx) me i’ve noticed that maybe not always

ne sont pas PARTag´ees(.) par l’autre\ /les you know the

exp´eriences dont l’interlocuteur est(.)

(.) plus ou moins EXclu\

moi j’ai remarqu´ec¸a(.) toujours mais(.) tr`es tr`es souvent

par exemple l’autre

DF3 [14] DF3[fr]

but very very often

for example the other

DF3 [15] DF3[fr]

day there was(xxx) a dancer who tells me yes because you

DF3 [16] DF3[fr]

know euh you know when you toe dance when you do this

DF3

jour il y a(d’autre part) une danseuse qui m’dit oui parce que tu

sais euh tu sais quand TU fais les pointes quand TU fais ceci

quand tu fais quand t’es sur la when you do what i’ve never done

when you’re on

Doing being expert [17] DF3[fr] DF3 [18] PF[fr]

sc`ene en fait euh

149

et j’ai remarqu´e que c¸a c’´etait souvent

the stage in fact euh and i’ve noticed that it was often mai:s l`a c’est’fin si vous voulez bien regarder/

PF

but here it’s well if you look

at

DF3[fr]

comme c¸a\

c’est paradoxal hein/

DF3

like this

it’s paradoxical isn’t it

The questioner, DF3, frames her turn as a p’tite remarque juste linguistique. This serves two main purposes. First, it functions as a topic transition device, since it announces that DF3’s turn will devote itself to other issues than the previous ones; secondly, it is a foreshadowing of the nature and content of her turn. DF3 then states the focus of her contribution: c’est sur ce tu (.), using the anaphorical demonstrative ce and pausing, thus inviting a confirming response (cf. Lavric 2010). Since the presenter confirms that she can identify what DF3 is referring to, DF3 can carry on by adding her evaluative comment (qui m’intrigue e´ norm´ement ‘which intrigues me enormously’) in the shape of a non-defining relative clause. With this evaluation, DF3 does not only claim the level of interestingness of the subject but implicitly also its complexity. Hence, the statement serves as a face threat avoiding strategy: if DF3 now questions PF’s authority in this subject, she is not taking away her face of ‘expert’ completely. This utterance is followed by a formulation of what PF (is believed to have) said about ce tu: c’est un tu un tu g´en´erique ‘it’s a you a generic you’ (lines 3-4). The subordinate clause comme on dit toujours ‘as is always said’ defines the quality of PF’s talk, labelling it as standard practice, which makes it a less serious error. The phrase also includes the speaker herself (in on, which is used generically here, but still evokes the notion of nous ‘we’). It thus brings her closer to the recipient of her talk; it is a way of working on the emotional, interpersonal aspect of the communication. This is the only time when PF’s hearer signal is a ouais instead of a oui. We can analyse it as a ratification of the content of DF3’s talk, and in that respect as a continuer, but since ouais belongs to the more colloquial end of the scale, it implies more personal involvement and is thus also hearable as a confirmation of the work that was initiated on the level of their interpersonal relationship.

150 Results of the data analyses Like in example 7.1, the formulation is then contrasted with DF3’s theory, which is based on her own research – or rather, observations – in this area. Since DF3 is not only making hypothetical speculations, and since she bases her argument on her own data, rather than PF’s, access to this theory remains with her alone and is thus difficult to be challenged by another participant. On the other hand, DF3 is reducing her claim somewhat by indicating that it has not been a very systematic study, and implying that there is not a large amount of (if indeed any) literature on the topic. Hence, it is not surprising that PF displays affiliation with DF3’s report in line 8: d’accord\ ouais\ ‘okay yeah’, even if this does not mean that PF would accept this view for her own data. She simply grants DF3 that she may have found these phenomena in her data. However, when PF takes over the floor (see line 1 below), she directs the attention back to her own data and thus achieves a reclaim of authority in the rest of the sequence: Example 7.2 cont. [1] PF [fr]

mai:s l`a c’est

PF DF3 [fr] DF3 [2] PF [fr] PF

but here it’s et j’ai remarqu´e que c¸a c’´etait souvent comme c¸a\ and i’ve noticed that it was often like this\ ’fin si vous voulez bien regarder/

oui/ mais si vous voulez

well if you

yes but if you have a

DF3 [fr] DF3 [3] PF [fr] PF [4] PF [fr] PF

look at c’est paradoxal hein/ it’s paradoxical isn’t it

bien r’garder a` la page quatre dans la transcription/ au tout d´ebut look at page four in the transcription quand on a (.)

at the very

cette locutrice se confie/ elle utilise

beginning when we have this speaker confides

she really

Doing being expert [5] PF [fr] PF

vraiment un JE dans les pronoms personnels\

euh tout

uses an I in the personal pronouns

euh first of all oui\ des relations

puis

tout d’un coup (.) elle se retraite

have all had relationships then

all of a sudden she retreats well

DF3 [fr] DF3 [8] PF [fr] PF

OUI\ yes (.) enfin (.) je sais pas pour toi/ (..)

mais (voil`a) MOI donc

i don’t know about you

but (there) me so there

DM [fr]

hm

DF3 [fr]

voil`a/

DF3 [9] PF [fr]

c’est c¸a eXActement\

that’s it that’s it exactly l`a elle prend en charge/ donc c’est locutrice UN tout en

PF

she takes over

so it’s speaker one

DF3 [fr]