Actions in practice: On details in collections

Abstract

Several of the contributions to the Lynch, et al. (2016) special issue make the claim that conversation-analytic research into epistemics is "routinely crafted at the expense of actual, produced and constitutive detail, and what that detail may show us" (Macbeth and Wong, 2016: 585-6). Here we seek to address the inappositeness of this critique by tracing precisely how it is that recognisable actions emerge from distinct practices of interaction. We begin by reviewing some of the foundational tenets of conversation-analytic theory and methodincluding the relationship between position and composition, and the making of collectionsas these appear to be primary sources of confusion for many of the contributors to the Lynch, et al. special issue. We then target some of the specific arguments presented in the special issue, including the alleged 'over-hearer's' writing of metrics, the provision of so-called 'alternative' analyses, and the supposed 'crafting' of generalizations in epistemics research. In addition, in light of Lynch's (2016: 18) more general assertion that CA has recently been experiencing a "rapprochement" with what he disparagingly refers to as the "juggernaut" of linguistics, we discuss the specific expertise that linguists have to offer in analyzing particular sorts of interactional detail. The paper as a whole thus illustrates that, rather than being produced "at the expense of actual, produced and constitutive detail," conversation-analytic findings-including its work in epistemics-are unambiguously anchored in such detail. We conclude by offering our comments as to the link between CA and linguistics more generally, arguing that this relationship has long proven to be-and indeed continues to be-a mutually beneficial one.

Conversational functions of ‘I know’, ‘you know’ and ‘we know’ in collaborative writing of primary school children

“…We first selected the utterances holding the verb 'know', together with the personal pronouns I, you (singular) and we, in all possible, positive conjugations. This enabled us to compile three sub-collections (Clift and Raymond 2018;Mazeland 2006) of utterances, 'I know', 'you know' and 'we know', that were subsequently analysed in terms of linguistic formatting, turn placement (turn-initial, turn-medial, turn-final, as a separate turn; Kärkkäinen 2003), sequential position (Schegloff 2007), and the uptake by co-participants (Enfield and Sidnell 2017). In this paper, the notion practice refers to the verbal, vocal, bodily, or material resources that form and accomplish an action, and actions are what participants do in interaction (e.g.…”

Scaffolding Embodied Access for Categorization in Interactions between a Blind Child and Her Mother

“…Moreover, we have elected to take a single-case analysis approach, in which findings from previous collections-based analyses of interactional phenomena are brought to bear on the examination of a single interaction (cf. Clift and Raymond 2018). Such an analysis, in Schegloff (1987, p. 101) words, has as its goal to "assess the capacity of [CA as an] analytic enterprise" by applying past results to new data.…”

On the relevance and accountability of dialect: Conversation analysis and dialect contact

“…Repair is a particularly powerful tool that conversation analysts often use to detect normative associations, as participants are willing to halt the progressivity of the interaction – that is, the forward‐moving trajectory of the talk (Schegloff ) – in order to ‘fix’ something that they deem relevantly fixable (see, e.g., Jefferson ). This allows the analyst to form a hypothesis as to why the participant(s) considered such a fix to be relevant, a hypothesis that is then empirically testable by situating the particular case within a collection of cases (Clift and Raymond ).…”