Incomplete utterances as critical assessments

Abstract

Using video recordings of draft meetings conducted as part of an intramural basketball program as data, this conversation analytic study examines the use of an incomplete utterance in a joint evaluative activity. In particular, we focus on how the participants, volunteer coaches, who meet to draft players for their respective teams, produce a syntactically incomplete utterance as a means to critically assess a player, a non-present third party to the interaction. Analysis reveals that the participants use an incomplete utterance as part of dispreferred design; it allows them to withhold articulating overt criticism of others. By trailing off where the criticism is due, the participants display reluctance to verbalize what is to be said and treat its articulation as delicate. The syntactic structure of the utterance that includes a contrastive conjunction (‘but’) and accompanying embodied actions such as head shakes help them convey a critical stance. We examine the use of incomplete utterances in both agreement and disagreement sequences; the recipients display their unproblematic understanding of the critical assessment and respond by providing their own assessments that either affiliate or disaffiliate with the conveyed critical stance.

Assessing Without Words: Verbally Incomplete Utterances in Complaints

“…Contrastive formulations have been observed as recurrent prefaces to both complaints and other potentially delicate actions ( Sacks, 1992 ; Golato, 2005 ; Clayman, 2006 ). The following excerpts show that after a positive assessment or positively valenced observation, the speaker does not need verbalize the contrasting negative element to perform a recognizable negative stance expression (see Park and Kline, 2020 , for similar observations on English data).…”

“… Li (2016) similarly demonstrates that speakers of Chinese use syntactically incomplete turns to accomplish negative assessments of third parties without uttering negative assessment terms. A recent study by Park and Kline (2020) on verbally incomplete negative assessments confirm these observations, while also documenting a particular recurrent lexico-syntactic format by which speakers accomplish critical assessments: utterances beginning with a neutral or positive clausal TCU followed by the contrastive conjunction but and a verbally incomplete clausal TCU.…”

“…to signal incipient assessments, modulate the strength of verbal stance expressions, and display their affective involvement in the activity ( Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987 , 1992 ; Ogden, 2006 ). Few studies have systematically investigated speakers’ use of bodily-visual conduct in assessing and responding to assessments, however (but see Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä, 2009 ; Kaukomaa et al, 2014 ; Park and Kline, 2020 , and the discussion in Haddington, 2006 ). The present study contributes to bridging the research gap by examining a particular type of verbal-embodied stance displays in French interactions.…”

“…The expression of negative stance is an integral part of complaints, deployed by complainants (speakers producing a complaint) to construct the ‘complaint-worthiness’ of the complained-about person or situation ( Drew, 1998 ; Drew and Holt, 1988 ). Research on verbally incomplete utterances indicates that such utterances may be specifically suitable when speakers wish to convey negative stance toward a person or situation without verbally putting it ‘on record’ ( Chevalier, 2008 , 2009 ; Chevalier and Clift, 2008 ; Ford et al, 2012 ; Li, 2016 , 2019 ; Park and Kline, 2020 ). In my data, this is not always the case.…”

“…At the same time, speakers have been observed to perform careful interactional work to attend to the delicacy of criticizing others, for example by introducing complaints in a stepwise manner that allows them to test the grounds for the complaint before launching the complaint fully ( Traverso, 2009 ; Ruusuvuori et al, 2019 ). Some of the abovementioned studies on verbally incomplete utterances and vocalizations suggest that such resources may be specifically useful means to convey negative stance without verbalizing negatively valenced assessment terms ( Chevalier, 2008 , 2009 ; Chevalier and Clift, 2008 ; Ford et al, 2012 ; Wiggins, 2013 ; Baldauf-Quilliatre, 2016 ; Li, 2016 , 2019 ; Park and Kline, 2020 ). The present study in part supports these findings, showing that verbally incomplete utterances may be deployed as resources for moving into complaining in a stepwise manner that delays explicit negative assessments (see also Skogmyr Marian, 2020 , 2021 ).…”