The interactional achievement of tellability: a study of story-openings

Berger, Evelyne

doi:10.3917/rfla.222.0089

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…While some of these utterances are part of story-prefaces that prepare the grounds for an incipient negative telling (cf. Sacks, 1974 ; Jefferson, 1978 ; Berger, 2017 ; see Excerpt 3 ), not all utterances precede stories (see Excerpt 2 , 4 ). Considering the contingent nature of complaints, which require coparticipant collaboration to come about ( Traverso, 2009 ; Ruusuvuori et al, 2019 ), embodied displays of stance, whether produced as part of a verbal-embodied package or self-standing (for the latter, see Skogmyr Marian, 2020 , 2021 ), seem to be a way for future complainants to ‘test the waters’ of their negatively valenced course of action before launching the complaint fully.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Without Words: Verbally Incomplete Utterances in Complaints

Marian

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This study investigates the use of verbally incomplete utterances in French-language complaints about third parties or situations. In these cases, a speaker initiates a turn with verbal means but stops talking before reaching lexico-syntactic completion. The utterance becomes recognizable as an expression of negative stance or as a precise negative assessment by virtue of the linguistic formatting of the turn-initiation, its position within the larger interactional context, and the speaker’s accompanying bodily-visual displays and vocalizations. Data consist of video-recorded coffee-break conversations among first and second language speakers of French. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis, the analysis documents recurrent linguistic formats of the verbally incomplete utterances and examines the interactional deployment of the utterances in two distinct sequential contexts: (1) in the initiation of complaints, and (2) at the end of complaint tellings or reports. In the first of these, the action of leaving a turn verbally incomplete and expressing stance with bodily-visual means allows the speaker to prepare the grounds for the complaint by foreshadowing the negative valence of the upcoming talk. In the latter case, the verbally incomplete utterance and accompanying vocal and/or embodied conduct are deployed as a summary assessment or upshot of the complaint which shows, rather than merely describes, the complaint-worthiness of the situation. In both cases, the utterances work to enhance the chances for the speaker to obtain affiliative responses from coparticipants. While prior studies on verbally incomplete utterances have suggested that such utterances may be specifically suitable for subtly dealing with delicate actions, in this study the utterances are sometimes produced as part of multimodal ‘extreme-case expressions’ that convey negative stance in a high-grade manner. The findings contribute to a better understanding of interactional uses of verbally incomplete utterances and of the multimodal nature of negative assessments. The study thereby furthers our understanding of how grammar and the body interface as resources for the accomplishment of context-specific actions and the organization of social interaction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Without Words: Verbally Incomplete Utterances in Complaints

Marian

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…The example is similar to the one about the champagne in that the self-generalization is presenting something that might be contrary to the perceived norms of society, and this per se seems to be a motivating factor for producing them; they index the tellability of the story (see Berger, 2017) by anchoring it through a description of the ‘characteristics’ of the person launching it. Also, as in example 1, the self-generalization can be seen to be orienting to a possible complainable, in this case in particular the cultural norm that one ought to be a good mother; the self-generalization can thus be seen to be commenting on the ‘wrongness’ of the account to come (see Drew, 1998: 295, 302), displaying an orientation to the possibility that one may be considered to have acted improperly.…”

Section: Self-descriptions In Finnish Conversations: Accounting For One’s Behaviormentioning

confidence: 90%

Self-description in everyday interaction: Generalizations about oneself as accounts of behavior

Visapää

2021

Discourse Studies

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This article suggests that there are systematic ways in which the identity of the ‘self’, as created and performed through first-person markers, can be made relevant and consequential in particular episodes of interaction. More specifically, the study looks at generalizations that people present about themselves in local interactional contexts: displays of the types of people they are and the ways in which they always or never behave (‘I am this kind of person’, ‘I never do this’). It will be shown that such self-generalizations are typically used to account for one’s behavior, and that this tendency is tied to the epistemic and moral rights provided by the first-person perspective, having the primary rights to one’s own experience. The study suggests that speakers’ personal characteristics or habitual behavior can be offered as a locally produced micro-identity, which can come to have interactional significance.

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“…Besides the function of projecting incipient storytelling and making the story coherent with the on-going talk, story-openings may also be used to justify the ‘tellability’ (i.e. why it is worth telling) (Berger, 2017; Sacks, 1974), or establish the ‘storyworthiness’ (i.e. why it is worth listening) (Beach, 2000).…”

Section: Ca Research On Storytelling and Story-openingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence, our current understanding of story-opening relies on the existing research on ordinary storytelling, which has uncovered several typical interactional functions. These include turn-taking management, that is, projecting an incipient story which requires a multi-unit turn (Sacks, 1974); sequence organization, that is, making the story cohere with the on-going talk (Dingemanse et al, 2017; Jefferson, 1978); and recipient management, that is, justifying the tellability of the story, foreshadowing the type of story, and giving hints to recipients regarding how to interpret and react to the story (Berger, 2017; Dingemanse et al, 2017; Jefferson, 1978; Sacks, 1974).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A conversation analytical study of story-openings in advice-giving episodes in doctoral research supervision meetings

2021

Discourse Studies

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Interactional functions of story-opening in everyday conversations across different languages have been widely examined in Conversation Analysis (CA). However, there is a paucity in research on story-openings in institutional talk. This paper addresses this research gap by examining how story-opening contributes to advice-giving in doctoral research supervision. It draws on a data corpus of 57 storytelling sequences produced by six supervisors during 25 hours of video-recorded supervision meetings at an Australian university. The analysis shows that story-opening supports the on-going advice-giving activity in two ways. First, it invokes the supervisor’s knowledge and experience, which functions to strengthen the advice under way. Second, it works toward building a joint understanding with the student, thereby serving the supervisor’s pursuit of the student’s acceptance of advice. These findings have significant implications for research on storytelling in institutional interaction, advice and supervision practices.

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The interactional achievement of tellability: a study of story-openings

Cited by 7 publications

References 36 publications

Assessing Without Words: Verbally Incomplete Utterances in Complaints

Assessing Without Words: Verbally Incomplete Utterances in Complaints

Self-description in everyday interaction: Generalizations about oneself as accounts of behavior

A conversation analytical study of story-openings in advice-giving episodes in doctoral research supervision meetings

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