In this essay, I discuss some of the recent findings on telephone openings. Moving beyond concerns with the variability of structural arrangements in such conversations, I analyze the role of spatial, personal, and social deixis in the accomplishment not only of mutual understanding in the conversation, but in the instantiation of talk as telephone conversation. Examples from a variety of telephone calls suggest that deixis plays an important role in this process, supporting the view that telephone conversations have universal features. One of these may be the presence of structure tokens, a form of metadeixis that has, so far, escaped our attention.
Ring, ring: A first summonsRecently, conversation analysts and ethnographers of communication have renewed their long-standing interest in a particular form of language use, the telephone conversation (Hopper, 1992). As a result, we now understand much better how telephony differs from conversations conducted face to face. Indeed, telephone conversations appear to constitute a distinct type of communication behavior with structural features that have been claimed to be universal (Hopper, Doany, Johnson, and Drummond 1990/91;Schegloff 1986). Differences in these two types of conversation are due in large part to technological characteristics of the communication medium, although we have not yet seriously weighed the influence of these primarily technological constraints against the primarily social constraints deriving from the modes of access made possible by the telephone (see Carroll 1987;Sifianou 1989). Because the telephone has been part of our everyday communicative inventory for around a century, we should also consider whether secondary rule sets -telephone etiquettes -may not have come to constrain telephone conversations beyond the parameters set Semiotica