Membership categorization, sequencing, and inference:
working towards 'the anchor point' (draft 1.1)
by Paul ten Have©,
University of Amsterdam
[Technical note: If you want to download this file, you should als download
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Paper for the panel 'Cognition-in-Action: Ethnomethodology', 7th International
Pragmatics Conference, International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), Budapest,
Hungary, 9-14 July 2000
Preliminary remarks
Case 1: Co-parents
Case 2: Making a medical appointment
Case 3: A survey interview
Case 4: A medical
consultation: picking up a relationship
Case 5: A medical
consultation: using the record
Case 6: A radio phone-in call
Case 7: Opening up chat room
encounters
Reflections
Conclusions
Notes
References
We ask what it is about natural language
that permits speakers and auditors to hear, and in other ways to witness,
the objective production and objective display of commonsense knowledge,
and of practical circumstances, practical actions, and practical sociological
reasoning as well.
Garfinkel & Sacks,
1970:
342
Preliminary remarks*
In this paper, I will consider some examples of conversational openings,
to explore the situated use of 'cognitive' resources to reach the point
at which the actual 'business' of the encounter can be started. In this
effort I will, of course, use the many insights into telephone conversational
openings that have been elaborated by E.A. Schegloff in his three well-known
papers on the subject. The explicit focus of his work is to explicate
the sequential organization of such openings, firstly the summons-answer
sequence used to establish the actual contact (1968),
secondly the organization of recognition/identification (1979),
and finally the elaboration of what he has called the 'canonical model'
of telephone call openings (1986).
My present explorations will differ from his work in a number of respects.
The first concerns a difference in focus. My focus is on the cognition-in-action
evident in, or inferable from, the actual work of opening a conversation.
I will use his insights and concepts regarding sequential organization
as a support for my analysis, but that sequencing is not my main point.
In Schegloff's work, an opposite focus is evident. He does include observations
on issues of a 'cognitive' sort, but these are side-remarks, often accompanied
by disclaimers that these issues cannot be given adequate treatment in
that particular context. The second difference is that while his work mainly
deals with calls between acquaintances, or at least 'private' calls
(1), I will explore a wider range or openings, including business
calls, face-to-face encounters and computer-mediated chatting.
My effort can be seen as taking a position in an ongoing, half-hidden
debate between Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis as two distinguishable
traditions. While recognizing the differences, it is my preference to combine
inspirations from both, as far as it seems feasible. In this way, my paper
can be seen as part of an effort at an 'ethnomethodologicalization' of
CA, focussing on the actual situated 'work', rather than longing for the
disclosure of an 'underlying organization' or the construction of an 'apparatus'
that 'provides for' the actual doings of the participants.
In focussing on 'structures of social action', i.e. sequencing, turn-taking,
etc., CA can be seen to marginalise processes of 'cognition-in-action',
which, however, are equally important in understanding the lived-work of
talk-in-interaction. What I would like to try in this paper is to shift
the focus, at least for this occasion, foregrounding the 'cognitive' work
involved in starting a conversation, while using (findings on) sequential
structures as background. What I hope to achieve is to make a (small) contribution
to a procedural sociology of knowledge, as applied to talk-in-interaction.
Inspecting the development of conversation analysis from its earliest
beginnings around 1964 until its full development a decade later, as documented
in Harvey Sacks' Lectures (1992), and
Schegloff's introductions to the volumes in which they were published,
it can be seen that the 'discovery' of turn-taking and sequencing has led
to the marginalisation of cognitive issues, as noted above. The most telling
aspect of this development is the virtual disappearance of the notion of
'membership categorization' after 1968, while it was quite prominent before
that time (2). I was only in later years,
that more ethnomethodologically inclined writers, including Lena Jayussi
(1984), Rod Watson (various papers) and
Stephen Hester & Peter Eglin (1997)
took up the ideas of Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) again. As
Hester & Eglin point out in the introduction to their edited volume,
the accent is now placed at investigating the actual use of membership
categories, rather than trying to formulate an abstract apparatus. One
way in which this could be tried might be to merge the focus on sequential
organization, as a gradually developing, stepwise process, on which current
CA works, with an MCA-like 'socio-logical analyses (cf. Watson, 1997).
That is, at least, my intention in this paper.
These issues deserve a much more extended theoretical and methodological
treatment than in can give them here. Taking an 'empirical' rather than
a theoretical tack, I will now discuss five data extracts, trying by way
of experiment and demonstration to develop these ideas as I go along. These
extracts were taken from telephone calls and face-to-face encounters, private
and institutional contexts. Furthermore, I will discuss some examples and
findings from two previous papers, one (case 6) concerning calls to a radio
phone-in show, and a second (case 7) dealing with categorizations as used
in text-based 'chatting' over the internet.
Case 1: Co-parents
I will start off my discussion with some observations on a telephone conversation's
first exchanges which is given in a recent (1997:
172-3) paper by Schegloff (3), although
he uses it for rather different purposes there. He provides the following
background information:
Marsha and Tony are the parents-now separated or divorced-of
the teenaged Joey, who lives with his father in northern California, but
has just spent a period of vacation from school with his mother in southern
California. This was the day he was scheduled to drive back up north, and
the exchange (...) comes from the quite brief telephone conversation which
Tony makes to Marsha.
I will just quote the first few lines:
00 ((ring))
01 Marsha: Hello:?
02 Tony: Hi: Marsha?
03 Marsha: Ye:ah.
04 Tony: How are you.
05 Marsha: Fi::ne.
06 (0.2)
07 Marsha: Did Joey get home yet?
08 Tony: Well I wz wondering when 'e left.
09 (0.2)
10 Marsha: .hhh Uh:(d) did Oh: .h Yer not in on what ha:ppen'.(hh)(d)
11 Tony: No(h)o=
12 Marsha: =He's flying.
13 (0.2)
14 Marsha: En Ilene is going to meet im:.Becuz the to:p wz ripped
15 off'v iz car which is tih say someb'ddy helped th'mselfs.
16 Tony: Stolen.
17 (0.4)
18 Marsha: Stolen.=Right out in front of my house.
A call opening, as Schegloff
(1986: 116) suggests, can be seen as an 'arena' in which the issue of what
they will be talking about can be 'worked out by the parties' involved.
It provides a base
position (I will call it the 'anchor position') for the introduction of
'first topic'. That position comes after a fairly standard set of four
or so sequences (depending on whether an exchange of 'howareyou's is in
point) have been 'run through' - a summons/answer sequence (Schegloff,
1968, 1970), an identification sequence (Schegloff, 1979), a greeting sequence,
and, if in order, an exchange of 'howareyou' sequences (Sacks, 1975;
Jefferson, 1980). After completion
of the second 'howareyou' sequence is the anchor position. Ordinarily,
it is the caller (or the initiator of the contact, if an earlier call which
failed to contact its target is being returned) who, in the first instance,
gets to initiate first topic, initiates it in the anchor position, and
regularly uses the opportunity to introduce something overtly announced
to be, or readily analyzable (by co-participant and academic analyst) as,
the 'reason for the call'.
In these terms, we see, in lines
00 and 01, a typical summons-answer sequences; the ring being the summons,
to which the 'Hello:?'
provides an answer. Next, in 02 and 03, we see a greeting plus an identification/recognition:
'Hi:
Marsha?'
followed by a confirmation: 'Ye:ah.'
(4). Then, caller starts an 'initial inquiries' phase with the
standard 'How are
you.' (04), which gets
the equally standard 'Fi::ne.'
(05). Marsha, the call recipient, does not initiate a second howareyou-sequence
and neither does she let Tony, the caller, state his reason-for-calling
in next turn, as would be the routine (Schegloff, 1986). Instead, she continues
after a very small (0.2) pause with a inquiry as to their son: 'Did Joey
get homeyet?'
(07).
While the parties ordinarily
'work through' a standard trajectory, also called the 'canonical model',
from the starting 'summons' to the 'anchor position', where the substantive
talk can begin, Schegloff stresses that at any point the parties can already
hint at, or start the first topic, a process he calls 'preempting'.
In fact, at very
nearly every position in the developing course of these openings, there
is an opportunity for one party or the other to preempt control of first
topic, and, with it, potentially the shape of the rest of the conversation.
The opening may be thought, therefore, to supply a metric of sorts for
the introduction of various tellables, with the degree of claimed priority
or urgency embodied in the degree of preemption before anchor position
pursued by the preempting party.
Schegloff (1986):
117
In the case at hand, we see
how Marsha, who is the call recipient, 'preempts' the routine control over
first-topic, with her inquiry 'Did Joey
get home yet?'
(07), attached after a mini-pause to her answer to his initial inquiry.
Tony, the caller, however, does not directly answer that query, but - building
on it - supplies what may very well have been his original 'first topic': Well
I wz wondering when
'e left.(08). In a way
then, he re-asserts his identity as a caller, but then Marsha, draws the
conclusion that he is not aware of 'what happened', .hhh
Uh:(d) did Oh:
.h Yer not in
on what ha:ppen'.(hh)(d) (10).
Tony confirms that (11), after which Marsha, the call recipient, starts
what actually becomes the call's topic.
One could say, then, that
the participants' action-based identities, caller/recipient, are superseded
by their knowledge-based identities, informed/not-informed, although this
takes a certain amount of negotiation. As to their more permanent identities,
as ex-partners and co-parents, these obviously ground the encounter in
a taken-for-granted manner. From a knowledge-in-action perspective, there
seems to be a clear divide between what is treated as pre-established common
knowledge, and any current 'update'. The first includs the relevant identities
of father, mother and son, the current location of the first two, and the
plans concerning the latter's return. It is within that shared framework
that an update is relevant, so inquires are made as to the son's whereabout
and the timing of his trip, which makes the news of his changed travel
plan and its circumstances the topic of the call. As the personal
identities are known and taken-for-granted, neither the relevant categories,
not the associated predicates are made explicit; they are just used. Such
a two-fold structure seems typical of what may be called an update-call
between intimates.
Case
2: Making a medical appointment
By way of contrast, I will examine
a call opening involving strangers as a man calls a doctor's office to
arrange an appointment for a neurological examination of his son..
01 A praktijk dokter 
Noor
man
doctor Noorman's practice
02 C goedemiddag u spreekt met Van Boorden
good afternoon Van Boorden speaking
03 C ik heb (.) eh (.) u heeft een brief gekregen
I have (.) uh (.) you have received a letter
04 C >als het goed is<
if it went alright
05 C van het em oh bee prinsengracht (.) eh
from the MOB at prinsengracht (5)
06 C over een onderzoek van mijn zoon Bob
about an examination of my son Bob
07 A ogenblikje
moment
08 [pause, about 2 min.; occasionally very soft voices at a distance]
09 A2 Noorman.
Noorman
10 C pardon?
excuse me?
11 A2 dokter Noorman.
doctor Noorman
12 C eh (.) u spreekt met Van Boorden
uh Van Boorden speaking
13 C het gaat over een onderzoek van mijn zoon Bob
it's about an examination of my son Bob
14 C op suggestie van het em oh be prinsengracht,
at the suggestion of the M.O.B Prinsengracht
15 A2 uw zoon Bob?
your son Bob?
16 A2 een onderzoek van wat?
an examination of what?
17 C eh:::m (.) ee ee gee en dergelijke,
uhm E.E.G. and such
18 C ik weet niet precies (wat er in [die brief sta-)
I don't know exactly (what's in the letter)
19 A2 [(wa- wa- vo-)
(wha- wha- fo-)
20 A2 van wie heb u die envelop gekregen? (.)
from whom did you get that envelope?
21 A2 van uw huisdokter?
from your G.P.?
22 C eh u moet een envelop gekregen hebben van het em oh bee prinsengracht.
uh you must have received an envelope from the M.O.B. Prinsengracht
23 A2 ohhh (.) ja ja (.)
ohhh yes yes
24 A2 eh hoe's uw naam zegt u?
uh what is your name you say?
25 C Van Boorden.
26 A2 en schikt het u om donderdag eh effe kijken wat zeg ik vrijdag te komen,
and does it suit you on Thursday uh let me see what do I say to come Friday,
27 [proceeds to making an appointment]
The overall structure of this call opening is as follows. The phone is
picked up by someone who is probably an assistant and who uses a strictly
institutional identification: 'praktijk dokter Noorman'
(doctor Noorman's practice) (1). The caller then takes a multi-unit
turn, containing a greeting, a last name identification, and the reason
for the call. In the latter he mentions that the call recipient, taken
as an institutional representative, should have received a letter from
a specific child guidance clinic requesting a medical examination of his
son. By referring to a letter that should be in the possession of the recipient,
and by adding an 'insecurity marker', '>als het goed is<' if it went
alright (4), he invites a confirmation, or alternatively, a search
for the letter. Instead, he gets a waiting request 'ogenblikje'
moment
(7).
As it turns out, this 'moment' takes about 2 minutes, after which a second
person, who turns out to be the doctor, picks up the phone and treats it
as a 'new' one, i.e. as a call on which he has not received any information
beforehand. The caller attempts to have his call treated as a sequel to
a letter to be recognised by the recipient, but he is rather unsuccessful
as the recipient even asks for information that has been given in the call
itself already, i.e. the reference to the child guidance clinic (cf. line
14, and the question in 20). It is only at the repeat in 22, that the recipient
produces a strong 'news mark' (in 23), after which he proceeds to making
the requested arrangement. The crux of the matter may have been that the
caller was treated as a requester for an examination, or, alternatively,
as in possession of the letter or envelope containing a specified request,
while he himself tried to make it clear that the letter stating the request
should already be in the possession of the recipient, who should be aware
of its contents, i.e. the request.
What we see in this fragment,
then, is a play of pairs: caller/recipient, requester/addressee, or even
of triads, made up of two connected pairs: father/son=patient/doctor. In
his formal sketch for a Membership Categorization Analysis, inspired by
his inspection of calls to an emergency psychiatric service, Harvey Sacks
(1972a), distinguished two kinds of Membership
Categorization Devices: R for Standardized Relational Pairs (SRPs), such
as the farther/son pair here, while a second, called K which is based on
the possession, or lack of, problem-relevant specialized knowledge. The
caller's problem is that as a next-of responsible for the person who is
the would-be patient, based on R, he has to mobilize one professional at
the suggestion of another, i.e. as an incumbent of Kl, a lay person, he
has to 'coordinate', in a way, two independent incumbents of the category
Kp, the professionals, i.e. the child guidance clinic and the neurologist.
In both cases so far discussed,
it is the actor-status and knowledge status that should be associated with
the local call identities of caller and recipient, which is negotiated
in the exchanges leading to the 'anchor point'. SRPs and knowledge-based
conventional contrasts have a certain usefulness, or rather they may be
used on a moment-by-moment basis. In the first case, the SRPs of ex-partners
and co-parents are not disputed at all, they just have to be established
(recognised, confirmed) before they can be used unproblematically. It is
the actual up-to-date-ness of their respective knowledge about recent events
and their outcome that is at stake. In the second case, again, the 'basic'
categories, here father/son and doctor/patient are not disputed; they just
have to be established. From then on, the parties have to work to come
to an agreement on who knows what concerning the details of the case; who
is the initiator, where is the request, what kind of examination is in
order. When that is provisionally established, the arrangement can be made.
Case
3: A survey interview (6)
The third case, I will consider
here, concerns the start of a standardized survey interview.
Such interviews are, of course, 'partly scripted', in that the interviewer
has to 'read the questions as worded' in the questionnaire, but - as I
have elaborated elsewhere (Ten Have, 1995,
1996,
1999:
170-80) - interviewers inevitably depart from their 'text', adding production
details like intonation, 'uh's and breathing, and departing more substantially
when the occasions demands this. This seems especially the case during
the opening phases of the encounter, and as trouble of one kind or another
arises. Both are the case here. As in my previous work on such materials,
I use the convention that those parts that roughly conform to the scripted
text are printed in bold, while 'deviations' are given in standard font.
Case
3 Transcr. RJM (Wisconsin Survey 01)
01 FR: hello:
02 IV: ·hh uh hi: my name's: (jane smith) an' i'm calling from the university
of wisconsin? as part of our national public opinion study?
·hhh we're trying to reach people at their home telephone numbers?
·hhh is this a residential number? {qconf}
03 (0.4)
04 FR: yes
05 IV: ·hh okay: a::nd to be sure i reached the number i dialed isthis area code
three oh three
06 (0.5)
07 IV: (five five five) [seven (0.5) five one seven ]{qcnfr}
08 FR: [what are you calling about?]
09 IV: i'm calling from the university of wisconsin?
·h [as
10 FR: [fo:r what.=
11 IV: =part of a national opinion study?
12 (1.0)
13 FR: ·h uh concer:ni:ng what.
14 IV: ·hh well it's:- it's a broa:d study it's what we call a mo:dular study
so they're a bunch of different segments of questions
each about (0.2) different things ·hhh >some of the< things:
in-volve things like politics: economic conditions and expectatio:ns:
·hhhh jst (.) different things >like that< m-mostly:
politics and government type [thing]s:
15 FR: [okay ]
16 IV: ·hhh a:nd just to confirm your number it i:s (five
The
call recipient picks up the phone with the - for the U.S. - usual hello:
(01). Then the caller
comes in with a multi-unit turn (02) in which she
first identifies herself and her organization and then continues with explaining
that 'we' (7) try to reach people at their
home telephone numbers. She
does not provide her recipient with any real opportunity to speak
and asks whether this is a residential number. In so doing, she does provide
for an action by the respondent, although it is a rather narrowly defined
one. After a pause (03) she does get a yes
(04). She immediately continues with a request for confirmation of the
telephone number (05,
07).That is, she treats
both the identifications and the call's purpose as not locally negotiable
or even 'receivable', dealing with her preliminary problem first, and discouraging
any comments the recipient might have on her identifications and purpose.
During the second part of
this request, however, the recipient in overlap asks for an explanation
of the announced purpose: 'what
are you calling about?'
(08). The recipient,
then, requests an acceptable 'first topic', i.e. an explication of the
'reason for a call' (8): The caller reacts
immediately by repeating the earlier given institutional identification
(09). Her following explanation is, after the inbreath, interrupted by
the recipient, using a condensed version of the earlier inquiry (in 08): fo:r
what.(10). After the
continued explanation (11), there is a one second pause (12). The recipient
breaks this with a third request for explanation: ·h
uh concer:ni:ng what.(13).
It is only then that the caller/interviewer starts with an explanation
'in her own words', rather than voicing the script (14).
It starts hesitantly ·hh
well it's:- it's a broa:d study,
and she repetitively uses extremely vague indications of the topics to
be treated. It serves
its purpose, however, as the recipient accepts with okay
that overlaps the end (15). On this acceptance, the interviewer immediately
switches back to her earlier request for confirmation, which has not been
answered yet (16 recycles 05).
Observe
that the interview schedule is described as a
bunch of different segments
of questions, while the
topics are called things
In a way, the questionnaire is discussed as a complicated 'object', constructed
from separate 'parts' (i.e. 'modules' or 'things'),
which deal with various things
(i.e. topics). In so doing, the interviewer 'distances' herself from this
'object' (9).
From the recipient point
of view, the call should follow the ordinary call-by-a-stranger format,
until it has been agreed to be something else. This requires that the 'reason
for the call' be brought forward immediately after the identification.
Instead, the interviewer starts dealing with her preliminary problem,
without presenting a framework which could provide for its sense. Furthermore,
she speaks in two 'voices', a reading voice and a talking voice, enacting
two different identities which can be distinguished only with difficulty.
This fragment, then, seemed
to provide another instance of the phenomenon, discussed elsewhere, that
'trouble' in the interview can often be analyzed as what has been called
'a problematic convergence' of different 'interactional formats'
(10). The 'trouble' is a bit different here, however, in the
sense that the institutional format, the survey interview, has not yet
been established interactionally. In the other cases, the 'ordinary' format
often seemed to 'erupt' into the institutional one. On other words, the
problematic convergence here is a product of an 'interactional asynchrony':
the interviewer is ahead of events, i.e. the acceptance of the format,
and the call itself, by the to-be respondent.
Case
4: A medical consultation: picking up a relationship
The participants in this case
are a GP, presumably in his 30s, and an elderly lady of about 70, who know
each other quite well, apparently. As the doctor has a bunch of cards at
his desk, it is clear that he does know who is coming.
01 P °goedemorgen
dokter°,=
good morning doctor
02 A =mevrouw
Verkerk.
mrs. Verkerk
03
(1.8)
04 P (kom) u weer 'ns plagen.
come to tease you again
05 A ja:?
yes?
06 P jà.
yes
07 A 'k zal (me) d'r op voorbereiden,
I will prepare myself for it
08 P 'm (.) nou 't wil helemaal
niet dokter
b- well it doesn't go at all doctor
09 P met [mij.
with me
10 A
[>ga zitten ga zitten<.
sit down sit down
11 (.)
12 A tegenaanval
de urine
was prima.=
counterattack the urine was excellent
13 P =oh
dat is goed werk hh.
oh that's good work
14 A dus (.) u mankeert niets
so there's nothing wrong with you
15 P hh hheheh
16 A hehhehhahhah
'hh hh
17 P hh was 't maar waar
hè?=
if that could be true
18 A =wat wou u nou
nog zeggen?=
what would you say on that
19 P =ik weet
het niet.=
I don't know
20 A ((ku[ch))
((cough))
21 P =[ik voel me zo
belabberd
[dokter (.)]
I'm feeling so awful doctor
22 A (([ hoest
))]
cough
23 P en ik eet
helemaal niet.
and I don't eat at all
24 A nee.
no
As the patient enters, she
greets the doctor, using a greeting plus title format (01). He returns
it with a cheerful recognition by mentioning her title plus last name (02).
Still standing, she formulates her visit mockingly as come to tease
you again (04). The doctor, in a similar tome, asks for a confirmation
'ja:?' yes? (05),
which in a definite tone is given 'jà.' yes (06). Continuing
in the same vein, the doctor announces that he will prepare himself for
it (07). Then the patient, this time with a sad voice, formulates her condition
as very bad: b- well it doesn't go at all doctor (08). Partly in
overlap, the doctor urges her to sit down at his desk (10), and then picking
up the previous joking manner, he gives an apparent test result: 'tegenaanval
de urine
was prima.'
counterattack
the urine was excellent (12). She expresses her pleasure at that, in
a serious way oh that's good work (13). But he continues the joking:
so
there's nothing wrong with you (14). They both laugh (15,16). With
a sad smile, she says if that could be true (17), but he continues
the joke with a mock challenge what would you say on that. (18).
She says she does not know (19), but then gives another overall negative
appraisal of her condition I'm feeling so awful doctor (21), adding
that she does not eat at all (23). From then on the conversation is mostly
serious, discussing her condition and family circumstances.
What we have here, then,
is the start of a professional/client encounter, which, however, involves
people who know each other well, in a way, and treat each other as such,
joking about her presumably quite frequent visiting. In so doing, she is
still able to bring in her negative assessment of her current state, which
he 'counters' with a bit of positive news. She returns, however, to her
sad an negative evaluation and brings in more information about her current
state. In this manner, the participants succeed in reestablishing their
relationship, both institutionally and personally, so to speak. They both
bring in the type of knowledge that fits their institutional identities,
as she reports on her condition and he gives test results, but these 'asymmetrical'
exchanges are embedded in a relational nexus of mutual familiarity with
their respective roles, condition and style.
In other words, while the
encounter exhibits and constitutes the mutual identities that fit with
what the Sacksian (1972a) Membership
Categorization type K (being based on specially relevant Knowledge), with
the relevant categories of 'doctor' and patient' (suggesting an asymmetrical
distribution of knowledge, which is, indeed, enacted here), the participants
at the same time demonstrate that they know each other quite well as persons,
by doing some fitting 'relation work'.
Case
5: A medical consultation: using the record
Case 5 is another face-to-face
medical encounter, with a male doctor and a male patient, both probably
in their 30s. Here is the extract.
01 A 'hh [daag
hi
02 P
[( ) Jansma ( )
Jansma
03 A ja
ga zitten
(.) dat is Kees Braamberg
yes sit down (.) that is Kees Braamberg
04 O dag
hi
05 A [van het] Huisartsinstituut
from the family medicine institute
06 P [(
)]
07
((31: schrijfgeluiden en gestommel))
((various sounds, writing, bumping))
08 A Jansma
hè?
Jansma right?
09 P Jansma ja
Jansma yes
10 A want wij hebben elkaar
nog niet gezien [(geloof ik [hè?)
because we haven't seen each other before I think have we?
11 P
[nee nee [(want ik ben
no no because I was
12 P bij u:w)
with your
13 A (bij Thijs van der Akke::r)
(.)
with Thijs van der Akker
14 A (nou ja) (.) zien we
elkaar ook een keer
(.)
well (.) then we'll see each other also for once
15 P ach
well
16 (28)
17 A dat is een hele::
hh 'h geschiedenis met jou geweest in eh janu ari hè
that has been quite a story with you in uh January wasn't it?
18 P ja (
)
yes
19 (.)
20 A en dat is toen dat
is (.) sindsdien goed gegaan?
and that has then that has been(.)going alright since then?
21 P ja
yes
22 ((46:
interrumperend telefoongesprek))
((46: interrupting telephone call))
23 P ('t is namelijk zo)
ik ben al een paar
maanden (.)
(it's the case that)for
a few months now I have beenhaving
(.)
24 P verkouwen
en dan is 't weer over en dan is 't weer weg
a cold and then it's over againand
then it's gone again
25 A ja
yes
26 P en eh zondag
kree' in één
keer eh (.) goed hoofdpijn
and Sunday I got suddenly uh(.)
a real headache
27 A ja
yes
The
physician greets informally (01), while the patient introduces himself
giving his last name (02). He is invited to sit down and the physician
introduces an observer, giving his first name and last name (03), and -
after the observer has greeted the patient (04) - his affiliation with
a medical institute (05). After a lengthy pause, probably filled with administrative
activities (07), the physician asks for a confirmation of the patient's
name (08), which is given (09). Then the doctor mentions that they haven't
met before (10), after which they 'together' produce the fact that the
patient has previously consulted with another doctor in the clinic (11-5).
After another pause (16, possible spent on the record again), the physician
refers to the patient's previous 'history', apparently just read in the
records that
has been quite a story with you in uh January wasn't it?
(17), which he then connects with the present and
that has then that has been(.)going alright since then?(20).
After an interrupting telephone call, the patient starts to present his
current complaints (23 etc.), which starts off the present consultation.
The patient's document history
seems to play a crucial role here, identifying him by name, and presumably
by complaint-type, while also offering a starting point for the expression
of his current concerns (11). While the
setting provides for the physician's identity and category incumbency,
his greeting, host-like invitation to sit down and presentation of the
third party, and consultation and citation of the record actualize these
properties. At the same time, the patient is constituted as a documented
case, while the observer gets a quasi-medical identity, although he is
completely ignored from then on. While in the previous case, the stage
for the consultation was set in category-embedded relational terms, enacted
through mutual recognition, here it is the revived document that does that
job.
Case
6: A radio phone-in call
This case was taken from a corpus
of calls to a radio phone-in program, broadcast in the Netherlands in the
late 1970s. I have analyzed a selected set of openings from this corpus
elsewhere and will now only summarize some general observations from that
paper. as available in the case-at-hand (12)
.
G = Germaine Groenier, the
host, C = Caller
01
((music fades out))
02 G: hallo
met Germaine Groenier?
hello it's Germaine Groenier
03 C: ja hallo
e:h
yes hello uh
04
(.)
05 C: ik e:h ben eh >(een) meisje
van vijftien=
I uh am uh a girl of fifteen
06 C: =en ik word [eh volgende
week zestien
and next week I'll be sixteen
07 G:
[(ja)
yes
08 C: en nou ·hh
en eh >m'n vriend=
and well ·hh and my boyfriend
09 C: =>die wil graag gemeenschap
met me hebben.
he would very much like to have intercourse with me
10 G: [ja
yes
11 C: [·hh en zelf
ben ik er nou nog niet zo heel erg
voor,
and I am myself not yet
so much in favour of it
As the music fades out, the
host presents herself with a hello and her first and last name, as she
usually does (02). The caller, a rather nervous sounding young girl, produces
a yes-reponse, which can be heard as a recognition-marker: she makes it
clear that she now understands that she has reached her 'destination' (after
having talked to one or more support staff members). She does not, however,
reciprocate the host's self-identification with one by herself, but just
produces a greeting hello which echoes the host's (03). As many other callers
do, she avoids giving her name
Then she presents herself
'as a case', that is without identifying herself in any but categorical
terms, i.e. gender and age (05, 06), followed by the use of an SRP (relational
category), i.e. her boyfriend, which form the 'matrix' of her problem,
as he wants to have sex with her (08-09), while she does not feel to be
ready for it (11).
In general terms, these calls
quite often have a rather restricted opening, with an asymmetrical (only
the host) or minimal (only first name) identification, minimal or no greetings,
a 'fast forward' approach. This may be related to that fact that the calls
are being broadcast and that they mostly concern rather intimate problems,
so the callers try to avoid identifying details (13).
Those problems tend to be sketched using general categories like age and
gender to 'place' the caller, followed by the evocation of Standardized
Relational Pairs, like girlfriend/boyfriend, parent/child, etc.; or sometimes
categories from the K set, like teacher/pupil, or doctor/patient to introduce
some 'complication' caused by these others' actions or attitudes. In their
problem sketches, categorical and relational obligations and rights, as
well as categorical discrepancies play a major part. Callers seem to work
hard to present their case as fitting the program's format and as interesting
enough to be discussed with the host for a large audience.
The program had a rather
specific moral character, in that its purpose was to allow people to discuss
relational/sexual problems in public and in this fashion serve as a demonstration
that such problems existed and could be discussed in everyday, rather than
professional terms. The callers and their problems were taken seriously,
even when they were much more uncommon or even bizarre than the one presented
in the case at hand. So openings like the one discussed here, sketching
a categorical/relational matrix, served to set the stage for such public
displays.
Case
7: Opening up chat room encounters
My last 'case' is also based
on a previous paper in which I discuss the ways in which Membership Categories
are used to set the stage for internet-based 'chatting', to which I refer
for a more elaborate discussion, technical background and many more examples
(Ten Have, 2000). I will not cite
just one opening, as I did previously, as categories are used in various
stages of the chat partner finding process in different ways.
Before one connects a chat
channel, one has to fill in a number of identifying slots, the most important
of which is the 'nick'(name), which has to be unique among the participants
on the channel. A lot of nicks provide or suggest categorical identifications,
including language, gender and age, as well as more specific topic-relevant
properties.
Examples of nicks:
^P0371G , amanda14,
anneke, banana81, Dream-Girl, emma69, ericdraven, latex_bi-tch1 , Leeroy,
LuCho1, Mary15, Miguelo , SomeFun, Steffi, teaser
In this way would-be chatters
present themselves to others. They also have the option, although most
don't use it, to write a 'profile' which can be requested to be projected
by others. Apart from corny jokings, these profiles also provide mostly
categorical information.
Examples of nicks with their
'profiles':
-
'"Hard Drive"'s profile: 23/m.'
-
'anna_16_les's profile: Perth,Australia,
talk to me now!!!!!!!'
-
'Hottkissss's profile: Married,
Bi-female'
-
'Shooter-1's profile: ...White
male, 5'11" (1.82m)..155# (70.45k)...blonde hair, blue eyes....fit, trim,
tan and into surfing, playing golf, & other outdoor activities....I
really love younger women who are quick-witted and open minded............'
-
'shelby18's profile: would love
to talk with an older woman about special things that two women can share
together'
-
'girlie's profile: HOT MALE
I WANT TO GO CAM TO CAM WITH FEMALES ONLY'
-
'Slyne§§®' profile:
36 / LesBitch / Belgium / Tall and thin / Domme / 5 languages / ' Ex-Combat
Instructor' with the 'Military' / BadAssBelgiumBitch'-and i am a ' Crazy
Girl' ! "WhipHer®" is my 'bitch' - I 'suspend ' her and 'Whip' her,
and 'torture' her for my pleasure - but sometimes we trade places!)'
When one 'enters' the channel,
one can request a list of room names which one can search for interesting
elements. Many room names are obviously designed for such a search.
Examples of room names:
Animal&Girls,
Australia-Sydney-Chat-Room, christian evening post, desert_and_cactus_only,
engineer, francais-saloppes, francais_soumise_sub_slave, german_deutsch_rollenspiele,
hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, holland-babbel, italia-14-19anni,
italia-padania-e-basta, L@Ros@deiVenti, nederlandse_chat, sex-tr, subslavespankbondage,
Sweet_Girl_From_Alabama, #BI_LES_FEM_ONLY, #Chinese_Chat, #France, #LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting,
#polska-do-flirtowania, #russian_Virtual-Bar?, #tr-%izmir, #ukphonefantasy.
Another option is to can search
for specific nicks, or nicks containing special elements, after which one
can either send a private message (whisper) to that user, or join the room
he or she is in.
After having entered a room,
a list of present chatters is given in alphabetical order. One can 'talk'
to the room or 'whisper' to a particular 'person'. Quite often such an
encounter is initiated by a request for 'a/s/l', which stands for Age,
Sex and Location, of users present themselves by giving that categorical
information.
Categorizations as found
in nicks, profiles and room names, as well as those given early in an exchange,
seem to be used in two ways: to select a suitable chat partner and to provide
a spring board for first topics.
Apart from these categorical
identifications, other elements from the 'canonical model' are being used
as well, although less frequently, including greetings and howareyou's,
which can also lead to various kind of 'pre-topic'-talk, as in 'it's afternoon
here' after a 'good morning', or 'I was in amsterdam last summer and I
loved it', following location information.
Reflections
Case 1 largely follows 'the
canonical model'; there is a bit of 'preempting' and a 'switch' as it is
the recipient who initiates the first topic and has 'the news' to tell.
The parties' known personhood' is 'in play', while the 'underlying' categorical/relational
network (in Sacks' terms, from the category collection R), which is of
'obvious' importance, is equally obviously not 'exposed' or formulated.
It is against this recognized and taken-for-granted background that the
just-now topic gets negotiated.
One can also note the moral
aspects of the call, in two respects. A first, and obvious morality concerns
the husband/father's right to be informed and the wife/mother's obligation
to inform about the changed travel schedule. The preemption and the 'switch',
noted above, can be related to the delicacy of this issue. Secondly, and
this is what the mother stresses in subsequent turns in the call, they
are victims of a crime. In a way, this last condition unifies the three,
son, mother and father, and so covers over the historical and present 'splits'
between them, as well as father's not having been informed earlier, by
mother and/or son.
Case 2 differs from 'the
canonical model', as discussed in Schegloff (1986), as it is a business
call involving strangers, so personal 'recognition' is irrelevant, and
self-identification and topic initiation (Reason for the Call - RftC) occupy
a multi-unit first turn by the caller. In that turn the caller presents
a categorical/relational complex that defines the roles of both present
and absent parties to the topic, i.e. the requested examination, while
he refers to a letter as a core object. In this complex both the category
collections R and K are used, to define the client side and the professional
side, respectively. Some misunderstandings concerning the requested examination
and the location of the letter occur and are repaired before the arrangement
can be made. As these people are new to each other, the use of last names,
categories and personal/institutional relations are obvious resources.
The father acts as a responsible parent, 'representing' his son, and taking
a care-taker's role. His reference to the child guidance clinic's letter,
offers an additional grounding in a relevant institutional setting: he
is not (representing) a new client but a referred one. His request is institutionally/professionally
sanctioned. Furthermore, he creates a double obligation, so to speak, on
the recipient side, to comply with the request and to 'recognize' the reference
to the letter. Apparently, the recipient is not able or willing to fulfill
the latter. This lack of cooperation seems to be covered, first by the
misunderstanding concerning the status and location of the letter, and
next by his readiness to comply with the core request, making an arrangement.
Case 3 is also a business
call involving strangers and has a similar multi-unit caller's first turn,
containing both self-identification and Reason-for-the-Call, ending in
a question. That question is answered by the recipient, but at the next
question, she initiates repair on the RftC, and only after a 'personal'
paraphrase agrees to be interviewed. In this call the caller at first restricts
her interest in the recipient to the connection's status as a residential
one, and the actual number. The request to cooperate in an interview is
implied, but not made in so many words. Both features may have contributed
to the recipient's decision to intervene and ask, through a series of NTRIs,
for an elaboration of the RftC. Her acceptance of the explanation that
is finally given is then taken as an acceptance of being interviewed. One
might say that the caller acts as if her identification by itself provides
her with a right to disturb the recipient's schedule, while it, by its
timing and structure, minimizes the recipient's chance to claim her right
not
to be disturbed. It is only after being addressed personally, rather than
being read to, that the recipient, now being constituted as a person, agrees
to cooperate.
Case 4, while having an official
business character, is enacted in a very 'personal' way. The institutional
character is clear from the location, her use of a title with her greeting,
and, of course, from the taken-for-granted topic, her medical condition,
and their respective role enactments concerning it. Her mocking formulation
of her visit suggests that she realizes that the frequency of her visits
might be taken as being plaintive and nagging. By showing this, while she
in fact does come to consult, she in a way excuses herself for it, and,
at the same time, stresses her claim that she experiences her condition
as , indeed, miserable. By joining her in her 'play', the doctor can be
seen to accept the excuse, the claim, and it's implications. He seems to
appreciate her 'distance', while allowing her to express her feelings,
which he later on topicalizes in a more or less 'therapeutic' fashion.
Together, they seem to have created a 'safe' environment for both expression
and discussion of her experiences and feelings.
Case 5, another consultation,
is different in that it is rather impersonal, although informal. During
the opening phase, the patient record seems to be used as a core resource
to identify the case. The doctor uses it to get to 'know' the patient,
to reconstitute him as a medical history, which can be evoked and used
as a starting point for the consultation. Through the record, available
to the physician-in-charge, the patient's identity and history can be moved
almost effortlessly, to another doctor's desk. In this way, doctors are
'interchangeable' and patients 'exist' in records. Doctors and patients
are 'just' incumbents of their respective categories, carrying names for
convenience. The patient's 'right to be there' seems to be pre-granted
by his documented history, which offers a springboard for an account for
his present visit.
The findings of my previous
research, here summarized and illustrated as cases 6 and 7, can be used
to extend these reflections. The phone-in calls were most often designed
to be rather anonymous, with minimal identifications on the callers' part,
and problem introductions in categorical terms, first age and gender, then
SRP's and at times institutional categories. In this fashion, the callers
made their problem intelligible for the host and the listeners. In a remarkable
number of cases, the presented problem was directly related to categorical
rights and obligation, and combinations of categories in a pair. That is,
categories were used in moral arguments, either in terms of the legitimacy
of categorical combinations or in terms of disputes about categorical rights
and obligations, in which callers sought support for their point of view
from the host.
In the case of text-based
chats over the internet, I investigated the use of categories of age, gender
and location/culture in a phased process of chat partner selection. Age
and gender mainly function as setting the scene for sexually explicit chats,
while location/culture categories are especially used to establish mutual
understandability. The three types, and others as well, are also used to
initiate (preliminary) topics, tasting the waters before morally more risky
ones are brought forward. At times, other elements from the canonical model,
like greetings and initial inquiries, are used in a similar manner.
Conclusions
Conversational openings are
used to prepare for a coordinated entry into the substantive part of the
encounter. While many settings have a restricted set of expectable topics,
the encounter's actual reason is rarely the first item on the agenda. As
Schegloff's canonical model (1986) specifies, a number of jobs can or should
precede actual topic work, although both preemption and topic preparation
do often occur. When participants are acquaintances of each other, identification/recognition
is, as Schegloff (1979) has described at length, a major pre-topic task.
This can be seen in case 1, and in a different fashion in case 4. When
participants are strangers to each other, things go different. In cases
2 and 3, we saw extended, multi-unit turns in callers' first slots, including
identification and Reason-for-the-Call. In medical encounters, patients
tend to postpone their topic presentations until the physician offers a
vocal and/or visual 'display of recipiency' (Heath, 1986).
In encounters of an institutional kind, including medical ones, one or
more documents serve as a springboard for the encounter, while in other
ones, the encounter is partly scripted as in case 3 here (see Frankel,
1989
and Whalen, 1995 for other examples).
In all cases, a shared knowledge
base has to be revived, adapted and/or constituted on the spot, before
the actual topic work can begin. Revival is often done implicitly, while
adaptation and first-time building up requires more explicit, and therefore
visible and analyzable work. Membership Categorization plays a crucial
role here, to constitute a matrix that can be filled in later in the encounter
with more personalized information and understandings.
In all encounters, the morality
of the participants is at stake. The opening phase is, therefore, also
a field in which that morality is to be revived, adapted and/or constituted.
This can take various forms, mostly implicit, including the careful, often
collaborative, avoidance of dangerous items or aspects by stressing safe
ones.
While classic CA offers a
rather restricted, sequence oriented perspective on conversational openings,
an ethnomethodologicalized CA allows for a broader view, showing the local
intertwining of organizational, cognitive and moral concerns in a unique,
local and dynamic configuration.
Notes
* When drafting this paper, I failed to note its
themes being quite close to those in a recent paper by George Psathas (1999).
In a planned revision, I will take up the similarities and differences
between his paper and mine.
1. In his 1968 paper he does use 'business calls',
i.e. calls to a 'disaster centre', but that characteristic is not given
a focussed treatment.
2. Cf. Schegloff's comments at page lv-lvi of the
introduction to the first volume (Sacks, 1992
a) The fact that Sacks did publish some of this early stuff in 1972
(a & b)seems
to indicate that he did not disavow this kind of work as such, but rather
went on to do different things
3. The transcript is quoted from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/
, which also allows you to listen to the tape.
4. This format, which he calls 'quasi-interrogative'
is discussed at length in Schegloff (1979) at pages 48 and following. I
will not go into it now.
5.
5M.O.B.
is
an abbreviation of Medisch -Opvoedkundig Bureau, a kind of child
guidance advice centre.
6. This section is in part based on earlier explorations
presented in the Workshop on Interaction in the Standardized Survey Interview,
Free University Amsterdam, 18-21 November 1995, and at Essex'96, the Fourth
International Social Science Methodology Conference, University of Essex,
July 1 - 5 1996. The data, transcribed by Robert J. Moore, were provided
through Nora Cate Schaeffer, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
7. This is a conventional way of marking the fact
that one speaks 'for' a collectivity, i.e. an organization, as is the 'our'
in the preceding line. Cf. Drew & Heritage, 1992:
30-1; Sacks, 1992a:
713.
8. On 'reason for a call' see Sacks, Lecture 1, Winter
1970, Sacks, 1992 vol. 2: 157-74.
9. I am indebted to Harrie Mazeland for the general
thrust of these observations.
10. Jefferson & Lee, 1981,
see also Ten Have, 1989 on medical
consultations, Mazeland & Ten Have, 1996
on open interviews, and Houtkoop (1995)
on survey interviews.
11. On medical records and their use in the consultation,
see Heath, 1981, 1982,
1986.
12. The paper is called: "The first call is in,
hallo, it's Germaine": Negotiating frames in radio counselling; Part 1:
Negotiating frames in opening sequences and was presented at he conference
on 'Broadcast Conversations: Interaction in the Media', Roskilde University,
Denmark, March 25. - 26. 1999. It is available at: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/emca/FC.htm
13. As elaborated in the original paper, it is only
in special cases, mostly non-sexial ones, that last names or locational
information is given.
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