Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

496 Part 6: Language and Interaction
what happened. Other things, to be sure, happened, but at least what
was on the tape had happened. It was not from any large interest in
language or from some theoretical formulation of what should be
studied that I started with tape-recorded conversations, but simply
because I could get my hands on it and I could study it again and
again, and also consequentially, because others could look at what I
had studied and make of it what they could, if, for example, they
wanted to be able to disagree with me. (Sacks, 1984a)
As Sacks goes on to note, we don’t have very good intuitions about conversation
(as we seem to for syntax, which is apparently the contrast he
was making) nor are we capable of remembering or imagining the details
of what happens in conversation. Consider that, as Heritage (1984a, 1984b)
notes, the following example is not unusual in its level of complexity:
(2) NB VII: 2
01 Edn: =Oh honey that was a lovely luncheon I shoulda ca:lled you
02 s:soo[:ner but I:]l:[lo:ved it.Ih wz just deli:ghtfu[: l.] =
03 Mar: [((f)) Oh:::] [°( ) [Well] =
04 Mar: =I wz gla[d y o u] (came).]
05 Edn: [‘nd yer f:] friends] ‘r so da:rli:ng, =
06 Mar: = Oh :::[: it wz:]
07 Edn: [e-that P]a :t isn’she a do:[:ll?]
08 Mar: [iY e]h isn’t she pretty,
09 (.)
10 Edn: Oh: she’s a beautiful girl. =
11 Mar: = Yeh I think she’s a pretty gir[l.
12 Edn: [En that Reinam’n::
13 (.)
14 Edn: She SCA:RES me. =
So there are some rather obvious reasons why conversation analysts
insist on working from actual recordings of conversation rather than imagined,
remembered or experimentally produced examples. There is also at
least one rather less obvious but absolutely critical reason that goes to the
very heart of CA as a practice. Sacks explains:
I want to argue that, however rich our imaginations are, if we use
hypothetical, or hypothetical-typical versions of the world we are
constrained by reference to what an audience, an audience of professionals,
can accept as reasonable. That might not appear to be a terrible
constraint until we come to look at the kinds of things that actually
occur. Were I to say about many of the objects we work with ‘Let us
suppose that this happened; now I am going to consider it’, then an
audience might feel hesitant about what I would make of it by reference
to whether such things happen. That is to say, under such a constraint
many things that actually occur are debarred from use as a