Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Conversation Analysis 497
basis for theorizing about conversation. I take it that this debarring
affects the character of social sciences very strongly. (Sacks, 1984a)
Here, then, Sacks notes that if one works with invented examples (or
even recollected examples) one is constrained ‘by reference to what an
audience, an audience of professionals, can accept as reasonable’. The
problem is that we know from studying the recordings of conversations
that many apparently counter-intuitive and quite unexpected things actually
do happen. If invented instances of such occurrences were presented
to ‘an audience of professionals’ they might respond with, ‘but people
don’t say such things’, ‘People don’t talk like that’ and so on. As Sacks
notes, then, the use of recordings can open up a whole range of phenomena
that no one would have ever suspected even existed.
We will be using observation as a basis for theorizing. Thus we start
with things that are not currently imaginable, by showing that they
happened. We can then come to see that a base for using close looking
at the world for theorizing about it is that from close looking at the
world we can fi nd things that we could not, by imagination, assert
were there. (Sacks, 1984a, 1984b: 25)
Intersecting machineries
So, given these considerations we should now turn to some actual bit of
recorded conversation and attempt to analyze it even if, given the constraints
imposed by an overview chapter, we can only give it some cursory
attention. The following is the transcript of the fi rst few seconds of a telephone
conversation between Deb, a woman in her fi fties, and her boyfriend,
Dick. The call comes the morning after Deb had hosted a party
with some guests attending from out of town.
(3) Deb and Dick
(ring)
(r[
01 Deb: [Hello:?hh
02 Dick: Good morning. =
03 Deb: = Hi:, howareya.
04 Dick: Not too ba:d. Howareyou?
05 Deb: I’m fi ::ne
06 Dick: Howdit g[o?
07 Deb: [.h Oh: just grea:t,