Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

512 Part 6: Language and Interaction
05 tuh do (.) .hhhh as I started lookin’
06 ‘round an’ seein’ other opportunities
07 I:: uh (.) uh all o’ sudden fell in love
08 with the business .hh I’m not (above for
09 a foamer) as I call’em bu’ I have enjoyed
10 → this business an’ I developed some knack
11 for it. and uh .h I’ve stayed with it fer
12 a long time.
13 I: → Some knack for it. I think some would say
14 that’s an understatement.
15 (0.2)
16 HH: Well thank you.
17 I: heh . . .
I have tried to illustrate the method of collecting through a focus on
next turn repeats. We have seen that although a collection of this sort is
deeply heterogeneous, it is nevertheless possible to identify commonalities
across instances. These commonalities reveal, of course, the underlying
norms to which conversationalists orient in producing and
understanding talk-in-interaction. Even in this very brief consideration
then we begin to see that, by drawing on the basic techniques and concepts
of CA, we can develop descriptions of conversation as a massive
and intricate web of practices.
At this point I need to sound a cautionary note: I have talked here
about types of ‘next turn repeat’ but this should not be taken too literally.
There are many dangers involved of thinking in terms of types. The
greatest concern is that once you construct a typology, it is all too easy
to slip into a kind of coding procedure in which the actual details of the
talk are ignored in favor of sorting instances into the categories you
assume they belong to. Moreover, ‘type’ implies a contrast with ‘tokens’
– almost as if there could be a ‘true’ abstract (Platonic) type that secured
the identity of all the tokens of next turn repeats. While this may be a
reasonable way of thinking about certain kinds of linguistic phenomena,
it does not work well for conversation as Sacks warned in his lectures
cited above. After all, we have seen even in this very brief
consideration the ‘types’ are not necessarily discrete – laughter can
infl ect question intoned repeats, penultimate stress repeats as well as
those that locate modesty.
A central point I have tried to illustrate here is that a given practice
need not, and in fact rarely does, map to a single action – a question-
intoned repeat can initiate repair, but it can also forward a telling, challenge
a previous speaker’s account or confi rm that what was heard was
heard correctly (and this need not involve repair). The relationship between
practice and action in conversation is a wholly contingent one [see