This part of the Mosaic may be considered as a 'theoretical' introduction for the ASL-project. I will summarize two strands of work that seem relevant for the empirical explorations that are to follow. The first has to do with 'membership categorization', as developed in the early work of Harvey Sacks, while the second consists of a series of papers by Emanuel Schegloff on telephone conversation openings, using a sequential analysis of turns-at-talk.
The notion of Membership Categorization, as I use it here, has been developed in the early work of Harvey Sacks (1935-1975; cf. Sacks, 1972 a & b; 1992a), and, after a period of neglect, has been revived in the 1990s (cf. Hester & Eglin, 1997; a technical summary can be found in Jayyusi, 1984:212-7).
Sacks' proposals for a Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) were mostly focussed on the ways in which procedures of 'membership categorization' could be seen to be inherent in members' talk to suggest obvious implications of what they were saying. In telephone calls to a suicide prevention center, for instance, callers references to family members, friends, neighbors, etc. seemed to function as an account for their claim that the had No One To Turn To (Sacks, 1967). Those accounts were based, then, on a taken-for-granted validity of what one could expect, or not, from certain persons in terms of the categories to which they belonged, vis à vis the speaker. MCA's task would be, then, to explicate such procedures and their situated use. Sacks distinguished various types of categorizations. Some, like age and sex could be used to categorize any member of a population. Others referred to a team (such as chair) or a relationship (such as cousin) of specific capacities (such as physician). Adequate use and understanding of category-based reasonings is something members expect from each other, which they rely on and for which they hold each other accountable.
The essential point in categorization is not correctness, but situational relevance. So for any category used, one may ask why it has been selected from all the correct categories that could have been used for that person. A crucial point here are the properties that are connected with the various categories, the so-called category predicates, and especially the so-called category-bound activities. So a mother is expected to care for her child (Sacks, 1972b), while one does in general not count on strangers to discuss one's personal problems, in contrast to family members (Sacks, 1967). For Sacks, the important point is not the existence of pre-supposed normative role-expectations, their use as interpretive procedures to create intelligibility and plausibility. One could say that MCA consists of two parts. On the one hand, one can explicate the underlying 'system' -- Sacks talks about the 'apparatus' needed to produce the findings, i.e. the actually observed usage (Sacks, 1972a en b). And on the other one can use such a 'systemic' analysis to understand the situational particularities of actual cases of categorizations in situ (cf. Hester & Eglin, 1997, Jalbert, 1999).
While most of this literature discusses categorization as an aspect of language use, one could also analyse 'visual' categorization. Many aspects of people's physical appearance, their dress and adornment is category-implicative in one way or another. Such visual categorization is an important aspect of the social life in public places and in encounters between strangers. In many cases visual categorization precedes verbal interaction and lays the groundwork for it. In mediated interaction, other means will have to be employed to compensate for the lack of visual information. On the telephone, voice qualities play an important part, as materials for age and gender categorizations, and for differentiating acquaintances, who one can recognize by their voice, and strangers, when this fails (cf. Schegloff, 1979). In text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) neither visual nor vocal categorization is available. Therefore, it is no surprise that verbal categorization is quite explicit in such situations.
While in face-to-face encounters visual categorization play an essential role preceding the actual interaction, category verbalizations are often used in the first exchanges of strangers meeting each other. It is in reference to such contexts that Sacks has introduced his ideas about categorization in his recorded and transcribed lectures (Sacks, 1992 a: 40-8).
I'll begin now talking about some very central machinery of social organization. (...) In dealing with first conversations I've very frequently found, as anyone can easily find, that especially in the early parts of these conversations certain questions are prominent like "What do you do?" "Where are you from?" etc. I wanted to see if there was some simple way that I could describe the items that those questions contain, so as to provide for their occurrence by rather abstract descriptions. (40)He notes that there are specific collections of categories that people can use to categorize 'anyone', such as 'sex, age, race, religion, perhaps occupation'. Therefore, you can always ask a question that inquires to which category in such a collection the other belong, 'which-type questions' , because the other always has a relevant answer available. So they are excellent topic openers, even when one does not need to ask them explicitly, as in the case of gender.
A second thing we can say about this class of category sets is that its categories are what we can call 'inference rich'. By that I mean, a great deal of the knowledge that members of a society have about the society is stored in terms of these categories. And by 'stored in terms of" I mean that much knowledge has some category term from this class as its subject. And the inference-rich character of these categories constitutes another warrant for their occurrence in early parts of first conversations. When you get some category as an answer to a 'which'-type question, you can feel that you know a great deal about the person, and can readily formulate topics of conversation based on the knowledge stored in terms of that category. (40-1)A third point is that someone who is a member of a category, will often be taken as a 'representative' of that category, even when that category is not organized as a group (as in gender categories). Therefore, Sacks has used the expression 'the MIR-device' (Membership, Inference-rich, Representative).
Then he asks: 'For any person being talked of, how is it that Members go about selecting the set in terms of whose categories that person is going to be talked of?' (41). How, in other words, are participants to decide which of all applicable categories are relevant in a case at hand? This question does not have any obvious general answer, I think, but some tendencies can be noted. If a gathering can be characterized in terms of a person-category, that category can be used as a link to construct a possibly relevant category for the interlocutor. So, being a guest at an anniversary or a vernisage, an obvious opening question is to inquire about the interlocutor's relationship to the core person, the birthday person of the artist, either by using an open question like 'what is your relation to X?' or as a suggestion: 'are you a friend (or whatever) of X?'. Such questions suggest using a particular kind of categorization devices, Standardized Relational Pairs (Sacks, 1972a).
Telephone openings around the world resemble nothing so much as each other.Just before that, he has summarizes the characteristics and functions of a canonical model in the following terms.
Telephone partners orient to four routine sequential tasks, within ordered slots, each of which may be filled by adjacency pair (2) constructions. The model shows close detailed fit with only a minority of telephone openings. Its picture of interaction is built upon divergences from routines. These marked openings unfold across turns, including issues of relationship and culture.He states that, in fact, 'we find far more non-routine openings than routine ones'. And 'Canonical cases provide a template for participants, a line-of-best-fit when nothing special is going on.' Deviations such as pauses, deletions and contractions may be used, then, to mark the talk as possibly special, in terms of relationship, urgency or whatever. 'Any first-occurring marking may be followed up in future turns, or participants may let the possibilities pass. The participants on the scene, in interaction, work out what, if anything, is special about any encounter.'
The model is called 'canonical', because it is seen as being, for members, a basic format that is used as an implicit criterion for inference and action; treating an opening as a normal, 'unmarked' one, or, alternatively, as more or less special. This conception resonates with the more general idea in a lot of conversation analytic writings that 'conversation', as informal talk among peers, is functioning as a model for unmarked talk, and therefore as a criterion for marking other formats as, for instance talk 'belonging to' one or another institutional setting (cf. Sacks at al, 1978: 47; Heritage, 1984: 280-90; Drew & Heritage, 1992). In both cases, the informal format is presented as somehow primordial, while other formats are often seen as resulting from a 'reduction', that is applied to it (cf. the general discussion in Ten Have, 1999: 161-81).
Returning to the canonical model of telephone openings, we can see that its formulations, as given in Schegloff (1986) and Hopper (1992) tend to have both 'structural' and 'functional' versions. The structural versions refer to specified elements such as sequences, i.e. adjacency pairs, while the functional ones are conceived in terms of a common set of 'organizational jobs' (Schegloff, 1986: 113). I take it that the latter are more basic, and less prone to a North-American cultural 'bias' and possibly less tied to the specific techical environment of telephone conversations. Different cultural conventions can be seen as different structural ways of doing general functional jobs, while different technical environments may be found to have different cultural conventions for doing an opening's work.
What is achieved in a telephone call opening is that by a few exchanges the participants establish a fully functioning interactional state. That process can be broken down in the following three functional phases (cf. Schegloff, 1986: 113):
My proposal to stress a functional, rather than a structural, perspective, is meant to suggest that underlying any differences in forms and formats, qwhether these can be related to the cultures or the technical environments used, there is a kind of functional similarity, in the sense that in all cases similar kinds of work have to be done: connection work, relation work and topic work. In the canonical model, as developed by Schegloff (1986) and taken over by Hopper (1992), what I call relation work is, so to speak, divided over three separate sequential phases or 'slots': identification/recognition, greetings and 'howareyou?'s or 'initial inquiries'. In the canonical model, topic work in principle follows after the actual opening, at what Schegloff calls 'the anchor position'. In many concrete cases it starts earlier, through what Schegloff calls 'preemption', i.e. by deleting canonical elements.
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.
It requires the parties' local sensitivity and ingenuity to bring
off these kinds of work in a manner that serves their goals in an unremarkable
fashion, using whatever conventions their cultures or the conventions that
have been developed for that technical environment, provide. For instance,
when calling a family one hasn't seen/spoken for some time, skipping 'howareyou?'
may suggest an urgent reason-for-a-call, or a 'this is just a small inquiry',
but is may also be taken to be rather rude. In a routine business call,
like one for making a table reservation in a restaurant, on the other hand,
a 'howareyou?' would (in our culture?) be extremely uncommon if one would
be just an anonymous guest. In other words, deleting elements from the
canonical model is one of the ways in which participants may display their
conception of the technical, institutional and relational environment in
which they operate.
2. The concept of 'adjacency pairs' is a basic one in Conversation Analysis (CA) as developped by Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff. It has been defined as follows:
Briefly, then, adjacency pairs consist of sequences which properly have the following features: (1) two utterance length, (2) adjacent positioning of component utterances, (3) different speakers producing each utterance.
The component utterances of such sequences have an achieved relatedness beyond that which may otherwise obtain between adjacent utterances. That relatedness is partially the product of the operation of a typology in the speakers' production of the sequences. The typology operates in two ways: it partitions utterance types into "first pair parts" (i.e. first parts of pairs) and second pair parts; and it affiliates a first pair part and a second pair part to form a pair type. "Question-answer", "greeting-greeting", "offer-acceptance/refusal" are instances of pair types. A given sequence will thus be composed of an utterance that is a first pair part produced by one speaker directly followed by the production by a different speaker of an utterance which is (a) a second pair part, and (b) is from the same pair type as the first utterance in the sequence is a member of. Adjacency pair sequences, then, exhibit the further features (4) relative ordering of parts (i.e. first pair parts precede second pair parts) and (5) discriminative relations (i.e. the pair type of which a first pair part is a member is relevant to the selection among second pair parts). (...)
A basic rule of adjacency pair operation is: given the recognizable production of a first pair part, on its first possible completion its speaker should stop and a next speaker should start and produce a second pair part from the pair type of which the first is recognizably a member.