Reference Recalibration Repairs: Adjusting the Precision of Formulations for the Task at Hand

Abstract

This report examines what is involved when a speaker overtly selects one formulation over another by employing a repair operation that reformulates a reference in a way that adjusts or recalibrates it, rather than abandons the original referent altogether. Focusing primarily on references to persons, we show that, beyond the narrowing of a reference—increasing its precision—that results in an improved fit between a person reference and other components of a turn at talk, these reference recalibration repairs can be used to do such things as meeting the requirements of a story's telling, upgrading the credibility of an information source, and justifying a rejection. This ties speakers' overt concern with calibrating a categorical reference to the formation of action in their turn at talk. By contrast, we then show how broadening a reference—decreasing its precision—can be used as a method for displaying uncertainty and, thereby, recalibrating a reference to fit the manifest knowledge state of the speaker (or a recipient).

Notes

¹See Sacks (1992, Vol. I, pp. 752–763 and especially Vol. II, pp. 19–20) for early considerations of “fitting a reference to the topic at hand” and “word co-selection in storytelling” respectively. Also relevant here is Sacks's (1992, Vol. I pp. 417–420 and p. 544) discussion of “misidentification” as a way of doing an action. By contrast, although Schegloff (1972, p. 80) notes that, “it would be foolhardy to try to excerpt from its conversational surroundings some particular formulation, and examine how it was selected out of a set of terms,” he goes on to characterize both Sacks's work on membership categories and his own on place formulations as having been usefully carried out “in temporary isolation from topical context”—“given the current state of investigation [at the time].” More recently, Schegloff (1996) and others (Land & Kitzinger, 2007, on self-reference and Stivers, 2007, on recognitional reference) have begun to describe how reference forms “can display (or constitute) … the current relevance with which the referent figures in the talk” (Schegloff, 1996, p. 447).

²The speaker thereby treats the original formulation as not having been precise enough, rather than, e.g., targeting the silence as indicating reluctance of the part of England to respond. See Bolden, Mandelbaum, and Wilkinson (2012/this issue) for a discussion of repairs used to pursue a response in this way.

³ Jefferson's (1985) examination of “defensive detailing” and the later exposing of an apparent (innocuous) detail as having been a gloss for a delicate matter that is then specified might stand as an early explication of the operation of granularity.

⁴For example, Schegloff illustrates a storyteller's move from projecting a gloss for something that was said in the scene he is describing to presenting a rendition of the utterance itself. He notes that this kind of calibration of levels of granularity marks a shift in the development of the narrative as it approaches its climax, suggesting a relationship between shifts in granularity (e.g., moving from coarser to finer forms of description) and the trajectory of a narrative.

⁵These constitute the majority of our cases—a fact consistent with the observation that replacing very likely constitutes the single most common same-turn repair operation in talk-in-interaction.

⁶Here, our concern with the recalibration of references to persons intersects with the work of Wilkinson and Weatherall (2011). Their investigation of insertion repairs found that one action inserting can be used to accomplish is specifying the trouble source. However, as they note, and our investigation confirms, the action of specifying is not insertion specific and, at least in the domain of reference to persons, seems to be predominantly carried out through replacement repairs.

⁷See Lerner and Kitzinger (2007) for a discussion of extraction and aggregation.

⁸The fact that she has earlier lamented not having heard from her husband's coworkers in Norfolk may explain the recalibration repair (shifting from “one 'r two people ↓in Norfolk.” to “frie:nds,” line 3), since it distinguishes friends from the coworkers mentioned earlier, extracting them from the broader reference to “people,” thus making clear that the persons in Norfolk from whom she has heard are not those delinquent coworkers, but rather, incumbents of a different relationship category: “friends.”

⁹The overlap of “people” with Skip's response (line 9) furnishes a systematic basis for retrieval of the overlapped talk and this provides an opportunity for selecting another term. In this case the postoverlap talk is composed as more than retrieval—it is formed up as a revision (“sort of acquaintances”).

¹⁰See Drew (2003) and Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (2005) for other practices aimed at backing away from something that has been claimed, but in these cases speakers are backing away from exaggerated claims in a manner that produces more precise ones.

¹¹Of course, one can find circumstances where broadening is used to clarify a possibly misleading reference, as in the following case from a radio interview (Weekend Edition Sunday, 4/7/12) in which the first, more specific formulation produces birth order ambiguity: “Also, (0.2) three weeks after my surgery, (.) our first daughter was bo:rn.=our first chi:ld.(.) and ah she was born there at home.” The interviewee's reference-broadening repair sharpens the uniqueness of this life-affirming event (the birth of a child) in the immediate aftermath of a life-threatening event (emergency open heart surgery).

¹²We would like to acknowledge John Heritage for suggesting this association to us.