The Interactional Bind of “Just [Do X]”

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of just-formulated advisings in ordinary, naturally occurring sequences of unsolicited advice giving when produced in response to troubles-tellings. Drawing on two examples from our broader collection, we demonstrate that such advisings are employed in response to advice resistance and function to minimize proposed courses of future action, attenuating their imposing nature. We show they place an interactional bind upon advice recipients that contributes toward further resistance. This article explicates this bind and its categorial, epistemic, and moral implications. Data are in American and British English.

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹ Various differences obtain in the syntactic design of the formulations in which “just” is produced. For review, see Lee (1987).

² A review of such usages—and of their versatility within the “discursive consciousness” (à la Giddens, 1984, p. 45)—transcends the limits of space and warrants an independent, empirical, sociological inquiry.

³ We are grateful to Celia Kitzinger for drawing our attention to this analysis.

⁴ It is quite possible that the phenomenon discussed in this article obtains in “institutional” contexts. Our focus on “ordinary talk” leaves this matter equivocal, however. Note that Schegloff (2007a, pp. 459–460, fn. 11) provides one conforming example from an interaction among a string quartet ensemble. The extent to which the interlocutors’ respective institutional identities are of “demonstrable relevance” (see Schegloff, 1992, pp. 107–110) to this sequence is, however, unclear.

⁵ As these data were parsed purposively—that is, for comparable instances of the interactional bind—an analysis of just-formulated advisings in different sequential positions cannot be taken up here. This is an avenue for future research.

⁶ The operative impediment to quantification here is the inherent “contingency” of social interaction (see Schegloff, 1996b, pp. 21–22). Turns-at-talk may, for example, be restarted, repaired, abandoned, and/or escaped over the course of their production. No turn-at-talk is insulated from such contingencies (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, p. 363). As Curl (2006, p. 1259, fn. 2) observes in an analogous context, this implicates a range of obstacles for quantification. We therefore made no attempt to quantify the frequency or distributional properties of the focal phenomenon. Moreover, while our sample is small, it remains equivocal what the relevant quantity of cases would need to be parsed in order for this (or any) phenomenon to be explicated “adequately.” In the absence of such a threshold, we continue then, as Schegloff (2000, p. 241, fn. 20) writes, “to limp along on the grounds of mere cogency.”

⁷ These are pseudonyms.

⁸ For additional examples, see Holmes (2014a).

⁹ This is evocative of the “Type 1 disjunction operation” described by Jayyusi (1984, p. 123, 134) following Coulter (1979).