Interculturality as an interactional achievement: Doubting others’ nationality and accounting for the doubt

ABSTRACT

This article examines the notion of interculturality in face-to-face, multilingual, ordinary interactions. The focus is on how participants perform constituent actions by reference to members’ normative expectations to a specific membership category. Employing ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this article elucidates interculturality is an interactional achievement in interaction. More specifically, I describe interactional practices for doubting others’ nationality and accounting for doubts accomplished by particular interactional practices in a specific interactional position. Analyzing these interactional contingencies produced by participants demonstrates that members’ practices to make interculturality relevant in a temporal unfolding of the activity and shows how they reflexively use interculturality as a resource for constituent actions. This study contributes to the existing literature on the interactional construction of international and intercultural communication, and on the situated, sequential, and embodied organization of interculturality.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
• interculturality
• correction invitation
• doubt
• account

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at Akita International University, Japan in 2017 and Hiroki Maeda's seminar at Keio University, Japan in 2018. I would like to thank to the audience and members of the seminar for their valuable feedback, especially Ivan Brown, Tim Greer, Hiroki Maeda, Shintaro Matsunaga, Yuri Nunokawa and Yuki Yoshikawa. I am indebted to Satomi Kuroshima and Atsushi Nakagawa for their extensive comments on earlier versions of the paper.

ORCID

Yusuke Arano http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7383-5047

Notes

1 The distinction between interculturality in theory and action is motivated by an ethnomethodology's radically-emic perspectives that is to unpack how the participants orient to the situation as intercultural and how they deal with it, thereby demonstrating social order built by the productions of social action (Garfinkel, 2002; Sacks, 1972a, 1992; Schegloff, 2007b). It is not derived from the notions of theoretical and empirical analytic methods. Therefore, it does not mean interculturality in theory is not an empirical one at all.

2 I used the Jeffersonian transcription system:

=     Latching

[     Beginning of overlapping

]     Ending of overlapping

(0.0)    Length of silence

(.)     Micro pause

wo::rd   Prolonged sound

°word°   Soft sound

WORD   Louder sound

word.    Falling intonation

word?    Rising intonation

word,    Half rising intonation like counting numbers.

word¿    Rising intonation, stronger than comma but weaker than question mark

Wo-    Cut-off

>word<   Speedy utterance

<word>   Slow utterance

£word£   Smiley voice

↑word   Tonal change (upward)

↓word    Tonal change (downward)

word    Higher pitch (putting emphasis or stress)

(word)   Transcriber's best guess

(())     Transcriber's note

Bodily conduct including gaze and gesture are transcribed following a transcription system developed by Lorenza Mondada (2018):

•, *, %, etc.  The initiations as well as the termination of the relevant conduct

---     The conduct is maintained until the same sign

…      The conduct's preparation

,,,     The conduct's retraction

>>     The conduct has started before the transcript

-->     The annotated conduct is maintained across the lines

-->>    The conduct is carried on throughout the excerpt

3 I transcribed Japanese utterances using romanized Japanese with the Jeffersonian system in the first tier. In the second tier, I provide word-by-word translations with abbreviations including ITJ for “interjection” and PST for “past tense,” if necessary. The third tier presents idiomatic translations of the original utterances.

4 Here, I initially describe this utterance as an interrogative instead of a question. However, “a grammatical formula of [interrogative] be used to accomplish a variety of different actions,” such as questioning, requesting for confirmation, requesting for agreement, challenging and the like (Raymond, 2003, p. 939). Hence, I use the term “interrogative” when I refer to the formulation of the utterance.

5 Briefly, “marked” is something non-standard, unusual, or noticeable; “unmarked,” standard (Firth, 1996).

6 See lines 18–19 in (12) wherein Tan normalizes the event by asking the question. Tan's question is no longer about interculturality, but rather facial hair.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number 17J04212].