The Comparative Study of Social Action: What You Must and What You Can Do to Align with a Prior Speaker

ABSTRACT

This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.

Acknowledgement

I gratefully acknowledge Carina Krieger’s assistance with the coding for this study. Three anonymous reviewers for the journal and members of the “Constitution of Meaning in Social Interaction” group at the IDS gave helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ His earlier jaja (“yes yes”) is not a confirmation but a way of aligning with the joking mode of Anna’s formulation, see Barth-Weingarten (2011).