Turning the Tables: Objecting to Conduct in Conflict Talk

ABSTRACT

This article is a Conversation Analytic study of occasions where a speaker formulates what a recipient is doing as something objectionable, thereby delivering an accusation, e.g., “Why you shouting” or “I dunno why you’re being so aggressive.” We call these lexical formulations of what someone has just done conduct formulations. These are: (a) responsive to an ongoing imputation of misconduct or misdemeanor, and (b) produced in response to an upgrade on prior attempts by the recipient to engage the producer of the conduct formulation in aligning with their project. The speaker thereby “turns the tables” on the recipient, challenging the legitimacy of, and thus rendering accountable, his line of action. The response by the recipient involves a downgrade of her prior action and so proposes resetting the terms of engagement on a more conciliatory basis. Data are in English and Italian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ “Advanced Revelation” (line 2) is a type of software involved in producing the book on which they are working.

² We thank Dragonfly Productions for permission to use the data from this series.

³ Morena is Lidia’s keyworker. In our data, Lidia is the only group member who uses the diminutive “Mory”—an index of familiarity—to address Morena.

⁴ In similar vein, Potter and Hepburn (2020), in work focused on family mealtime interactions, focus on what they call “shaming interrogatives” in that they both draw attention to problem behavior and put the recipient in a position of providing an account for it—often where no account is possible that doesn’t incriminate the recipient in some way.

⁵ There are affinities here with some of the antagonistic sequences examined by Dersley and Wootton (2000, p. 401) in which the complainee resists aligning as a complainee and instead assumes the role of (counter) complainer.

⁶ “Advanced Revelation” (line 2) is a type of software involved in producing the book on which they are working.

⁷ This is how the participants refer to the group meeting. They do so without religious connotations.

⁸ Note in this connection the possessive construction in the design of the accusation: “wearing your Mum’s clothes on Facebook,” which invokes the general principle of not taking things without permission, as opposed to “wearing Mum’s clothes …, ” which indexes the local relationship of mother, father, and daughter.

Additional information

Funding

Collection of the Italian data was funded by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union Seventh Framework Programme [FP7=2007-2013] under REA grant agreement no. 626893. The contents of this article reflect only the views of the authors and not the views of the European Commission.