The Embodied and Negotiated Production of Assessments in Instructed Actions

Abstract

Based on video recordings of instructions produced by a car dealer for a customer who has just bought a car, this article deals with assessments produced in professional interactions in which participants' attention is focused on a copresent object that is pointed at, described, or explained. It contributes to the study of the systematic organization of assessments, relying on their sequential positions and on the multimodal actions manipulating the assessable object, as well as on the identities of the assessors, their epistemic stances, and their relations to the assessable. The sequential organization of assessments has been previously described in two sequential environments: At the end of extended sequences, they work as closing-implicative resources. In the context of sequences of assessments, the first is preferentially upgraded by the second. The corpus studied here shows alternative formats, sensitive to the context and the activity. Participants orient to the interactional metrics of asssessments, by expecting but not always producing them as the stronger type of response to extended descriptions of copresent objects. They also orient to this interactional metric in sequences of assessments, not only when they produce second upgraded ones but also when they produce downgraded seconds. The data reveal a peculiar format, consisting of a first positive assessment, upgraded by a second, which is then downgraded by the first speaker in third position. This format, as well as the possibility of downgrading assessments in second position, shows that in certain activities the production of assessments can be risky, i.e., vulnerable to a downgrade in the next position. The article reveals practices that not only corroborate the bright side of assessing practices well described in the literature, showing that they display shared experiences, alignment, and affiliation, but also their dark side, showing that assessments can also express disaffiliation, contending authorities, resistance, claims of autonomous epistemic access, and distinct rights to assess.

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Helsinki, May, 2006, and at the International Pragmatic Association Conference, Göteborg, Sweden, July, 2007. I would like to thank Anna Lindström and two reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The study is one of several investigations in the project Language and Social Action: A Comparative Study of Affiliation and Disaffiliation across National Communities and Institutional Contexts (financed by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and the Swedish Research Council). The study is also based on the EMIC project (Espace Mobilité Interaction Corps/Space Mobility Interaction Body, 2003–2004) dedicated to the study of car conversations; I thank Jonathan Bergena and Caroline Cance for their collaboration during fieldwork.

¹Transcript conventions are fully explicated at the end of the article. For a discussion see Mondada (2007a).

²Pomerantz (1984, p. 62) speaks of a “speaker's procedural rule”: “A recipient of an initial assessment turns his or her attention to that which was just assessed and proffers his or her own assessment of this referent.” In the case studied here, this attention is mobilized before, during the initial description—as evidenced in the bodily behavior of the recipient. Assessments are the product of this shift of attention.

³See Schegloff (1982), Goodwin (1986), and Jefferson (1978, 1983, 1984) on the specific sequential positions of tokens like “mhm,” “yeah,” and assessments. See also Heritage and Sefi (1992) for another context where this distribution indexes different knowledge positionings.

⁴“The participation possibilities provided by assessments enable participants to negotiate both the status of a proposed assessable, and the way in which the talk containing it will be attended to” (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987, p. 45).

⁵See Goodwin & Goodwin (1987) on concurrent assessments, produced in overlap and within a detailed and finely tuned coordination between coparticipants. In our corpus, coproduced assessments are not very common, but here is an instance:w

un peu aléatoire is initiated by Guy (3) but then repeated and completed almost by Guy and dealer together.

⁶Risks involved in assessment sequences in professional activities are mentioned by Clark, Drew, and Pinch (2003, p. 11) as well as by Clayman and Reisner (1998, p. 194). The latter speak of risky levels of confrontation and commitment involved in highly positive assessments and show that this favors mildly favorable assessments, which allow greater flexibility in subsequent negotiations.

⁷In French, génial can be translated as brilliant, terrific, fantastic; it is very different from the English genial.

⁸Analyzing patients' practices for inviting doctors to produce an assessment, Jones (2001) gives examples of the extension of the punchline as a technique for inviting to assess, and documents participants' difficulties of finding stronger pursuits of a climax.

⁹We see very clearly that nods are not assessments; nods are not to be confused with assessment head shakes (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987).

¹⁰See Goodwin & Goodwin (1987, p. 44) on refusals to produce an assessment and thus to produce the assessable character of the referent.