Commentary on Stivers and Rossano: “Mobilizing Response”

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Notes

I am indebted (once again) to my colleagues John Heritage and Gene Lerner for their critical reading of earlier drafts and their thoughtful advice on matters of substance, balance, and nuance. If there remain rough spots in the text, the responsibility is entirely mine.

¹ In fact, when I first addressed myself to “questions” as an analytic target, it was to call into question prevalent views of them: “On Some Questions and Ambiguities in Conversation” was first delivered in April, 1972, first circulated by Steve Levinson and Gerald Gazdar in Pragmatics Microfiche in 1976, and first formally published in Atkinson and Heritage, 1984.

² Or would S&R dismiss the relevance of these as they appear to do when they write: “The inclusion of multiple response-mobilizing turn-design features leads to higher response relevance than the inclusion of fewer or no features. There is a clear ‘ceiling effect’ with actions that are ritualized and/or leave little room for design variation such as greetings and farewells” (2010/this issue, p. 27). Is this a ‘ceiling effect’ or a ‘cellar effect’? What is striking is that summonses, greetings, and farewells do not mandate any of the features S&R treat as the sine qua non of mandating response—not lexicomorpho-syntax, not distinctive interrogative prosody, not epistemics, and not gaze. Should they simply be dismissed as an inconvenience?

³From  “Opening up closings,” by E. A. Schegloff and H. Sacks, 1973, Semiotica, 8, pp. 324–325. Copyright 1973 by De Gruyter. Reprinted with permission. In the original publication a footnote underscored the following point:

A simple distinction between face-to-face and telephone interaction will not do. We do not yet have any adequate technical account of these notions, which would specify the analytic dimensions of significant distinction. A variety of intuitive, plausible distinctions do not hold up. It should not be taken, from the text, that whereas face-to-face conversation can be either continuously sustained or have the character of a continuing state of incipient talk, telephone conversation invariably has the former character. That does not appear to be the case. And even if it were, it would be the distinction between these two modes, rather than that between face-to-face and telephonic, which would be relevant. (pp. 325–326)

⁴ Note “extended,” not abandoned. One reader of an earlier draft of these comments expressed a concern that the citation from “Opening Up Closings” might be taken to imply the cancellation of all the past findings about turn taking, sequence organization, repair, etc. There is ample evidence of the continuing analytic robustness of that work (grounded largely in data from occasions of continuously sustained talk) when applied to conduct in continuing states of incipient talk. That does not blunt the relevance of strong work addressed precisely to what makes for the recognizability and distinctiveness of these two modes of talk- and other conduct- in-interaction. Although that could, in principle, engender major transformations in our understanding, that does not so far appear to be the case.