A Scalar View of Response Relevance

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Thank you to Nick Enfield and John Heritage for valuable comments and discussions in the course of writing this response and to Charles Antaki for making it possible to have such a discussion in the pages of Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Notes

¹ Data referred to in the book as Chinese Dinner, Chicken Dinner, Virginia, and Stew Dinner are all face-to-face mealtime conversations. Others such as US, KC-4, SN4, Pre-party, Post-party involve other forms of copresent interaction: hanging out at a shop, a visit by one couple to another, a visit to borrow notes at a university dormitory, and car rides to/from a party, respectively.

² Our data include both situations where couples are copresent for dinner and cases where friends are together in order to talk to one another. Both commentators imply that all of our data is of the “nonfocused” or “continuing state of incipient talk” variety.

³ Actions that are maximally response mobilizing obviously have less room for manipulation via turn design. This is certainly true of highly ritualized actions such as greetings, farewells, and summonses. Yet, limited ethnographic observation suggests that even here gaze and delivery can make a difference for responsiveness. Schegloff has also noted that a recipient of a second summons can recognize it as a second, thus as qualitatively different from a first, even without having heard the first summons. Part of this may arise from the “upgraded” nature of second summons (Schegloff, 2007, p. 52).

⁴ By focusing on potentially sequence-initiating actions, we maximize the relevance of response derived from sequential position. Arguably in second and third position sequential position reduces the pressure to respond.

⁵ Heritage and Raymond (2005) argue this same point from the perspective of the second speaker.

⁶ Since Goodwin's initial study, research has repeatedly shown how concerned interactants are with each others' states of knowledge, rights to know and make assertions, and relative authority to know and make assertions (e.g., Drew, 1991; Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Schegloff, 1996).