What “What?” Tells Us About How Conversationalists Manage Intersubjectivity

Abstract

When studying how conversationalists assess mutual understanding, research has focused on one type of evidence: next-turn talk. This article identifies another, antecedent type of evidence involving how talk is produced by reference to repair-opportunity spaces that are systematically provided for by conversation’s generic organization of repair. As current speakers talk, recipients claim understanding ex silentio on an action-by-action basis as they forgo each next repair-opportunity space—that is, as they ‘withhold’ talk at each next transition-relevance place. This conversation-analytic article supports its argument through an analysis of multi-action/TCU turns generally, and specifically when recipients initiate repair on such turns with: “What?” In these cases, people respond by repairing only the most proximate action in their prior turn, which indexes their understanding that people who initiated repair understood relatively distal actions. Data are drawn from naturally occurring, ordinary, telephone conversations between friends and family members. Data are in American and British English.

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (July 2012); the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (October 2012); and the annual conference of the International Communication Association (London, June 2013). The author thanks Galina Bolden, John Heritage, and Nick Enfield for comments.