How to Begin

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction organized around the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The contributions to this special issue collectively consider “how to begin”—either a new encounter or a new sequence after a lapse in conversation. All articles analyze naturally occurring, video-recorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our social relationships in everyday life. Before introducing the individual contributions to this special issue, this article elucidates state-of-the-art findings from conversation analytic research on how people begin encounters, delineating the modular components that people regularly use to constitute the copresent opening phase of interaction. Data in American English.

Notes

¹ Since 2004, I’ve been continually collecting and analyzing video-recorded openings. I’ve amassed a data corpus that currently involves over 365 residential encounters (e.g., friends, family, roommates coming home or coming over) and 88 workplace encounters (e.g., in schools, break rooms, restaurants, salons, gyms) with the informed consent of participants and permission to use these data in publications. My analysis of over 92 hours of naturally occurring video-recorded data has thus far yielded 518 copresent openings between English-speaking persons (on the west and east coasts of the United States) coming together to socialize and do work.

² Exceptions to this are accountable: In my data set, residents who issue a summons and wait for admission to their own residences regularly account for their actions (e.g., a misplaced key) to fellow cohabitants who open the door.

³ Though participants’ entry into social copresence is distinct from their entry into physical copresence, analysis reveals that parties orient to a “preference” (Heritage, 1984; Pillet-Shore, 2017a) for entering into both near the same time (Pillet-Shore, 2008). Parties treat delays between entry into physical copresence and moves to enter into social copresence as accountable and possible grounds for negative inference.

⁴ I use the terms “preference” and “dis/preferred” throughout this article in the conversation analytic sense to refer to systematic properties of turn and sequence construction (Heritage, 1984; Pillet-Shore, 2017a; Schegloff, 2007). “Preferred” actions are characteristically performed straightforwardly and without delay, whereas actions that are delayed are termed “dispreferred.”

⁵ Generic/unspecified personal state inquiries that transpire before the participants have established a common frame of dominant orientation (Robinson, 1998) are often treated as pro forma, whereas specified/recipient-designed personal state inquiries, particularly those produced after the participants have established an engagement framework, are often treated as bona fide (Pillet-Shore, 2008).

⁶ See Pillet-Shore (2005, 2017a, 2017b) for analysis of the timing and preference organization of participants’ registering actions.

⁷ Previously unacquainted parties can use a version of this action during introduction sequences when claiming preexisting knowledge about recipients (e.g., “I’ve heard so much about you”).