Encounters in Public Space: How Acquainted Versus Unacquainted Persons Establish Social and Spatial Arrangements

ABSTRACT

This article studies how people enter into interactions in public space by examining casual encounters initiated either by strangers or acquainted persons. It contributes to the study of openings of interactions in public space from a conversation analytic perspective. The analysis reveals systematic similarities and differences between these two kinds of encounters, with regard to the prospective participants’ recognition, identification, and categorization, their spatial approach, the absence vs. presence of greetings, the delivery of a reason for the encounter vs. the manifestation of the social relation, and the shaping of the embodied participation framework. Data are in French and Italian with English translations.

AppendixTranscription conventions

Talk is transcribed following Gail Jefferson’s conventions. Embodied actions are transcribed according to Lorenza Mondada’s conventions for multimodal transcription: (https://franz.unibas.ch/fileadmin/franz/user_upload/redaktion/Mondada_conv_multimodality.pdf).

Notes

¹ On occasion, parties engage only in “distant salutations” and no reciprocal approaching occurs (see Ex. 11).

² Names have been anonymized in all the excerpts, and the authors have permission to show the persons’ faces.

³ In public space, a mere exchange of greetings may be treated as a complete social encounter: “an exchange of greetings is a minimal proper conversation” (Sacks, 1992, I, pp. 553–554). Interestingly, whereas Sacks considers an exchange of greetings as a potentially complete conversation, Schegloff (1979) sees greetings as closing down what he calls the “pre-beginning” of an encounter: “Greetings [are] the end phase of incipient interaction—what I referred to earlier as ‘pre-beginnings’” (Schegloff, 1979, pp. 33–34). One aim of this contribution is precisely to show how “incipient interaction” is achieved.

⁴ For a similar observation, see Pillet-Shore (2012, p. 377): “Participants to incipient encounters visibly hold off doing the action of greeting until they see ‘who’s there,’ displaying their orientation to identification/recognition via visual inspection as prerequisite to producing a copresent greeting.”

⁵ The fact that Nina is using a different greeting-token in her redoing the greeting (cia:o:. rather than SALve.) possibly addresses Salvatore’s difficulty in recognizing her. Indeed, while in current Italian the token salve is used to address acquainted, unacquainted, or socially distant persons (see Ex. 12, where Paolo greets his ex-teacher in this way), ciao is used between acquainted persons, friends, or among young people. In other words, by replacing salve with ciao, Nina exhibits that the encounter is involving acquainted people and that therefore Salvatore should display some sort of recognition.

⁶ The fact that Salvatore initiates a handshake exhibits his difficulty in recognizing Nina as an acquainted person and in categorizing her, a handshake being a greeting that many Italians would exchange with socially distant people rather than with closely acquainted persons.