On Being Known: Displays of Familiarity in Italian Café Encounters

ABSTRACT

This article explores the embodied and linguistic practices by which visitors and staff members of cafés display recognition of and mutual familiarity with each other. Based on video data collected in two Italian cafés, we use conversation analysis to examine two sequential positions where displays of familiarity are salient, i.e., the initial moments of the encounter and the placement of the order. We demonstrate that individuals rely on reciprocal visual perception, embodied and vocal resources, in particular greetings, to display their service-related recognition and acquaintanceship. We identify three ways in which a café service between “frequently attending visitors” and “usual staff members” can be initiated: (a) the customer places an order (in a sequentially delayed position), (b) the barista articulates a “candidate order,” (c) no vocal order is articulated by either party. We show that these practices crucially rely on the knowledge the “recurrent parties” share of each other. Data are in Italian and Friulian.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See also Sacks’s observations about “glance-determinable” aspects of interaction (Sacks, 1992, Vol. II, p. 539).

² See De Stefani (2019, pp. 117–119) for a detailed analysis of this excerpt.

³ We prefer to speak of orders (rather than requests, etc.) because in the setting under investigation, order is the vernacular term most likely used by English speakers (ordine in Italian). Moreover, customers on occasion orient to orders as being “nonrefusable” (see Extract 2), whereas requests can be complied with or refused.

⁴ The use of voi is limited to some areas of southern Italy, especially to the region of Campania.

⁵ In a pro-drop language such as Italian, subject pronouns are not mandatory. However, the conjugated verb (eri [“you were”]) and the object pronoun (ti [“you”]) are morphologically marked as tu-forms. The corresponding construction based on the subject pronoun lei would be “cos’era a fare che è un po’ che non la vedo.”

⁶ Frequently attending visitors are not necessarily categorized as “consuming and paying customers” (Extract 5) or as “customers” in the first place.

⁷ Here and in Extract 4a, the transcription starts with line 00, which we use for indicating moments of the encounter that precede the use of vocal resources. Given that the individuals are in the process of becoming coparticipants in interaction, they do not yet share a mutually accomplished temporality: For this reason, we have refrained from providing temporal indications in line 00.

⁸ On the management of multiple courses of action, see Mondada (2014) and De Stefani and Horlacher (2018).

⁹ On self- and other-incrementation in Italian conversation see Calabria and De Stefani (2020).

¹⁰ While Dottò’s signori (line 03) is grammatically a masculine plural noun, it is commonly used as a masculine generic addressing a plurality of individuals irrespective of their gender.

¹¹ Frequently attending visitors may also be, e.g., beggars who recurrently stop by the café to ask for money or services not related to ordinary café business. We documented one such case in our corpus (not analyzed), in which the baristas display knowledge of the entering person by identifying them with a (derogatory) recognitional.

¹² We are not aware of any comprehensive and interactional study on greetings in Italian. This study offers first observations on how greeting formats relate to identity and knowledge of the parties in interaction, which complement sociolinguistic studies, such as Molinelli (2002).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) under Grant number [G0E1519N].