Making Arrangements: A Sketch of a ‘Big Package’

ABSTRACT

This article examines the making of arrangements for future joint activities as a “big package” of talk in interaction. Arrangement-making is here characterized as having a segmented structure, a series of sequences in which the details of time, place, and manner are addressed, often discretely, in sequences that are boundaried off from one another and variable in their ordering. The analysis also addresses the launching of the package and the varying ways it can emerge out of a prior remote proposal sequence or an already presumed activity, also, some of the contingencies impacting the body of the arrangement, and the sequential mechanisms through which segments and the overall package are closed. It is suggested that the segmented “sequence of sequences” structure may apply to the analysis of other big packages. Data are in English.

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor of ROLSI and the reviewers of this article for many cogent and helpful suggestions, which have enabled us to improve it. We also thank Jeff Robinson and Giovanni Rossi for their generosity in searching their video-recorded data sets for instances of arrangement-making, and sharing their findings with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The authors are aware that the data in this article were collected prior to the institution of informed consent regulations. The preponderance of data displayed here were collected through the voluntary collaboration of participating families, but the rights of some participants to agree to be recorded may not have been respected at the time of recording. Participating families were invited to erase any conversations of their choosing, and we have reason to believe that at least some of them exercised that right.

² Our own searches of video recorded data, together with assistance from Jeff Robinson and Giovanni Rossi using separate large-scale data corpora, yielded fewer than five cases. In contrast, locally realized activity proposals were common and easily identified in video recordings of face-to-face interaction.

³ Note that our use of proposal here is designedly broad and contrasts with the more specific sense developed by Couper-Kuhlen (2014). As noted earlier, arrangements follow from service requests and offers (e.g., transportation, object transfers) as well as social activities (shared meals, sporting events, etc.).

⁴ The timing of the transfer is not addressed in this call.

⁵ Note that her disavowal in turn occasions a further interpolation (“our two local places have gone down hill rather”), apparently designed to account for the recommendation of a place she has never been to.

⁶ “Mm hm” is an “archetypical continuer” (Gardner, 2001, p. 25).

⁷ However, as in conversation closings (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), the apparent finalization of an arrangement sequence may not be definitive. In the case below concerning an object transfer, Al’s proposal (line 4) is accepted (line 6) and reconfirmed (lines 7–8). As it turns out, however, Fran’s subsequent comment (line 10) raises a difficulty that ultimately requires reconstructing the arrangement. So here segment closure is followed by a reopening of the apparently completed arrangement.