Abstract
With a mixture of previously published and original work, this volume brings together 12 empirical chapters – with data from English (Pomerantz, Koshik, Kitzinger and Wilkinson, Drew, Wu and Heritage, Lerner and Raymond), Swedish (Lindström), Korean (Lee (but see below), Oh and Park), German (Egbert), Russian (Bolden), Mandarin Chinese (Wu and Heritage) and Yélî Dnye (Levinson) – on a range of topics, demonstrating some of the breadth of conversation analytic work that has developed since the publication of Schegloff’s (1968) ‘Sequencing in conversational openings’, which the editors describe in their introduction as ‘the first work to be published that is recognizably conversation analytic’ (p. 3). The volume also contains a previously published two-part interview with Schegloff, a chapter by Couper-Kuhlen outlining Schegloff’s contribution to linguistics, an original preamble by Drew prior to his previously published chapter and an extract from a previously published article by Schegloff, presented as a rebuttal to the (previously published) chapter by Levinson.
Of particular interest to me were the chapters by Pomerantz, Drew, and Lerner and Raymond. Pomerantz’s chapter analyses how recipients of a query go about inferring the purpose of the query, as displayed in their response. This leads into a discussion of recipients’ work in answering the question of ‘why that now’. As Pomerantz puts it, ‘an important aspect of participants’ answering “why that now” is their figuring out the relevant scope of “that” and the relevant scope of “now”’ (p. 75). Similarly, Drew demonstrates how features of setting and participant identity are insufficient for determining relevant context for the design and understanding of talk, how participants talk this context into being and how this can go wrong.
In the interview, one thing that Schegloff emphasizes is the importance of video-recordings, rather than just audio, for the analysis of face-to-face interaction. In their chapter, Lerner and Raymond demonstrate this importance in their analysis of gestures and instrumental actions that are redesigned in their course. They have also made the video data available through the Internet, even taking the possibly dangerous step of dispensing with transcripts, something they manage to pull off quite successfully.
As perhaps should be hoped for in a volume compiled to honor one of the founders of a vibrant discipline, various parts of this volume raised for me issues that seem to resist easy resolution. One issue is related to the occasional criticism that conversation analysis has an Anglophone bias, a criticism that Schegloff mentions in the interview and quickly refutes by pointing out work that ‘has been done on materials from cultures and languages quite different from American English’ (p. 17). Examples of such work on Korean, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Yélî Dnye can be found in this volume. Nevertheless, traces of this bias seem to remain. For example, in the chapter by Lee, even though it involves analysis of data from Korean, these data are only presented in the form of transcripts in ‘idiomatic English translation’ (p. 108), except for two data extracts also included in the appendix in the three-tier format. This left me wondering if Lee considers Korean to be too exotic for readers of this volume to want to grapple with. Fortunately, the authors of the other chapter using Korean data, Oh and Park, present their data in Korean, using the three-tier format to make it more accessible to all readers. A second issue is related to the necessity of having ‘native speakers’ as analysts, an idea that is discussed in the Schegloff interview. As someone who often works with interaction involving second-language users, I find the notion of native-speaker competence problematic. The chapters by Pomerantz and Lerner and Raymond contain data in which one of the participants is a second-language user of English, though this is neither relevant for nor brought into the analysis. Should such participants be considered abnormal in some way? My answer is, of course, ‘no’, but if we are to consider second-language users as normal participants and interaction involving such participants as normal interaction, should we not also consider the possibility that a researcher can be a competent analyst even without being a native speaker? There is, for example, Levinson’s previously published chapter on Yélî Dnye interaction and Moerman’s (1988) work on Thai interaction, which is actually cited by Schegloff in the interview as an example of how conversation analytic work has moved beyond work on English.
A third issue relates to a recent development in conversation analysis associated with two of the editors of this volume, which is work on what has come to be called epistemics. Within an epistemics framework, Wu and Heritage compare particles in English and Mandarin Chinese, which are argued to do similar work within a particular restricted context – responding to a query – even though they do very different work outside this context. This chapter is interesting, but I wonder whether change of state is something which ‘oh generically carries’ (p. 293) or, rather, whether this is something which oh can index in certain sequential contexts. This has led me to reconsider the convincingness of Heritage’s (1998) analysis of oh-prefaced responses. Also related to epistemics, Koshik, in her chapter on responses to challenges built through reversed polarity questions (RPQs), states that ‘wh-questions are likely to be heard as RPQs … when the question is asked from a position of epistemic strength, …’ (p. 81), though sequential context and turn design are also recognized as important. Nevertheless, in the analysis, Koshik shows how RPQs can be heard as challenges based on their sequential position and features of turn design, without relative epistemic status being brought into the analysis (cf. Lindwall et al. 2016).
In considering these different issues, I do not mean to detract from the achievements and contributions of Schegloff, nor from the achievement of the editors and contributors in constructing this volume. This collection is thought-provoking, enlightening and, at times, even inspiring, a rare achievement for an edited volume and a fitting Festschrift for Emanuel A. Schegloff.