Abstract
In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages (Danish, Estonian and Finnish) we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to be either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses.
Introduction
That the human ‘interaction engine’ (Levinson, 2006) is largely pro-social in that it aims at social bonding and cooperation is something that has been suggested across disciplines (e.g. Allwood, 1976; Axelrod, 1984; Clayman, 2002; Enfield, 2006; Grice, 1975). In the field of Conversation Analysis, cooperation has been considered in terms of alignment and affiliation, with alignment being understood as cooperation at the
In the service of defining and distinguishing affiliation and alignment further and in order to demonstrate the analytical relevance of these concepts for understanding social cooperation, we, in this paper, investigate the underlying dimensions of alignment and affiliation as they are employed and/or oriented to by participants in interaction through a particular interactional practice, that of producing an anticipatory completion. This practice has largely been understood and described as being, prima facie, both aligning and affiliating: On the structural level, anticipatory completions can be understood as aligning, in so far as they are built to be grammatically contiguous with a turn-constructional unit (TCU) already in progress, and as they propose a completion of that TCU (e.g. Lerner, 1996a, 2004; Szczepek, 2000a). Anticipatory completions are also known as ‘pre-emptive completions’, ‘co-completions’, ‘collaborative completions’, ‘co-constructions’ or ‘collaborative productions’ (e.g. Hayashi, 1999; Helasvuo, 2004; Lerner, 1996a, 2002, 2004; Szczepek, 2000b). As many of these terms suggest, anticipatory completions are typically discussed as being employed for cooperation also on the affective level, that is, being affiliative, in so far as they are used, for instance, to help out a current speaker with finding a word, to express understanding of and agreement with what a current speaker is articulating, or to form an in-group with a current speaker. From conversation analytic explorations of other practices that are prima facie cooperative, we know, however, that any such practice may, when employed in a specific sequential position, in fact be
Following the implications of this line of research, we will use anticipatory completions as a window into exploring affiliation and alignment as different levels of social cooperation. As we shall demonstrate, anticipatory completions aptly reveal the multi-faceted face of cooperation – and non-cooperation − as they can, for example, be designed to be cooperative or non-cooperative from the beginning, they can be locally non-cooperative but yet cooperative with respect to a larger sequential trajectory, or they can end up being non-cooperative even if they were designed to be cooperative.
Data and methodology: Three examples of anticipatory completions produced in tellings in Danish, Estonian and Finnish
The data that forms the basis for the subsequent analysis consist of a collection of anticipatory completions sourced from interactional corpora in three languages: Danish, Estonian and Finnish. These corpora each include both face-to-face and telephone conversations of an everyday nature, that is, taking place between friends and family members in relatively informal settings. We have included in our collection all instances in which one participant produces a turn-at-talk that is grammatically contiguous with a clearly unfinished turn-constructional unit being produced by a co-participant. While the three languages were chosen for very practical reasons, namely that each author is a speaker of (at least) one of these languages and has access to interactional corpora in that language, we are also implicitly attempting to prove a methodological point: while speakers of different languages are known to have available to them and use different types of resources for implementing specific interactional practices (see, e.g. Sidnell and Enfield, 2013, for a discussion and examples of this), the dimensions of cooperation are presumably of universal relevance for all human beings. Thus, while the different grammatical structures of Danish, Estonian and Finnish do mean that the way in which the anticipatory completion is produced in each of the languages may differ, 3 the underlying reasons and the outcomes of this practice are the same.
The three anticipatory completions that we will analyse in this paper are presented below, to illustrate how speaker B in each case produces a turn that is a grammatical continuation of speaker A’s turn-in-progress
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:
Both the structure and the interactional impact of each of the three anticipatory completions will be discussed in more detail in the remainder of this paper; suffice for now to point out that in all three examples, speaker B’s turn:
(a) is grammatically fitted to a prior incomplete TCU delivered by A, and
(b) serves to bring that TCU to a possible completion.
What is not evident from the three examples as they are presented above is that they are all produced in the context of story tellings, and, moreover, were initially identified by us as being in some way non-cooperative in the context of that activity. As tellings constitute an interactional
Non-cooperative anticipatory completions in tellings
In order for a telling to be produced successfully, the turn-by-turn talk that is ordinarily in play (Sacks et al., 1974) is suspended and participants take on the roles of teller and recipient, respectively. A prospective teller, for instance, can use various cues to indicate that he or she is about to launch a telling and simultaneously to provide the recipients with indications of what kind of telling is being launched and what kind of reaction it makes relevant next. Similarly, in order to conclude a telling (and return to turn-by-turn talk), the teller does work to make the end of a telling recognizable as such. Recipients, in turn, monitor the teller’s actions in order to participate as recipients of a telling, thus drawing on the cues provided by the teller in order to respond appropriately, as recipients, at each stage of the telling (e.g. Drummond and Hopper, 1993; Duranti and Brenneis, 1986; Goodwin, 1984; Jefferson, 1978; Kjærbeck and Asmuß, 2005; Mandelbaum, 1989; Sacks, 1972, 1992).
In the context of tellings, the production of an anticipatory completion can be a highly cooperative move (e.g. Brenning, 2015). For instance, when used at the conclusion of a telling to indicate understanding that the telling is complete, anticipatory completions support and facilitate the activity, and match the formal design preferences in the sense that they are grammatically fitted to the prior turn, thus aligning with the prior turn. Moreover, anticipatory completions may display affect in relation to the content of the telling, thus affiliating with the telling. Anticipatory completions are, however, intrinsically contradictory with respect to alignment and affiliation, that is, cooperation. While they do align with the activity and match the formal design preferences of the previous turn, they do not align with the proposed interactional roles, that is, those of speaker and listener. Moreover, while they may be used for displaying empathy and support the stance of the telling, they do not necessarily cooperate with action preference. They are, thus, not
Dismissing the tellability of a story
Our first example comes from a Finnish conversation between two young women, Anna and Beea, who are sitting in Beea’s kitchen drinking tea and chatting. The anticipatory completion (line 30) is a ni(in) (‘so/then’) clause. It completes a compound TCU whose first part is an adverbial clause initiated by the particle ku(n) (‘as/when’).
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The turn that is initiated by Beea and completed by Anna thus ends up being: ja sit totta kai ku se on niinku kaasuuntunu ni se räjähtää (‘and then of course when/as it has been like gasified then/so it explodes’):
The anticipatory completion that Anna produces in line 30 is delivered at the end of a telling initiated by Beea about a ‘bonfire video’ from YouTube. Before Beea initiated this telling, the two women have agreed that the tv-show ‘Funniest Home Videos’ often shows videos that are not really funny, because the events shown could be dangerous and people get hurt. As an example of this, Anna has told about the Russian version of the show, where the videos (according to her) are of the type where people ‘pour gasoline on something, ignite it and then it explodes’. As we can see from the following, Beea’s telling is thus both topically and interactionally triggered – or, locally occasioned (Jefferson, 1978):
The talk delivered by Beea in lines 1–6 serves as a story preface (e.g. Sacks, 1974) where the particle hei (‘hey’, line 1) marks the story as locally triggered (Hakulinen et al., 2004: 818−819). The descriptions hirvee (‘awful’) and pellet (‘clowns’/‘idiots’) in lines 4 and 5 inform Anna about what kind of a stance is relevant towards what is about to be told (Sacks, 1992: 10). This projected stance is well in line with the joint position already taken by Anna and Beea on the issue of people producing dangerous-looking videos. Subsequent to the story preface and before launching the actual telling, however, Beea mentions, as an aside or a parenthetical remark, that the person in the video she has seen could not have been Finnish:
According to Routarinne (2003: 88−98; see also Mazeland, 2007), parenthenticals can serve to introduce relevant background information or to direct the recipient’s affective stance towards what is being told, and as we see here in lines 9−10, Beea expands on a particular position, namely that Finns would not behave dangerously around bonfires, as they are ‘so familiar’ with the dangers because of the Finnish midsummer bonfire tradition. That the parenthetical remark constitutes a shift, both in the focus of Beea’s telling and in the general stance towards the topic, is evident from Anna’s behaviour: before this, she has taken on the position of a telling recipient, first by producing the continuer mmm in line 7, then by taking her tea cup, moving it towards her lips and beginning to take a sip (line 9), thus indicating that the ordinary turn-by-turn organization of talk has been suspended and that Beea has been allocated the role of a teller. However, at the point at which it becomes evident that the focus of the telling has shifted, that is, when Beea produces the word kaikki (‘all [Finns]’), Anna removes the tea cup from her lips (line 10) and produces a token of disagreement älä viitti, ‘don’t say’ (line 11), in overlap with Beea’s talk. This disagreement is produced with laughter particles and a smile on Anna’s face, a smile that she holds throughout her inbreaths in lines 13 and 14. While Beea is taking a serious stance towards the topic of ‘bonfire videos’ by seeking to explicate how Finns would not put themselves in such a situation, Anna through her smile and her disagreement proposes a more humorous stance towards the same topic (on ‘turn-opening smiles’, see Kaukomaa et al., 2013). When Beea fails to reciprocate Anna’s smile and continues her telling, Anna now makes an explicit bid for producing a telling by stating overtly that she has ‘a story about this’ (line 17). As the continuation of example 1 illustrates, however, Beea ignores this bid and continues her telling. It is in this context that Anna produces the anticipatory completion (line 30): Example 1c
Although Anna has clearly stated that she has a story to tell, she accepts the role of being a recipient to Beea’s continued telling, thus aligning with the telling’s sequential progression. Her contributions during this sequence consist only of minimal response tokens (lines 22, 25 and 27), however. Though Beea does work to animate the telling by enacting the pouring of gasoline on the bonfire in line 21 (e.g. Niemelä, 2010; Sidnell, 2006) and thus further soliciting affiliation from Anna, Anna produces neither nods (see Stivers, 2008) nor facial expressions (see Kaukomaa et al., 2013) to display such affiliation and instead remains in a position of passive recipiency, leaning back in her chair and maintaining a blank face.
At this point then, we have a telling produced by Beea underway through which she is basically indicating the position that Finns (unlike Russians) would not pour gasoline excessively onto a bonfire before igniting it, because they are familiar with how to properly ignite bonfires. Anna has clearly resisted affiliating with this position, first by explicitly disagreeing with this stance (line 11), then by stating that she has a story to tell about exactly that kind of situation (line 17). Beea, however, has persisted in her telling (and the stance encompassed in it), seeking Anna’s affiliation through additional means, for instance through enactment. In this context, Anna’s resistance towards Beea’s telling and the stance encompassed in it is further evidenced through the production of the anticipatory completion in line 30. The anticipatory completion clearly aligns with the formal design preferences of Beea’s turn (lines 28−29) in that it provides the ni(in) (‘so/then’) clause projected by the ku(n) (‘as/when’) initiated clause and is thus syntactically fitted to that turn. The anticipatory completion is, however, positioned slightly early and in overlap with kaasuuntunu, ‘gasified’, which renders it a sense of pre-emptiveness in that it indicates that Anna does not need to wait for the production of the word ‘gasified’ to be able to demonstrate her understanding (see, Sacks, 1992: 140−142; Vatanen, 2014: 121−151; Vatanen, 2018). This is further emphasized by Anna’s addition of the confirming adverb aivan (‘exactly’), which indexes that Anna has equal and independent epistemic access to the telling and its conclusion, in other words, that the story was ‘no news’ (cf. the use of a corresponding Estonian word täpselt (‘exactly’) by the
This uncooperative nature of Anna’s anticipatory completion shows also in what follows, where the anticipatory completion gets sequentially deleted by Beea:
(Followed by a story about Anna’s brother who had seen the videos that had been circulated in e-mails and who had then used gasoline for their midsummer bonfire.)
Instead of responding to the anticipatory completion, for instance by confirming or rejecting it, Beea provides her own completing ni(in) (‘so/then’) clause, ‘so it becomes such like an insane flame like approximately so that (0.5) vuff’. Content-wise, this clause is not very different from Anna’s ‘so it explodes’. In terms of affect, however, Beea’s ni(in) clause is much more loaded; the explosion is (once more) enacted gesturally and through the sound object vuff. In thus providing the climax of her telling once again and in an affective manner, Beea provides another slot in which an affiliative, evaluating response could be produced by Anna. Anna, on the other hand, appears to maintain her resistance, producing only minimal response tokens (lines 34, 40) as before (e.g. example 1c, lines 22−27). In the face of Anna’s resistance, Beea produces her own evaluation (lines 35−39). Anna receipts the evaluation with nii, produced with low volume and level or flat pitch and as a separate unit from what follows. In this context, the nii treats the stance taken by Beea as inadequate (see Sorjonen, 2001: 185−198). Moreover, Anna immediately after the production of nii in line 40 launches her own telling (lines 41−42) which reasserts her own prior stance. The particle siis at the beginning of the turn (line 41) frames the telling as a ‘my side’ telling bearing emotive content that draws from Anna’s personal experience (Hakulinen and Couper-Kuhlen, 2015). The telling explicitly expresses that Beea’s telling was no news to her and that furthermore, she had personal experience over the matter Beea’s telling was about, and that her experience goes against Beea’s stance.
In example 1, the anticipatory completion is thus non-cooperative in various respects. Although it aligns with respect to the grammatical progression of the first part of the compound TCU by being grammatically fitted, it does not align with the sequential progression of the telling, leaving the response slot for the teller to fill herself. It also fails to affiliate with respect to the evaluative-affective stance towards the story. Moreover, it fails to align with respect to the whole tellability – and therefore relevance – of the story, since it demonstrates that the story was no news to its recipient.
Circumventing evaluation of a co-participant’s intimate friend
Example 2 is from an Estonian face-to-face interaction between two young women, Margit and Katrin. The anticipatory completion lähtuvalt teistest, ‘based on others’ is produced by Katrin in line 25 where it completes Margit’s utterance ta nagu otsustab ikkagi, ‘she (like) decides anyway’ in lines 23−24. In theory, the clause ta nagu otsustab ikkagi is syntactically complete, since it could be understood as encompassing an implicit object nominating what it is that is decided (cf. the English ‘she (like) decides anyway’). However, in this context (shown below) the TCU in progress is both pragmatically and prosodically incomplete, and the anticipatory completion produced by Katrin takes the TCU to its possible end in a grammatically contiguous manner.
This anticipatory completion comes at the end of Margit’s telling about what might happen in her budding relationship. Margit is dating a woman, Miina, who is also known to Katrin. Miina, however, is still in another relationship, and in her telling Margit explicates how she will feel if Miina will not leave her current partner. We will first focus on what happens in the sequence leading up to the production of the anticipatory completion:
Ultimately, Margit is here portraying the potential failure of her (future) love interest. She first ascribes a range of positive features to Miina (spontaanne, ‘spontaneous’, line 3, süda on avatud, ‘open-hearted’, line 5, and sada protsenti toeks, ‘hundred percent supporting’, line 6). These features are, however, preceded by a compound conjunction isegi kui, ‘even if’, which projects an alternative description to follow. The alternative description is expressed in what follows in lines 8–13, where Margit suggests that it is exactly the positive aspects of Miina’s character that will result in her not leaving her current partner. In predicting a possible negative outcome of her (future) relationship with Miina and attributing the blame for it to Miina, Margit can be heard to ‘sow the seeds’ of a complaint sequence. As noted by Drew and Walker (2009), however, a recipient of a putative complaint might face a dilemma: how to agree and affiliate with the other and simultaneously avoid the risk of ‘going too far’ and escalating the complaint to a point where the other does not want to go. In example 2, this dilemma is further aggravated by the fact that if Katrin joined the complaint, she would go on record as having complained about a person who might eventually end up being Margit’s partner for life.
Katrin’s solution appears to be partial affiliation: during Margit’s delivery of the negative sides of Miina (lines 12−14), she nods repeatedly, thus displaying support for Margit’s stance (e.g. Stivers, 2008). But when Margit’s description is potentially complete after lihsalt (‘simply’, line 13), Katrin produces no uptake at all. That uptake at this point is relevantly missing is evident by the fact that Margit first repeats part of her turn, then produces a rather generalizing upshot of her telling (‘she’s too good for that’, line 14). At this point, the recipient Katrin produces the acknowledgement token mhmh (line 15), though slightly late in the ‘transition space’ (see Jefferson, 1986). Having continously nodded throughout Margit’s telling (line 5 and onwards from line 9), Katrin now nods more firmly in conjunction with the acknowledgement token. Both the mhmh, which indicates passive recipiency (Jefferson, 1985), and the nod constitute non-aligning actions at the (possible) end of a telling in so far as they treat the telling as incomplete (Stivers, 2008). In our case, this causes a problem in turn taking which leads to talk produced in overlap:
While Margit launches a new and expanded description of Miina’s character (lines 16, 18−19), Katrin initiates a formulation of a possible upshot of Margit’s previous talk (line 17) but self-interrupts and leaves the floor to Margit. Margit’s description is this time presented as a report of Miina’s thinking which (like the enactment done by Beea in our previous example) can be interpreted as a pursuit of an affiliative response (cf. Holt, 2007). In reporting Miina’s (alleged) thoughts, Margit seems to be building a three-part list of factors that might prevent Miina from breaking with her current partner to enter into a (proper) relationship with Margit. First, she poses the question of how it would affect the current partner (line 18), then how it would affect the partner’s child (line 19) and finally how it would affect ‘that person and that person’ (see Jefferson, 1991, on ‘generalized list completers’). Using a list construction maximizes the projectability of a turn: a completion can be projected to occur upon the production of the third item of the list and, in terms of content, each item of the list can be expected to share some degree of ‘sameness’ (Jefferson, 1991). In other words, a list-in-progress makes it possible for the recipient to predict what is going to be said and when what is said is possibly complete, thus making it possible for the recipient join in. After Margit has produced the first part of a list and a particle chain ja siis, ‘and then’ followed by an inbreath (line 18) that indicate continuation, Katrin joins in and produces the generalizing utterance ja mis ma sellega sellele teen ja, ‘and what (shall) I cause to this (person) and’ (line 20). Katrin’s turn indicates understanding of Margit’s telling, perhaps to the degree that she could be interpreted to truncate the description-in-progress. The anticipatory completion that is produced in line 25 similarly appears to be truncating Margit’s (by now rather expanded) telling: Example 2c
In lines 23−24, Margit initiates the upshot of her three-part list, stating (broadly speaking) that her future love interest, Miina, makes decisions based on what other people will think and feel. While Katrin has hithertofore been relatively non-responsive to Margit’s telling, she now produces the anticipatory completion lähtuvalt teistest, ‘based on others’, to the upshot initiated by Margit, ta nagu otsustab ikkagi, ‘she decides anyway’. With this anticipatory completion, Katrin shows that she has understood and is able to at least partially paraphrase the basic message that was delivered and projected through Margit’s telling. This is ratified through Margit’s subsequent repeat of the completion (line 28), which is furthermore confirmed by the adverb täpselt, ‘exactly’.
Though the anticipatory completion produced by Katrin is thus ratified by Margit, it is not entirely cooperative: Through its production, Katrin can avoid making an explicit assessment or evaluation of the person Margit is talking about. That an evaluation is missing we see from the fact that Margit’s confirmation (line 28) is followed by a one second pause (line 29), which only ends when Margit takes a turn and produces an evaluation concerning Miina’s behaviour herself (line 30):
Margit’s evaluation is followed by a second evaluation by Katrin (lines 31−32). Katrin’s evaluation is not focused on Miina, but concerns people’s behaviour generally. In other words, Katrin displays her stance to the potential complainable in generic terms, that is, by ascribing the type of behaviour just relayed by Margit to ‘many people’ rather than to Miina in particular. Thus, she shows that she shares the same negative stance as Margit with respect to the kind of behaviour in general, without evaluating Miina as an individual (cf. Mandelbaum, 1991/1992: 116). Moreover, she does it as a parallel assessment that does not claim direct access to the experience that is reported (see Heritage, 2011).
To sum up the elements of cooperation in example 2, we begin by noting that the anticipatory completion by Katrin (line 25) is grammatically aligning and it aligns with the overall activity of the telling by taking the turn initiated by Margit to its projected end. By doing so, however, Katrin reverses the turn-taking system so that she herself is no longer the recipient of a telling; most notably this means that she can avoid producing the evaluative-affective response that would otherwise be relevant in this position. In this way Katrin both fails to align with the sequential organization of the telling and to affiliate with Margit. However, when observing the overall sequence, we can see that elsewhere throughout the telling Katrin does display affiliation, for example, by nodding. Furthermore, her anticipatory completions (lines 20, 25) display her understanding of the telling and her production of a second, responsive assessment (line 31) displays her agreement with Margit. Unlike example (1) above, where Anna seemed to be more generally non-cooperative towards the telling produced by Beea, in this example (2), such non-cooperativeness is not evident from the launching of the telling. Rather, it seems that the non-cooperative nature of Katrin’s anticipatory completion is in this case due to conflicting preferences: were Katrin to align and affiliate with Margit’s telling at the point at which the upshot is produced, she would be evaluating Miina – a person who is close to Margit – negatively and in that way would be heard as taking a negative stance towards a person who Margit has just expressed a wish to spend a significant amount of her future with.
Completing a telling prematurely
Our third example comes from a Danish telephone conversation between Fie and Regitze who have been friends for a long time. The anticipatory completion is in line 14, det fik hun (‘that she got’). It completes a so-called left-dislocated construction, where an initial lexical noun phrase (det der legat hun havde søgt i forskningsrådet, ‘that scholarship she had applied for in the research council’, lines 12–13) is followed by a full clause with a pronoun that is co-referential with the initial noun phrase:
Fie and Regitze are catching up with each other on the phone. Fie’s daughter, Tine, has recently started a PhD abroad. The PhD is currently un-funded and Tine has decided to use the first 6 months trying to secure funding or – alternatively – secure a part-time job to finance the PhD herself. Regitze knows of this plan from previous talks with Fie and also knows that the first 6 months of Tine’s PhD are coming to an end. At the point where the excerpt begins, Fie has been listing what has happened recently in her family and in lines 1−3, as part of this listing, she mentions that Tine has come home ‘about a week ago’ (line 3). This information is ambiguous as to whether Tine is merely visiting her parents or whether she has returned home for good (i.e. has abandoned her PhD). In reaction to the informing about Tine’s whereabouts, Regitze inquires what she has decided to do (lines 6−8):
JO so lucky, (0.3) thate:hm (0.2) .clhh
Regitze’s inquiry in lines 6–8 is formulated as what Thompson et al. (2015) term a ‘telling’ wh-question: it serves as an invitation for Fie to produce a longer, multi-TCU turn. As we see, Fie’s response aligns with the invitation: First, her response begins with jamen (‘yes+but’, line 9), a particle combination, which projects an extended answer when following wh-questions in Danish (Steensig and Heinemann, 2014). Secondly, the adjective heldig (‘lucky’, line 10) in the response serves as a prospective indexical (Goodwin, 1996), setting up the sequential implication of ‘good news’ (Maynard, 2003), which are yet to be unpacked.
In most circumstances, projecting the valence of news and affiliating with it is considered a pro-social action by which participants can display a great degree of mutual understanding. In terms of shared knowledge, Regitze and Fie both do rather elaborate work to display their mutual understanding: By producing the inquiry in lines 6–8, Regitze shows that she knows that there is a decision to be made by Tine.
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Fie similarly orients to Regitze as a knowing recipient by including the epistemic marker jo in her response (line 10) (Heinemann et al., 2011), thus indicating that the fact that Tine had applied for a scholarship is already known to Regitze. This knownness is further highlighted by Fie’s use of the demonstrative determiner,
In terms of sequential progression, however, Regitze’s anticipatory completion is less cooperative, as it in effect pre-empts a more extended telling by treating the news-delivery as complete at this point. That an extended telling was potentially relevant at this point has at least partially been projected through Fie’s initial response in lines 9−13, not just through her use of jamen which projects an extended answer (line 9): the past perfect tense of the verb ‘apply’, havde søgt (‘had applied’, lines 9−10) indicates that an episode has been completed and has no present consequences (e.g. Comrie, 1985; see also Seppänen, 2007) – in the context above havde søgt thus serves to imply that Tine’s application was unsuccessful in a similar fashion to Sacks’ (1992: 175−187) ‘first verbs’ (see also Schulze-Wenck, 2005). By stating that Tine was ‘lucky’ (line 10) Fie thus indicates a more complex situation than that of simply applying for a grant and then getting it, and projects that there is something more to tell at this point than what would be accomplished through the delivery of ‘good news’. Fie’s reception of Regitze’s anticipatory completion clearly shows this:
Regitze’s completion is followed by a short pause (line 15) and no uptake from Fie. Instead, Fie continues her own turn-at-talk by tying lines 13 and 16 together with å (‘and’), thus sequentially deleting Regitze’s completion. Notably, at the end of line 15, Fie abandons the projected det fik hun (‘she got’), which, through its similarity to Regitze’s completion at this point, could have indicated a next, new completion. Instead, Fie adds more material to further extend the telling (det ringede de så og sagde fredagen inden hun skulle på konference, lines 18−20), thus further delaying the delivery of the upshot and providing more detail to expand the telling. To a certain extent, then, it seems as if Fie here is building her turn to avoid creating any (new) positions in which Regitze can interpret the delivery of the news as almost complete. And indeed, Regitze now aligns with her role as a recipient of a telling, by producing only acknowledgement tokens (lines 16 and 20) until Fie’s telling is both grammatically and pragmatically complete in line 23, at which point Regitze can now (again) affiliate with the news/telling in a more appropriate place and in a more appropriate manner. She does this first with the negative response token nej, line 24 (Heinemann, 2005), which is prosodically marked through stretching, voice quality, emphasis and rising intonation to indicate positive disbelief, and then with the more directly evaluating ih hvor dejligt (‘oh how lovely’) (line 26).
In example 3, the anticipatory completion produced by Regitze is overwhelmingly designed to be cooperative. It is built to be aligning with the sequential progressivity of delivering good news as well as being affiliative with the positive stance of that news. Nevertheless, this anticipatory completion is non-cooperative at other levels: by embodying the upshot of good news, it short-circuits Fie’s delivery of an extended telling; moreover, the affiliative stance it embodies is directed towards the ‘simple’ achievement of getting a scholarship, whereas the real ‘luckyness’ projected in the telling is directed towards the more complex situation of getting a scholarship after an initial rejection.
Concluding discussion: The complexities of cooperation, alignment and affiliation
In the previous sections, we have considered three examples in which the recipient of a telling produces an anticipatory completion. We have done so in order to illustrate the analytic relevance of concepts such as alignment and affiliation for understanding social cooperation. We now draw together our observations by comparing the different ways in which alignment and affiliation interrelate and come into play in the three examples.
We can begin by observing that in all three examples, the anticipatory completions are
The three anticipatory completions also differ with respect to the issue of
Just as the three examples of anticipatory completions we have considered here differ in various ways with respect to cooperation at the structural level, that is, alignment, so they differ with respect to cooperation at the affective level, that is, affiliation. In fact, only in example 3 we can claim that the anticipatory completion is “maximally pro-social” because its producer through it matches “the prior speaker’s evaluative stance” and “display[s] empathy” (Stivers et al., 2011: 21). Thus, despite its many non-aligning features (see above), the anticipatory completion in example 3 clearly comes across as highly cooperative at the affective level: through its early production it serves to demonstrate the degree to which the two participants share common ground and intersubjectivity – so much so that the recipient of the telling is able to predict the upshot with only a very few cues. Furthermore, this anticipatory completion was prosodically laminated to display an affective-evaluative stance that clearly aligned with the overall projection of good news. By contrast, both example 1 and 2 involve anticipatory completions that are not – at least at an initial glance – as cooperative at the affective level. In both cases, the anticipatory completion does serve to match the prior speaker’s stance, in so far as the content delivered through the completion matches what has been projected by the previous speaker whose turn is completed (cf. Lerner, 1996b: 311, on how anticipatory completions can be “used perversely”, that is, to “tack an implausible completion onto the prior speaker’s turn”; see also Brenning, 2013: 364−365, and Bolden et al., 2019). Similarly, the anticipatory completions in both examples 1 and 2 can be said to be affiliative in so far as they both serve to “cooperate with the preference of the prior action” in bringing a telling to its projected end at a time at which this is relevant. On the other hand – and as noted above – the way in which the tellings are brought to their projected ends in examples 1 and 2 is perhaps not in accordance with preference organization: the production of the anticipatory completions makes it possible for the story-recipient to avoid producing a more affective-evaluative response and so neither in example 1 or 2 does the producer of the anticipatory completion affiliate with the teller by displaying empathy.
Finally, the three examples we have considered suggest, when taken together, that affiliation and alignment are not merely momentary and local accomplishments that can be gauged from a turn-by-turn analysis. Considering example 3, for instance, we can quite easily conclude (as others have done before us, e.g. Stivers, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011) that alignment and affiliation are separable as levels of cooperation so that any given turn-at-talk can be aligning, but not affiliating, and vice versa. We can also – and more interestingly, perhaps – conclude that both alignment and affiliation are matters that can be oriented to at different levels of interaction, that is, at the level of the turn, the activity, the sequence, and perhaps even at the level of interpersonal and relational considerations (see, e.g. Mandelbaum, 1991/1992). Thus, in all of our three examples, it should be evident that any aspect of (non)alignment and (non)affiliation that is accomplished by the participants locally and momentarily, that is, turn-by-turn, must be considered also for its impact within the larger sequential context of the telling.
In example 1, for instance, the anticipatory completion comes across as a highly non-cooperative move, not just because it is both locally and sequentially non-aligned (i.e. early, in overlap with the TCU-in-progress and late with respect to the completion of the telling), nor because it is produced in lieu of a more affiliating display of empathy, but
By contrast, the anticipatory completion of example 2, which shares many of the same local and momentary traits of non-alignment and non-affiliation with that of example 1, can ultimately be understood as much more cooperative, when considering the larger sequential context in which it is produced. Most notably, when comparing to example 1, we can see that though the anticipatory completion in example 2 is both non-aligning (i.e. somewhat delayed) and non-affiliative (i.e. lacking a display of empathy), this is exclusively a local and momentary lack of cooperation: throughout the preceding telling sequence, the producer of the anticipatory completion did in fact display affiliation by attending closely to the various points of the telling; moreover, she does work to subsequently match the teller’s stance by eventually producing an evaluative-affective response when this is made relevant for the second time. In example 2, then, the anticipatory completion constitutes only a momentary and very local lack of alignment and affiliation – and one that was, as we suggested, done for cause, that is, to avoid being heard as criticizing the teller’s love-interest. Similarly, the seemingly contradictory nature of the overwhelmingly non-aligning, yet strongly affiliating anticipatory completion in example 3 can only be understood as being highly cooperative when considering the larger context in which it is produced.
As this summarizing conclusion suggests, issues of cooperation, alignment and affiliation are complex and interrelated. By focusing on one particular practice as it is employed in one particular interactional context, we hope to have identified at least some of the many issues that may be relevant when attempting to employ concepts such as alignment and affiliation in analytically relevant ways. In particular, we hope to have demonstrated that a purely local determination of alignment and/or affiliation may in reality say very little about the degree to which participants in interaction can be said to cooperate, or not. That is, matters such as whether any given turn-at-talk can be identified as being, for instance, either grammatically aligned (i.e. matching the formal design preferences of the turn), aligned with respect to the ongoing activity (i.e. facilitating the activity or sequence) or as being locally affiliative in terms of matching the stance expressed in the prior turn or through displaying empathy with that stance, do not in and by themselves determine the overall (non)cooperativeness of that turn-at-talk (and by implication the speaker producing that turn-at-talk). While the current tendency in CA and other related interactionally oriented studies seems largely to be oriented towards the investigation of large corpora and collections with methodologies adopted from natural sciences and quantitative studies in order to establish taxonomies of interactional order, we thus suggest that the true intricacies of everyday interaction and in particular matters such as affiliation, alignment and – more generally – cooperation are best studied through single-case analyses of larger extended sequences, as only there it is possible to determine how participants in interaction manage to produce unique social situations and to respond to and interact in unique social situations in a methodical manner and over and over again.
Footnotes
Appendix
Acknowledgements
The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction, University of Helsinki, has provided the intellectual environment, working space, and technical equipment for this work.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The first author was funded by the Kone Foundation, the second author by a Marie Curie Fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF, Grant agreement number 628892).