Clare Jackson

‘Why do these people’s opinions matter?’ Positioning known referents as unnameable others

The way we refer to third parties in talk is one means through which relationships between speaker, recipients and referents are made relevant. A range of referring expressions is available and any number of expressions might correctly refer to a referent. One guide to selection is the preference for achieving recognition and the default practice is, where possible, to use a name. This conversation analytic article describes a practice that does not fit the default pattern. In this practice, speakers select a broad social category (typically gendered, e.g. guy, woman, but not always, e.g. people) when a recognitional form could (and perhaps, ought to) have been used. Despite the designed selection of a categorical form, the referent(s) remains recognitional. For example, in one extract, a mother in conversation with her teenage daughter refers to a collective made up of her former husband and his girlfriend as ‘these people’. The daughter has no difficulty working out who ‘these people’ are and recognizes it as a reference to her father and stepmother. I show that this designedly categorical formulation often contributes to hostile action by distancing the referent(s) from parties to the interaction – making the referent(s) unnameable and not connected to the speaker and recipient. The role of demonstrative pronouns – this, that, these – are discussed in relation to constructing social distance between speakers, recipients and referents.

Discourse, Culture, and Extraordinary Experiences: Observations from a Comparative, Qualitative Analysis of Japanese and UK English Accounts of Paranormal Phenomena

This article examines communicative practices in Japanese and UK English accounts of extraordinary experiences. We compare the way in which specific narrative features are handled: description of the actual experience, and the completion of the narrative. We also examine some ways in which the accounts are rhetorically designed to address skeptical alternatives. The perspective is informed by an ethnomethodological focus on communicative competences in description. This comparison identifies differences between Japanese and UK English narratives. This focus on interactional features of the data is contrasted to macro cultural or psychological perspectives on the relationship between national culture and language.

Changing girlhoods – Changing Girl Guiding

This article discusses the changing nature of girlhood over the last century as it is depicted through an empirical study of all editions of Girl Guide handbooks since 1910. The article describes three strands of change, which we describe as ‘stringy’, insofar as they are co-occur together and are difficult to untangle from one another; yet they are also stories of change that are nevertheless visible as strands in and of themselves through the empirical material. We illustrate the importance of incorporating children and childhood into more general theories of social change, in order to better understand how they are intrinsic to the mechanisms of intergenerational change.

The Interactional Bind of “Just [Do X]”

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of just-formulated advisings in ordinary, naturally occurring sequences of unsolicited advice giving when produced in response to troubles-tellings. Drawing on two examples from our broader collection, we demonstrate that such advisings are employed in response to advice resistance and function to minimize proposed courses of future action, attenuating their imposing nature. We show they place an interactional bind upon advice recipients that contributes toward further resistance. This article explicates this bind and its categorial, epistemic, and moral implications. Data are in American and British English.