Galina B. Bolden

Beyond Answering: Repeat-Prefaced Responses in Conversation

The article presents a conversation analytic investigation of one technique for responding to questions in naturally occurring social interactions: repeating the question verbatim in part or as a whole before providing a required response. A close examination of production features of repeat prefacing in Russian demonstrates that it is used by conversationalists to resist agendas and presuppositions generated by questions and other sequence initiating actions. The study shows that some repeat prefaces characterize questions as problematic by contesting or outright rejecting its presuppositions or implications. Depending on how precisely repeat prefaces are articulated, they may also display the speakers difficulty in retrieving requested information. The study extends our understanding of devices conversationalists can deploy to resist, sidestep, or curtail the constraints imposed by questioners’ interactional agendas, thereby providing an insight into how communicative goals are discerned, responded to, and negotiated in social interaction.

“So What's Up?”: Using the Discourse Marker So to Launch Conversational Business

In this article, I use conversation analytic methods to analyze interactional junctures in which transitions to the first conversational topic are accomplished. I examine several ways in which parties in ordinary (and especially telephone) conversations coordinate the launching of first “talkables,” focusing specifically on environments in which such moves are delayed. I observed that many such moves are prefaced with the discourse marker so suggesting that it plays an important role at this interactional juncture. In the article, I demonstrate that the underlying meaning of so as a marker of “emergence from incipiency” serves to characterize the upcoming action as introducing the conversations first intended topic—something that was projected by the very act of initiating the contact and oriented to by participants as having been pending or incipient. In addition to mundane telephone conversations, I briefly examine several institutional encounters to explore how so gets deployed for introducing institutional agendas.

Preference organization of sequence-initiating actions: The case of explicit account solicitations

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages (English and Russian), this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct (predominantly with why-type interrogatives). Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct (Bolden and Robinson, forthcoming). When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation , and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld.

‘Articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of others’ talk

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a previously unstudied conversational action: ‘articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of other people’s talk. Contributing to the extant research on formulations and on interactional functions of discourse markers, the article shows that and-prefaced formulations accomplish a distinct conversational action that has the following features: these formulations are assertions about the addressee’s domain of knowledge that perform a repair operation in the form of a request for confirmation; they articulate a ‘missing’ element of the addressee’s preceding talk (which is, typically, an extended informing turn); what is being formulated is claimably inferable from the prior talk; moreover, such formulations extend the addressee’s course of action on his/her behalf. The article describes compositional and sequential features of and-prefaced formulations and how they shape interactional trajectories of in-progress courses of action.

Pursuing a Response by Repairing an Indexical Reference

Prior conversation analytic research has demonstrated that when, following a sequence-initiating action, a response is relevantly missing (or is forthcoming but is apparently inadequate), speakers may use a range of practices for pursuing a response (or a more adequate response). These practices—such as response prompts, preference reversals, or turn extensions—treat the missing (or inadequate) response as indicative of some problem, and they may either expose or mask the response pursuit and the problem they attempt to remediate. This article extends this prior research by showing that speakers can also use repair technology—specifically, repair of an indexical reference—as a resource for pursuing a response. It demonstrates that speakers can use repair of indexicals, particularly when no uncertainty as to the referent seems possible, in order to pursue a response while obscuring some other possible source of trouble. Initiating repair on an indexical reference in transition space claims that a missing response is due to a problem of understanding or of recognizing the reference, and by repairing it, the speaker makes available another opportunity for a response without exposing recipient disinclination as the possible source of the trouble. Likewise, repairing an indexical reference in the third turn can pursue a more adequate response, while avoiding going on record as doing so, by treating the sequence-initiating turn as the source of the trouble. We show that, by ostensibly dealing with problems of reference, repairs on indexicals manage (covertly) other more interactionally charged issues, such as upcoming disagreement or misalignment between interlocutors.

Across languages and cultures: Brokering problems of understanding in conversational repair

This article examines the interactional construction of language competence in bilingual immigrant communities. The focus is on how participants in social interaction resolve problems of understanding that are demonstrably rooted in their divergent linguistic and cultural expertise. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine mundane video-recorded conversations in Russian-American immigrant families, I describe a previously unanalyzed communicative practice for solving understanding problems: byone participant enacting the role of a language broker in a repair sequence. The article thus contributes to the existing research on the interactional construction of language competence, on the one hand, and on the organization ofrepairanditsrelationshiptosocialepistemics,ontheother.(Languagebrokering, repair, conversation analysis, social epistemics, multiparty conversation, Russian, immigrant families, intercultural communication)*

On the Organization of Repair in Multiperson Conversation: The Case of “Other”-Selection in Other-Initiated Repair Sequences

This article examines a previously undocumented way in which the presence of more than two interlocutors matters for the organization of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977): when the repair initiation is addressed to—and thereby selects as the next speaker—somebody other than the speaker of the trouble-source turn (“other”-selection, for short). The speaker of the trouble-source turn is ordinarily the one who is selected to repair it (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Under what circumstances, then, is “other”-selection used? The analysis shows that, while rare, “other”-selection in other-initiation of repair is a systematically deployed practice. In selecting somebody other than the speaker of the trouble-source turn to provide a repair solution, the repair initiator orients to two broad considerations (sometimes concurrently): progressivity and social epistemics. The article examines how these considerations play out in a variety of contexts and considers implications of “other”-selection for our understanding of the repair organization.

Unpacking ''Self'': Repair and Epistemics in Conversation

Goffman’s work on footing has paved the way to specifying the analytic concepts of speaker and hearer in social interaction. This article empirically examines participants’ moment-by-moment negotiated understandings of speakerhood in the context of conversational repair—sequences of talk dedicated to resolving problems of hearing, speaking, or understanding. I demonstrate that participation in repair sequences reflects interactants’ orientations to socially distributed rights to knowledge, or epistemics. Even though speakers are ordinarily entitled to speak on their own behalf and, thus, to repair their own talk, the application of this right is a contingent, negotiated, and sometimes contested matter. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine a large corpus of video-recorded English, Russian, and bilingual multiparty interactions, I show how asymmetries in participants’ experiences and expertise are drawn upon in the process of repair resolution, suggesting a respecification of the notion of “self” as it pertains to repair.

Grammatical Flexibility as a Resource in Explicating Referents

This article examines one aspect of interplay between grammar and social interaction: how speakers of different languages explicate referents that had been referred to tacitly, i.e., without using an explicit referential expression. The focus is on situations when speakers go on to explicate the referent in the transition space, after bringing the turn constructional unit to a possible completion. Depending on the grammatical affordances of the language, rendering a tacit reference explicit may either expose or mask this operation. Focusing on the latter, we show that the grammars of Russian and Brazilian Portuguese (and, to a lesser extent, English) enable speakers of these languages to explicate referents by extending a possibly complete turn constructional unit with a grammatically fitted increment and, thereby, embed this remedial operation into the progressive construction of the turn without engaging repair machinery. We discuss how tacit referring and flexible word order can enable speakers to carry out this repair-like operation in a covert or embedded fashion, and we examine some interactional functions of this referent-explicating operation.

Speaking ‘out of turn’: Epistemics in action in other-initiated repair:

This article provides an empirical demonstration of the saliency of epistemics to two core conversational organizations, turn-taking and repair. To that end, I examine cases in which a participant of a multiparty conversation intervenes into a repair sequence to respond to a repair initiation addressed to the trouble-source speaker, that is, in violation of the turn-taking rules, without having an epistemically grounded entitlement to do so. I show that such interventions enact a range of corrective actions vis-a-vis the repair initiation, such as contesting and correcting assumptions or understandings conveyed by the repair initiation. In providing these corrections ‘out of turn’, the intervening speakers demonstrate their own attentive recipiency or cultural expertise and, at the same time, expose the repair initiator’s interactional faux pas. The analysis demonstrates the procedural consequentiality of epistemic considerations (such as who knows, should know and has the right to know what) for the interlocutors – and, thus, the necessity to incorporate them into an empirically grounded analysis of their actions.