The discursive accomplishment of normality\" On 'lingua franca' English and conversation analysis

$Page 1: The discursive accomplishment of normality\" On 'lingua franca' English and conversation analysis$
ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

The discursive accomplishment of normality" On 'lingua franca' English and conversation analysis

Alan Firth*

Department of Languages, Aalborg University, Havrevangen 1, DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark

Abstract

Lingua franca interactions in English - those exclusively involving nonnative speakers - are common, everyday occurrences worldwide, yet have not been studied by conversation analysts. By examining the naturally-occurring, work-related talk of management personnel communicating in 'lingua franca' English, this paper explores a range of issues surrounding the applicability of conversation analytic methodology to lingua franca talk-data. While conversation analysis (CA) does provide a basic methodology through which we are able to describe in detailed ways how such interactions are sequentially and thus socially constructed, consideration of the data type itself allows us to cast new light on some of CA's methods and working assumptions. At the same time, the paper documents some of the various methods through which participants do interactional and discursive work to imbue talk with an orderly and 'normal ' appearance, in the face of extraordinary, deviant, and sometimes 'abnormal' linguistic behaviour.

1. Introduct ion

Conversa t ion Analys i s (hereafter , CA) has emerged as one o f the most powerful and influential me thodo log ies hi therto deve loped to analyse talk and, in a wider sense, social action. In its th i r ty-year deve lopment , beginning with Harvey Sacks ' s first Lectures on Conversation in 1964 (see Sacks, 1992a,b), C A has accumula ted an array o f f indings on the nature and social organiza t ion o f what Scheg lof f (1987) has referred to as its proper object o f s tudy: ' t a lk - in- in te rac t ion ' . t Bui ld ing upon eth- nomethodo log ica l foundat ions , work within C A has demons t ra ted that ordinary, interact ive talk must proper ly be v iewed as a local ly and del ica te ly accompl i shed

* E-mail: [email protected]; Fax: +45 98 13 80 86. Limitations of space obviate an exposition of CA's findings, concepts and working methods. Useful

and detailed overviews can be found in Heritage (1984: ch. 8), Zimmerman (1988) and Psathas (1995). Collections of CA studies include Schenkein (1978), Psathas (1979), Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Button and Lee (1987), Boden and Zimmerman (1991), Drew and Heritage (1992), and ten Have and Psathas (1995).

0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII 0378-2 166(96)00014-8

238 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

a c h i e v e m e n t , and that the ' normal ' and ' rout ine ' appearances o f talk are the result of the participants' ceaseless and contingent application of complex though methodic practices. Utilising transcripts of naturally-occurring talk, conversation analysts have viewed as their major task both the explication o f those methodic practices and the detailed description o f how talk is sequentially structured and interactively managed.

Although practitioners have maintained that casual conversation is the 'basic ' , 'pr imordial ' form, or 'bedrock ' , of all forms of talk (see, e.g., Sacks et al., 1974: 730; Zimmerman, 1 9 8 8 : 4 2 4 425; Drew and Heritage, 1992: 19), the epithet ' talk- in-interaction' informs us that the researchable domain of CA is not restricted to 'casual ' or 'mundane ' conversation. Over the last decade in particular, a good deal of CA-based research has begun to examine a wide range of non-conversational interactions, most o f which are located within institutional or workplace settings and practices (e.g. classrooms, courtrooms, emergency services, doctors ' surgeries, jour- nalistic interviews, and political speeches). 2 Yet there remains a large number of settings, talk-based practices and data types that have not been subjected to conversation analytic scrutiny. Indeed, if we begin to examine the data types analysed in studies o f 'casual ' conversation or institutionally-anchored talk, a picture emerges of an enterprise that has shown a remarkably consistent though restricted interest in the talk of ' normal ' a d u l t s who are members of the s a m e c u l t u r e 3 and who share and use the s a m e na t i ve l a n g u a g e - in the majority of cases the English language. 4.5

As I want to show here, the implications of this restricted focus are important for a number of reasons, though have rarely been addressed within the literature. A common working assumption within CA, for example, is that the analyst is able to make observations on the data transcripts partly on the basis of his or her c o - m e m b e r s h i p

of the participants' linguistic-cultural community. Some of Sacks ' s earliest work was based on the observer-analyst sharing - with the parties observed - access to culturally-based knowledge of such things as ' eve ryday ' scenes and social roles: "we can use that information which we have as members of the same society that these ... people are in" (Sacks [Lecture 14, 1964], 1992a: 116). Co-membership, then, is a resource for both analysts and participants alike. It is on this basis that the analyst 's "intuitively plain observations" (Jefferson and Schenkein, 1978: 170, fn.

2 For a recent review of this work, see the introductory chapter in Drew and Heritage (1992). The col- lected studies in Drew and Heritage (1992) are representative of current institution/work-related CA studies. 3 For the sake of the argument to be developed in this paper. I am at this juncture using the term 'culture' as a commonsense notion that implies a community's shared "system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1971: 41). This is not to deny that such a 'system' is locally enacted and situationally motile. 4 Some conversation analysts might claim that categorizations such as cultural membership are relevant only insofar as they are made 'procedurally relevant' in the talk itself (see, e.g., Schegloff, 1991). However, in light of the remarkable uniformity of data types examined in CA, it appears that - implicitly at least - such categorizations do have relevance for analysts, in their selections of data materials. 5 Of the (relatively few) conversation-analytic studies undertaken on languages other than English, see, e.g., ten Have's (1987) work on the Dutch language, Moerman's (1988) and Bilmes's (1992) studies on Thai. Bergmann (1987) on German, and Lindstr6m on Swedish (1994).

A. Firth / Journal of Pragrnatics 26 (1996) 237-259 239

10) are considered warrantable, the supposition being that, since I as an analyst 'know' or 'belong ' to the participants' linguistic and cultural community, I can war- rantably recognize situationally (ab)normal, (dis)orderly - and hence describable - ways of doing things.

Moreover, the interactants whose talk is examined are presumed to share knowledge of, and equal access to, a common linguistic code, which is itself underpinned by a shared and stable linguistic and interactional competence. Analysts have thus been able to propose the existence of 's tandard' or 'patterned' deployment of conversational phenomena [e.g. so-called 'change-of-state ' tokens (Heritage, 1984) and proverbs (Drew, 1994)], and that parties ' share ' knowledge of conversational practices. Claims have been made that participants orient to 's tandard' silences (of one second) (Jefferson, 1987), or have 'canonical ' ways of opening (Schegloff, 1986) and closing telephone interactions (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), taking and coordi- nating turns at talk (Sacks et al., 1974), doing 'repair work ' (Schegloff et al., 1977), talking about ' t roubles ' (Jefferson, 1988), and more. It is through the social and local accomplishment of these (and other) practices, Michael Moerman (1988) has argued, that people are able to enact, reproduce and confirm their common cultural membership.

It is not the intention of this paper to challenge the veracity of such work, for I am convinced of the integrity of the findings made, and of the inherent soundness of the assumption of a commonality of individuals who for all practical purposes share linguistic and interactional competence. After all, as analysts have shown, such shared competence is procedurally though tacitly demonstrated by the participants themselves in their 'normal ' , ' routine' , 'orderly ' , and ' recognizable ' interactions with one another (on this, see esp. Schegloff and Sacks, 1973: 290). What I want to do here is to enter into the equation a data type that - at least in theory and, at certain moments, in practice - renders problematic an assumption of a common community of language users - professional analysts included - who share a developed and stable linguistic and interactional competence. The data I am referring to is a type of spoken interaction within which participants typically make unidiomatic and non- collocating lexical selections, and where the talk throughout its duration is commonly 'marked ' by dysfluencies, and by syntactic, morphological, and phonological anomalies and infelicities - at least as such aspects are recognized by native-speaker assessments. 6 This is the naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction produced by non-

6 Two important caveats are in order. First, in making these cursory observations I do not wish to be seen to be making evaluative assessments of the data type to be considered here. Indeed, as I attempt to show, although the non-native speaker data evidence various kinds of non-standard and 'marked' usage, a remarkable feature of these interactions is the fact that the participants are routinely able to overcome such apparent linguistic anomalies and accomplish their practical, work-related tasks. Second, I am not implying that all non-native speaker interactions are characterizable in this way. As explained below, the observations made in this paper are restricted to a data corpus of naturally-occurring non-native speaker interactions engaged in within two specific work settings. While acknowledging that some - indeed, many - non-native interactions may be hardly distinguishable from 'ordinary' native speaker interactions in terms of observable linguistic and conversational competence, it is reasonable to regard the linguistic

240 A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

native speakers of (in this case) English. Here, English is used as a 'lingua franca' - a 'contact language ' between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communicat ion. 7

Although foreign-language, or l ingua-franca, interactions are an extremely common, even quotidian, occurrence in manifold settings throughout the world - and particularly English l ingua franca interactions 8 - such interactions have been over-

looked by conversat ion analysts (though see Jordan and Fuller, 1975). In light of this, a number of basic questions require attention. For example: are C A ' s working assumptions (on, e.g., orderliness in talk) and findings (on, e.g., the sequentially- based management of talk) equally as applicable in linguafranca interactions as they are in the analysis of monol ingual talk? And is CA methodology amenable to the

analysis of linguafranca interactions? 9 The argument developed in this paper is that, while CA does provide a basic methodology through which we are able to describe in detailed ways how lingua franca interactions are sequentially and thus socially constructed, consideration of the data type itself allows us to cast new light on C A ' s methods and working assumptions. At the same time, an attempt is made to show that addressing l ingua franca interactions from a conversat ion analytic perspective

will contribute to an improved general understanding of (1) the nature of conversational competence, and (2) the linguistic and interactional resources deployed and required in order to conduct meaningful , orderly and indeed 'o rd inary ' discursive

practices.

and interactional features observable in the current corpus as representative of a fair proportion of comparable naturally-occurring non-native interactions, at least amongst management personnel in the (non-English-speaking) industrialized world. 7 In an earlier paper (Firth, 1990) I proposed a conceptual distinction between English as an intrana- tional "lingua franca' and as an international 'lingua franca'. The former refers to English used as a 'contact language' within national groups whose first languages are mutually incomprehensible (e.g. in India and Nigeria), whilst the latter refers to English used amongst different nationality groups (e.g. the native Danish speaker interacting with a native speaker of Greek, a native speaker of Dutch and a Japanese native speaker). While recognizing the rudimentary character of this dichotomy, and the number of bor- derline cases it invokes, the 'international' understanding of 'lingua franca' is nevertheless represented in a large number of clear-cut cases. 8 Although there are at least 360 million native speakers of English world-wide, Sir Randolph Quirk, writing in The Sunday Times on 17 April, 1994, estimates that on a global basis non-native speakers of English now outnumber native speakers. This tells us very little of non-native competence in nor use of English, however. Certainly English is the world's most studied and geographically widespread language, the implications of which have only relatively recently begun to attract commentators' and researchers' serious attention. Bryson (1990: 177) notes that "there are more people learning English in China than there are people in the United States", and McCrum et al. (1987) claim that nearly half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in English. Dinyon and Greaves (1989: 14) describe English as the "lingua franca sine qua non" in the European Union's headquarters in Brussels. 9 Such questions are not restricted to 'lingua franca' talk, but are likely to be of relevance for a range of (potentially) 'non-standard' linguistic-performance materials, including the talk of aphasics, the men- tally retarded, the senile, and very young children - to name but a few.

A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 241

2. Lingua franca data

The point should be made from the outset that this paper is not addressing all potential ' l ingua franca' interactions, and therefore does not claim to cover the manifold settings, activities and levels of proficiency within which such talk commonly occurs. Rather, the observations and discussions are restricted to a corpus of audio- recorded data from two Danish international trading companies. The discussions here should thus be seen as initiatory and preliminary. The data examined are a col- lection of telephone calls involving Danish export managers and their international clients. In the Danish companies concerned, international communications are invariably conducted in English. 10 Most frequently, such interactions are of the 'lingua franca' type; i.e., they exclusively involve normative speakers.

The telephone calls comprising the present corpus are visibly 'business calls'. That is, through their discourse actions, the participants overridingly display an orientation to the work-related nature of their interactions, and by so doing reflexively accomplish the 'business-like' character of the calls. 11 The 'business ' involves sell- ing and buying commodities (foodstuffs and micro-electronics).

From a conversation analytic perspective, the notion of ' l ingua franca interactions' is an analyst construct, potentially without procedural relevance (i.e. relevance that is demonstrable in the talk itself; see Schegloff (1991)) for parties so cat- egorized. The notion, then, is comparable to such categorizations as, say, 'women ' s interactions' or 'old aged persons' interactions'. And yet, as we shall witness presently, the notion does have some real-world (members ' ) validity, in that parties to lingua franca interactions on occasions do make the ' l ingua franca' status 'procedurally relevant ' for the production and management of talk.

As a conceptual categorization, however, the 'lingua franca' epithet does have some advantages, particularly when contrasted with more ideologically-fused cog- nates such as 'foreigner talk', ' interlanguage talk', or ' learner interaction', t2 For in contrast to these latter-mentioned categorizations, the term ' l ingua franca' attempts to conceptualize the participant simply as a language user whose real-world interactions are deserving of unprejudiced description, rather - as these latter categories - than as a person conceived a priori to be the possessor of incomplete or deficient communicative competence, putatively striving for the ' target ' competence of an idealized 'native speaker' .

~o A study conducted in 1988 for the Danish Council of Trade and Industry (Hesselberg-M011er, 1988) reported that, for Danish companies, English is used in over 80% of all international business contacts and communications. ii This is not to claim that the calls do not contain phases of activity which are 'social' or 'non-work' related. On some occasions during some calls, parties engage in 'casual talk' (see Firth, 1995) on such topics as the weather and vacation plans. However, such topics are typically evanescent, and invariably occur at very early stages of the calls. They are, moreover, made to appear as 'preliminary' to the work- related reason for the call. 12 Such studies include Gass and Varonis (1985), Long (1983), F~erch and Kasper (1983), and Bialystok (1990).


3. Lingua franca talk

What, then, do 'unprejudiced' descriptions of lingua franca interactions reveal? Seen in terms of the participants' orientations to their own concerted activities, the dominant impression is that lingua franca talk is not only meaningful, it is also 'normal' and, indeed, 'ordinary'. The crucial point, though, is that the talk is made 'normal' and 'ordinary' by the participants themselves, in their local discursive practices. That is, the orderly and 'normal' character of the talk is an accomplished and contingent achievement, sustained through locally-managed interactional, interpretive and linguistic 'work'. Such 'work' is fundamentally predicated upon the situated application of a range of conversational mechanisms and resources as these have been explicated and described in numerous studies of monolingual casual conversations. However, preliminary observations suggest that, at times, the mobilization of conversational mechanisms and resources can be done differently in some circum- stances, thereby giving rise to different kinds of 'interactional work' than has been accounted for previously in monolingual studies. Such 'interactional work' has two major aims: first, to pursue, through talk, substantive institutional goals (e.g. to agree upon conditions of economic exchange); second, to furnish the talk with a 'normal' and 'ordinary' appearance in the face of sometimes 'abnormal' and 'extraordinary' linguistic behaviour.

In order to see this, consider, first, the following extract, where H, the Danish seller, has called G, an Indian buyer (transcript conventions are reproduced in an appendix to this paper):

(1) 1 H 2 3 G 4 H 5 6 G 7 H 8 G 9 H

l0 l l H 12 G 13 14 H 15 16 G

fine than(k) you (.) you know now the summer time had- t-come to D'nmark as well (.) hh:uh ((laugh))= =((laughing)) huh hh:eh heh heh heh:.hh so for:: the:- us here in Denmark it's hot (.) it's uh twenty five degree, (.) .hh but for 2L[o__~u it will be-

[ya:h, it would be "['cold (.) I think n___oo, here in this pwu:h forty- forty tw__._QO y_~? (1.0) [[well [[yes (1.o) well I prefer twendy five. (.) it's better to m__ee (0.9) yeah

Even a superficial examination of the linguistic encoding in this extract indexes the talk as 'nonnative'. There are grammatical infelicities (e.g. H's 'now the summer time had come to Denmark', line 1 ; H's 'twenty five degree', line 4; H's ' it 's better to me', line 14), unidiomatic clause constructions (e.g., G's 'here in this forty, forty two', line 8), and prosodic and pronunciation variants that furnish the talk with

A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 243

a 'nonnative' timbre. Also noteworthy is an apparent misunderstanding arising in lines 4-9. Judging from G's utterance at line 8, it appears that H's 'in Denmark it's ... twenty five degree(s) but for you it will be- it would be cold' (lines 4-7) is heard not as a comparative (i.e. 'but that temperature would be cold by your standards') - as it is surely intended - but as an estimation of the current climatic conditions in Saudi Arabia (i.e. 'it must be cold in Saudi Arabia now'). To G, moreover, this is an estimation that is wide of the mark, hence his 'disagreeing' turn-initial no, followed by here in this forty, forty two at line 8.

Now while one could attempt to account for the cause of the misunderstanding as H's opaque formulation (at lines 5 and 7), or G's reduced receptive proficiency arising from his non-native status, the central issue from a conversation analytic perspective is that, since neither party orient to or display awareness of the 'misunderstanding' (see H's subsequent 'yes? ' at line 9, and G's 'yes' at line 12), it is rendered interactionally irrelevant. If H was cognizant of G's apparent misunderstanding, we may reasonably surmise that he 'let it pass', since at this sequential moment, and during this particular activity in the call, the misunderstanding was adjudged to be inconsequential or, as Jordan and Fuller (1975) put it, 'non-fatal'. The same can be said of the grammatical, phraseological, phonological and prosodic infelicities throughout this segment. As this paper shows, participants demonstrate a remarkable ability to systematically and contingently - and on the basis of quintes- sentially local considerations - attend and disattend to a range of anomalies and infelicities in their unfolding interaction.

For conversation analysts, what is analytically important in this regard, then, is the participants' orientations to, and reflexive accomplishment of, interactional order in the unfolding talk. Through the conjoint management of topic, the orderly distribution of turns at talk and the participants' orientations to a basic 'rule' of interaction, namely that 'one party talks at a time', through a demonstrable reliance on the assumption that utterances are sequentially linked, that is, a reliance on and deployment of what Sacks called 'the fundamental ordering principle', through a proclivity to let grammatical and pronunciation (etc.) anomalies and misunderstandings 'pass' where these are adjudged to be transparent and/or interactionally 'non-fatal', what the interactants are doing is both constructing order and letting the appearance of order prevail. Thus the supposition of normality is reflexively underpinned by the 'normal' though contingent deployment of the mechanisms and resources of interactive talk.

3.1. 'Let it pass'

The 'let it pass' concept, emanating from Schutzian phenomenological sociology, is an 'interpretive procedure' (Cicourei, 1973) that hearers adopt when faced with problems in understanding the speaker's utterance. The hearer thus lets the unknown or unclear action, word or utterance 'pass' on the (common-sense) assumption that it will either become clear or redundant as talk progresses. This procedure would appear to be a commonly-deployed resource in lingua franca interactions, though is by no means unique to such interactions. However, despite the


concep t ' s intuitive appeal, it is general ly difficult to handle in conversat ion analytic terms. For it is often the case that we cannot know whether the ' p r o b l e m ' was missed by the hearer (but not by the analyst), or whether it was heard or seen by the hearer and al lowed to pass. The central methodological point, again f rom a CA perspective, is that one focuses analytic attention on the participants' demonst rable orientations and relevancies as these are publicly displayed and cont inuously updated.

In the fol lowing extract, the Dane, H, is talking to B, a Syrian. Here it is possible, on the basis o f displayed orientations, to identify both the ' le t it pass ' procedure in operation, and its interactional consequence:

(2) I B 2 3 4 5H 6 B 7 8 9 H

10 l i B 12 13 14 15B 16H

... so I told him no___! to u: :h send the:: cheese after the- (.) the blowing (.) in the ?customs (0.4) we don't want the order after the cheese is u: :h (.) blowing. I see, yes. so I don't know what we can uh do with the order now. (.) What do Y._Q.U_ think we should uh do with this is all "l'blo:wing Mister Hansen (0.5) I 'm not uh (0.7) blowing uh what uh, what is this u: :h too .~g or what? (0.2) n._.oo the cheese is "['bad Mister Hansen (0.4) it is like (.) fermenting in the customs' cool rooms H ah it's gone off?. yes it 's gone off,l, we: :11 you know you don't have to uh do uh an__~thing because it 's not ... ((turn continues))

In retrospect we can observe that B ' s use of the term blowing (lines 1 and 4) is unknown to H, though initially he lets it ' pass ' (line 5). However , in the ensuing talk, and now building upon a presumed (and displayed) ' c o m m o n ground ' , B asks H a direct question relating to the ' b lowing ' cheese (lines 6-7) . At this stage, H is compelled to display - to make public - his unfamiliari ty with the term. Clarification takes the form of an ' insert ion sequence ' (Sacks, 1992b: 528 [Lecture 1, 1972], Schegloff, 1972), constituted by turns in lines 9-15. H ' s ' answer ' is finally forthcoming in line 16.

Briefly, what this extract shows is two things: first the interactional vulnerability of the ' let it pass ' procedure, and second the fact that participants, regardless of their different cultural membersh ip and/or varying linguistic ability, may act as if they understand one another - even when they in fact do not - unless and until special techniques are deployed to challenge the assumpt ion of mutual understanding. This extract is thus a vivid example of the way parties treat verbal interaction as both the product and the source of mutual understanding (see Taylor, 1992: 214). And, moreover, it is on the taken-for-granted basis o f an assumed mutual understanding that


parties to talk - monolingual or lingua franca - are able to achieve their practical ends.13

3.2. 'Make it normal'

The notion of ' let it pass ' carries an implication o f passivity on the part of the hearer, though it is more accurate to say that the hearer is actively though implicitly engaged in the task o f attempting to make sense of what is being done and said. On many occasions, faced with the other par ty ' s marked lexical selections and unidiomatic phrasings, the hearer behaves in such a way as to divert attention from the linguistically infelicitous form of the other 's talk. This commonly precludes, for example, doing 'other repair ' and 'candidate complet ions ' - actions that potentially make manifest the other par ty ' s encoding-related difficulties. The orientation, which appears to have maxim-like qualities in these data, serves to effectively make the other's 'abnormal' talk appear 'normal'. One way of doing so is by producing 'upshots ' or ' formulat ions ' o f the other 's 'marked ' or opaque usage. Consider Extract 3; B is Syrian, H is Danish, employed by 'Me lko ' dairies:

(3) 1B 2 3 H 4 B 5 6 7 8 9

10 I l H 12B 13 14 15 16H 17B

... SMelko is the reputation in the Syrian market=it's a ve:ry good names (0.4) yes? you have a v:ery good "['name, very good uh reputation in the Syrian market

---).hh an' that's why I don' wa:nt uh there to be:: at the same time it's the TOP (pe) for united products (1.0)

---)THE "]'TOP OF THE WORSTS (0.8) of [course that will co:st]

[an' so that's why ] =I don' want the same thing to be LINKED with United products=saying that Melko is going with United products by the worst qua:lity: (0.4) of course not because uh that wi:ll destroy the brand name yes

Here, in lines 4--7, B says: ' i t ' s the top for United products, the top of the worst ' , referring to one o f H ' s competitors. At lines 12-14, B remarks: 'Melko is going with

~3 Considering the nature of the work being engaged in, and the relationships of the interlocutors in the calls recorded, one can surmise that, as a general rule, the parties are highly motivated to focus on the substantive content component of their interaction and thus to concomitantly minimize and/or overcome potential linguistic and interactional problems associated with the form of the interaction (see also Stalpers, 1993: 1). This general orientation does not preclude, of course, the ceaseless local management and assessment of linguistic problems.


United products by the worst quali ty ' . Rather than drawing attention to the (abnormal) form (e.g. going with and by the worst quality) of B ' s utterances - to the 'surface ' o f discourse encoding - H focuses on the substratum of message content, offering upshots (at lines 11 and 16) which indicate understanding of and agreement with what has been seen to have been said. j4

This orientation can also be seen in Extract (4):

(4) 1B 2 3 4I-I 5 6B 7 8

and u : : :h the problem is the quality after being uh released from the customs two weeks later .hh (0.2) they started with this oroblem (0.7)

--)their::: yes their::: u:h (0.2) their cartons- k- their bricks get u : : :h (.) blowing uh [like the balloons]

[yah that's it ] yeah the bricks g- get blowing and uh they had suffering=they have a very bad reputation (.) very : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ((2.8 sec. sound stretch)) (.) worse name.hh commercial name in the market

At line 7, B produces an extraordinarily long (3-second) sound-stretch on the final syllable of the word very, followed by a micro pause, during which he is quite clearly ' searching ' his mental lexicon for a subsequently appropriate word (adjec- tive) or expression (note, incidentally, that his choice of very ... worse name is lexi- cally marked). However, rather than offering a 'candidate complet ion ' of the other 's turn at talk (and one may deduce that a completion would have been at least feasible here), H, it appears, resists doing so. Such activity typifies the corpus as a whole, where there are strikingly few 'candidate complet ions ' of others ' talk in components o f turns where completions would appear to be viable and legitimately 'guessable ' .

Extract (4) is also noteworthy in another regard, since it displays an additional resource which parties to lingua franca talk routinely exploit, and which in many ways shows how the talk may evince differences from monolingual interactions. This is the practice of incorporating - into one ' s own turn - marked lexical and grammatical resources furnished by the other party. Now while the phenomenon of incorporating co-participants ' expressions, grammatical constructions and wordings directly into one ' s own turn has been described in monolingual talk (see, e.g., Good- win and Goodwin, 1986), the interesting and perhaps previously unobserved feature of its deployment here is the incorporation of unidiomatic, or 'marked ' , usage into one ' s own turn.J3 In this extract (4), which occurred shortly after the talk reproduced in extract (2), H now uses the previously unfamiliar term 'b lowing ' in his turn,

t4 We must allow for the possibility that the recipient (H) was not cognizant of the linguistic abnormalities in the other's talk. This proviso does not invalidate the point being made, however, since in the corpus as a whole there are very few instances where marked (often almost opaque) usage is followed by other-repair. This issue clearly demands further considered attention. 15 Jefferson (1987), for example, found the opposite phenomenon in her study of mono-lingual conversational talk, that being the activity of rephrasing or reformulating the other party's errant usage in one's own turn in such a way that the rephrasings effectively 'corrected' the deviant form. Jefferson referred to this phenomenon as 'embedded repair'.


though its grammatical construction (the 'get ' + 'blowing' form, as in: 'their bricks get blowing', line 4) is marked. In next turn, B reproduces both the 'blowing' term and the marked grammatical construction (line 6). As well as demonstrating close monitoring of the co-participant 's talk, and an ability to re-use the linguistic resources provided in the other party 's turn, the extract also demonstrates that participants can learn and use known (and also nonstandard) resources as they become known-in-common during the talk itself.

A related phenomenon can be observed in Extract (5):

(5) 1B 2 3 4 H 5 6 B 7 8 9 H

10B 11 12H

okay I will explain to you=actually: (.) .hh u: :h there is (.) %a very very very bad impression regarding the five hundred grams the bricks in the market% I- I c'n understand that uh if there: have been so many: (.) bad uh:::::: ((sound stretch 0.5 secs.)) bricks in the market= =right- yes .hh a:nd that's why uh the woolsale are refusing to buy actually (.) the bricks (0.3) yes a:nd at the same time they have uh goods 1"everyday returned to the shops$ (0.5) yes I: see

In line 6, B ' s pronunciation of what must presumably be intended as wholesale is actually encoded as woolsale. (B is a cheese wholesaler and is talking about wholesalers ' problems with 'br icks ' [500 gram packagings] in the market). Judg- ing by H ' s response at line 9, he lets the deviant pronunciation pass, presumably because the sense of the utterance is contextually recoverable. Once again, this is a case of utterance meaning consisting of significantly more than its constituent (and what may be mispronounced and syntactically marked) parts. Again this is a clear example of participants ' remarkable ability and willingness to tolerate anomalous usage and marked linguistic behaviour, even in the face of what appears - to this analyst-observer at least - to be usage that is at times acutely opaque. This in turn inevitably raises the important question - a question that can only be touched on in this paper - of what kind of, and how much, anomalous and marked usage can be tolerated by participants before intersubjective meaning is rendered impractical.

With its focus on the fine detail of talk as retained in transcript form, CA methodology can awaken us to and can provide a set of resources for describing the local practices and contingent methods through which participants accomplish both instru- mental goals and intersubjective meaning. For activities and understandings are of necessity ineluctably achieved on a sequential, turn-by-turn basis. By attending to the ways in which participants make public their understandings, and thus conjointly construct coherent activities, we can observe what are for them and at that particular sequential moment features of the talk that are 'opaque ' , ' transparent ' , or otherwise.


3.3. lnteractional robustness

The observations made above permit us now to venture that, in some contexts and during some specific language-based activities, talk is inherently more ' robust ' and better able to withstand anomalous and deviant linguistic behaviour than in other contexts and/or activities. This is an empirical matter, and CA appears to be well placed to allow such investigations. But CA cannot tell us carte blanche which linguistic and/or interactional resources are essential, necessary, or optional in order to sustain meaningful conversational involvement. CA was never developed for such a task. Rather, CA provides a methodology that allows us to capture the way members make situated assessments as to the ' robustness ' of their activities, and the way resources are deployed ' in flight ' , so to speak.

The following extract captures, with exceptional clarity I think, a talk-based activity that is less ' robust ' in terms of its capacity to allow for linguistic and interactional anomalies to be ' i roned out ' implicitly, as we have noted in the cases above. Here M, an Arabic native speaker, asks J, a Dane, to spell his (J 's) name. What is almost excruciatingly clear throughout the subsequent turns is that such an activity - spelling names - is inherently ' f ragile ' , that fragility being perhaps brought more prominently to the fore when the name (or words o f any kind, for that matter) being spelled is unfamiliar to the hearer. This element of fragility is crucially related to the need - if indeed it arises - for an explicit and specific display, on the recipient 's part, of understanding following each and every turn. 16 Thus, for an exchange of approximately ten turns, turn-size is reduced to one or two words (or syllables) per turn, as J first says a letter, fol lowed by M's repetition of the letter-as-heard, fol lowed by J ' s confirmation of the correctness or, as the case may be, ' repair ' , o f M ' s turn. While the sequential organization of talk furnishes the parties with a critical resource for the accomplishment and display of mutual understanding, the resources are in this case made to bear a heavier interactional load than is ordinarily the case:

(6) 1 M allright (.) allright, so uh can I have uh (.) your name so he can call you 2 (0.2) 3 J .hh okay uhw (.) our: company: name is mel ko dairies,[, 4 M that I know very well 5 J an uh my name is e__fisben je__n_nsen ((as in 'yensen')) 6 (0.2) 7 M i:s what? 8 J e_.fisbenje_._n_nsen: 9 M can you spell it?

~6 Quite clearly it is not invariably the case that 'spelling names" demands a letter-by-letter turn construction and turn exchange, as is required in the extract ((6)) examined here. And yet, as this case proves, such an activity provides what I think is compelling evidence that some activities are, as a result of the interactional and substantive demands they impose on the participants, inherently less 'interactionally robust' than others.


10 J jay ee em, es__fis ee [yem ((j. e. m. s. e. m.)) 11 M [/3/ay? 12 J jay ee=((j, e.)) 13 M =/3el /uh/3i : / for/3/aguar? 14 (0.5) 15 J eefor : : : ~'e_gyptor 16 (.) 17 M ee for egypt 18 J yes 19 (.) 20 M ee ((e)) 21 J emm ((m)) 22 M emm ((m)) 23 (0.4) 24 J sorry, enn ((n)) 25 M en[n? ] ((n)) 26 J [uh ] yes 27 (0.2) 28 J ' n ' es_~s ((s)) 29 M yah 30 (0.4) 31 J l"ee ((?a/e?)) 32 M yah 33 J enn ((n)) 34 M emm ((m)) 35 (0.4) 36 J no sorry, en__.n (.) like uh l"n.aation or 37 M nations (.) so,l, Tee enn (.) essay ((a)) en.___n_n$ ((e.n.s.a.n.)) 38 (0.6) 39 J uh "['jay ee enn (.) ess ee enn$ ((j.e.n.s.e.n.)) 40 (0.2) 41 M yeah 42 (1.8) 43 M "['/3el/ee enn, ess ee enn? 44 J ~ that's correct 45 (0.2) 46 M all: :right,],

J tells M his full name at line 5. Upon being asked to 'spel l it ' (line 9), J (line 10) actually elects to spell his last name, and this he does in its entirety within one-and- the-same turn as /dsel/, /i:/, /em/, /es/, /i:/, /em/. The fact that J has pronounced

- in line 5 - his name as he would in Danish (where initial-position ' j ' is pronounced / j / ( a s i n / j e s / ( ' y e s ' ) rather than the Engl i sh /dsef f ) may be the cause of M ' s apparent desire to have the correctness of his hearing of the first letter conf i rmed by his interlocutor. (Note M ' s / s e l / , produced with rising intonation, line 11.) By this stage, we may observe that both participants pronounce English letters in non-standard (or even deviant) ways; J pronounces n a s / s m / a n d M pronounces j as/Sel/ . By line 12, however , the non-standard usages are not oriented to, though they are visible in the


audio-recording (and retained in the transcript): M does not orient to J ' s mispronounced n and J has not oriented to M ' s marked j. Fol lowing J ' s pronunciat ion of each letter o f the name ' Jensen ' , turn-change occurs, whereupon M either repeats the letter-as-heard or utters ' y e s ' (or a token of the type, e.g. ' yah ' , line 32). M ' s hearing projects J ' s confirmation of its correctness or incorrectness in the subsequent turn.

By this act iv i ty ' s very nature, perceived problems in understanding must be dealt with immediately, rather than being al lowed to 'pass ' . That is, it is necessary, here and now, for M not only to record his co-par t ic ipant ' s (J ' s) name, but also to record (spell) it correctly. As witnessed through his actions, J acknowledges the necessity. Thus, for example, at lines 24 and 36, J ' repairs ' a perceived problem displayed in his inter iocutor 's immediately preceding turn.

In such an activity, then, the resource of providing an 'upsho t ' of the preceding turn (as an implicit display of understanding), observed in extract (3) (above), is non-viable. Here, during the ' spel l ing ' activity, the need arises for the participants to accomplish and to make explicit their substantive understandings on a turn-by-turn basis.

In the fol lowing extract (6), both participants make the assessment not to ' let pass ' potentially problematic features of talk in the hope that they will subsequently be rendered irrelevant or transparent. The issue here is whether or not commodi t ies are being sold at f i xed weights. In this case it is not so much the activity itself (e.g. spelling what is assumed to be - for the hearer - an unfamiliar name) that reveals the lack of robustness - the fragility - of the talk; rather it is a need to clarify, at the next turn ' transit ion relevance place ' , a specific detail in the other 's talk. Such an assessment results in the recipient doing discursive ' wo rk ' in order to explicate mutual understanding:

(6) 1 H --~ yes .hh eh uh the quotation you have received, is that with fixed weight 2 (0.4) 3 because uh: we can g_¢2 it with ah: (.) eh:¢uh:: different weights 4 on (.) each unit=but an averayge around four hundred 5 'n ' fifty=but (.) they can be from four hundred to five 6 +hundred gra: m.,[, 7 (0.7) 8 but w__ee have decided to= 9 G ---) =NO +no. one uh l"fi___xx uh: this

10 four 'undred fifty ,[,grah [m. 11 H --~ [it's a fixed uh 12 (0.5) 13 G --) f[ixed] 14 H [(*) 15 G yes 16 H yes °ah uh ° 17 G --~ four hundred fifty gram fixed

A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 251

In order to examine and discuss briefly the CA notions of orderliness and participants orientations in talk I should like to undertake two cursory analyses of this extract. The first analysis takes what we may submit to be the conventional CA position - as outlined, for example, by Heritage (1984: 241) - that "no ... detail can be dismissed a priori as disorderly [or] accidental", and encapsulated in Sacks 's obser- vation that "we may ... take it that there is order at all points" (1984: 22). The second analysis allows for the possibili ty that some order of detail may be accounted for as a result of an a priori consideration of participants reduced linguistic (i.e. foreign language) competence.

Analysis 1: The 'conventional ' posit ion On line 1, H asks G whether a quotation received from a competing producer is

for ' f ixed weight ' cheese. As a general rule in this context, inquiring into the details contained in a competi tor 's offer is a delicate matter. Note, then, that the question has been formulated in such a way as to reveal the delicacy of the matter being inquired about. This is displayed in the eh and uh in turn-initial position, as well as in the 'account ' for the question; the account begins at line 3. Research in CA has shown that delay markers - such as 'uh ' and 'eh ' - and 'accounts ' are indicators of 'delicacy' in talk (see, e.g., Heritage, 1988). The account for the question is occasioned by G ' s lack of response at line 2. In the account H explains that his company can supply multiple-weight cheese (which is normally regarded as more advanta- geous and saleable than fixed weight). At the turn transition relevance place at line 6, G does not take the floor, although the 0.7 second 'gap ' at line 7 suggests that he is being given the opportunity to do so. Consequently, H 'self-selects' (Sacks et al., 1974) and continues, and is apparently in the process of disclosing what his company have 'decided' . It is at this moment, within H ' s turn, that G interjects with no no, one uh f i x (line 9). It now appears that G, on seeing that H is constructing a case on the assumption that the quotation received is for multiple-weight cheese (i.e. not fixed weights), now sees the necessity to point out that the contrary is in fact the case. In line 11 H seeks confirmation of this. ~7 G ' s confirmation is provided in line 13.

Analysis 2: The 'foreign language' posit ion H, seeing that no answer to his question is forthcoming, continues his turn at talk

on line 3 by accounting for his reasons for asking the question. This allows him to emphasize the fact that his company can supply multiple-weight cheese, which is a possible advantage over a competi tor 's quotation. In so doing, H orients to the possibility that G has not adequately understood the question. This he does firstly by revealing his reasons for asking the question, and secondly by carefully stressing the

17 Note, first, G's equivocal juxtaposition of no, no andfix (line 9). H's question at line 1 projects yes confirming the quotation is for fixed weights, no for multiple weights. Yet here G has juxtaposed no and fix. Observe also G's usage; whereas H has used the adjectival -ed ending (fixed), G has not (fix). G responds by confirming, though this time reproduces H's (standard) -ed (fixed) formulation (line 13). This form is repeated in line 17. This is an instance of what Jefferson (1987) has described as 'embedded repair'.


words different weights (line 3); the theme of 'different weights' is repeated in the formulation f rom four hundred to f ive hundred grams (lines 5-6). With the question's answerability enhanced, G's answer is once again relevant at line 7. The 0.7 second 'gap', however, is again treated as being indicative of G's failure to understand the question, as evidenced by H's new turn at line 8, which shifts the topic from weights of cheese to decisions made by his company. Now, seeing that the topic is being changed, and needing to address the question which wasn't adequately understood, G responds to it at line 9, interrupting H and thus pre-empting a new topic. G's formulation of 'fixed' - which is morphologically marked as f ix - and the subsequently 'self repaired' standard grammatical formulation (fixed, line 13), suggests unfamiliarity with the word, and hints at the cause of the problem in understanding.

These cursory analyses are provided for illustrative purposes only, for they attempt to raise an issue that is encompassing, and I think important. While one of CA's claimed 'fundamental assumptions' - namely that no detail can be dismissed a priori as disorderly (cf. Heritage, 1984; Sacks's 'order at all points') - is a powerful and fruitful analytic position, it is nevertheless predicated on an assumption that participants are linguistically and conversationally competent, that the competence is shared, fully developed, and stable. Thus features of talk that have been dismissed (often by linguists; see Chomsky, 1964) as disorderly and inconsequential - e.g., laughter tokens (see, e.g., Jefferson, 1987), turn restarts (see, e.g., Schegloff, 1987), uhs and ahs, and even silence (e.g. Levinson, 1983) - have been shown by conversation analysts to be ordered, systematically placed, and both produced and responded to with awesome precision. In the conversational data analysed in CA, the assumption has been surely warranted, for the participants themselves operate with a 'default' assumption that competencies are fully developed, shared, and stable.

Yet as I hope to have at least suggested in the two juxtaposed analyses above, the assumption is illustrative of a particular analytic 'mind set' that informs the way conversation analysts approach data, including what participants are seen to be 'orienting to' in their talk (on this, cf. Beach, 1990), and also, ultimately, what is seen as viable and researchable topics. When we enter into the analytic equation the possibility that (some of) the participants have neither fully developed nor stable nor shared competence and, more importantly, that they themselves demonstrate cog- nizance of such a state of affairs, it would appear that analyses (of participants' actions in the transcript) will be affected accordingly. Thus, for example, assigning interactional significance to, say, restarts, 'gaps' and filled pauses is rendered potentially more problematic. Because linguistic competencies vary and are unstable, a greater array of variables appear to be operative; this in turn has the potential to pose an additional set of problems for the analyst.

As I have tried to show, CA's resolution of such issues - which is to focus on what the participants render interactionally significant - is also less straightforward and transparent than one might initially suspect. Hence, as demonstrated above, with restricted and/or unstable competence entered into the analytic equation, analyses may be opened to considerations (including participants' orientations) that analysts might otherwise overlook.


An additional implication of the data type considered here relates to CA's research practices. Two prominent, even dominant, practices are (1) the discovery and explication of what might conveniently be termed conversational 'objects', and (2) a focus on activities undertaken and accomplished through action-sequences. 'Objects' studied have included 'restarts', 'recycles', particles such as 'oh', individ- ual words such as 'and' and 'no', proverbs, and laughter. These 'objects' are examined for their distribution in talk, how they are occasioned in talk, what 'trajectories' or consequences follow upon their use, and their general interactional characteristics. Most typically, such objects are examined across a (relatively large) corpus of transcribed data. Studies of this nature have been based almost exclusively on recordings of 'ordinary', casual, adult, monolingual conversation.

The focus on activities has dominated CA-based studies of work tasks and talk in institutional settings, though is not restricted to such studies. Activities explicated include how telephone calls are opened and closed, how members of the public ask for and receive emergency assistance, how witnesses are cross-examined in court, how plea-bargaining is undertaken, and how clinicians impart diagnostic news to patients. On work of this nature, Drew and Heritage (1992: 17) observe that "CA begins from a consideration of the interactional accomplishment of particular social activities" (original emphasis).

It would seem to be reasonable to propose that 'lingua franca' materials - particularly the kind of materials examined in this paper - are more amenable to this second research practice in CA, one of the reasons being that, when using lingua franca materials, as an analyst one cannot so unproblematically assume (or, moreover, witness) the same degree of consistency, systematicity and stability in the use of conversational 'objects' as one can when examining monolingual corpora. What one can focus upon, however, and in so doing retain the analytic rigour and detailed explication that is the hallmark of CA, is the way in which people go about the task of struc- turing and accomplishing their social and practical goals. For it bears repeating that such goals are of necessity achieved locally, on a turn-by-turn basis, using resources that are transparent and publicly available for inspection. And the activities engaged in are, moreover, made recognizable, and thus rendered 'orderly' and 'normal', by the participants. Describing the sequential nature of such achievements is the legitimate goal of conversation analysis, and is equally as challenging and legitimate regardless of whether one analyses lingua franca materials or other types.

3.4. Lingua franca status

In lingua franca interactions, participants have different ways of dealing with their status as nonnative speakers, and with what may be perceived as linguistic (foreign- language) incompetence. As I have shown, most often participants 'do work' to divert attention from the 'surface' features of talk, and are differentially able to disattend to encoding difficulties and linguistic infelicities. On some occasions, though, the participants' (perceived) lack of competence is made relevant in the talk, though this can be achieved in different ways. Consider two instances. First Extract (7):


(7) 1 L ((Hungarian: name of company)) 2 (0.4) 3 H yes he'l'llo: this is Hanne from "l'CellPhone 4 (0.2) 5 L oh$ '['hello [how are you? ] 6 H [he: $11o::] 7 (0.2) 8 H 1"fineS thank you an you::$ 9 L .hh oh fine thank Syou

10 H how are sales going in SBudapest I I (0.3) 12 L oh (.) "['sorry'l" 13 (0.2) 14 H how are sales going in SBudapest= 15 L =o:h I think now its- its a little bit "['middle h(h)h, hh. middle power hu(h) 16 hu(h)h [h(h)u(h) 17 H [(h)o:k(h)a(h)y: :$ 18 L it's not- it's not so "]'ni::ce 19 (0.2) 20 L .hh= 21 H =so [why's that 22 L [but it 's going hh. h(h)hu(h) 23 H okay:

In line 14, H asks L, a Hungarian, how are sales going in Budapest?. L ' s response - i t 's a little bit middle, middle p o w e r (line 15) is fol lowed first by L ' s and m o m e n - tarily later H ' s laughter. What does the laughter tell us about the part icipants ' orientations? I would venture that this displays mutual orientation to L ' s marked usage - a little bit middle ... power . Moreover , by laughing at his own marked usage (and note that L laughs first), L is not only displaying an awareness that the usage is somehow marked, he is also displaying an orientation to the 'non-fa ta l ' , even humor- ous, nature of the anomalous usage, and inviting H to do likewise.

Rather than dealing with usage problems or abnormali t ies in this implicit manner , occasionally participants make their non-native status, and lack of competence, explici t in the talk. Consider Extract (8):

(8) (Gramkow Andersen, 1993: 99) l M we're going to send a: mm how do you say in English I don' know 2 [I (0.3) li ]ke eh.hh 3 P [in Espanol ] 4 M recibo negociable 5 P sisi 6 M ehm draft

Here M, in remarking ' how do you say it in English' is making both his nonnative status and a (perceived) lack of competence explicit. Whereas it is not uncommon in monolingual interactions for participants to produce utterances such as its


whatchamacallit, or that's a, uhm, now what's the name of it?, it would be highly unlikely for native speakers of English to ask how do you say it in English? Inter- estingly enough, in response to M's remark, P - the coparticipant - code switches to M's first language (Spanish). I shall not dwell on this feature here, suffice to say that there are remarkably few instances of code-switching in my data corpus. This may be related to the fact that the first languages of the interactants in my corpus are languages that the parties are unlikely to have any knowledge of (the first languages are Danish on the one hand and Arabic, Japanese and Urdu on the other). In European contexts, where participants might reasonably be expected to have some (albeit scant) knowledge of other European languages, the case may be that a first language is more commonly invoked into the interaction as a resource when required. This clearly requires empirical investigation.

4. Conclusions

In a world where international travel and cross-national communications are everyday occurrences, the English language is overridingly the modus operandi for communicators. In a great number of instances English is used as a linguafranca, in which case none of the interactants involved has the language as their mother tongue. It is somewhat surprising, then, that 'lingua franca' interactions have not been investigated or described by conversation analysts. In fact, CA has demonstrated a remarkable uniformity of data type selected for analysis, overridingly restricting its focus to the interactions of monolingual adults. This paper has been a preliminary exploration of the methodological implications of this restricted focus.

The nature of the lingua franca data suggests that important questions require attention. Such questions pertain especially to the assumptions conversation analysts operate with while undertaking analyses of recorded talk-data. The working, methodological assumption of 'order at all points', for example, based as it is on an observed stable community of language users, has enabled analysts to explicate and document community-wide ways of doing things with words, utterances, pauses, reformulations, turn overlaps, laughter, and more. Studies have shown that phenomena that may ostensibly appear as incidental aberrations of encoding and general speech dysfluencies can be delicately so-designed and/or occasioned in systematic ways.

Yet such an assumption of order emanating from stable and developed communicative competence - so profitable in monolingual talk-data - appears to be less secure when one is confronted with talk produced by people with less than stable, or native-speaker-equivalent, competence. The full theoretical and methodological implications of this remain to be investigated more fully than has been possible here, although such investigations would, we may presume, seek to investigate the uni- versality of such notions as the '(dis)preferred' construction of turns, and the func- tions of 'accounts', laughter, silence and hesitation phenomena, reformulations, and 'repair'. It would appear reasonable to conclude - on the basis of the empirical materials examined here at least - that certain conversation analytic procedures, specifi-


cally those which seek to detail the linguistic and interactional characteristics of conversational 'objects', are rendered inherently more problematic when the observer- analyst is confronted with lingua franca data comparable with the type examined in this paper. While this is so, it was also argued that other analytic procedures - those that attempt, first and foremost, to document the way activities are accomplished through lingua franca talk - are predicated on firmer methodological assumptions.

This preliminary study of 'lingua franca' talk in English has also argued that, although the lingua franca interactions evince linguistic infelicities and abnormalities, the parties nevertheless do interactional work to imbue talk with orderly and 'normal' characteristics. The bulk of this discursive, interactional 'work' deploys the basic mechanisms of conversation, notably those of turn-taking, sequential relations, and topic management. Some resources - such as 'other-repair' and 'other completions' - appear to be less prevalent in the data examined here, and it was suggested that a reason for this was that such devices have the potential for focusing attention on the form of the other's talk - a practice these interactants appear averse to engage in. Although interactants represent diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, data analyses show that parties to talk overridingly adopt the ('default ') position that their talk is understandable and 'normal' - even in the face of misunderstandings and abnormalities. However, it was also shown that some talk-based activities and/or topics may be less 'interactionally robust' than others, in which case the 'default position' is overridden, as participants are compelled to focus attention explicitly on each other's discourse encoding and decoding.

Finally, the data-type examined here is vivid and salutary testimony to the remarkable flexibility and robustness of natural language, and offers compelling evidence of people's often extraordinary ability to make sense in situ, as part and parcel of the local demands of talking to one another. It may be hoped that some of the observations made in this paper open the way for new insights into the nature of conversational competence - its 'vulnerability' or 'robustness' included. CA seems well placed to investigate the locally and contingently accomplished character of that competence.

Appendix

Transcript notation

The audio-recorded materials in this paper are transcribed according to the following notations. The notations are a set of symbols designed to capture the interactional qualities of speech delivered in real-time.

Symbol (1.5) (3 (**)

(())

Represents Inter- and mid-turn silences, timed in 10th's of seconds. Micro-pauses of less than 0.2 seconds. Unrecoverable speech; the number of asterisks represent the number of unrecov- ered syllables uttered. Double brackets contain relevant contextual information.


a: :nd

::hh hh:: very ALL

ALL

°yes °

[[well [[yes

[right ] [huh mm]

9 $$

%..%

Colons represent lengthened vowel sounds; the number of colons show the relative stretch of sound. Colons preceding h 's show audible inhalations. Colons following h's show audible exhalations. Underlined letters indicate emphasis. Capitalised letters indicate that the utterance/word is enunciated louder than surrounding speech. Underlined, capitalised utterance/word shows emphatic stress, enunciated louder than surrounding speech. Degree signs encapsulate talk that is quieter than surrounding talk. A single dash indicates an abrupt cut-off in the flow of speech. Equals signs show latched speech, where the turn or utterance is followed without a perceptible pause by the next turn or utterance.

Utterances starting simultaneously are linked together with double left-hand (square) brackets.

Overlapping utterances are marked by single (square) brackets; the left-hand bracket shows where the overlap began; the right-hand bracket shows where the overlapped speech is terminated. A period indicates falling tone. A comma denotes tone group boundary. A question mark indicates rising intonation. Marked rising and falling shifts in intonation are indicated by upward and down- ward pointing arrows. Talk encapsulated between percentage signs is produced at a markedly slower tempo, relative to preceding and subsequent talk.

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Documents

The discursive accomplishment of normality\" On 'lingua franca' English and conversation analysis