FW: [Linganth] Repetitious conversations

[Kathryn Woolard]

In this particular case CA ideas about preference structures and adjacency
pairs rather than repetition as such seem to me most relevant. For example,
I'd guess the group wasn't providing the expected second parts to the first
part that the quoted evaluative remark constituted. And was the story
recycled with the same  interactional "point" each time?  See Sacks's
classic analysis of the reframing of a failed joke.

Kit Woolard 




------ Forwarded Message
> From: Robert Lawless <robert.lawless at wichita.edu>
> Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:53:10 -0500
> To: <linganth at cc.rochester.edu>
> Subject: [Linganth] Repetitious conversations
> 
> Are there studies of repetition in informal conversations? Early Saturday
> afternoon I had the occasion to be with a group of five for a couple of
> hours. One of the topics of conversation was the theft of a Boy Scout
> trailer from a church parking lot. The story was told four times, twice by
> two different people. The group of five didn't change during the two hours
> and the four stories were not really versions, since there was no
> controversy about the facts of the story. During the first telling of the
> story another member of the group said, "I read about it. It made me sooo
> mad!" After she had said this twice during the first telling, I kept a
> mental count of how many times she repeated this phrase. Sixteen times. She
> repeated the phrase regularly, four time during each of the four tellings.
> Yet another member of the group told his story about the lack of customer
> service at the local Home Depot. He told this story in more or less the
> same words three times during the two hours. Later in the afternoon in a
> different setting with just the two of us, he repeated the story to me. Any
> comments or insights into this behavior? Robert.
> 

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