30.2502, Review: English; Japanese; Korean; Sociolinguistics: Robinson (2016)

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Subject: 30.2502, Review: English; Japanese; Korean; Sociolinguistics: Robinson (2016)

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Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 16:56:13
From: Marine Riou [marine.riou at univ-lyon2.fr]
Subject: Accountability in Social Interaction

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4477.html

EDITOR: Jeffrey D. Robinson
TITLE: Accountability in Social Interaction
SERIES TITLE: Foundations of Human Interaction
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Marine Riou, Université Lyon 2

SUMMARY

In Ch. 1, “Accountability in Social Interaction”, Jeffrey D. Robinson provides
dense theoretical background on accountability in social interaction, tracing
the notion back to the very beginnings of Conversation Analysis. Robinson
provides a rich definition of accountability and details the different
meanings and shapes it can take, showing that “accountability and accounting
are integral parts of the reputation economy of everyday life in social
interaction” (p.34). He details how participants “form and ascribe actions
(i.e. recognize and understand) possible actions” (p.10) as well as how
participants have “omnirelevant, moral responsibility or adhering to relevance
rules during the formation and ascription of action, and how people manage, or
account for, accountable conduct, or that which breaches relevance rules”
(p.33). In this chapter, Robinson also defines accounts and argues for a
preference for self-accounting.

In Ch. 2, “On Failure to Understand What the Other is Saying: Accountability,
Incongruity, and Miscommunication”, Paul Drew and Claire Penn offer the case
study of one sequence of atypical interaction in which a person with aphasia
(Jess) and her speech therapist (Rose) fail to understand each other. Jess
tells something about her younger days to Rose. This attempted telling is
presented as humorous by Jess, but Rose does not understand the content and
the point of what Jess is trying to tell her. The authors analyze how this
instance of a major communication breakdown develops in the conversation. They
analyze the features of Jess’ telling which render meaning obscure, such as
the difficulties that Jess experiences with reference to persons and self, as
well as the ways in which Rose fails to understand what Jess is saying and the
point of the story (the “tellable”, p.59). The authors show that
“understanding is something of a two-way street, in which the accountability
of talk is not solely the speaker’s responsibility” (p.52).

In Ch. 3, “Defending solidarity. Self-Repair on Behalf of
Other-Attentiveness”, Douglas W. Maynard analyzes approximately 200 instances
of utterances prefaced with I mean (I-mean-prefaced utterances, IMPUs).
Certain social actions, such as praise, invitations and offers to help, are
typically preferred actions because they are prosocial and enhance solidarity.
However, they can become inapposite under certain circumstances. For example,
an invitation to go shopping together can be too self-attentive, rather than
other-attentive, when one’s co-participant has just stated that walking is
painful for her because of a toe injury (pp. 79-83). When participants realize
that the action they have initiated is inapposite and self-attentive, they can
revise it with an IMPU. In the example mentioned above, the speaker revised
her invitation to go shopping together with a turn offering to get something
for her injured friend instead (“I mean er can I get you something?” p.82).
Maynard analyses how IMPUs can be used to pre-empt the problematic
self-attentive character of a previous action, and defend it by revising it in
a more other-attentive way. 

In Ch. 4, “Delicate Matters: Embedded Self-Correction as a Method for
Adjusting Possibly Available Inapposite Hearings”, Jenny Mandelbaum focuses on
embedded self-correction as a strategy to revise an inapposite action without
making it the overt main business of talk, in the form of an increment. Upon
realization that something they have said may be hearable as “rude, offensive,
or in some other way threatening to social solidarity” (p.126), participants
may pre-emptively produce an increment correcting the problematic hearing. In
one of the extracts shown, the following self-correction by participant Jim is
analyzed: “I jus’ got u:p. off the cou:ch.” (p.127). The increment “off the
couch” corrects the potential understanding that Jim was lying in bed and/or
just woke up, which could give a negative impression of him as being lazy.
Mandelbaum argues that embedded self-correction allows participants to
“tacitly remov[e] an inapposite hearing […] without making its producer
accountable for it” (p.134). She argues that such a strategy shows that
correction should be kept analytically distinct from repair.

In Ch. 5, “Political Positioning Sequences: The Nexus of Politicians, Issue
Positions, and the Sociopolitical Landscape”, Steven E. Clayman analyzes
positioning questions in the context of broadcast news interviews: a practice
by which journalists can hold politicians accountable for their views and
“geared to the task of locating where the politician stands on a salient
political issue” (p.145). One of the examples analyzed comes from an interview
held before the 2008 presidential election in the United States, and in which
Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmanm was asked the following question:
“So you believe that Barack Obama may have anti-American views” (p.166).
Clayman analyses how positioning questions sequences are used by journalists
and politicians to position the latter on the political landscape,
conceptualized as a series of concentric circles whose centre represents
consensus and the outer circle corresponds to deviant opinions and beliefs.
Politicians can endorse the viewpoint expressed by the positioning or resist
it. The fact that journalists pursue such sequences is a way to make
politicians accountable by explicitly positioning themselves with respect to a
specific viewpoint.

In Ch. 6, “Epistemic Asymmetry and Accountability in Service Interaction”,
Seung-Hee Lee focuses on a corpus of service calls in Korean, analyzed with
respect to the participants’ institutional roles and identities. Lee analyzes
telephone calls between customers and an airline service, with a focus on 16
instances in which the usual epistemic asymmetry found in service interactions
is tilted: customers have pre-existing knowledge on a matter, and such
knowledge is incongruent which what agents know and say. Lee shows that
customers deploy the following strategy so as not to undermine agents’
epistemic authority: they ask a question that can be translated in English as
a yes-no question, not disclosing their own knowledge at first. This gives
them the opportunity to check that there is indeed a knowledge incongruity.
Customers can then disclose their knowledge to resolve the knowledge
incongruity, for example by referring to the third party from whom they
acquired that knowledge. Lee shows how, through such a conduct, “customers
display caution and avoid being held accountable for correctness of their
knowledge” (p.194), all the while displaying “an orientation to the
accountable, institutionalized epistemic asymmetry, deferring to the agent’s
epistemic authority on the matter” (p.182).

In Ch. 7, “Subjective Assessments: Managing Territories of Experience in
Conversation”, Kaoru Hayano compares subjective assessments (“I love tha:t”
p.208) to objective assessments (“it was s:::so: goo:d”p.208) in Japanese
interaction. The author draws from a collection of 171 tokens and argues that
objective assessments are more basic. By contrast, subjective assessments are
used to manage specific issues of personal knowledge and experience with the
referent being assessed. The data suggests that subjective assessment are
employed to claim that an opinion was formed independently (epistemic
independence), which can be used when participants hold a diverging opinion.

Ch. 8, “Increments”, is the edited version of previously unpublished but
influential material by Emanuel A. Schegloff. This chapter offers a much
welcome theoretically informed view of increments and where they might fit
among the “infra-structures of talk-in-interaction – those organization of
practices, such as turn taking, action formation, sequence organization,
repair […] through which the very constitutive possibilities of orderly and
meaningful talk-in-interaction are implemented” (p.247). Increments are a
practice by which participants fit further talk to a previous turn which has
just been brought to completion. The additional material is grammatically
fitted (“symbiotic”, p.241) to the previous turn. In one of the numerous
examples analyzed in the chapter, Bonnie is inviting her friend Marina to a
party. She asks “A:nd (3.0) okay d’you think you c’d come? Pretty much for
sure?” (p.241). Schegloff analyses the increment “pretty much for sure?” as
re-completing the question, so as to diminish the possibility of being
answered with “maybe” – something that several other invitees have already
replied to Bonnie. Schegloff reviews the typical features of increments. He
identifies three main grammatical formats they can take (lexical, phrasal,
clausal), their sequential environment (next-beat, post-gap, and
post-other-talk positions), and the form that their host unit can take (mostly
sentential). Schegloff also considers a less typical scenario, in which the
increment is produced by a different speaker than the turn being completed
past its initial completion point.
 
In Ch. 9, “The Accountability of Proposing (vs. Soliciting Proposals of)
Arrangements”, Jeffrey D. Robinson and Heidi Kevoe-Feldman investigate one
type of proposal action, namely, when participants “propos[e] to engage in a
future, concrete, joint action (e.g., How about I meet you at seven?)”
(p.286). Basing their analysis on 29 tokens taken from 6 different corpora,
the authors argue that there is a preference for soliciting a proposal for an
arrangement (“so what time are you gunna pick me up” p.283) rather than
proposing an arrangement (“oka:y. I’m=’nna pick you:p ‘bout nine=a” p.269).
They explain that proposals for arrangements are especially delicate and
accountable, for example because their recipients might be unwilling or unable
to accept them, and yet, the preferred action after a proposal is acceptance.
To manage this nexus of potentially cross-cutting constraints, the authors
argue that participants use two main strategies. They can work on the design
of their turn to mitigate it with various forms such as interrogatives (“How
about…”) and turn-prefaces (“I was thinking that…”). Participants can also
manipulate sequence organization so that instead of proposing an arrangement,
they ask their recipient to propose one.

In Ch. 10, “When Speakers Account for Their Questions: Ani-prefaced Accounts
in Korean Conversation”, Stephanie Hyeri Kim analyzes a practice in Korean
interaction by which speakers retroactively account for a question they asked
by prefacing a third-turn (after the other participant’s answer) with the
token ani. Ani is a negative response particle which can be translated by “no”
in some contexts, such as in response to a polar question. The chapter
investigates two contexts: when participants volunteer an account for their
own question, and when an account is solicited by their co-participant.
Ani-prefacing is identified as “a practice for ‘claiming’ responsibility for a
question being accountable, and thus is deployed to manage such issues of
responsibilities” (p.314). The author discusses the discourse-pragmatic
properties of ani and how this token may be undergoing a process of
grammaticalization into a discourse marker. Interesting questions are raised
about the intricacies of sequential position and the semantic/pragmatic
meaning of linguistic forms.

In Ch. 11, “The Omnirelevance of Accountability: Off-Record Account
Solicitations” Chase Wesley Raymond and Tanya Stivers analyze known-answer
questions. They show that known-answer questions can be used by participants
to solicit an account, i.e. asking a question whose answer has already been
made obvious in the conversation, in order to nudge one’s co-participant into
providing an account explaining something they have said. In one of the
examples analyzed, Deborah says “Oh do I.” after Jim asserted that she has to
try a specific type of red wine – when she has just said that she does not
like the taste of alcohol (p.325). The authors mention the practice of asking
the question “why?” (Bolden and Robinson, 2011), with which the request for an
account is “on-record”. They build on these previous findings by focusing on
“off-record” requests for accounts. They argue that when participants request
for confirmation by asking a known-answer question, “the normative response is
to provide an account” (p.346).

EVALUATION

The book is a tribute to the invaluable contribution of John Heritage to
research on human interaction. More specifically, it aims to build on
Heritage’s influential work on accounts in interaction (Heritage, 1988), and
more generally, how participants “treat one another as morally and socially
accountable for their actions” (Heritage 1988: 144). The focus of the book is
primarily on accountability as a social phenomenon.

One of the main strengths of the book is the variety of angles through which
the topic of accountability is investigated. The reader will enjoy the
different types of data analyzed – casual conversation, service interaction,
news interviews, atypical interaction – as well as the inclusion of data in
Korean and Japanese along with different varieties of English – American
English, British English, and South African English. As series editor N. J.
Enfield observes in his preface, “the concept of social accountability is
seldom foregrounded in research on social and cultural life, and it plays
little if any role at all in linguistics” (p.viii). While the book provides a
great cornerstone on which to direct further research, the different chapters
diverge in how much they foreground the notion of accountability – which in
itself shows how such a crucial notion is in need of explicit, targeted effort
to understand its complex ramifications. 

One might regret that many chapters describe their data only cursorily. Even
though conversation analysts are well used to reading transcripts featuring
Emma, Lottie, and Nancy, the reader is often left wondering when and where the
recordings were made, where to find the corpus, etc. Another point about which
we need to be cautious is the use of numbers. Focusing on a small number of
occurrences is not a problem in itself. In that respect, Ch. 1 shows how much
the detailed analysis of a single case can bring to the table. Conversation
Analysis has advanced knowledge on social interaction to an unprecedented
degree precisely because of its attentions to the specificity of each case
(Schegloff, 1993). However, when conversation analysts do choose to use
numbers, it is important that this is done with the rigor habitually shown to
other aspects of methodology. Without entering the on-going debate (Stivers,
2015; Steensig & Heinemann, 2015), it is important to consider whether
percentages are the best way to represent data when the collection of
occurrences is smaller than 100 and/or not compared with another collection.

Overall, the book is an interesting read on a topic in want of further
investigation. It provides very rich theoretical grounding for the study of
accountability in interaction, based on various types of interaction,
practices, and three different languages.

REFERENCES

Bolden, Galina B. & Jeffrey D. Robinson. 2011. Soliciting accounts with
why-interrogatives in conversation. Journal of Communication 61(1). 94–119.

Heritage, John. 1988. Explanations as Accounts: A Conversation Analytic
Perspective. In Charles Antaki (Ed.), Analyzing Lay Explanation: A Case Book
of Methods (p. 127 144). London: Sage.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1993. Reflections on quantification in the study of
conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26(1). 99–128.

Steensig, Jakob, & Trine Heinemann. 2015. Opening Up Codings? Research on
Language and Social Interaction 48(1). 20 25.

Stivers, Tanya. 2015. Coding Social Interaction: A Heretical Approach in
Conversation Analysis? Research on Language and Social Interaction 48(1). 1
19.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marine Riou completed a PhD at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris Diderot
universities (Paris, France) in 2015 on topic transition in American English
conversation. She is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Curtin University
(Perth, Australia) where she analyzes emergency ambulance calls for patients
in cardiac arrest. Her main areas of research interests include grammar and
prosody in interaction, corpus linguistics, linguistics applied to health, and
mixed-methods analysis.





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