8.3Conversation analysis and the “context” issue

8.3.2The issue of relevance

A different strategy used by conversation analysts for dealing with the accusation of “noncontextuality” has been to directly address the issue of what context is. This has been done, for instance, by Schegloff in his discussion of what he calls “the problem of relevance”(Schegloff 1991: 49–52).

One of Schegloff’s recurrent replies to those who criticize him and his colleagues for not taking “context” (or “enough context”) into consideration has been to reframe the issue from “who’s got more context?” to “how do we decide which context matters?” To say whether or not an analysis has taken into consideration “enough” (or “the proper”) context would then mean for Schegloff to say whether or not the relevant context and not any kind of contextual information potentially available to an observer has been taken into consideration (Schegloff 1992b: 195). Since each individual is characterizable in many different ways, how do we know which way counts in this case?

Once we recognize that whoever can be characterized as “male” or as “protestant,” or as “president” or whatever, can be characterized or categorized in other ways as well, our scholarly/professional/ scientific account cannot “naively” rely on such characterization, that is, cannot rely on them with no justification or warrant of their relevance. (Schegloff 1991: 50)

The same argument can be extended to features of the environment and definitions of the situation. For example, how can we say ahead of time which contextual conditions are relevant to what I will talk about while having dinner tonight? Will it be relevant that I have been spending several hours by myself writing at a portable computer, that I have not been wearing shoes, and that I have been hearing people speaking Spanish downstairs?

Since, in most cases, we cannot say a priori which aspects of context are going to be relevant, conversation analysts like Schegloff have been arguing that the only empirically appropriate way to evoke context is to attend to what the participants themselves make relevant, through their linguistic actions, the idea being that “the search for context properly begins with the talk or other conduct being

analyzed” (Schegloff 1992b: 197, emphasis in the original). Thus, we cannot a priori decide whether a person’s social identity as a “cousin” or “doctor” or “friend” counts, simply on the basis of the information that is available to us about such a person and his interlocutor. It is indeed possible that even in her own office a doctor might relate to a patient as a “doctor” at one point and as a “friend” at another. For this reason, any kind of analysis of interactional material should make reference to a sound justification of the reason for choosing

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a particular type of characterization or description of the situation over other possible ones.

There is, however, a potential weakness not in the problem of relevance itself but in the methods whereby relevance is established. In particular, if relevance means that out of a number of possible contexts or features of context, some are chosen (mentioned, discussed) while others are left out (because assumed known or claimed irrelevant), the issue remains of the access to or discovery of relevant contextual features. We need ways, in other words, of retrieving contextual information that may not be available in the talk itself. For instance, in order to think about whether a participant is being (or “doing”) “doctor” we need to know that she is indeed a doctor or that the conversation is taking place in a medical facility. Although we can expect doctors to speak in a way that would easily identify them as medical experts, there are situations where we might need to be more specific and know whether someone is an expert on infectious diseases or the head of a laboratory (Cicourel 1992). The participants may or may not refer to each other’s specific medical qualifications. For this reason, to render a contextual analysis possible we need to use ethnographic methods that could give us the richest documentation of the on-going situation and its temporal and spatial surroundings (see chapter 4).

Some conversation analysts have argued that we cannot in principle rule out an analysis of something simply because some aspect of the context has not been mentioned or properly recorded. However, unless we have ways of enlarging the context of a particular verbal exchange, it is difficult to know what else is relevant. Thus, although one should not ignore an analysis of something said in a face-to-face interaction simply because there is not enough information available on eye gaze or on where the participants were located with respect to one another, we will never be able to know whether such features were relevant unless we do have the opportunity to have access to participants’ eye gaze and positions. The issue, as always, is one of scope. Just like an audio recording of a spontaneous interaction allows us to see regularities that we could not have imagined before (see section 8.1), visual recordings also widen the range of phenomena that can be examined. Goodwin (1981), for instance, showed that at least some self-repairs can be connected to the attempt to secure a recipient. Example (26) above, for instance, is analyzed by Goodwin as part of an interaction in which the speaker loses the gaze of his recipient in midutterance. “When it has been regained, the speaker repeats the noun phrase that was spoken while his recipient was disattending him, this time adding a new adjective to it” (Goodwin 1981: 130). Example (26) is here repeated as (32), with the additional information about eye gaze (a straight line indicates that the party so marked is gazing toward the other, a comma marks withdrawing of gaze, a

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period marks the movement that brings gaze to another, and a capital X shows the exact place where gaze reaches the other participant):

(32)Ralph: Somebody said looking at my:, son my oldest son,

Thanks to the visual record, Goodwin established that repair phenomena are (at least in some cases) related to the construction of precise eye gaze coordination between participants. This does not discredit earlier analyses of repair (e.g. Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977), but it adds a new and, in some respects, richer analytical dimension. Similarly, recordings of the same speakers over an extended period of time – what psychologists call longitudinal studies – provide an opportunity to ask questions about individual variation that would not be otherwise possible. Susan Philips (1992), for instance, has argued that the lack of longitudinal methods in conversation analysis does not allow researchers to find out the extent to which certain linguistic phenomena are truly spontaneous or the result of personal style (or even planned strategy). In examining the speech of judges to defendants in four Arizona state courts, for instance, Philips found that some judges corrected themselves at the same point and in the same manner in talking to different defendants. Here are examples of the same judge introducing a uh always after the complementizer that on four different occasions:

(33)You have the right to have the Court tell the jury – instruct the jury that, uh, you are to be presumed innocent.

(34)And the Court would instruct the jury that, uh, you are to be presumed innocent. ...

(35)I’ll order that, uh, a pre-sentence investigation and report be made by the Adult Probation Officer in this Court.

(36)Alright. It’s ordered that, uh a pre-sentence investigation and report be made by the Adult Probation Office of the Court.

(Philips 1992: 316)

The question in this case as in others that could be presented is whether the different ways of defining the boundaries of the relevant context forces earlier analyses to be revised or be simply augmented or enriched (Schegloff 1992b is dedicated to this question). This I believe to be an important question because it sets the agenda for any kind of collaboration between conversation-analytical methods and ethnographically oriented research of the type usually carried out by linguistic anthropologists (see chapter 4).

In (24) above, for instance, I gave an example of the beginning of a telephone

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conversation in Italian that I will now recontextualize. The exchange is here repeated as (37):

(37)G: pronto, hello,

S:Giorgio?

Giorgio?

→G: ah ciao. oh hi.

S:ciao. hi.

In the third turn, Giorgio produces what I earlier characterized as the first pair part of the opening greeting (ciao). He does so, however, by prefacing the ciao with an ah which I had left unanalyzed. There is evidence in my data that this Italian ah is similar to the oh sometimes found in the same position (third turn) in American telephone conversations:

(38)C: Hello.

M: Hello, Charlie?

Schegloff (1979) informally characterized this English oh as a marker of “success just now” at recognizing the caller. That the oh is indeed such a marker is shown by the fact that it sometimes appears after the answerer had tried to “fake” recognition by returning a greeting without using the name of the caller:

(39)A: Hello B; Hi:

A: Hi: (0.3) Oh Hi Robin (Schegloff 1979a: 43)

Similar examples are found in my Italian data, as shown in (40), where the ah appears after a significant one-second pause and is followed by a series of “upgrades” whereby the answerer seems to make up for the delayed recognition of the caller:

(40)MLuisa: pronto,

hello,

Franco: pronto Marialuisa? hello Marialuisa? (1.0)

MLuisa: ah Franco ciao bello come va?

oh Franco hi handsome how is it going? (“MLuisa”)

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