8.4 The meaning of talk

When we enlarge the context of (37) above, however, the ah gets tinted with a new meaning. Because of the way the data were collected (all from the same telephone over a number of days), we have access to a previous call by Giorgio to Franco’s house, when Franco was not at home and Giorgio had asked Franco’s father to tell Franco to call him back. Therefore, Franco’s call to Giorgio in (37) is not just any call or any call by Franco to Giorgio, but a “returned call.” In the context provided by this new piece of information, the ah does not just sound as a “oh, I see now who you are” but “oh, I see that you did call me back.” Does this change the preliminary analysis of ah in Italian? Does it give us possible hints about reexamining the oh’s in Schegloff’s data? The answers to these questions are best answered empirically, that is, on the basis of actual investigations over diverse materials. It is likely that in some cases, as argued by Schegloff (1992b), the widening of the context of the interaction – e.g. adding prior or subsequent talk, visual documentation, background information about participants – may not challenge the validity of an earlier analysis. It is also possible, however, that in some other cases, additional information on the situation and its participants may affect our analysis. For these reasons, the issue of relevance is one that must be dealt with empirically and not on a priori principles. Such an empirical testing, however, is not as easy as it seems due to fundamental differences in methods and theories between most conversation analysts and linguistic anthropologists.

8.4The meaning of talk

One of the problems with the empirical validation of conversation analysts’ findings and claims and the extension of their work to a wider range of speech communities has been the relatively small number of studies of conversational interaction carried out by linguistic anthropologists outside the US (or the UK). This is partly due to the fact that many linguistic anthropologists tend to concentrate on ritual and political speech and they rarely record casual conversational exchanges.18 This has made it difficult to have comparable data for crosscultural analysis. Unfortunately, some of the earlier refutations of the universality of the English turn-taking system were not based on actual recordings (Godard 1977; Reisman 1974).

But there are other factors that make the utilization of conversation-analytical findings and methods somewhat problematic for some linguistic and cultural

18This criticism was made by Bloch (1976) and was reiterated by Moerman (1988: 11). Things have changed considerably in the last decade, as students of conversations and other genres have started to interact more within linguistic anthropology. However, many social and cultural anthropologists continue to record only ritual or political speech and miss the opportunity to carefully examine how language is used in the most common everyday interactions.

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anthropologists. Conversation analysts look at conversation as a series of structures which include recurring patterns of certain types of “acts” or “moves.” What drives most conversation analysts is an interest in the logic (or “syntax”) of such moves and the extent to which they display systemic orientations or preferences, e.g. to agree, to avoid simultaneous talk, to allow speakers to correct themselves. The analysis usually begins with conversational data and ends with some generalizations about how conversation is organized. Conversation constitutes both a means and an end of analysis.

Many anthropologists, on the other hand, are interested in conversation as a means to understand other types of structures. For example, they are interested in how what is being said in one particular context by a group of people relates to what the same people say in another setting. This means that it is important to record interaction of the same individuals in different situations. This implies not only a longitudinal study, but also an extended commitment to a group of people (a family, an organization, a political unit) as a community of speakers who share verbal as well as economic resources. Their movements, meetings, life choices become important for the researcher who wants to continue to keep track of where they are and what they are up to. Rather than conversational sequences per se, it is social actors that matter. This partly explains why ritual exchanges and the language that accompanies them are more important to linguistic anthropologists than to conversation analysts. Rituals mark important moments in the life of a community. They also require units of analysis, like activity or event, which are different from conversational sequences (see chapter 9).

Linguistic and cultural anthropologists use linguistic units and methods to unveil the role played by linguistic resources in constituting an interpretive frame like the establishment of an institutional context or the expression of a given ideology of self and other. Ultimately, linguistic anthropologists believe that if we want to understand what people mean with, through, and sometimes despite their words, one must look beyond linguistic means. The mechanisms of talk do not by themselves carry the burden of intentionality, accountability, and truth. Utterances, words, morphemes, prosodic and paralinguistic means are powerful tools to carry on an idea, to point to a certain connection. Language may very well be the House of Being (Heidegger 1971, 1977) but it is not Being itself. From looking at how language is used in people’s lives, we learn that meaning lives through the connections that talk helps create within as well as beyond itself, across contexts. This means that anthropologists who study marriage ceremonies consider the role played by speech in such contexts, but within the overall structure of the event, where objects and not only words are exchanged (Keane 1994). Researchers working on the use of deictic particles study conversational interactions to understand how a particular morphological

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system that indexes the speaker’s spatial orientation and visual access to the immediate surrounding context can also be seen as presupposing a particular conceptualization of the wider living space of the community (Hanks 1990). Ethnomusicologists who study myths or musical performance try to connect the stories told in the narratives and songs they record to what a given group of people care about, emphasize, or see as part of their place and destiny (Basso 1985; Feld 1982). Those who study chanted ceremonial exchanges try to establish correlations between the social organization of such exchanges and the local ideology of social relations with the outside (Urban 1988).

In her study of Xavante men’s councils, Graham (1993, 1995) saw the Xavante tendency to routinely overlap one another’s speech by repeating or paraphrasing what the current “principal speaker” is saying as a practice that obscures individuality and constructs a collectively produced discourse – in which speakers echo each other’s talk and sometimes incorporate or reformulate what has just been said by others. Graham hypothesizes that this type of polyphonic discourse represents and indexes a more egalitarian type of ideology than the monologic discourse characteristic of those genres controlled by one particular speaker.

The comparison of these studies with studies carried out by conversation analysts suggests that the questions asked by linguistic anthropologists and conversation analysts may differ because the notion of meaning implied in the two traditions is not the same.19 In anthropology, meanings are seen as located not only in language, but in social values, beliefs, social relationships, and larger exchange and support systems, including family structure and the social organization of the community. Most ethnographers believe that such meanings certainly need and make use of language – to be articulated, tested, negotiated, recreated –, but they do not just reside in talk. It is the issue of the supremacy and autonomy of talk itself in social and cultural analysis that is at the core of the issues discussed in this chapter. Those fieldworkers who emphasize the power of words and the interactional structures supported by talk tend to take conversation analysis more seriously than those who emphasize the role of social institutions and see them as overpowering and controlling the meaning of talk. Only by raising our standards for theoretical clarity and empirical validity can we hope to resolve such issues.

8.5Conclusions

In this chapter I have shown that conversation analysis provides us with useful units of analysis and concepts that make conversational exchanges into microcosms of

19This dichotomy between linguistic anthropologists and conversation analysts is overcome by many researchers who try to combine the two approaches.

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the social order and enlighten the culture that makes such an order not only possible but meaningful. By studying in great details the sequential nature of conversational interaction, conversation analysts have significantly improved our ability to think about speech as the product of an interaction, thereby expanding the context of individual speech acts studied by Austin and Searle and coming closer to the type of language games discussed by Wittgenstein. I have also argued that the notion of preference can be a powerful tool for the study of the constraints under which human actors must communicate and make sense of their own as well as of others’ action, a classic concern of linguistic anthropology at least since the formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see section 3.2). If, as suggested by Wittgenstein and others, individual motives and intentions must be understood in the context created by public institutions, the study of turn-taking systems and the expectations generated by continuous participation in them is an excellent example of how to relate individual behavior to larger institutional structures.

I have also examined some of the criticism of conversation analysts by anthropologists and other social scientists and concluded that whereas the hypotheses made by conversation analysts cannot be dismissed a priori on the basis of their methods of collecting data and defining context, ethnographic and longitudinal methods allow us to enter new areas of inquiry and in some cases question earlier analyses based on data collected without using ethnographic methods.

More generally, an interest in conversational interactions cannot be, from an anthropological perspective, exclusively an interest in the forms or mechanisms through which such interactions are made possible. Just as it is important for anyone working on everyday speech to recognize the type of recurrent patterns and preferences unveiled by conversation analysts, it is equally important for anyone working on conversation to realize that such mundane exchanges acquire their meaning from inside as well as from the outside of the exchanges themselves. The fact that such an analysis is difficult is not a reason to avoid it altogether. Successful conversation is not made possible only by turn-taking mechanisms just like proper pronunciation of certain sounds is not just made possible by the shape and position of the larynx in humans (as opposed to other species). An ontology of conversation – a detailed study of what makes conversation what it is

– must rely on an understanding of the implications and consequences of a system of communication with a number of interesting and yet still largely unexplained features such as the overall reluctance to correct others and the difficulty of excluding the participation of specific individuals without resorting to a violation of the very system that makes conversation possible. Are these preferences and features due to universals of human politeness or are they necessary features for the survival of the species? Or both? Is the nature of conversational

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interaction inherently democratic and pluralistic? Why? The reluctance to face these questions by conversation analysts is partly a by-product of the formal nature of their work. It resembles Chomsky’s reluctance to face either a psychological or a sociological level of explanation for the linguistic phenomena he studies. It makes conversation analysis suggestive of a wide range of issues and yet impermeable to the criticism that the formulation of those other issues might evoke. Such wisdom, however, comes with a price. As new generations of students are exposed to the subtleties of conversational practices revealed by conversation analysts, they will have to choose whether to stay within the boundaries of the discipline as defined by its founders or adventure into the dangerous waters of cultural analysis where formalism must often be left behind in order to grasp the uniqueness of the human experience.

In the next chapter we will venture into units of analysis that further expand our analytical horizon to include not only more complex exchanges but also situations where talk merges with other communicative resources.

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