S522 Lecture 7

March 9

Discursive practices; managing interaction and dialogue

Dialogue; the work of Deborah Tannen

• What happens in dialogue; overlap and interruption

• Questions of dominance v. collaboration: gender issues

Male-female differences in speaking (quantity)

Eakins & Eakins: Faculty meetings -Males: 10-66 - 17.07 secsFemales: 3.0 - 10.0 secs

Swacker: conferences -% papers: M 59.3 F 40.7% questions: M 72.6 F 27.4

Interruptions

Zimmerman & West: naturally occurring campus conversations - 96% of interruptions were by men

Eakins & Eakins: faculty meetingsMale interruptions 2 - 8Female interruptions 0 - 2

Edelsky 1981

Singly developed floor: one person speaks and others listen - men talk more

Collaboratively developed floor: more than one voice can be heard - women talk as much as men.

The meta-message

• What is being conveyed overall and received overall

• How is this negotiated

• How are participants positioned

• Who is speaking

• In what body

• Telling what story

• From what perspective

• In what social and cultural frameworks

Discursive action model: Edwards & Potter 1992 p 154

• The focus is on action, not cognition• Remembering and attribution become, operationally,

reportings (and accounts, descriptions, formulations etc) and the inferences that they make available

• There is a dilemma of stake or interest, often managed by doing attribution via reports

• Reports displayed as factual• Reports rhetorically organised to undermine

alternatives• Reports attend to agency and accountability• Reports attend to accountability of current speaker

Michael Billig

TALKING OF THE ROYAL FAMILY

Routledge 1992

Description as attribution:positioning other(s), blaming, inviting, making responsible etc

Becky oi (.) sh shh (.) It could have been that

Neil No that’s not making a noise

Alan No (.) something outside (0.4) it was definitely outside

Becky Neil you’ve got shoes on

Interest and stake: ascribing stake - [Mandy Rice Davies]

It wasn’t, in truth, much of a case. The only defense witness was a cousin of one of the defendants and she got her story muddled up anyway; and the prosecution witnesses, many of them passers-by with no conceivable axe to grind, were articulate and plausible

Stake inoculation

[Stereotype of tortured genius]

Dr Post was initially skeptical, but having looked at the lives of nearly 300 famous men he believes exceptional creativity and psychiatric problems are intertwined. In some way mental ill health may fuel some forms of creativity, he concludes

Stake confession/discounting;

including the “would say that, wouldn’t I” allusion

My own feeling is that the British theatre critics are a kindly and perpetually hopeful bunch, and that if we have a fault it is that we tend to praise shows too much. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Blaming and excusing:normative role accountability

Category entitlement: different credibility, and managed differently

Disclaimers: preliminary statements which anticipate a particular response to future utterances

I’m not anti them at all you know, I, if they’re willing to get on and be like us but if they’re just going to come here, just to be able to use our social welfares and stuff like that, why don’t they stay home

Extreme case formulation: pushing example to extreme, normalising extreme case

I’m not anti them at all you know, I, if they’re willing to get on and be like us but if they’re just going to come here, just to be able to use our social welfares and stuff like that, why don’t they stay home

Footing:highlights the basis on which an account is offered;who is speaking, who is accountable, who is credible?

Use of metaphors to create descriptions with different rhetorical goals

• Description as attribution• Interest and stake: ascribing stake• Stake inoculation• Stake confession/discounting• Blaming and excusing• Category entitlement• Disclaimers• Extreme case formulation• Footing• Use of metaphors rhetorically