Ambiguities in action ascription
| Panel: | P42 - Action Ascription |
| Author: | Stivers, Tanya |
| Abstract: | |
| In social interaction participants monitor each next turn for the action(s) its speaker might be doing with it (Schegloff, 2007: 2). As Garfinkel demonstrated through his breaching experiments, people go to great lengths to make sense of what is said and done in social interaction. As he points out "The big question is not whether actors understand each other or not. The fact is that they do understand each other, that they will understand each other, but the catch is that they will understand each other regardless of how they would be understood" (Garfinkel, 1952: 367). So how do speakers package an action in talk to be understood as, for example, a "request" or "invitation" or "complaint"? And how do recipients recognize this as what the speaker is doing? The question is all the more intriguing when we consider that the turn taking system grants speakers the right to produce only 1 TCU at a time thus requiring that social actions typically be done in a recognizeable way within that 1 TCU. Despite the fact that there are usually multiple ways to design any given social action, that they must be recognizeable in a single TCU and that lexical semantics will typically rely on substantial implicatures, most social actions are performed and recognized in an unproblematic way. This paper seeks to gain leverage on the question of how speakers design achieve this by focusing on situations in ordinary spontaneous conversation where action ascription is oriented to as (potentially) ambiguous. By examining such situations, this paper addresses three main questions: (1) Are some actions inherently more/less ambiguous than others? (2) What interactional resources do people rely on to disambiguate actions? (3) When do people design actions to be ambiguous. |
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