For the most part, it’s pretty clear what action a speaker is doing in interaction; more importantly, it’s pretty clear to the participants – to the one ‘doing’ the action, and to the recipient – what action is being done. In that respect, the indexicality of language does not result in any practical problems for participants, for whom there is (again, generally) little ambiguity in what a speaker is doing when she asks Wanna come down and have a bite of lunch with me? (inviting the recipient over) or If your husband would like their address mine would gladly give it to him (making the recipient an offer). But ambiguities as to what something ‘meant’ (was doing) do sometimes arise; and sometimes, these ambiguities may not be so innocent. Ambiguity may be a resource for avoiding doing certain actions ‘on the record’, for deniability, or for treating the other as if they had done a certain action. Such possibilities can involve conflicts (disputes and disagreements) between participants as to what was being done – all part of what might be regarded as the politics of social action. An underlying dimension of some of these ‘disputes about actions’ is a voluntarism principle, as I’ll explain in this exploratory account of moments in interaction when the ambiguity of action comes to the surface. Drawing on wide-ranging corpora of telephone and face-to-face conversations/interactions, from the UK and US, this report focuses on moments when participants appear to contest what one of them was ‘doing’ –as part of a research inquiry into action formation (or how ‘speech act’ are constructed and managed in interaction).
|
