AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

By examining different features of turn design, this conversation-analytic dissertation investigates a range of “account-able” “members’ resources” (Garfinkel 1967) that are mobilized by participants in the service of intersubjectivity, progressivity, and the interactional negotiation thereof. First I describe the structure and interactional use of what I term the ‘do-construction’ in English-language conversation (e.g., The kids do eat cake; cf. The kids eat cake). It is illustrated that, across a variety of sequential positions and in conjunction with a range of social actions, this construction is used consistently to index a contrast. After establishing the contrastive work that this resource accomplishes as a general feature of turn design, I consider how the use of the do-construction can be seen to be relevant to particular sequences of action, and conclude with a discussion of the relationship between this grammatical construction and ‘embedded other-correction’ (Jefferson 1987). Chapter 3 reports on a subset of do-construction cases in which the contrast indexed through use of the do-construction is not with the content proper of a prior utterance or sequence of utterances, but rather with a potential implication thereof. That is, this grammatical resource is routinely mobilized to index contrasts not only with explicit or otherwise demonstrated understandings (as in the majority of the cases in Chapter 2), but also with possible ambiguities and potential misapprehensions that might be gleaned from prior talk. Through the use of the do-construction in such contexts, speakers can be seen to be actively holding themselves and one another accountable for the commonsense inferences (Garfinkel 1967; Sch?tz 1962) that prior talk may have generated, while simultaneously working to refine and shore up the shared understanding being developed with their hearers. Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure the distinction between “unmarked” and “marked” progressivity across turns within a sequence (Heritage 2013, 2015, frth.), examining two turn-initial particles in Spanish: bueno and pues. The chapter argues that both bueno and pues preface some “unexpectedness” to come in the responsive turn, but a different sort of “unexpectedness” is foreshadowed by each particle. I demonstrate that bueno-prefaced turns do not overtly problematize the prior utterance, but rather accept its terms before departing from them, and thereby acquiesce to the prior turn’s design (albeit a marked form of acquiescence compared to a turn that is not qualified with a turn-initial particle). Pues-prefaced responses, on the other hand, are directly addressed to the prior turn, but they cast that prior turn’s action or design as problematic in some way. That is, rather than acquiescing to the terms of the first-position utterance (as with bueno), pues-prefaced responses target and problematize some aspect of the prior turn, thereby noticeably ‘pushing back’ on, for example, its presuppositions or epistemic stance. In this way, pues-prefacing is…