Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53 (Spring 1989), 227-241

Collaborating on Context: Invoking

Alluded-to Shared Knowledge
ROBERT E. NOFSINGER
Analysis of a segment of conversation in which one participant repairs the broken-off utterance of another indicates that utterance design and sequential placement play key roles
in this accomplishment. The participants coilaboratively produce a display of shared
knowledge t h r o u ^ the use of conversational practices that do not include explicit reference
to, or even passing mention of, the item of knowledge. Knowledge shared by the participants
is merely alluded to, but participants are able to access it using routine conversational
practices. Context is argued to be an ongoing achievement of such practices of utterance
design and sequential placement.

ONTEXT IS A MUCH USED and somewhat abused term in communicaC

tion. We appeal to it for explanations of both misunderstanding and
seemingly difficult-to-achieve understanding among interactants. We
teach our students always to consider context when they interpret
messages and to design their own messages to "fit" the context. It is
widely accepted among communication scholars that "language and
discourse... cannot be separated from an extralinguistic context (situation)" (Ellis, 1983, p. 222), and that "rule govemedness [in social communication] is context bound, that is, it is shaped by an interactional
context and the definition of a situation" (Sigman, 1983, p. 174). Mishler's
(1979) appeal for a redress of research methods that attempt to neutralize
the context of subjects' behavior argues that social psychological, educational, and other interactional phenomena are essentially dependent on
context.
The term is used with widely varying scope. As Haslett (1987) notes,
those who take a cognitive approach to the study of communication tend
to regard context as a cognitive representation of all or some of the
following: general commonsense knowledge, the rules and practices of
the communication system, the structure and elements of social situations, i>erceptions of the participants in the current episode, and its
development so far (pp. 85-103). Those who take an interactional approach tend to focus on communicative patterns and how they establish,
modify and sustain a context of momentarily relevant features (pp.
103-108). It is increasingly agreed that talk reflexively affects context.
ROBERT E. NOFSINGER is Associate Prf^eesor of Communications at Washington State
University, Pullman, WA 99164-2520.

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Western Journal of Speech Com.munication

Analysts using the ethnomethodoiogical approach of conversation

analysis regard participants as not only sensitive to locally relevant context, hut also as contrihuting to it and to its ongoing elaboration (Beach,
1983, pp. 203-209). Heritage, for example, says that "the significance
of any speaker's comraunicative action is douhly contextual in being both
context-shaped and context-renewing (1984, p. 242). Schegloff puts the
position this way: "It is not, then, that some context independently
selected as relevant affects the interaction in some way. Rather, in an
interaction's moment-to-moment development, the parties... select and
display in their conduct which of the indefinitely many aspects of context they are making relevant, or are invoking, for the immediate moment" (1987b, p. 219). A distinction is made between treating context
as exogenous to the conversation (institutional roles, the rules of social
situations, shared knowledge, and so forth) and treating it "as something
endogenously generated within the talk of the participants" (Heritage,
1984, p. 283). This analysis regards context as created in and through
conversational action.^
Considerable conversation anals^tic work has displayed how context
that might be thought of as exogenous actually gets produced in interaction. For example, Maynard (1984) shows how the roles of district attomey ind public defender are maintained through framing and other
practices of the participants (pp. 62-68). Atkinson (1982) shows the ways
in which the Tormality" of certain oflRcial or public meetings is generated
by interactional practices designed to achieve shared attentiveness
among the parties present (pp. 97-110). And Beach (1983) describes how
participants employ background understfindings that they (for the most
part) name, describe, or otherwise refer to in their talk. One implication of studies such as these is that institutional structures, shared
knowledge, and other potential components are not to be regarded as
context unless and until they are invoked or made momentarily relevant by the participants. Context is what the participants can be shown
to orient to and what can be shown to be "procedurally related" to the
course of their interaction (Schegloff, 1987b). Other interpretive
resources remain only potential or possible context until they are invoked. For the purposes of this analysis, context is a subset of participants' general background understandings: the specific item(s) of
shared knowledge that the participants coUaboratively locate, access,
or invoke as momentarily relevant.
INVOKING SHARED KNOWLEDGE
One way in which participants achieve the context of their ongoing
talk is by displaying that they share, or have mutually accessed some
item of knowledge. They employ a variety of practices or techniques
available to every competent language user to invoke that item (and
perhaps related items), making it a relevant aspect of context for the
moment and avEiilable for use.

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229

One way in which participants can invoke shared knowledge is by

a speaker explicitly describing the knowledge in some way; that is, by
using a word or other expression to identify the relevant categories. This
practice operates in concert with such recipient actions as using the same
categories or producing an acknowledgment or other "knowing"
response. Requesting clarification may also be used, since even when
the spteaker directly refers to an item of shared knowledge, misunderstanding may occur. An example from Beach (1983) will illustrate this
practice: The speaker says, "This place reminds me of that restaurant,
remember, Oiir House?" (p. 202). Here, the background understanding
that the participants share is rather directly referred to with such terms
as "that restaurant" and "remember. Our House." The recipient of this
utterance, however, is momentarily misled by the similarity between
the name of the restaurant and the expression "our house," and the participants require a few turns to repair that misunderstanding. Participants can also make an item relevant one step removed by using
a term that is categorically related to the one they are making relevant.
In effect, they can invoke a term by producing its conceptual sibling.
For example, a person might say "what a lousy team" as a way of complaining about a peirticular player on the team (see Sacks, 1972, on
membership categorization devices).
It is not immediately evident, however, that invoking shared
knowledge need not involve explicit mention of either the specific category
or even closely related categories. The analysis reported here of a classic
case of invoking context by alluding to shared knowledgemaking
available something the participants never mentionindicates that
other practices are sufficient to make an item of shared knowledge
momentarily relevant. One difference between this case and the data
analyzed by Beach (1983) is that here the item of shared knowledge is
not mentioned and concerns neither a recent event, nor one that the
participants have talked about recently. Accordingly, the identity of that
item will not be explicitly written into the analysis.
DATA
A first step in analyzing how shared knowledge can be made momentarily relevant when it is merely alluded to is to select a segment of
talk in which the participants' reliance on such an alluded-to item is
clearly evidenced. One sort of conversational occurrence that meets this
criterion is when a second speaker repairs the unfinished sentence of
a first speaker and gets the first participant's agreement. When a participant is able to articulate what would have been said by a prior
speaker, we can initially assume that the participants share some item
of knowledge that has served as context at that point.
The segment of conversation that constitutes the primary data for
this study esihibits a striking case of this. Data Display 1 was prepared
from an audio recording and brief field notes of a conversation in a

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Western Journal of Speech Communication

professor's office. The participants knew they were being tapted, but were
meeting for the purpose of transacting routine business, rather than
to record their talk.
In an earlier portion of the conversation from which Data Display
1 is taken, D (a graduate student at a western university) is talking
with P (a faculty member at the same university). The conversation is
discontinued when S (an undergraduate student), arrives to have her
enrollment form signed by P, her advisor. This bit of business is itself
momentarily discontinued when D offers to remove a bug from S's hair.
She agrees and, just prior to line 01, remarks on its being springtime.
Data
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

Display 1 [TAM:BP
S:
. . . It's (0.6) Spring bugs in rmy hair.
P:
1-Well it's it's one of
tho:s:e ruh: insects that consu.-7nes uh hair sprray.
S:
LBack t' nature (.) heh heh heh
'Yah=
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
Iprobafc/j-,
D: 'r somewhere and it couid have been that ((gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
*-hhhhh\hhh
*heh
S:
l-Or Hawaii an they c'be crawlin'
outta the
(0.6)
D: phhYou wish VA said whrat
hhhh
S: l-XJhkay (1.0)
Uhen 111 see you on Tuesday.
P: All right (.) Good.=
S: =With my little thing all fillred out? (Ueaving))
D:
LWe could be at Texas A
roa'tAhhhhhhhhhhhh
heheh
rfeo
P: l-A'right ( ) That's exactly it I wish I wi Lsh you had
*
*
said College St(h)ation Tex(h)as.
(1.0)
P: .hhHaha
D: .hhhh 'at's right,
P: Heheh

First, a brief summary is in order of what (I take it) the participants

are engaged in doing in this segment. Initially, they are continuing to
joke about the bug, lines 1-13 (excluding line 9). Then, in lines 15-17
and part of line 20, S and P are concluding arrangements for S's registration. This analysis focuses primarily on lines 9, 14, and 18-25, where
P and D are working out their understandings of line 9. Roughly, what
seems to happen here is that D's utterance about Dallas, Texas "triggers" something for P, who indicates that he wishes D had said
something else; but what that might be is not stated. Then, apparently
with no special prompting, D produces an utterance about Texas A&M
University that P responds to as being "exactly" right. Both P and D
seem to enjoy D's remark as something of an accomplishment, and the
humor of the conversation is preserved.

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231

ANALYSIS
Ordinarily, participants in a conversation experience it as orderly
(Schegloff, 1987a). A fundamental tenet of conversation amalysis is that
the participants produce such orderliness in the routine course of orienting to each other and to the "occasion-at-hand" (Beach, in press). This
segment of conversation is clearly orderly for the participants, despite
the fact that whatever "occurs to" P is never articulated by him, either
in line 9 or elsewhere. It seems that both P and D have used the same
item(s) of shared knowledge to reach the final state of agreement and
mutual appreciation that they display at the end of the segment. But
since neither participant articulates the item(s) of "shared" knowledge,
the sources of this orderliness are not immediately apparent. Conversation analysis should be able to reveal, even in a single episode
(Schegloff, 1987a), the practices by which the participants enable each
other to locate and thereby use this knowledge. Beach (in press) argues
that "exactly what gets achieved is undeniably the upshot of how
speakers and hearers fashion, shape, and make available to one Einother
their understandings...." The present analysis reveals these sources
of orderliness to be such routine conversational practices as designing
and positioning utterances so that they project a contrast, display a
specific relevance, initiate a repair, or ratiiy another's proposal.
Since the allusion in line 9 seems to arise because Ps utterance is
unfinished, the analysis begins by characterizing the utterance in relation to D's initial attempt to get it repaired Qine 14). Second, an analysis
is undertaken of the design* and sequential placement of line 9, comparing it to D's prior utterance (the one that "triggered" something for
P). Third, the analysis focuses on what seems to be an interactively constructed list of locational terms (Dallas, Hawaii, etc.) and on whether
D's 18-19 r . . .Texas A an' M") fits such a list. Fourth, D's candidate
repair (lines 18-19) and the participants' ratification of it are considered.
These four steps provide a description of how the allusion arises and
how the participants collaboratively cope with the problem of accessing and relevancing an item of shared knowledge, as they try to "makle]
sense of how [the] others are making sense" (Beach, 1983, p. 197). That
is, the analysis identifies the practices used to collaboratively construct
the participants' context-of-the-moment.
Allusiveness and Repair
In the subsequent turn to D's remark about Dallas, Texas, P says
"I wish (.) I wish you had s:" and strikes the desk with his hand during
"you" and "s:" (as indicated by the asterisks beneath that talk in Data
Display 2). This utterance is oriented to by D as being incomplete
(broken-oif by P, most likely due to overlap with the other participants).

232
Data
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

Western Joumal of Speech Communication

Display 2 [TAM:B]
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
i-khhhkVbiih *
*heh
S:
lOr Hawaii an they cTje crawiin'
outta the
(0.6)
D: r.hh You wish Td said whi-at
hhhh
S: I-Uhkay (1.0)
Uhen n i see you on Tuesday.
P: All right (.) Good.=

The most immediate evidence supporting this interpretation is D's utterance: ".hhYou wish I'd said what hhhh" (line 14). It takes the form
of a next turn repair initiator (NTRD, in this case, a partial repeat of
the utterance proposed as needing repair, plus a question word
(Schegloif, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, pp. 367-369; Scheg:loff, 1979, p. 38).
The design of D's utterance shows specifically that it is P s line 9 that
D is proposing needs repair (an important point, since technically the
NTRI does not occur in the very next turn, but in D's next turn). The
perspective of the personal pronouns is switched to preserve their
referents, of course CVou" replaces "I" and "I'd" replaces "you had"), but
with this taken into accoimt the wording of D's utterance matches that
of Fs. This establishes that D is asking ahout P's utterance. Note also
that D uses the word "said" at the corresponding point where F s talk
had ended with an "s" sound, thus displajdng D's orientation to the way
P might have finished. Finally, D ends 14 with the interrogative pronoun "what," displasdng his orientation to the incompleteness of Fs utterance and, correspondingly, the need for repair.*
D's utterance proposes that he knows something of the form, though
not necessarily the content, that Fs completed utterance would have
had. That is, line 14 treats F s uttersince as a truncated form of: "I wish
(.) I wish you had said Y," where the letter Y represents some word,
phrsise, or larger unit that would have made F s utterance complete.
(That Fs line 9 projects this particular design will turn out later to have
important consequences for D.)
Now, insofar as P does not actually mention what he is talking about,
he can be said to be alluding to it (see Sacks, 1971, on the allusive discussion of a topic). In this case, the allusion arises initially from the incompleteness of F s utterance; but even if P had completed it by producing Y, the utteramce still could have been allusive to the extent that
the shared knowledge P is relying on is only alluded to-rather than
stated-in Y.
Not only is F s utterance incomplete in the sense described above,
but he fails to take several opportunities to repair it himself. Schegloff,
Jefferson & Sacks (1977) have argued that converaation is structured
to favor self-correction, that is, repair of an utterance hy the original
speaker of that utterance. The first place where P could correct his utterance is line 9 (by continuing or restarting it immediately). This may

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233

be a marginal opportunity, because his talk is overlapped first by D's

long, strained exhalation and laughter (line 10) and then by S's remark
about Hawaii (line 11). But even though conversational participants
orient to achieving one and only one party speaking at a time, they also
orient to a rule that (when no one has been specifically selected by the
prior speaker) the first psirty to self-select as speaker has the rights to
the turn (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1978). In this case, that is clearly P; both D's laughter and S's utterance begin after Vs utterance is
established. And participants do, in fact, continue to talk through other
participants' laughter and talk. So P could probably persist and produce
the missing Y portion of his utterance (that is, he could reveal what
he wishes D had said), ptu-ticularly if he has D as a recipient. Next, P
could recycle his utterance at the six-tenths-second silence in line 13
(compare Schegloff, 1987c, on recycled tum beginnings). This is a major opportunity for self-correction, and P fails to make use of it. Finally,
D's NTRI is the first pair part of an adjacency pair that makes relevant
a continuation or other repair by P (on adjacency pairs, see Schegloff
& Sacks, 1973, pp. 295-296). Even though D's utterance overlaps S's
reiteration Qine 15) of arrangements made earlier in the conversation,
it is still a rather strong prompt for P to produce a completion (Y) of
line 9. Lines 14 and 15 begin simultaneously, and much of D's NTRI
is spoken in the clear during the one-second pause in S's talk. This suggests that P could self-correct his own line 9 as a reply to D's repair initiator. Instead (in line 16), he acknowledges S's utterance, perhaps
because she is the one who finishes talking last.
This presents D with an interactional problem. In order to respond
competently to P, he must produce an action (presumably an utterance)
designed to demonstrate its relevance to Ps talk. But that talk has omitted something that D should treat as relevant. He has been left in a
difficult position because, as the conversation progresses away from line
9, the task of making relevant another question about it becomes more
complicated. The import of P not self-correcting is that D, in effect, is
left to figure out the repair of line 9 (the puzzle about what Y is) for
himself. In many ways, D would be better ofFtrsdng to solve the puzzleand his interactional problemon the basis of what has already been
said, rather them to prompt P again for a repair.
Format and Sequential Placement
One resource that D can draw upon to project how Fs utterance might
have been completed is its apparent compound format. Lemer (1987)
describes the structure of certain turn-constructional units (see Sacks,
Schegloff & Jefferson, 1978, p. 12) and their role in the completion of
an ongoing tum by its recipient. A sentence or other ttmi-constructional
unit with a compound format of the [preliminary component + final component] type allows a recipient to project something about what the final
component will be like on the basis of the preliminary component. It

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Western Journal of Speech Communication

also allows a projection of an opportunity space where the speaker may

be preempted and the utterance completed by the recipient.* Lerner
describes several compound formats, including [if X -I- then Y] and its
variants [when X + then Y] and [instead of X + Y]. He gives the following example of the latter tjrpe:
Data Display 3 [Lerner, 1987, GTS, 28]
01 K: insteada my grandmother offering him a drink
02
of beer shell say
03 L:
wanna giassa milk?

Here, K produces the preliminary component [instead of X], where X

is the reference to the grandmother offering "him" a drink of beer. From
this component, and perhaps other information, L is able to project a
final component [Y], where Y is the description of the grandmother saying "wanna giassa milk." Lerner argues that this is also an example
of the format [quote marker -f quote], in which the speaker produces
a preliminary component that projects a quote or paraphrase of
somebody's words as the final comptonent. Thus, Data Display 3 has concurrent formats in which both the [instead of X -f Y] and the [quote
marker -f- quote] structures contribute to the possibility of L's collaborative completion of K's turn (Lerner, 1987).
Given D's interpretation as revealed by line 14, F s "I wish (.) I wish
you had s:" can be seen to have the [quote marker -I- quote] format. The
preliminary component is the quote marker "I wish you had said," and
the final component consists of D's wished-for words. The format is [I
wish (.) I wish you had said -f Y]. The projected quote is not what someone has already said, but what P wishes D had said. It can also be argued
that F s utterance fits a variation of the [instead of X -(- Y] format. The
wording, "I wish you had said" proposes not only that P wishes D had
said something, but that P wishes D had said something else-th&t is,
a contrast of some sort with what D actiuilly did say. The format is [(instead of X) I wish you had said + Y], in which the X is indexed without
putting it into words.
This version of the format, then, alludes to some prior event (rather
than actually referring to it, as happens with the "instead of wording
in Data Display 3). Although the potential for collaborative completion
remains unrealized, either this format, or the quote marker format, or
both concurrently, provide resources for D to begin to project what the
final component, Y, might be. But what specifically could Y be, beyond
being talk by D that should contrast with something he said earlier?
Or rather, how does P help D to discover the relevant characteristics
of y?
Heritage (1984, pp. 254-264) notes that participants routinely orient
to adjacent utterances as having a special relationship. Unless marked
to indicate otherwise, an adjacently-placed second turn is treated as
displaying an interpretation of, and providing a response to, the immediately prior turn. In this case, P self-selects to talk in the very next

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235

turn slot following D's utterance in lines 5,7-8 (presented again in Data
Display 4).
Data
05
06
07
08
09
10

Display 4 [TAM:B]
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
Iprobaiiy,
D: 'r somewhere and it could have been that ((gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
heh

The adjacent positioning of F s utterance Gine 9) indexes D's justcompleted turn as momentarily relevant to the contrast projected by
the format of F s utterance. That is, it proposes that something of what
D has just said is relevant to the construction of the missing final component, Y. This provides a potential steirting point in D's search for the
specific contrasting categories: Y would seem to be something that D
might have said, contrastively related to Dallas, or to Texas, or to bugs,
and so forth. D must access the shared knowledge that was involved
in his utterance that triggered something for P.
But is this a case of shared but unstated knowledge? It was claimed
in the Invoking Shared Knowledge section above that this case involves
alluding to shared knowledge without explicitly describing it, thus making available something the participants never mention. The issue here
is whether "Dallas Texas 'r somewhere" formulates the same item(s) of
knowledge that Texas A an' M" does. In other words, is "Texas A an'
M" a possible "somewhere"?
Indexicals of Location
It might be argued that the three participants in lines 05-12 of this
conversational segment (reproduced below in Data Display 5) are collaboratively constructing a list of locational formulations and that D's
" . . . Texas A an' M" in lines 18-19 is merely another item on that list.
ScheglofPs (1972) analysis of the selection of locational terms shows that
participants select formulations with features that fit the ongoing conversation. Such formulations are oriented both to who the participants
are and what they have been talking about. Schegloff calls these considerations a membership analysis and a topic analysis, respectively
(1972, pp. 88-106). In the present conversation, talk has focused on insects and climate in the several utterances prior to line 05 of Data
Display 5 (e.g., "Spring bugs" earlier in line 01).
Data
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

Display 5 [TAM:B]
D: =Could rbe worse, we could be living in Dallas Texas
S:
^prohably,
D: 'T somewhere and it could have been that {(gestures with thumb and
index finger)) big.
P: I wirsh (.) I rwish you had s:
D:
^hhhhhVhhh *
*heh
S:
1-Or tHawaii an they c'be crawlin'
outta the

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Western Journal of Speech Communication

D, in the same utterance in which he again refers to insects Tit could

have been that big"), uses a locational formulation that fits features of
both climate and insects. Beach (1983), in his discussion of background
understandings in conversation, reminds us that members "of a given
culture possess a certain amount of pragmatic knowledge about that
culture" (p. 215). With "Dallas Texas 'r somewhere" Gines 5,7-8), D proposes that P and S, being members of the general category of adult
AmericEins, are familiar with the common folklore that insects thrive
in a warm climate. He proposes that, for the same reason, they can
recognize certain well known American locational terms as displaying
those features of warm climate and insects. Notice that D's utterance
does not focus specifically on Dallas, Texas. Its design, ending with "'r
somewhere," marks that location as only an example of a larger set of
formulations having the necessary features to fit with those displayed
in the ongoing talk. In line 11, S adds to the list another locational term
fitting the same feattires; "Or Hawaii." She also makes reference to insects ("they c'be crawlin' outta the"). Note that D and S both use "or":
They are selecting locational formulations with certain features and producing them so as to match with respect to those features.
As argued in the previous section, however, Fs line 9 (through a combination of utterance design and sequential placement) makes relevant
talk by D that would contrast in unspecified ways with lines 5 and 7-8.
P may be seen as proposing that a different (or additional) set of features
(besides bugs, etc.) would be relevant to him and D. This raises the issue
of sequential ambiguity in the design of D's lines 18-19: "We could be
at Texas A an' M hhhhhhhhhhi\h heheh ha."
In some respects, this utterance seems fitted to the list of locational
formulations discussed above. Texas A&M is, after all, in the same state
as Dallas and might be expected to have a warm climate and insects.
According to such an analysis, the pstrticipants have expanded the list
begun by D (in 5, 7-8) to include three locational terms: Dallas Texas
'r somewhere, Hawaii, and Texas A an' M. In this case, D's production
of lines 18-19 would not involve alluding to shared knowledge (making
available something the participants never mention) because the relevant features have already been made available by D's and S's earlier
formulations. The design of lines 18-19, however, indicates that the utterance is not merely another item in the sequence of locational terms.
For one thing, "Texas A an' M" involves a different membership
analysis than the other terms. While the use of "Dallas Texas" and
"Hawaii" propose geographical locations, "Texas A an' M" proposes an
institution, rather than merely a place. Scheglofif(1972) notes that locational terms can be used to formulate other categories besides location,
such as occupations, activities, and stages of life (pp. 81-83). So in lines
18-19, D not only makes relevant new features having to do with universities, but may be formulating an occupation or other related category,
such as where one works or goes to school, rather than where one lives.

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237

Just as the utterance "I'm calling Harvard" can be used to formulate

the identity of an academic colleague in a way that would be more difficult using "I'm calling Cambridge, Massachusetts" (or " . . . Boston"),
so D's "Texas A an' M" makes relevant a somewhat different set of
features than the prior locational terms do.
Candidate Repair and Ratification
Another important characteristic of D's utterance is its design as a
candidate repair of P s line 9. Having failed to get a repair from P in
response to line 14, D now resorts to a stronger repair initiatorone
that incorporates a proposed version of the repair (Schegloff, Jefferson,
& Sacks, 1977, p. 369, n. 15).* In line 18, D repeats part of his line 5
as a way of relevancing his current talk to that earlier utterance. The
parallel construction between "We could be at Texas A an' M" and "we
could be living in Dallas Texas" is striking. Not only is there a repetition of "we could be," but the next terms are parallel also. "At" differs
from "living in" primarily in that the former is fitted to an institution
name, whereas the latter is fitted to a town or city name. Thus, D
displays an orientation to the details of his earlier utterance, while at
the same time altering the specific locational term. Maynard (1984) suggests that repeating part of an ejirlier utterance may, in effect, delete
the earlier occurrence (p. 123). This makes lines 18-19 a replacement
for line 5exactly the sort of contrast that D's "I wish (.) I wish you had
s:" seems to call for.
So both the chsmge in type of locational term (to a imiversity name)
and the parallel construction in lines 18-19 (to D's earlier talk) indicate
that "Texas A an' M" does not merely confirm eind repeat features
already introduced by other locational terms. Rather, it is designed to
respond to F s call (in line 9) for a contrasting formulation. "Texas A
an' M" is being offered by D as a candidate repair of P s incomplete utterance. In her discussion of the use of candidate answers as an information seeking strategy, Pomerantz (1988) argues that in offering a candidate answer to one's own question, a speaker displays knowledge of
the situation (p. 369). The same may be said of D's candidate repair.
It formulates features that have only been alluded to by P and invokes
an item of shared knowledge between the psirticipants: D is proposing
that he knows what P was alluding to and that "Texas A an' M" will
be recognizable to P as a way of formulating it.
This raises the question of how P responds to D and how "Texas A
an' M" gets treated in subsequent talk. Mandelbaum (1987) describes how
one of two potentiid storytellers (both of whom know the incident being
told) displays familiarity with the events in the story that the other has
begun. She calls such a "knowii^ utterance a ratification of the storytelling so far (pp. 151-152). As Data Display 6 shows, P gives strong support
to D's utterance-support that, in effect, ratifira it as the wished-for
replacement for D's earlier talk and as an acceptable repair of P s line 9.

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Data
17
18
19
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Western Journal of Speech Communication

Display 6 [TAM:B]
S: =With my little thing aU fillred out? (aeaving))
D:
l^We could be at Texas A
ran' 'HLhhhhhhhhYkYih^t
heheh
rha
P: "-A'Tight ( ) That's exactly it I wish I wi Ish you had

21
22
23 P:
24 D:
25 P:

said College St(h)ation Tex(h)as.

(1.0)
.hhHaha
.hhhli 'at's right.
Heheh

That is, the status of lines 18-19 as Y, the acceptable repair of F s brokenoff utterance, is collaboratively achieved by P and D through their
responses to those lines, as well as by the design of D's utterance. Notice
that P not only says (with some emphasis) that D's utterance is "exactly
it," but he repeats his own line 9 even to the recycling of "I wish" Oines
20-21). ITiis directly treats D's utterance as relating specifically to that
earlier utterance. P also transforms "Texas A an' M" to "College
St(h)ation Tex(h)as," a form that more closely matches D's original utterance (lines 5 & 7), in that a city name is used. In so doing, P
demonstrates that he understands D's formulation well enough to
tremsform it (Schegloff notes such transformations, 1972, pp. 95-96). F s
laugh tokens in the name (line 21), and his laughter in lines 23 and 25,
further display an appreciation of D'B candidate repair. Notice also that
D (in line 24) responds "[th]at's right" to F s transformation, thus further collaborating in their joint achievement. AU this helps to constitute
their invocation of shared knowledge: P shows that "Texas A an' M"
is indeed recognizable to him as a formulation of some resource shared
by him and D, and D shows his recognition that "College St(h)ation
Tex(h)as'' is also a formulation of that resource and shows his confidence
that they both know what has been alluded to.''
CONCLUSION
In this conversation, Dfiguredout what P had been going to say (what
P wished D had said)a particularly clear instance, it would seem, of
the "operation of context." The problem with resorting to the concept
of context to explain such a striking instance of communication is that
we tend to take for granted the very processes we ought to be studying.
In this case, P and D share a very large set of items of background
understanding (knowledge, perceptions, and other interpretive
resources), only a few particulars of which can be helpful to D in figfuring out what P wanted him to say. The ways in which P and D
methodically help each other to access those particular items as relevant to a specific moment of the conversation are ways of achieving context. That is, context works because it involves subtle processes of participants communicating to each other (or indexing for each other) which
particulars have momentary interpretive value. By treating context as

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an achievement of the participants, it is made available for communication study. Accordingly, the point of this analysis has been to discover
the practices employed by P Eind D to achieve the context that enables
D to repair P's utterance.
The participants invoked shared knowledge through the use of five
conversational practices, none of which involves the explicit mention
of that knowledge. First, P produced an utterance designed to project
(but not provide) a contrastive final component (Fs broken-off line 9).
Second, P positioned this utterance (adjacent to D's 5,7-8) so as to display
its relevance to a specific prior turnthat is, to show that elements of
the prior turn had triggered a contrast for him. Third, D initiated
(solicited) a repair of the utterance, displaying his recognition that some
further talk on his part had been projected by P (D's line 14). Fourth,
D designed an utterance as a recognizable candidate repair, formulating
for the first time what some of the features of their shared, locally relevant knowledge might be (D's line 18-19). Fifth, P and D in turn designed
several utterances to ratify and show appreciation of D's camdidate repair
and the item of shared knowledge that it invoked (lines 20-25).
Invoking shared knowledge can be accomplished through practices
of utterance design and sequential placement. Such practices need not
involve either direct reference to, nor passing mention of that shared
knowledge. Allusions to such background understandings, effected
through the organizational characteristics of talk, are sufficient for participants to locate and make momentarily relevant the particular(s) that
constitute the context of a conversational moment.
ENDNOTES
1. My interest in the achievement of context was stimulated by a discussion by Emasuel
A. Schegloff about constraints on the analytical use of tbe concept, in a paper now available
in published form (Schegloflf, 19B7b). I also wish to thank Wayne Beach, Robert Hopper,
and Gene Lerner for their vry helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
2. I have used an asterisk, placed below a line of talk, to mark the occurrence of a
sharp rap or striking a desk (possibly by that speaker). Also, the italicized h represents
a strained exhale, bordering on laughter.
3. The term design, as used here, does not imply any conscious planning or
deliberateness on the part of the speaker. The design of an utterance is its shape or pattern regardless of the processes that shape or pattern it.
4. D's utterance, then, is sequential evidenix for the incompleteness of Ps line 9. There
are linguistic bases for hearing this utterance as incomplete, as well. For example, to
the extent that the final "s" sound does not count as a complete lexical item, the utterance
is syntactically ill-formed.
5. This point and several others in the following discussion on format were conveyed
to me by Gene Lerner (personal communications. Fall, 1988).
6. My thanks to Gene Lerner for pointing this out to me.
7. Sims D could have designed lines 18-19 to contrast with his lines 5,7-8 in a multitude
of ways, it seems parsimonious to conclude that D's success is due to his having accessed
the same item of shared knowledge that P is tising. In this particular case, the analyst
is privy to what that rraource probably is: A mutual friend of P and D had recently moved
from their university to Texas A&M. Bat note that this information telJs us nothing abotit
how the participants brought that shared knowledge to bear in their talk. Knowing what

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participants jointly know helps to explain their conversational achievements only in light
of the practices through which they invoke their shared knowledge as context. Note also
that D's formulation in lines 18-19, "Texas A an' M," preserves F s earlier allusiveness
in that it does not directly mention their mutual friend. P then continues to preserve that
allusiveness with 'College St(h)ation Tex(h)as.'' Sacks (1971) discusses some of the reasons
why participants might want to preserve the allusiveness of prior utterances.
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