Part I

Fall 1968

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 1 Lecture
Second stories · "'Mm hm · " Stor" ' ' .I

prefaces; �Local news;' Tel/ability

Hereafter I'll begin with some rather initial considerations about sequencing
in conversation. But this time I'm going to put us right into the middle of
things and pick a fragment that will introduce the range of things I figure I
can do. I'm proceeding this way for this sort of reason: Basically what I have
to sell is the sorts of work I can do. And I don't have to sell its theoretical
underpinnings, its hopes for the future, its methodological elegance, its
theoretical scope, or anything else. I have to sell what I can do, and the
interestingness of my findings. So we've got this fragment of conversation,
this thing about the automobile wreck. 1 I want to start picking it apart.
I'll begin off with what I initially found interesting; why I initially worked
on this fragment. And that is, some relationship between what I'm calling the
'second story' and the 'first story . ' The 'second story' is:

B: You know, I looked and looked in the paper- I think I told you f­
for the uh f-fall over at the Bowl that night. And I never saw a thing
about it, and I I I looked in the next couple of evenings.
A: Mm hm
( 1 . 0)
B: Never saw a th- a mention of it.

Call that the second story.

I will have to make a case that there is some reasonable warrant for talking
about it as ' second; ' second to the first (the first being the thing that begins,
"Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local
radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, and on the
way home we saw the most gosh awful wreck . " )
I think it's kind o f obvious that there are some similarities between the
second story and the first. The second story, like the first, seems to be about
an accident; involves a witness and victims. Let that suffice for now with
respect to similarity. There seem to be more or less similar characters and a
more or less similar topic; it's a different sort of accident apparently, but it's
an accident. So we have these naively apparent similarities. We might be led
to ask, "Are they happenstance?, " i.e. , it just happens that here's a story, and

1 A more extended fragment was handed out. It can be seen in Spring 1 968, April 24
lecture, vol. I, pp. 764-5 .

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 3

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
4 Part I
here's another story that has some similarities to it. One can easily enough find
many stories that are similar to other stories. If you pick a row of books out
of the library and find a story in one, it wouldn't take you all day to find a
story in another book that you'd find more or less obviously similar. Does the
similarity here matter? Is there reason to believe that the similarity is an
achieved similarity?
This might be a matter of lay observation. One would, I suppose, figure,
' ' Sure. That similarity is not just happenstance. ' ' The teller of the second story
is obviously telling her story in response to the other story. They happen in the
same conversation. They happen as between the same people - A tells the first
to B, and B tells the second to A. B tells the second shortly after the first, etc.
Now we can develop a lot better reasons for figuring that the possibility of
such a relationship exists. But just for now let's assume, on the basis of the fact
that it's no jolt to our intuition, to our understanding of the world, that it may
be possible that those two stories are similar for non-incidental reasons and
therefore that we can figure that the similarity is an achieved similarity. Then
we can ask, as the first real question, how is it that the similarity is achieved?
What I mean by 'an achieved similarity' is that B produced this story in
such a way that its similarity to A's will be seeable; that is, in such a way that
A can see that what B is telling A is 'a story similar to the story that A told
B. ' That is to say, the problem of achieving 'a similar story' is B's problem.
And our question is, how did B go about doing that? What we now look to
is, what would it take for us to have shown how B does it? What sort of a
thing would be an explanation of that? Not an explanation of 'Why?' but an
explanation of ' How?' We want, that is, a characterization of what B did;
something which would set out, at least in gross terms, some of the
parameters involved.
Presumably what is involved is that B listened to A's story in some fashion,
and engaged in some analysis of what A was saying (what exactly such an
analysis would be, needs be found out). Then, that B used that analysis in
searching her memory, and found in her memory some story which she could
offer, which could be seen as 'similar. ' What we're asking, then, is "How is
it that B listened and did her analysis and used her analysis so as to find a story
to tell?"
Now we can approach that kind of a question in a series of quite different
ways. Consider these sorts of possibilities. Suppose that B analyzes out of A's
story its topic and its characters. It's about an accident, it involves as characters
'witness' and 'victims. ' Having those features of the story at hand, what B
then does is to see if she knows such a story. That is to say, she looks for a story
which has an accident and a witness to the accident. That might yield the
second story. Now is there anything manifestly or developably wrong or
inadequate about such a possibility? What sort of stories would it yield? It
might yield such a story as the following. "I remember reading about a wreck
once, in the paper. Seven people were killed and it was three days before
anybody noticed. " That is to say, it could just yield any story about a wreck.
We can then ask, would such a story as would occur where this one does
 Lecture 1 5
be just any story about a wreck? When people tell a story about a wreck they
saw yesterday, could somebody then, e.g., report on a wreck they read about
in the paper? What we need to do at this point is to watch conversations
hereafter and see. I don't say that we should rely on our recollection for
conversation, because it's very bad. What I mean by that it's 'very bad,' is
this: It happens to be perfectly reasonable for linguistics and philosophy to
proceed by considering, "Well, let's take a certain locution, a sentence. Would
anybody say that? If they said it would we figure it was grammatical? or a
puzzle? or not?" And pretty much reasonably educated people feel comfort­
able with such a procedure. That is to say, they feel that they have control over
what it is someone might say. They recognize something as loony or not
loony; they recognize something as what they figure to be grammatical pr not
grammatical. One can invent new sentences and feel comfortable with them.
One cannot invent new sequences of conversation and feel comfortable about
them. You may be able to take 'a question and an answer, ' but if we have to
extend it very far, then the issue of whether somebody would really say that,
after, say, the fifth utterance, is one which we could not confidently argue.
One doesn't have a strong intuition for sequencing in conversation. So relying
on recollection is not a procedure that I'm going to advise us using, nor will
I use it.
Again, then, the possible analysis I offered as one that B could have used
on A's story, will yield any which story. It seems to be that B's second story
is not any which story. Furthermore, there are stories which would not be any
which story, and they might be done, but they would be quite different from
this second story. Consider this possibility: A tells a story about a wreck she
saw. "I was driving along and I saw a car smashed up and I went over to see
what happened. There were all these people laying on the street. I stayed there
quite a while. ' ' Now B uses the procedure I initially proposed; find a story
with such an event and with such characters, and tell it. And the story that B
remembers goes like this: "I was in an accident one time and I was laying
there on the street and all these people came over and stood around gawking
at me. It was really awful. "
Those two stories fit together in a rather different way than the ones we're
considering fit together. That is to say, that shift as to who was who in the
story may be something that matters. In this case, we have as a fact that A was
a witness and B was a witness. And perhaps that's a relevant sort of thing for
the way that B goes about determining what the characters should be in the
story she should find. Not merely some particular set of characters, but,
furthermore, that there are some characters in the first story and A is one of
them, and there are some characters in the second story and B is one of them.
And besides that, the character that A is in the first story, B is in the second
story. That's a much finer sort of situation than 'search for a story in which
there are the same characters. ' It's ' search for a story in which you are the
character the other was in their story. '
A sort of gross possible reason for doing it that way would be that if the
person is trying to make a point with the first story, then having such a second
6 Part I
story is a way of seeing that you agree with the point. So, for example, in other
materials a second story is prefaced with " I know just what you mean" and
then a story is told which has the same paralleling of characters.
Aside from that, there is a technical kind of problem; one that I can't all
that easily develop here, but I'm going to try. It turns out to be rather
important that there be an ordering to the way that B searches for characters,
in the search for a story: The first character B searches for counts more than
the second character. And by that I mean that the first character B picks will
control the way B looks for a second character. That is to say, there is a way
in which characters in stories fit together, and, as the position of the storyteller
shifts, then the terms for conceiving the various other parties shift. So, for
example, if I'm a victim in an accident then I may conceive of the others
around as 'witnesses, ' but I may also conceive them as 'possible helpers, ' or
'gawkers, ' or whatever else, whereas if I'm a 'witness' then the way in which
others are conceived may not be in exactly the same sort of way. I may see
them as 'people to talk about the accident with,' i.e. , as possible co­
conversationalists.
That sort of shift is rather transparent in one way, and that is, if you
consider that it's not 'the same story' invariant to perspectives, characters, etc. ,
then 'the same event' in some sense may have quite different things going on
depending upon who is telling about it. And depending upon what they said
was going on, would also tum how they put everybody together. So that for
a bunch of people on a train, each of them may have a different way of seeing
who else is there. That can be suggested in a fairly obvious way. One guy on
the train could see the others as 'whites , ' one guy may see the others as
'marks' (e.g. , if he's a pickpocket), and various other such ways of seeing
what the others are. And if we're taking the situation as being one in which
the storyteller is a character, then which character they are can matter a good
deal for what the other characters are. Now I made that point so as to try to
suggest that there is reason to believe that if somebody's going to be searching
for some event in their memories so as to produce a second story, then they
don't just want a list of characters, A, B , C, they want an ordered list of
characters. And they want at least a first character around which to organize
that ordered list - in contrast to, say, the characters' order of appearance,
which just doesn't get stable. Now I proposed that one way that B might go
about searching for a story would be to find such a story as had B being a
similar character to the character A was in A's story. And that is then to say
that such an initial use of the character A was in A's story could be basic to
B's finding a story.
There are some rather nice features for a procedure like that. One thing is
that it's capable of enormous generality. It doesn't matter what story A tells
you, you have a way of searching for a second story, that procedure holding
independent of the particular character. You find what character A was, and
then use that to find whether you have a story in which you were such a
charaaer. And it's not just general in the sense that we could propose a
procedure which says 'find a story in which the first character mentioned in
 Lecture 1 7
A's story is a character, and tell this as your second story,' but it specifically
fixes on the party who's telling you the story. That is to say, if we're talking
about the story as being told in conversation, between some set of people,
involving them in interaction, then what we have is not just a general
procedure but one that's also the most interactionally relevant. That is to
say, in each case, for a particular second story, the second storyteller is
constructing his story not only by reference to the story that A told him,
but by reference to what A did in that story, i.e. , that A told the story is
then made something that B deals with. By going about constructing his
story by reference to finding a story that he is a similar character in, B is
making something of the fact that A told B the story, i.e. , the procedure is
'interactionally relevant. '
With this procedure we have a proposed description of how people may
sometimes listen to stories; a proposed description which can be checked out.
We can look to other story sequences to see whether it happens that as the
stories vary in character we get second stories involving that the teller of the
second story is the same character as the teller of the first story. If that is so,
then we have a series of gains. For example, we have as one gain that we can
talk about this being seriously a 'second' story. We have hints of far more
interesting gains than that. For example, we may be getting some glimpse of
the way in which somebody' s memory is at the service of a conversation. If
we're talking about B going about searching her memory, it isn't overt labor.
That is to say, when somebody comes up with a second story like this, they
haven't found themselves working to do it, it just literally pops into their
head. Which is to say, perhaps, that it may be possible that this thing we
think of as an extremely private repository but which we're also aware of as
operating quite without control, is something that operates by virtue of
procedures which are socially organized and are characterizable.
One thing we can be noticing about such a relationship between two stories
is that B's story is told within 'conversation time. ' That is to say, it isn't a
situation in which A tells a story and some time later B tells their story. That
happens, to be sure, i.e. , B remembers something a week later, etc. , but for
a considerable amount of stuff, B is able to produce a story right then and
there. Now that B is able to produce a story right then and there matters a
good deal for what can be done with the story. One of the things that can
thereby be done is showing that one got the point of the first story, since B can
tell it at such a place in the conversation that A, looking at it, can see what
it's about. That is to say, if A told a story and then the conversation went
along and they were talking about something or other, it may well happen
that if B then tells her story, A is going to figure it's a new story, or it's a
second story but it's second to some other first story. The juxtaposition of this
story to that one may matter a good deal for, e.g., A to see that B's story is
produced by reference to A's particular story. The reason for that is that B's
story doesn't, after all, say that it's the product of an analysis of A's. It's only
if you analyze B's story that you find that it's that. A has just produced her
story; she knows what her story's about. She hears B's story, and if she's going
8 Part I
about listening and analyzing as B did with hers then she'll find that
' similarity' is used in producing it. But that she has B's story so available may
well turn on where the story is placed. And that is a topic to which a good deal
of attention will be given later on.
Now, in talking about the second story I gave a characterization of it which
specifically was concerned with its having been produced by reference to
performing some operations on the first story. I want to mention in passing,
something which should be marked: That hearing in such a way as to analyze,
and analyzing in such a way as to produce a second, is a basic way one goes
about showing that one understands something that another person has said.
Some procedures can be formally characterized in similar ways to the second
story. Sometimes there are much simpler sorts of things, sometimes much
more complicated sorts of things. Here's a simpler one:

A: How long are you going to be in town?

B : Till Wednesday.
A: Oh you'll just be here a week.

The way in which "you'll just be here a week" is a way of showing one's
understanding of what the other person said, involves the way in which it
takes "Till Wednesday" and performs some operation on it by reference to,
say, when 'now' is. 2
So what we're seeing is that people aru going about using their hearings.
But anybody could say that; the question is, can we say something fairly clean
about that. And also, can we use it to bring attention to parts of what
happened which, not only were we not aware of, but wouldn't come to be
aware of. That is to say, it isn't obvious in the first instance that if I had made
a list of features of the second story which included the fact that B was the
same character that A was, that one would notice that it was an observation
that counted in any way. What we have at this point, then, is not only that
it's an observation about this story, but an observation that we've done
something with.
I'm going to leave the second story for a while and go back to the first
story. I want to deal with some other ways that story is listened to, beyond the
ways that the second story shows it was listened to. One sort of thing we
might want to fix on, but we would, I suppose, if we were conservative
enough, figure we couldn't at all deal with, would be something like this
" Mm hm: "

2 The actual fragment runs off a bit differently:

A: How long are you going to b� here,

B : Uh: (.) not too long. uh: : jgst until uh: : I think MQnday.
( 1.2)
A: Till, oh you mean like a week tomorrow,
Elsewhere the actual data has simply been substituted for the presented data, but in this
case the comment appears to be geared to the data as presented.
 Lecture 1 9
A: Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on
the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura
yesterday,
B: Mm hm
A: And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck.

I suppose if one was altogether naive one might say that what a person
understands when they say " Mm hm" is whatever the other person has said.
It would seem obvious that you couldn't show that that was so, and
furthermore, sometimes it's obviously not so. One sort of question is whether
we can say anything about what "Mm hm" does in this case.
One thing we can notice about stories is that we tend to get a sequence of
things like "Mm hm" ("Uh huh," "Oh: : , " "Yeah," etc.) and then
something else, like "Oh isn't that awful. " The question is whether that sort
of fact turns out to matter, i.e . , whether that sort of fact gives us some idea
about what " Mm hm" does. Let's notice what the story has so far involved.
A begins by saying "Say did you see in the paper or hear anything last night
on the radio. " Now obviously what we've got going there is that A is making
some request of B for information. And B in due course fills that request for
information, saying "No, I haven't had my radio on, " and a little later on, "I
don't get the paper. "
Now we can ask, how does B know where to place her answer? An obvious
answer to that would be, she should place her answer at the end of the
candidate news story. Well, how does B know when it's over? You could
perfectly well have:

A: Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on
the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura
yesterday,
B: No, I didn't see it in the paper.

That is to say, if B sees this as the thing that could occur in a newspaper, then
B might, having read the paper, treat just this as adequate for trying to recall
whether it was in the paper or not. But B does not do such a thing. She waits
to get more. She does not see the first part as the candidate news story. And
it may be that the request, indicating that 'news' is involved, helps B to decide
on the matter. So that one wants to see that the request for information is
placed at the beginning of the story, and also to see that at some point before
the answer is placed, other things are done ("Mm hm, " "Oh: : , " "Uh huh,"
etc.) which have at least the relevance that they are talk, and not yet the thing
that B is going to do at the end of the story. What "Mm hm" does is at least
this: It says, "The story is not yet over, I know that. " And also, it is placed
at a pause-point and shows that B is listening - where there is a sense that B
would have to show that she's listening, to show that she knows the story's
not over. That's at least a sort of listening, in that, in this case in particular,
there is something that she should do when she sees that the story is over.
10 Part I
Now she gets what she should do from what I'm going to call the 'story
preface, ' "Say did you see anything in the paper or hear anything on the local
radio. " It turns out that stories regularly have prefaces, and they regularly
have prefaces which are relevant in approximately the sort of way that this one
is relevant, i.e. , they inform their hearer what the hearer should do when the
story is over. This is a particularly simplified one in the sense that it obviously
consists of a request for information. Characteristically it's not that sort of a
thing, but it's something like "I heard the most terriblejwonderful thing
yesterday" and then the story is told. That line is similar to "Did you see
anything . . . etc. , " in that we find that what that says is, 'When you hear the
story is over, say something like "Oh isn't that terriblejwonderful" . ' That is
to say, the characterizing adjective for the story is used by the hearer of the
story to produce their remark on recognition that the story is over. And if they
fail, then that can be picked up by the hearer, i.e. , the initial storyteller, and
sometimes it could be a touchy issue. For example, in one bunch of materials
there's place where A is telling about a house she has for rent. And the point
that she wants to make, she makes in the following fashion.

A: So I thought just for fun, I would uhm -- uh, since I had this much
time, I'd run a little ad myself ?
B: Uh huh,
A: And maybe handle it myself if I could?
A: Mm hm,
B: And do you know I was just amazed, it was in last night, I was
amazed at the responses I got.
B: Mm hm,
A: And uh it's- I already have a ( 1 . 0) a deposit for it.
B: Well good!
A: Isn't that something?
B: Well I should say.

Notice, where B says "Well good,! i.e. , "It's good that you rented the place"
or " . . . rented the place so rapidly, " A says "Isn't that something?" Now
what she's doing with "Isn't that something?" is picking up what she was
telling about that was "amazing," i.e. , the responses she got from this little
ad she ran herself, and not that she got the place rented, which is ' 'good. ' '
And the other grants that it was "something. "
In that regard, then, we can find that something like "Mm hm" can have
something said about it by reference to the way in which somebody listens to
the progression of a story. That is to say, we're not in a position of merely being
able to say something about the second story following the first and exhibiting
an orientation to it, but we can say that the first story is listened to as it is
developed, and that there are ways of dealing with the ways it's being de­
veloped. Where, furthermore, the ways of dealing with the way it's being
developed are something that a person who builds that story is going about
setting up. In particular we've seen that one sort of thing a storyteller can be
 Lecture 1 11
occupied with is informing the listener what it will take for that story to be
over, so that the listener can see such a thing as that it isn't over or that it is
over, in that it's not at all common, usual, done, that at the end of a story one
says, "And now the story's over," but, that the story is over is something that
needs to be detected. For one, the teller of the story gives, right at the beginning
of the story, information as to what should be watched for as the thing that will
be the completion of the story. If someone says "I heard the most wonderful
thing yesterday, " then you should watch for what it is that could be a
wonderful thing. And when you've heard what could be a wonderful thing,
then you should show that you see the story's over. If you don't, then they'll
say "Isn't that wonderful?" and you'll be in a position to be seen to be
thinking that the story is still to go on - which is to say, you've failed to
understand it. And that obviously can happen. I certainly don't mean to be
saying that that sort of thing cannot happen.
In this particular case, the preface is indicating that the story involves
something that might be seen in the local news, for a hearer who is presumed
by this to know, perhaps, what the local news contains, not merely in the
sense of what yesterday's newspaper contained, but what any local news
contains. Where, that it might be seen in the local news locates for the hearer
what they could say, for example, that they didn't see it; recognizing that it
might have been there, but "I didn't read the paper, " knowing however that
such an item has been presented as could be in the local news - which would,
e.g. , rule out Ruth Henderson and A driving to Ventura.
And that her knowledge of what constitutes local news is used by B, is
something which is clearly present in B's own story. When B tells her own
story, involved in it is not just an analysis of characters and topics, but
specifically in addition to that, reference to what happened in A's story; that
it was possible local news that was not found. Now this gives us a little bit
more extensive sense in which B is attending A as telling the story. A was a
witness to the accident, B is telling a story in which B was witness to an
accident. But A was much more than a witness to the accident. A saw the
accident as 'news' and looked in the paper to see if it was there, and didn't
find it there. And by reference to not finding it there, by reference to an
interest in it as 'news,' she tells it to B. And B comes back with a story that
was just that sort of story. B also is not merely a witness to an accident, but
was a witness to an accident who thought that it was a piece of news, a piece
of local news, and who looked for it and couldn't find it. Telling the story to
A, B remembers all those things.
We can also be noticing that what A does in her story is not just report an
accident; she's reporting something which she saw and then did a bunch of
work on. What I mean by that is, what she saw was a wrecked car. She
worked it up into the 'worst accident she ever saw. ' Now I take it that one
doesn't just see, laid out in front of you, 'the worst accident you ever saw' -
you see an accident and make it into 'the worst accident you ever saw' by
engaging in a comparison of other accidents you may have seen. But what I
take it is going on is something like this: It is going to be claimed about the
12 Part I
accident that it is possible local news. The fact that it's an accident is, by itself,
no grounds for it to be local news. Not any accident is local news. What
makes an accident local news is, e.g. , that it's a 'big accident, ' in that n people
were killed, or something on that order. And now the way that she can deal
with its candidacy as local news, is by her having come to see it as 'the worst
accident she ever saw. '
That she makes of it 'the worst accident she ever saw,' and looks in the
paper for it, are mutually relevant in this way: If I were to say, " Hey did you
see Huntley and Brinkley last night? There was an accident out in front of my
house yesterday and they didn't say a thing about it, ' ' one might ask, "Why
would they ever say anything about it?" The accident is not something that,
via it's having happened in front of my house, one would figure it should
have been on Huntley and Brinkley. If I were to say "Did you see anything
about it in the Daily Pilot?" then it might be a candidate for such a local
newspaper, where it might not be a candidate for a national news show like
Huntley and Brinkley. Now, it' s not that it happened on my block that
prevents it from being reported on Huntley and Brinkley. Things could occur
on my block that would be so reported. It's on somebody's block that a
helicopter crashes. And some automobile crashes can perhaps make some
sorts of national news. So that you can read in the New York Times about an
automobile crash occurring outside of New York if, say, 1 1 people were
killed. Not as headline news, but somewhere in the paper.
So you build in your characterization of what sort of news it might be
candidate for. In the case at hand, she builds in her characterization of it as
candidate for local news by talking of it as the worst accident she ever saw,
and by suggesting that there were people killed in it, where it is the case that
local newspapers present reports of accidents in which people were killed. The
point is, in her forming this thing up as something she's going to tell
somebody, one wants to see that she has to do it right, or that she's telling
them something that's not tellable can be claimed; "Why are you telling me
that?" can be raised.
The sheer telling of a story is something in which one makes a claim for its
tellability. And its tellability cari be dealt with. We have a sequence in which
a lady who works at Bullock's gets a call from another lady, who'd driven by
there, who reports that it looks like there was a robbery at Bullock's. The
recipient of the call has had the day off, and the lady who's calling is reporting
to her what she's missed. The recipient specifically deals with the tellability of
the story by saying " Oh I'll call Penelope right now. " (Where Penelope also
works at Bullock's, and was at work when the incident occurred.) That is to
say, she accepts the tellability in the classic way of accepting tellability, i.e. , to
tell somebody else. Or to tell the one who told you that you are now going
to tell somebody else. Many times when we're told a story what we specifically
do is to say just that: "Wait till so-and-so hears this. " So she says, ' 'I'll call
Penelope. " She calls her, and Penelope says she doesn't know much about it,
oh yeah it happened but "in fact I didn't even say anything to Johnny about
it because I just thought well it was so kind of silly. " That is, she deals again
 Lecture 1 13
precisely with this issue of whether that thing is tellable. One finds as a
recurrent feature in the telling of stories that people deal with its tellability; in
that one could tell stories that people make you out a nut for, a bore for,
whatever else. And so you're going about working them up into something
tellable. 3
Obviously in some sense, to work it up into a piece of possible local news
is to make it tellable. So that it isn't just another description, put in there for
the hell of it, that it was 'the worst wreck I ever saw. ' And in that regard, the
other person uses that questionable feature of its local-news status in her story,
thereby gaining for her story its also-plausibility. That is to say, she saw
something happen at the Bowl; it didn't occur in the news, also. That 'also'
is a very curious 'also' in the sense that it may well be that it had no reason
to occur in the local news. She figured it ought to be in the local news, the
local news didn't include it, perhaps not for any reason other than that it
wasn't local news. She may be saving that story so as to find, when she gets
some other story told to her, that the other story is one that 'also' didn't
appear but was 'kept out, ' so as to preserve the status of her story as having
been local news.
Such a use of 'also' is an enormously common thing, and to get a sense of
it as a usual piece of rhetoric, here's a yesterday-instance of it. Governor
Wallace is being interviewed by a reporter and he's asked about what he
makes of the New York Times' characterization of him. He say, "The New
York Times said Castro was a good man. They were wrong then, they're
wrong in this case, also. "
Again, then, in B's preservation of this story so as to make it an 'also' is one
way of keeping her claim that the thing was local news alive as a reasonable
claim, not a piece of nuttery. So, one thing I'm saying is that if you're going
to claim something to be 'local news,' then that puts another task into telling
the story. However, there's the possbile gain i.e. , if she can make it out as
'local news' then she also makes it out as something tellable, worthwhile.
Let me turn now to a consideration of the line, "Ruth Henderson and I
drove down to Ventura yesterday. " I want to make a case for the fact that that
characterization - as well as many many characterizations in the story - is
specifically construaed for this story. That is to say, we don't want to propose
in the first instance that when she and Ruth Henderson set out that morning
they said "Let's go to Ventura. " It's at least reasonable that they would say
"Let's go to Mary's," or to some store which happened to be in Ventura. It's
by virtue of the fact that she's reporting on an accident and locating where the

3The following mmed up between the time the leaute was given and transcribed . From the
New York Times, October 1 , 1 968:
While Joseph Loo was watching television on Sunday evening, the telephone rang. His mother
answered .
It was Ngoon Goon, Joseph's 13-year-old friend , calling to say that the teachers' strike was
over and that they had to go back to school the next day. Ngoon gave the message to Joseph's
mother. The message was neither interesting enough nor important enough to the two boys
for them to discuss it over the phone themselves.
14 Part I
accident happened that what is said turns out to be ' ' drove down to
Ventura. "
Now she could easily handle that by having said "Ruth Henderson and I
drove down to see Mary Smith who lives in Ventura, " but there are some
problems about that. If it was somebody who the other person doesn't know,
then it would just cause a complication to mention Mary Smith: "Oh, who's
she?" "She's a friend of mine who . . . " etc. And anybody knows that when
somebody uses, instead of the name of the person they went to see, a place,
then they're telling you among other things, 'you don't know who I'm
talking about; ' e.g. , "I went to a party at La Marina last night" tells you
among other things, 'you don't know the person I went to see. ' Where, if you
knew who they went to see, they would tell you who they went to see.
Again, then, what "down to Ventura" does is to help locate where the
accident occurred. It occurred "on the way home, " i.e. , between Ventura and
Santa Barbara. Note that it was " on the way to" Santa Barbara for these
ladies, who were returning from Ventura to Santa Barbara. In no other way
is it "on the way to" Santa Barbara. It could be "on the way to" San
Francisco. A stretch of highway is "on the way to" wherever it is that you can
go from that stretch of highway. And that's a real problem for seeing a 'local
news event' on a highway. Let's say you're from Orange County and you're
driving in Arizona, and you see an accident on the side of the road. It could
happen that the person in the accident lives next door to you, or is the cousin
of your neighbor. But you would have to have some reason to figure that an
accident occurring on a road in Arizona involved somebody whom you might
know. Odds are that most accidents you see in such a place are accidents that
involve somebody that's nobody you know.
And when you're driving the freeway you rarely ever see anybody you
know. So we have to have some way of figuring out why it is that an accident
seen somewhere on a highway can be seen as possibly involving local people.
And not as a matter of craziness, either. Now, people do seem to have the view
that there are some parts of some roads which, while they're traveled by people
going wherever, are also specifically traveled by people going to some specific
place. My evidence for that is such a thing as, e.g. , if you're driving up the
Harbor Freeway on Saturday, and you look into the next car and see some
distribution of people, you're liable to say "Oh they're going to the USC
game, " though you can be five miles from USC. Or you could see that they're
going to Dodger Stadium, and a series of such places. And people routinely do
look into the next car, or see the traffic, and say "Everybody's going to the ball
game. " So that they have some sense that some parts of the road, while they're
trafficked by all sorts of people going all sorts of places, they are also specifically
trafficked by specific sorts of people going specific places. And there then may
be some part of the freeway outside of Santa Barbara which is seen as that part
of the freeway on which people are, who are going to Santa Barbara.
Now it's important that the people in the accident live in Santa Barbara,
because unless the people live in Santa Barbara it's not likely to be local news.
If the accident was on the border of Santa Barbara and Ventura and the
 Lecture 1 15
people lived in Ventura, it might be in the Ventura newspapers, but it
wouldn't necessarily be in the local Santa Barbara newspaper. For one, then,
the borders for local news are not strictly geographic. Somebody who lives in
Santa Barbara gets arrested half a block into Ventura, it might not be Ventura
news but it might be Santa Barbara news. Somebody from Santa Barbara gets
killed a mile into Ventura, it might be Ventura news if somebody from
Ventura killed him; it might not be Ventura news if nobody in Ventura was
involved, though it could be Santa Barbara news. You might perfectly well
come home to Newport Beach from Arizona and find out about an
automobile accident in Arizona reported in the Newpon Beach newspaper.
Which is to say, you might find out that somebody from Newpon Beach got
killed in Arizona.
So the monitoring of events in terms of that they are local news 'for here,'
wherever we are, can involve this business of 'on the way home from Ventura'
as a rather serious kind of matter for characterizing where we happened to be.
Indeed, had it not been 'on the way home from Ventura, ' then it might not
have been a told story at all - or, for that matter, an auto wreck that anyone
gave any attention to. That is to say, it's possibly the case that the interest in,
the noticing of, the wreck is somewhat geared to where the wreck occurs by
reference to where you normally are.
Now I want to name what has been done. We took a couple of phrases, or
clauses, " . . . down to Ventura . . . and on the way home . . . , " and what we
are engaged in is trying to see what the social circumstances are which would
involve these things being said. It's not a matter of 'style, ' but what
knowledge of the world is there that persons have which involves them in
putting these items in. The interest of the usage is if someone living
somewhere else could use such a line as 'drove down to X . . . and on the way
home' and be doing the same son of thing, exhibiting the same son of
knowledge and attention to the same sorts of issues as to what 'local news' is
made of, etc., as this person is.
Let me just note one funher thing related to the local news, and that is that
the event happened "yesterday. " That it happened "yesterday" is relevant in
this way: The constraints on mentioning something can be rather severe, such
that in talking of it today, it's only that it happened yesterday, or the day
before yesterday, or some day formulatable by reference to today - and within
very narrow limits - that it could be mentioned at all. That is to say, you
wouldn't expect that you could say "Did you read in the paper six months
ago there was an accident?" Under one alternative: You can mention it as a
second story. One marked difference between first and second stories is that
second stories don't contain time. The first story says 'something happened
yesterday; ' second stories don't contaip. time, or don't need to contain time, or
don't need to contain time that is related to the time of the conversation. And
in this case the second story talks of something that happened "that night, "
i.e. , some night, some time ago. And that's another sense, then, in which we
can say that this is a 'second story. '
We have, then, a rather strong time constraint on mentioning a piece of
16 Part I
local news. Essentially the constraints are, what happened between our last
conversation and this one - for certain sorts of people, anyway. And that can
be something with real interest, in that it permits us to deal with what's a
terribly deep sort of problem: It could be a subject of much puzzlement that
two sorts of facts are coexistently so: If you talk to somebody every other day,
you have something to talk about with them every other day. If you talk to
somebody every six months you don't have anything to talk about with them
when you talk with them.
Now how in the world would it be that you could have something to talk
about every day with somebody, and not have something to talk about when
you talk to them every six months? Why is it that you don't have six months
of news? You could figure that the less you talk with somebody, say, a friend
who lives in another city, the more you'd have to talk about. It's a rather
universal experience that that's not so. It's the more frequently you talk
together, the more you have to talk about.
The answer to it is like this: If you talk to them every other day, then what
happened today is an item that could be mentioned. And for every day one
can have events in that day which are a day's events, mentionable to
somebody one talks to on that day whom one talks to regularly. However,
suppose for example she had finished this conversation and somebody called
up whom she hadn't talked to in three months. The odds are enormous that
she would not mention the accident she saw yesterday, i.e. , the thing that
happened yesterday was specifically 'local news. ' Or, narrowing it to things
that are much more directly one's own, say you got a small raise yesterday. If
you talk to somebody today you could tell them "I got a raise yesterday. " If
you talk to somebody in three months, that raise is no news. What we have,
then, is that you need something you can talk to them about every three
months, which stands as a something which counts over three months. And
the set of things that count over a day would not count over three months,
and you then may literally find that you have nothing to say. Unless you're
able to manage your tri-monthly conversation as though it were a daily one,
which is on the one hand hard, and on the other hand the sort of thing that
if you can do it you get known for it. People come away from a conversation
with some sorts of people and say, "I haven't seen him in five years but it was
just like yesterday," i.e. , you had a bunch of things to talk about, which one
would talk about with somebody who you talked with yesterday.
What is eligible to be mentioned can, then, have interactional consider­
ations. I take it you can shift from one conversation to another and find that
the things that were perfectly okay in the last do not even occur to you to be
said in the next. And that can suggest the operation of an order of attention
to, not just who you're talking with, but when you talked with them last.
 2 Lecture
Features of a recognizable 'story;'
Story prefaces; Sequential locator
terms; Lawful interruption
I guess I ought to mention what it i s that people in the class will be doing.
Your tasks will be to give yourself a chance to see that you're catching on, by
doing some series of exercises. The exercises have a series of virtues to them,
and that is that the stuff I'm presenting is, as I understand it, researcher's stuff
in a particular sort of way. One tends to have a view from one's classes that
you have the same access to what something means as anybody else,
invariantly perhaps to your position. That is to say, there are things like a
researcher, a textbook writer, a lecturer, a TV audience, a class. And people
tend to have the view that everybody has pretty much the same understand­
ing of whatever material. Researchers don't have that view at all, at least the
researchers I know, including myself. I tend to figure that in the way in which
this stuff works, unless you do it or do some research, you don't know what
research looks like. You don't know how to read the results, you don't kuow
their sense, you don't know whether anything's been learned or what's been
learned. By doing the exercises you can come to see what you, yourself,
can do.
For something that looks either like magic, or like nothing, or like
impossible to be done, you can come to see that you could do it on different
materials. You get a rather different view of things that way, and I would like
people to get that view of things for themselves. You'll see that you can do
things at one point that you couldn't do at another, so you get a sense of what
sort of progress in your own minds you have acquired. You also find that you
learn something from what you did. And this experience of finding something
out may be fairly cut off from you, and it's something you ought to get, quite
independently of what I'll be doing here, and the virtues of the sortS of things
I do.
So there'll be these exercises, and let me say just blandly I've had classes for
four or five years now and the exercises aren't impossible; pretty much
everybody can do something and they get better over the semester. People get
a kick out of it, and find that they understand everything much better that
way. Now, nobody's expecting you to make miracles. What I do for any
given class, for example, will have taken me anywhere from six months to two
years to work up, and I don't expect that you would do things of that
elaborateness in two or three weeks. But the work is set up so that you can do
17
18 Part I
something in two or three weeks. It's set up so that you can do something
every day, in that that's the only way I can live with doing research - to find
something out every day. I don't like to have to wait four years to see if I've
got anything. So it's designed, in a way, to give you constant small rewards.
I'm going to start off by going over parts of the last lecture and
redeveloping certain things in it which I fudged, our of I suppose initial fear
that it would lose the class right then and there if, in order to make the
smallest passing point, I had to begin with something elaborate. So I fudged
some points and I'd like to come back to them and discuss them somewhat.
Then I'll go on with some more stuff about the same materials.
I began off by saying there are two stories here. A first thing I want to come
back to is the issue of that those things which I'm calling 'stories' are stories.
Now, it's obviously a story. What we're asking is, is there some set of features
that stories have so that one can have some principled basis for using what is
after all a lay characterization. What we want to find are some features that
have been put into it which provide for its recognizability as 'a story' . We
want, then, some features that are not just there incidentally, carried-along
artifacts of its being a story, but features that are put in, in the making of a
story.
What I want to be dealing with - and I'll give a lecture on this sort of
phenomenon shortly - is that among the most central things about stories is
that stories go on over more than a single tum of talk, or a single utterance.
Now, if you intend at the outset to produce talk which will involve that you
talk, somebody else talks, and you talk again, then, in the characteristic
environment of conversation, which is not two-party conversation but
more-than-two-party conversation, there's a real problem. And that is, if you
talk, and now B talks, it's open as to who's going to talk after B. Maybe you'll
get a chance to talk then, maybe you won't. The question is, is there some way
whereby you can provide that B should talk next, and also that when B is
finished, you should talk again, i.e. , that the others allow you that next slot?
The usual run of talk does not involve an attempt to control a third slot, and
usually you don't have very good ways to control the third slot.
Now the 'story preface ' phenomenon which I talked of last time - things
like "Say did you see anything in the paper last night" or "I heard something
wonderful today ' ' - announces that there is a story coming and therefore that
what one intends is to be talking in alternate positions until the story is
finished, not particularly caring who comes into the alternate positions, but
whenever they finish their "Mm hm"s, "Uh huh"s, whatever else they put in,
that others will be silent and allow you to go on. So that basically what a story
is in some ways, is an attempt to control the floor over an extended series of
utterances. Formally it can be said to be in the first instance an attempt to
control a third slot in talk, from a first. That's why, in terms of the sequential
organization of conversation, that one is 'telling a story' is an important thing
for others to recognize. So that, for example, if there were more than two
persons present in this conversation, if she finished "Say did you see anything
in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson
 Lecture 2 19
and I drove down t o Ventura yesterday, " and B said " Mm hm, " somebody
else shouldn't just go on about whatever they wanted to talk about. And
people don't. Stories can be told invariantly to the number of persons present
in a conversation. That is, you have people telling stories in a seven-person
conversation, and getting the floor for ten utterances across twenty.
So that's one basic reason that, that you're telling a story is something you
do right off. And it makes, then, the issue of recognition of a story something
that's not only relevant to what happens after the story is finished, but to how
the talk proceeds during the story. And one major import of the story preface
is announcing a ' story' and thereby announcing that this person is going to
talk across a series of utterances, allow for others to talk in the course of his
talk, and want the floor back after each finish of another. The preface is, then,
very important for the issue of ' a story. ' Further, I suggested last time that a
story preface does a lot of work. It indicates what it will take for the thing to
be finished, and it suggests what sort of thing should be done at the end. And
that's one order of the things involved in 'telling a story. '
Now there are a bunch of other things that are also present. One gross,
recurrent thing that is present for stories is that across its sentences one finds
that a lot of the words, particularly those that are 'carriers of the story' so to
speak, i.e. , the nouns, verbs, adjectives, can be said to be co-selected. If we take
the various words like 'drove, ' 'wreck, ' 'on the way home,' 'car, ' 'smashed, '
' small space, ' etc. then if we took each place in which the word we were
considering occurred, we could get easily enough that the word that occurred
there was a word from a similar class where one could replace it by more or
less equivalent words, i.e. , that would in some way 'say the same thing. '
We have a partial picture of persons, in producing their talk, engaged in
selecting words out of various formulations of word classes. They do it by
reference to syntactic constraints on word classes and various things like that,
and in various ways fix in on a word class from which a word is selected -
where many of them can be replaced with another. And one thing to look to
is that range of talk within which it looks like a set of words of some sort are
selected by reference to each other, or selected by reference to some stateable
thing, e.g. , a 'topic. ' I'll eventually claim that when people are doing 'topical'
talk it's not so much or only that all or some of their talk is 'about something; '
e.g. , they're talking about cars, or each utterance is about cars, but that how
you talk about cars when you're 'talking about cars' is distinctive from how
you talk about cars when you're 'talking about' something else. So, for
example, this isn't a discussion about cars. And the ways in which cars are
talked of in this conversation has to do with that what's being done is 'talking
about a wreck. ' So that, e.g. , in describing the car she saw, she doesn't say
"There was this 1 964 Chevrolet convertible, olive green with black uphol­
stery . . .
"

What I'm saying is if you take what I'll call the 'descriptors' in talk, then
you find that when people are telling stories, the descriptors are co-selected.
Let me bring that kind of thing home in a particular way, by reading another
story. If it's not too easy to see the point with one case, then with another case
20 Part I
you might be able to get a glimpse of a kind of parallel thing going on. This
story is told by a teenage boy, with three or four people present:

A: When I was thirteen some guys talked me into doing houses. Some
guy stole this jade cigarette lighter it must've been worth two
hundred bucks. Sold it for two bucks the next day. Cut down a
chandelier y'know. They stuffed it in my locker. I wasn't there. I
didn't go with 'em stealing. They stick it in my locker.
B: A chandelier?
A: A chandelier. It was crystal and all. They were doin' houses. It was
all kinds'v loot. Principal comes over says open up your locker. I says
why I just got books in there. Opened the locker. I didn't even know
it was in there. Bam I'm kicked outta school till they find out I didn't
have nothing to do with it.
B: When did this happen.
A: I was in junior high school.

Looking at the way in which the talk of, say, burglary goes on, one sees, with
things like "doing houses, " that the person who's talking about burglary is
using a way of characterizing what they were doing which is not, e.g. , the way
in which some of us might talk about burglary. It's not that he's a crook, he
happens to be an ordinary teenage kid, and many kids do that sort of thing.
And he might not talk about burglary in that fashion but within the telling
of a story about it. We get terms like "doing houses, " "loot, " "two hundred
bucks, " "stuffed. " It's not, for example, that this follow has "bucks" as the
only word with which to refer to money. In other places he talks about
"dollars," and things of that order.
If you look through stories comparatively, i.e. , take several stories and see
if there's a same sort of item or a same sort of action referred to in them, then
you can see each item or action looking like other items and actions referred
to in the story that it's in, and if you try to shift them around then you find
that it doesn't look right.
Now, I haven't proved that this is a story, or given anything like a
comprehensive analysis of what stories are like. But I think that I've suggested
that in using the term 'story' I haven't used an utterly unexplicated term; that
it looks explicable, that it seems to have parts, that its parts seem to be
analyzable, that they look like they'd be more or less interesting. It isn't
essential to the analysis that I prove that it's a story. But it is more or less
essential - at least in the style of work that I'm going to be doing here - that
when one is engaged in making an observation which proposes about some
matter that it's a case of some lay class, that you have something to say about
that lay class, or how it's a case of that lay class. That is to say, it misses the
point altogether when, e.g. , occasionally a co-professional of mine will say,
"Well what you really turned out to say was that that's a story. It was
interesting logic, but what you're really saying is that that's a story. " That's
not the point at all. The only thing that's interesting is the logic. That's the
 Lecture 2 21
whole thing. That it's a story, anybody knows. That's not the sociology. The
'points' are the points in the analysis. Sometimes the observations have
independent interest, where I take it that a lay scrutiny of some piece of
material would not come up with those observations. But those observations
were generated by some analysis yielding some phenomenon as observable.
And what you want to be watching is the way the argument is made. It's not
that that's a way to make an argument about the point, it's the way the
arguments are made that's the whole thing.
So, I take it there's a warrant for saying that the first is a story. Now if one
took that as a more or less exclusive structure, then one thing you would be
led to conclude is that the second isn't a story. You might say, "Well the
second doesn't have some of those things. It doesn't look anything like the
first. " Now how can we make a claim that it's a story. The key thing about
this one, which I will now develop, is that it's a ' second story. ' I intend to
develop that it's a second story in such a way as to have us be able to look at
some other sequence of stories which are not about the same topic and do not
involve the same people, and find there's a first story that looks like this first,
and a second story that looks like this second. I want to make a case that there
is a sequential organization with one of its characteristic features being, as a
general matter, that there are ' second things; ' that there can be 'second
stories, ' and that second stories are different than first stories.
A first sort of thing that will give us indications about the more or less
special character of this is that it says that what it's presenting has already been
told before to the same person: "I think I told you . . . " Now what gives us
any information that that's something distinctive? I guess the plain fact is, if
it happens that you do monitor the possible things you might say by reference
to whether you said them before and to whom you said them before, then if
you come up with that you've said it before to the person you're now talking
with, the consequence is that you should not say it. That is to say, there's a
major sort of norm against repeating the same thing to the same person. If
you do repeat the same thing to the same person, I guess that the usual
circumstance is that you don't realize it, i.e. , you just happen to repeat the
same thing to the same person.
Here we don't have that she just happens to tell this person something she
already told them, but she specifically announces that she knows she's doing
that. And that would suggest that there's some specific reasons for doing that.
That is to say, in that one should not tell somebody something you already
told them, to tell them something you know you've told them before is to do
something special. We can then ask in some strong way, why is she telling her
this? There's always the question why is she telling her this, but we can now
ask why is she telling her this in that she already told her, and she knows she
already told her.
One sort of thing relevant at least to why she might consider telling it is
that she just remembered it now. Remembering is much involved here, in
that, with "I think I told you . " she is engaged in asking the other to
remember something. And that remembering is involved is of some real
22 Part I
importance. If we look to the occurrences of utterances which are accompa­
nied by the various announcements and requests for remembering, we find
that they have very orderly features to them. For example, one announces that
one remembers something when what has just been said stands as an
explanation for how it is you remembered that. Using the terminology I'll
eventually use when I develop that matter as part of a much more general
topic, one of the ways you go about proposing that the talk you're delivering
now is 'topically coherent' with the talk that's being done is to use "I
remember. "
Now that's a gross point which says that a term like " I remember" has a
sequential function in conversation, locating a relationship between a given
utterance and a given prior utterance. It's a rather common phenomenon.
There are other terms in conversation which have a sequential, structural
function. I'll give an instance from this same data that's perhaps easier to
digest right now than "I remember. "

A: We were s-parked there for quite awhile but I was going to listen to
the local r-news and I haven't done it.
B : No, I haven't had my radio on either.

The term 'either' in conversation is this sort of a term. What it says is that
what I'm saying, I'm saying after you said something. It's simply a sequential
locator of some utterance. Now, there's an explanation for why it's done. I
don't want to give the explanation by reference to "either" because I'm not
on sure grounds about the sort of problems involved with it, but I suspect it's
a same sort of problem as there is with another instance of this sort of thing,
which is "I did too. "
"Too" is exactly that sort of a term. Somebody says "I noticed that" and
somebody else says "I did too. " It isn't that I noticed after you, it's that I'm
announcing that whatever I did, I'm saying it after you. So that if I had said
it first, you'd say "too . " And, for "I did too . " why you have that "too" is
kind of neat. The reason is if you take "I did," it's an utterance that is
occupied as to the sorts of actions it can do. It has essentially two possible sorts
of actions it can do, which are affiliated with the stress pattern. That is to say,
you can either say "I did," or I did. "
Now the thing is, if somebody says "I noticed that" and you say " I did,"
then you seem to be quarreling, and you're not intending to quarrel. If
somebody says "I noticed that" and you say "I did, ' it seem as though they
doubted you. So, in that this thing is in that sense occupied as to the
sequential actions it can do, i.e. , one says "I did" at certain places to do, say,
'reaffirmation' as a sequential object, and " I did" at other places, then if you
don't want to be quarrelling or indicating that you figure somebody doubted
you, but simply to follow some assertion, you put in 'too' and it takes the
stress, and thereby takes off the alternative issues. So the whole set of ' 'I did, ' '
" I did, ' ' and " I did too" are fully issues about the sequential organization of
conversation. And 'either' is that sort of object, too. You could fiddle around
 Lecture 2 23
with such utterances without those terms, to see that they seem a little
puzzling.
I raised that by reference to "I remember" which is not obviously the same
sort of thing, so as to show that there is a class of terms in places which are
occupied with work which is specifically involved in the sequential organiza­
tion of conversation. I make that as a point because it's an utterly unknown
one; unknown in this way: The area in which such sorts of issues as "What
does 'either' mean?" or "What does 'too' mean?' ' might be considered, would
seem to be the area of semantics. And the discipline of semantics doesn't take
it that, that there is a sequential organization to conversation matters for, say,
the meaning of talk in any strong way. I take it there are many things which
have as their 'meaning' that they're sequential operators, in the same sense
pretty much as there are things which are syntactic operators or logical
operators. Sequence is an independently structured phenomenon in conver­
sation, and it has objects which work in it, whose explication consists in
analyzing their sequential work.
The field-related question is, what sorts of things will it yield that we
thought were understood, or we didn't think were puzzles, or we didn't think
were understandable, that a consideration of the sequential organization of
conversation will illuminate or will solve. That is to say, what extensiveness of
import does the fact that conversation is sequentially organized, and that it's
an independent structure, have for whatever we know about language.
I was saying, then, that one of the things that the use of "I remember" does
is to propose that the utterance it's a part of is topically coherent with prior
talk, that is, that it is second to some prior talk. What's involved is, it's not
simply that a person proposes "I remember" something, but if you look at
what they've proposed to remember, it's something that's similar to, touched
off in some way by, topically coherent with what the other person said. As, for
example, an article in the New York Times, April 2 , 1968. The New York
Times has this Man of The Day article; some guy they talk about today by
reference to something that happened on this day. And this one is about Avril
Harriman:

A mellow William Avil Harriman switched off his television set after
President Johnson's speech last night, and picked a memory from his
vast collection.

Now the thing that's neat is that it's a "vast collection, " but given that
buildup, what the memory will be is locatable.

It was not really so extraordinary that the President had decided not to
run for reelection he said, why, he remembered sitting in the District of
Columbia's National Guard Armory that Saturday night of March
1962 . That was the dinner meeting at which Harry S. Truman, one of
the four other presidents of the United States who Mr Harriman has
24 Part I
served, stunned the political community with the statement ' ' I shall not
be a candidate for reelection. "

It's that order of things for which I went through the issue of the hearer's
analysis, etc. last time; that there really are sharp constraints on what
somebody will propose they remember at some point.
However, we have in our case something much more powerful than we
have in the Harriman story. Because while we could do a distributional
analysis of stories which suggested that when people use 'remember' they
really do present a thing that's strongly similar to and apparently occasioned
by something prior, we have in this case - and in other cases - that they aren't
simply saying "I remember, " they're engaged in attempting to get the other
person to remember.
When somebody tries to get another to remember something, they'll
present some body of information that can be used to find that thing. Now
in this case she doesn't give very much information: "that fall over at the
Bowl that night. ' ' What fall? (And there could be issues about what kind of
an object a 'fall' is. We make it out that there was some sott of accident, but
it needn't be heard as that. Indeed, this is one of the really fudged points last
time; that a lay reader would see that the second story had victims, and there
are no victims mentioned. I take it that we have the sense that there must
have been victims, but it's also so that I can't just say that there are victims.
I've fudged on that.) So the story is utterly spare. But it's sufficient. That is
to say, a question is, how can the other remember it when it is as spare as it
is? And the way it can be remembered when it is as spare as it is, is this: That
it's recognizably intended as 'a case similar to this other story' is used to find
what it is. The spareness of the story is, then, a feature of it.
I'll give a much more dramatic instance, from these kids in a group therapy
session. One kid is talking about a job he got. At some point the therapist says
" Last week you were mentioning something about the fact that you uh-" and
he's cut off by the kid saying "I got lost in one job? yeah. " The question is,
how does the kid, given that information, ' 'Last week you were mentioning
something about the fact that you . . . ' ' know what it is, of the things he said
last week, that he's being invited to remember. Obviously what it turns on is
things having been said right now in this conversation, where one can use
what has just been said to find what you're being invited to remember. You
can use it in a perfectly natural way, be not at all surprised that you turn out
to know this thing that they were reminding you of, before they even say it -
by virtue of the fact that you know that they remember it in just the same way
that you remember it. That is to say, what you just said reminded them of
something, where it may well have reminded you of that very thing.
One sort of consequence - and this is a rather technical consequence - is
this: As we're all well aware, interrupting is not a thing that people are
supposed to do in conversation. But interrupting occurs in conversation. The
question is where does it occur in conversation. And there are some sets of
lawful places that interruption occurs. That is to say, if we locate a class of
 Lecture 2 25
places which have no obvious relationship to 'interruption' as it is semantically
or otherwise defined, and we can say that there we will find interruption, then
that's kind of an interesting prediction situation. What I'm proposing is that
when persons go about doing 'reminding, ' i.e. , say to somebody "Do you
remember, ' ' "I think I told you," etc., then there you will find interruptions.
There you will find instances of talking before, e.g . , a sentence has been
completed. So it's not an enormously rare thing that someone is engaged in
announcing they've remembered, before what it is that the other person
might figure it would take for you to remember has been presented.
I leave aside the issue of why it is that when they remember they
immediately come in and don't wait for the other to complete; I'll deal with
that at another time. But that they do interrupt when they do remember has
at least the import for this discussion, of making it a question: How do they
come to be able to see what it is that they're being reminded of ? And I take
it that that turns on the fact that one reminds people of things that are
'talk-so-far-occasioned. ' Which is to say that 'remindings' deal with the
'seconds' phenomenon. And here 'second' is a technical term. It could
perfectly well be a third or fourth. A fifth story is for our purposes a 'second. '
It may well be there's some way of differentiating third and fourth and fifth,
but I don't know it yet.
That 'seconds' have different structural features than firsts seems to be a
wider phenomenon than just for storytelling. So, for example, for another sort
of thing that has firsts and seconds - questions and answers - then answers
tend to be less like sentences than questions are. Now we don't in the first
place tend to take it that there's a class of non-sentences and those are
'answers, ' since we can't recognize an 'answer. ' That is to say, that something
is an 'answer' is not in principle detectable unless you also have the sequence
in which it occurs. But if you get the sequence in which it occurs, then you're
liable to find that 'questions' are indeed sentences, and 'answers' are, with
some recurrence, not sentences. It's the same sort of thing for stories, and there
are other things like that as well.
That that is a ' second story' is, then, kind of intrinsic to it. Its production
turns on its being 'second' in the sense that one of the things involved is asking
the other to remember some story, where for that request for remembering to
work turns on use of the first story to find what sort of story that second would
be, and perhaps to find the very story.
Last time I mentioned that not only did the first story happen "yesterday, "
but that it happened yesterday is announced. And that there's n o announce­
ment of when the second story happened. First stories have specifically that
character. If you're going to tell somebody something that's 'news,' some­
thing that you have some reason to tell them, then you tend to say when it
happened. And you tend to only do it when it happened within some such
unit as 'yesterday, ' 'the other day, ' 'last Saturday night, ' and things like that.
The second story doesn't have to have that, as the first story occasioned it. One
might figure that that's incidental, so I'll read another. If you get rwo you
might feel a little better. Or you might figure it's still just chance.
26 Part I
A: My little brother's an animal lover. He comes up with some wierd
things. This morning he was mad at me 'cause people kill gophers.
Says uh "gophers, " you know I said "Well people kill gophers 'cause
they're on their property not because they don't like gophers, 'cause
gophers are harming them. ' ' And then he fought back, ' ' But how do
you know it's not the gopher's land. ' '

B : My mom came up with something like that. She said everybody's

hunting all these deers and everything, what happens if the guys gave
guns to the animals.

Leaving aside the ways in which those two stories can have the same other
sorts of similarities as the auto wreck stories, i.e. , such similarities as "my
brother comes up with . . . " "my mom came up with . . . , " and the ways in
which they're topically the same, they also have this business of "this
morning" for the first and no time for the second. So the 'time' thing is, I
think, relevant in that it is transparent in the telling of the second story that
it's occasioned by the first.
[Question re. the purpose of the course}
In the most general terms, here's the purpose. If you're going to have a
science of social life, then, like all other sciences of something or other, it
should be able to handle the details of something that actually happens. It
should be able to do that in an abstract way, while handling actual details. My
research is about conversation only in this incidental way, that conversation is
something that we can get the actual happenings of on tape and transcribe
them more or less, and therefore that's something to begin with. If you can't
deal with the actual details of actual events then you can't have a science of
social life. That sociologists or anthropologists don't study this sort of thing is
more cause for considerations about what are they trying to do, than anything
else. I take it that this is the most obvious thing one would study if one had
the interest of building a science of social life.
[Question re leaving out things like facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.}
Leaving aside whatever else is left out - and the kind of analysis I do
doesn't deal with , e.g. , all the things linguistics deals with - the main reason
why it's left out is that the sorts of things I'm trying to do are not particularly
to develop anything like a comprehensive analysis of what actually happened,
but to begin to set minimal constraints on what an explanation or a
description of talking or doing things together would look like, and one gets
started where you can maybe get somewhere. And things like facial
expressions are enormously difficult to study - which isn't to say that it
wouldn't be great to study them. It would be great to study them. It's an
absence. But there are lots of terribly difficult issues for trying to study things
like facial expressions, having to do with, e.g. , it's difficult to even consider
how you would do the filming that would be involved. Like, just consider two
 Lecture 2 27
people sitting and having a conversation together; it's not too obvious how
you'd get a picture which got you what each of them saw of the other, at the
same time, so as to see what they were seeing. Clearly enough, a picture of the
conversation from across the room wouldn't give you the same sort of thing
as the idea of a camera built into each one's head.
At any rate, the initial question I faced was, could I do something with
conversation at all. Some people figure it's absurd to have a conception that
we could develop a reasonable science of sociology, therefore let's do sorts of
things we're interested in, i.e. , focus on problems in the world, and get better
information for people to solve those problems. And others would figure that
you could study materials like this, but you couldn't study them in any more
or less obviously 'scientific' way. Now, I suppose that social science can be
considered to be a primitive science in a very literal sense. Look at what
primitive sciences tried to do, i.e. , they could make 'news' that anybody could
see. You could point it out to somebody and they could see, "Yeah, look at
that. " So that they're informative in a very conventional sense of 'informa­
tive. ' And, again, I take it that we can begin to work on the issue of what it
is that descriptions or explanations should minimally look like, and that we
could begin to get an idea of what might be involved in them as we developed
a feel for the phenomena. Because we have all sorts of ideas about what
explanations should look like, but not particularly ideas of what they should
look like when they're controlled by coming to terms with this sort of
material, i.e. , just whatever happens in whatever way it happens.
So what's involved is a sort of beginning. Though that shouldn't be treated
as claiming excuses. It might be possible to do some things with, say, facial
expressions, but I don't know what to do with them now.
[Question re. "I remember"]
The possibility that there are some ways in which memory is organized by
reference to organizational features of conversation is kind of an awesome one,
and one which I can give little bits of remarks on. One of the things about
inviting somebody to remember is that one seems to feel confident that the
remembering you invite, and it turns out with some large regularity to it the
remembering you get, is something that can take place in 'conversation time. '
That is not merely to say that it can take place such that the person
remembering can do it in the same conversation, but can announce the
memory when you finish your utterance, or even before. And that the usual
timing constraints of conversation - that people start up very rapidly after
somebody finishes - can accomodate remembering is a kind of im­
pressive fact.
Another way that it appears that memory is in some perhaps quite
dramatic way at the service of the conversation is that what one remembers
stands in some dose relationship to what it is that's just been done, and if you
don't get a chance to say it, when you then get a chance to say it, you've
forgotten it. It is in some ways an utterance by utterance phenomenon. I don't
know, all I can say is that the fact that what one remembers, that simply pops
into your head, turns out to be point-after-point appropriate, and that it pops
28 Part I
into one's head within these very severe timing constraints, seems to be a sort
of fact that some attention should be given to. And whether it means that the
organization of conversation has some relevance for the study of memory, I
don't really know. The time constraints in conversation may be some basis for
the time constraints of memory. At least that memory that's used in
conversation. But I'm a bit leery of moving from people saying things like "I
remember" to talking about ' memory. '
And I don't know a thing about stuff that would seem quite relevant; the
psychological literature on memory-time, etc., but I once read a paper by
David Rappaport, who specialized in things like memory. It's in his Collected
Papers and it's a report on a fellow who had amnesia. And they gave him a
story that they figured was similar to his circumstances, and he read the story
aloud, burst into tears and his amnesia disappeared. So the issue of the way
in which stories operate to produce memories is maybe a curious one.
Now there's one other connection that's important in this regard, and
that's the relationship between remembering something and making some­
thing into one's experience. As a way of thinking about the things that get
presented in these two stories, they could be said to have as a peculiar thing
about them that they're presented as these people's own experience. Whereas
you could imagine living in some sort of 'objective' world in which the way
one finds out to whom something happened is, e.g . , suppose it was a sad
thing that happened, then you find out to whom specifically it was sad, and
it's their thing.
But what happens is not that at all. It's that everybody, in whatever way
they're involved, it's their experience. There's relatively little about the people
who were in the wreck; mostly there's stuff about the wreck she saw, and it's
incorporated as her wreck. Maybe that operates by virtue of the fact that
regularly what one can remember is one's own experience, so one works
something up into its being one's own experience - for which there's old
psychological literature. Like William James would have supposed that
remembering, recognition, and the self are inseparable. And I suppose that
turns on an interest in amnesia, in which you get specifically that having lost
the sense of who it is you are, then you've lost all the memories that somehow
are collected that way. But certainly if we reconsider the discussion of last
time, the teller's position is in each case key. And one doesn't remember, e.g. ,
another story that the first storyteller was in, one remembers a story that
oneself was in; where that holds independent of the characters involved.
What's beautiful in its fashion is that it's not just one set of big problems
that one can attack by considering even this little fragment of data, but that
there are a considerable range of tacks one can take on it. That has a great
virtue in that one of the research-psychology problems is how in the world do
you get yourself to look at a page of conversation day after day, week after
week - and you need to do that in order to get just the collection of small
observables that you need, to be able to get characterizations of the
phenomena. It takes a long time looking at a fragment like this to get even
a list of 2 0 or 30 points about it, without any explanations, descriptions, etc.,
 Lecture 2 29
just by virtue of the fact that it's hard to see anything when you look at a piece
of conversation. You have to have a way to come back to it. And one way you
can keep looking at it is to see the range of tacks you can take on it, which
aren't just fitting it to something, but which it will bear consideration of.
At any rate, I'm not prepared to talk about the relationship between
remembering and the organization of conversation, beyond that small
collection of points having to do with timing, topical coherence, the
effectiveness of an invitation to remember, and the fact that if you don't get
a chance to say something very quickly you forget it; all of which seem to
suggest at least that memory is at the service of the organization of
conversation. And a possibility that, on the other hand, the organization of
conversation reflects the possible constraints on the way memory, physiolog­
ically or whatever, can operate, is certainly not to be ruled out.
[Question re the teller of the second story as a 'witness' when she doesn't say
that she "saw it. "}
A way to consider this is to ask, if you don't put in how you come to know
something, what will it be heard as? That is to say, sometimes people don't
put in how they came to know it, e.g. , "There was an accident last night . . . "
And there's a series of possibilities. You could have read it in the newspaper,
heard about it, saw it, been in it, etc. Is there anything that can be said about
what people make of a report where there's no indication of how the report
was gotten? My guess is that if no indication is presented, for some class of
things for which it's at least possible that you saw it, then it will be heard that
you saw it. And if you didn't see it, then you should announce that you
didn't.
That's a type of rule. It says that certain things should be done and if you
don't do one of those things, then an alternate item is heard. For example,
somebody might say "There was an awful traffic jam over at the circle this
morning . " Someone else might say "How long were you caught in it?" And
you say "I wasn't there, I heard it on the radio. " But they will in the first
instance take it that you were saying you were there. That's one sort of thing.
And if you were, say, in an accident, that would surely be put in, i.e. , you
would surely say "I was in this accident . . . " by virtue of the fact that that
would locate the sorts of things that the other should say when you've
finished. They would then be engaged in commiserating and things like that.
But I would rather withdraw the point that she was a witness and not look
for that question in this material, and to say that you want to really look to
the question of which things get presented, e.g. , "John told me . . . " "I
heard, " etc. , and if none is presented, which is taken to be present. The whole
game is to find out what you can find out from anything. If you can't study
it there, you don't study it there.
However, there are more than a couple of reasons why you'd figure that
this person was a 'witness. ' One important sort of thing is that it really does
matter that how her story is told maps in some ways onto some part of the
categories that the first story has. If the memory-search operation goes on in
the ways I've suggested, then even if she doesn't say she was a witness, the
30 Part I
way she found that story is by looking for a story in which she was a witness.
And if you look at the other stories, then they come out that way directly.
That is to say, "My brother comes up with . . . " "My mom came up
with . . . " and in the other set of materials I gave out last time, it's really
close. 1
So that's a procedure that people use. They take the teller's status in the
story, seek to find a story in which they are just such a person, and then tell
that story. If they don't have success they don't get a story. And if the
procedure works this way, then it would just 'happen' that way, that she
would be a witness.
Now you may say, well that's not the procedure. But then the issue is that
one wants to introduce materials which suggest that the procedure is not as I
had extracted it from these and other stories. What one wants is not an
absence, i.e. , that she doesn't say she was a witness, but a situation in which
on the occurrence of a first story, someone tells a story that wouldn't have this
procedure used to get it. The key thing is the procedure. And we're trying to
extract from this sequence an apparently generalized procedure, a generally
usable procedure. I'm not saying it's the only procedure used for finding
second stories; I don't believe that for a minute. It's a procedure that is usable
for finding second stories. It's an interactionally elegant procedure, since if a
person is using a story to make a point, then what you can do to show that
you agree is to tell a same story. Furthermore, if you want to do a
disagreement you can tell a story which has you in a different position, for
example. Which is to say that it's perfectly expectable that on some occasions
people will tell stories that are 'different; ' analyzing out, besides the
characters, the point of the story, and using now the point as the thing they're
dealing with.
[Question re proving that somebody understood something.}
If we had a bunch of experimental sociologists, psychologists, etc. , and we
asked, "How do we prove that somebody heard and understands something
that somebody said?" we would all come up with constructions of ways to
determine that. A typical device is if somebody tells a story, you give a hearer
ten minutes and then ask them to retell the story. Or you construct a set of
short-answer questions. And they'd say that's a way of deciding what the
memory is. Now what's impressive here is, instead of saying "Let's find a way
of seeing whether people understand what somebody else says, " we've asked
"Is there some procedure people use which has as its product a showing that
they heard and understood?" And if we describe that procedure, we have a
way of showing that they heard and understood - or finding that in some
sense they didn't hear and understand, i.e. , sometimes the other person will
say "No that's not what I meant. " So it could be a test, if you like. But we
have an abstract procedure which describes how people go about showing an

1 Probably referring to the "Oh God Christmas" fragment which has, "his father said,
'Well, after 25 years, I don' t think we're gonna give presents ' , " and "I know just what you
mean . . . my father said ' No gifts ' . " See Spring 1 968, May 29 lecture, vol. I, pp. 795-6.
 Lecture 2 31
understanding. It is also a description of how they proceed. A further beauty
of it is that, for such a question as what is it that somebody's supposed to find
out from what somebody said, that procedure is directed also to telling us
what they found out.
So it's in these sorts of ways that relevant to, e.g . , proving things is that you
try to find some procedure they use and then characterize it.
 Lecture 3
Turn-taking; The notion
'conversation; ' Noticeable absences;
Greetings; Adjacency
This time I'm going to give a lecture which, in its standards and its import,
and the implication of its parts considered, will make up the substance of the
rest of the course. What I want to do is to lay out in as general a way as
possible at this point how the sequential organization of conversation is
constituted. I start out with two observations about single conversations, and
thereafter develop some of the ramifications of the initially observed features.
I give in this first instance no materials for the observations, in that they are
grossly apparent. By the term 'grossly' I mean that while they're overwhelm­
ingly present features, they are also sometimes not present features - and their
sometimes non-presence is something I will talk to at considerable length. In
that they are grossly apparent, there will be no news involved in the
observations themselves. That is to say, I make no claim that there's any
particular insight in making those observations. They are not the first
observations one would make about conversatiop, they're not the first
observations I made about conversation. But the interest in them is not that
they are news, but what news can be gotten from them.
Here's the first feature: In a single conversation, people talk one at a time.
Or, putting it in a different way, at least and no more than one party talks at
a time in a single conversation.
The second: Speaker change recurs.
Now, an initial observation about those features. It's not just one feature
and another, but those features are co-occurrent features. That those two are
co-occurrent is a fact that we should make a lot of. In particular, from the
co-occurrence of the two features, we can produce an initial problem which is
clearly an interesting problem; clearly, if you like, a sociological problem.
That is, it's a coordinational problem.
The problem is, how is it that while speaker change recurs, one-party-at­
a-time is preserved. That's clearly a coordinative problem in the sense that
what it involves us in noticing and trying to see how it could ever happen, is
that the stopping by one speaker and the starting by another speaker occur in
close order. And the question is, then, how does it happen that when
somebody stops - though the notion 'stop' is clearly a very problematic kind
of notion - somebody starts up. And only one starts up. That is to say, on the
one hand, people don't start up talking just anywhere in the talk of others.
32
 Lecture 3 33
And on the other, if conversations take place with more than two people
present, then there's a question as to how it could happen that at each
given point when somebody stops and somebody starts up, only one starts
up.
Let me put it this way: We have the initial observations, one and two. We
have, then, an observation about the features observed in one and two. And
that observation about the features observed in one and two. yields a problem
for us: How is it that two happens while one is preserved. Now that problem
has this to recommend it in the first instance; that it locates for us a class of
places in conversation where the two features whose co-occurrence it's dealing
with are particularly problematic. Call that place 'completion-transition points, '
i.e., a completion point or a transition point. That is to say, the problem tells
us to look at completion-transition points as a place where the initially
observed features have a distinctive problematicalness.
And the problematicalness is evidenced in these sorts of ways: First of all,
just observationally, that's one class of places where more than one speaker
talking at a time specifically happens. It happens of course elsewhere that
more than one speaker talks at a time, but here we're locating a class of places
to look at where that thing occurs and where we have reason to figure that it
will occur, so that we can get at how it comes to occur there, and perhaps the
particular sorts of features it has when it occurs there. Also, silence
distinctively occurs here. That is to say, no one talking at a time occurs here.
Recall that the initial observation was 'at least, and not more than one. ' It's
not just that at some places in conversation one person is talking, but that
someone is always talking. That's clearly not true in some ways, but I'll deal
with that.
I want now to make a case for what may or may not be obvious on any sort
of reflection; that achieving the co-occurrence of one and two takes work. So
we have an initial problem, how is it that while two occurs one is preserved,
and what we want to do is to find out what the achievement of a solution to
that problem involves; what sorts of coordinative work are involved.
First of all there's that sort of work as between a current speaker and any
others which involves how it is that a current speaker is able to show other
participants to the conversation that he isn't yet, that he's about to be, that he
is now, completing. What does he do so as to indicate that he's still talking.
I take it it's plain that it isn't obviously the case that you just have to keep
spewing forth words, i.e., people are recognizably 'still talking' when they are,
e.g. , paused. And more importantly in its fashion, speakers have ways of
showing that they are now finished. If the feature is that exactly one should
be talking, then showing that you're finished when you're finished is
important so as to allow somebody to start talking directly upon your
completion. And this has as a correlate, how is it that non-current speakers go
about determining, from whatever it is that a speaker is doing, that he is or
is not finishing, is or is not finished.
Another sort of problem concerns, at least initially, the relationship
between the various non-current speakers: How is it that the various current
34 Part I
non-speakers coordinate their actions at the transition point so that at the
transition point some one of them talks, and only one of them talks.
Now, given the initial observations and now this third, we can pose a
problem by reference to just those features, when we come to consider some
other sorts of facts about these features. And these facts are the sorts of
invariancies that these features have when they co-occur. They are not features
that vary with, e.g. , the number of participants to a conversation. They hold
for single conversations across whatever n participants there are for the
conversation, and across changes in the personnel of a given conversation.
They hold across various other compositional features of the parties. I don't
know which features they don 't hold across, but they seem to hold across
things like sex, occupation, political persuasion, etc. That is to say, it's not
particularly a feature of, e.g. , male conversation or female conversation or
female-male conversation that one party talks at a time and speaker change
recurs. They hold also across types of conversations - argument, business
talks, whatever else. They hold across the parts of a conversation -
beginnings, middles, ends. They hold across topics. So they seem to be, then,
rather general, formal features of conversation.
Let me note a couple of incidental things. With respect to the point about
n participants not serving to provide variants of 'one at a time,' what I'm
saying is that it doesn't happen that when we get six people in a conversation
as compared to two, what we get is more than one party talking at a time.
However what we do get, at least sometimes anyway, is that as the n goes up
you may get more than a conversation going. So that what happens is that the
features are preserved and more than one conversation emerges. That is to say,
it may be 'hard' to conduct a conversation with ten people. As a way to ease
the problem, we don't then allow three people to talk at a time in that
conversation. What you'd get, however, is two, three, four conversations
developing out of it. It's via such sorts of points that some of the points in the
initial observations can be gotten. That is to say, you can begin to see that
people 'adjust' to these features. And that observation itself, about the
emergence of multiple conversations, becomes available as something one
might look to, by consideration of the initial observation. So we're really
going about abstracting whatever we can from these initial observations.
And we'll be doing that for a very, very long time.
So we have these features, one and two. We have some suggestions about
their generality of presence and their invariance across other features (and by
'invariance' I do not mean 'invariableness. ' They are utterly not 'invariable').
We also have a problem, i.e. , how is it that while two happens one is
preserved, and some brief considerations about the sorts of coordinated work
that we want to be looking to so as to see how it is that that problem might
get dealt with.
Let me stop that line of consideration for a bit, so as to give a different way
to consider this sort of issue. When I began to work on conversation, one sort
of question was: Did it seem to be the case that there was a reasonable unit,
'a single conversation, ' i.e. , could that be an analytic unit. That is to say, as
 Lecture 3 35
compared to its being the case that there are only, e.g . , subspecies. That there
are various types of conversations, the various types have their features, but
if you look at the various types there's nothing that is literally in common,
though there may be something here and something here and something here,
so that we could get an average and say there is a generalized 'conversation'
but no actual conversation has its features. And if no actual conversation has
all the features, then there's no point in talking about the unit 'single conver­
sation. ' Conversations may go on that way but they're not organized to go on
that way. What I wanted to find was, are they organized to go on that way.
Now, how do you go about coming up with something like an answer for
that question. One obvious way would be to see if there seems to be any
invariant parts to a conversation; parts of a conversation which were parts of
any conversation. So, consider what seem to be 'parts' of conversatons. For
example, asking about the weather, or saying goodbye at the end. Do those
seem to be present for any conversation? Clearly not. And there didn't seem
to be anything that, as a 'part' in that sort of way, was a part for any
conversation. But there was something that seemed to be rather close to that,
and that part is what I'll call 'greetings. '
What makes 'greetings' close to an invariant part, aside from the fact that
greetings occur in a hell of a lot of conversations, is that there are some rather
neat aspects to greetings which might permit you to use them as a definitive
feature of conversation, and thereby permit you to say that, there being a
definitive feature of conversations, i.e. , single conversations, then 'single
conversations' are things. Which is what we've been attempting to find a way
of doing.
One of the nice things about greetings is that while greetings sometimes do
not occur in actual conversations, at least sometimes when they do not occur
their absence is noticeable. For example, people say about somebody they
talked to, "He didn't even say hello. " That the absence of greetings is at least
sometimes noticeable suggests that they have a relevance beyond their aaual
use. That is to say, they are used in some corpus of conversations but beyond
that corpus they have a relevance for other conversations in which they are
noticeably absent.
The 'noticeably absent' thing is very, very important and it will come up
again and again. If you're going to make a statement which proposes that
something is absent, then you can't in any serious way propose that X is
absent unless you have some way of discriminating the absence of X from the
assertable absence of millions of things, or ten things that anybody could
name. In order to make a non-trivial assertion that X is absent, you have to
have some way of showing that a statement, "X is absent," is different from
some statement, "Y is absent, " where Y may also be absent. For example, I
might say "There is no greeting in this conversation" and somebody else
might say "Well, there is no suicide threat, either, so what is it that makes
your statement that there was no greeting something other than just
something you're saying?" Now one way to go about dealing with making
non-trivial statements about absences is to have some way to say that the
36 Part I
absence is also an event. That is to say, for only some class of things will it be
the case that you can say that X is absent by virtue of the fact that the absence
of X is a noticeable feature of what happened. And one criterion for its
noticeable status is that people say about it, "X is absent. "
There are other things about greetings, particularly relevant to their
absence, and also relevant for that there are indeed 'parts' of conversation.
One of them is that greetings have a place where they occur if they occur, so
that if they don't occur you can say where they didn't occur. Greetings occur
at the beginning of conversation. It's not just a part anywhere in a
conversation, look for it maybe you'll find it, but you can say where to look
for it. It has, in that sense, a structural place in conversation. And there's
another rather neat feature which also raises greetings as candidate for a part
of conversation: It isn't obvious that one can come up with an exclusion rule
for greetings. If there is one I don't know about it at this point. But it appears
to be the case that for most sorts of conversations that you could think of, at
the beginning of that conversation a greeting is a relevant thing to do. People
you speak to every day, year after year, it doesn't happen as, e.g. , with
exchange of introductions, to take a gross comparison, that after some nch
meeting they become irrelevant and you don't do them anymore. Greetings
remain relevant. You're married 2 5 years, you can still, when you come into
the house, say "Hello . "
S o there's this candidate part o f conversation. Now we get into a little bit
of trouble. Clearly enough, I suppose, one would say that if you happen to
have, e.g. , some half.,hour conversation with greetings at the beginning, then
you have a conversation. What happens, however, if you have only an
exchange of greetings? And we get, not at all infrequently, people doing
'merely' an exchange of greetings. Would it be said that that's 'a conversa­
tion'? Having picked on greetings as at least a part that conversation has, and
therefore we can talk about a 'single conversation' as a structured thing, we
now end up with the possibility that we're in a position of calling "Hi" "Hi"
a conversation. And that grates on people. It seems to be inconsistent with
people's conception of what a conversation is.
I'm going to leave the consideration of is there a unit, 'conversation, ' and
talk now to the issue of what's a conversation. The problem can come up in
a series of different ways; for one, in just the way it came up here, where we're
engaged in allowing for something being a conversation which people figure
is not a conversation when it's brought to their attention. Once the issue
comes up, it can be framed as a matter of modem philosophical interest:
What do we have to say about the notion 'conversation'? And taking myself
as a particularly relevant sample for that sort of issue - i.e. , philosophers do
this sort of discussion with me - that problem seems to be dealt with by
saying things like, "Well, would you consider a press conference to be a
conversation?" "Would you consider that section of your class when people
are asking questions to be a conversation?" "Would you consider the talk that
people do, who are engaged in assembly-line work, over time, to be a
conversation?' '
 Lecture 3 37
Another sort of procedure is to look to actual conversation to see when the
notion 'conversation' comes up, to see what it is that people seem to
understand by it. That is to say, to explicate the notion of 'conversation' used
in conversation, and then use that to constrain the candidates, classes, parts,
or whatever else, that you're going to call 'conversation. ' That would seem to
be a rather natural procedure. Now, in that this procedure may seem quite
close to procedures I routinely use, it's very important to follow the
distinctions I'm going to make about it for 'conversation. ' I'm going to be
proposing that such an explicational procedure for 'conversation' will not
work, should not be used.
The reason we want to reject the results of that procedure has to do with
a consideration of when it is that the notion of 'conversation' comes up in a
conversation. It can come up in places like this: You say, "I had a conversation
with so-and-so yesterday. " And somebody may say "Oh? What did you talk
about. " And you say "Nothing," or give some kind of a characterization.
And by reference to what you offer, he may then say "Well that's not a
conversation" or "You call that a conversation?" Now the point about that is,
in part, that the locus of use of a notion may be criteria! for what the notion
is. If the question of the notion of 'conversation' comes up only at special
places, and those special places operate in particular ways, then perhaps one
ought not to suppose that the notion that comes up at those places is the
notion used independently of its coming up.
That is, for the notion 'conversation, ' as for an enormous range of other
notions, its conversational locus is relevant to what use you want to make of
it. The use of conversation as a way of locating some conception which you
then are going to give the status of 'semantics' to, e.g . , to use to rewrite an
entry in the dictionary, has as one major sort of difficulty that the structure of
conversation is relevant to when it is that that notion becomes a talked of
thing. And unless you have reference to what sorts of issues are involved when
that thing is being talked of, then claims that, e.g. , when it's not talked of it's
known in the way it is when it is talked of, can't be made.
I want to turn our attention just a little bit and notice the following. The
complaint that if you had a candidate conversation that went just "Hi" "Hi"
then you don't have a conversation, is in the first instance looking at some
historical object. It may be that what will turn out to be the correct criteria for
deciding what is a 'conversation' don't particularly involve you in focussing
on the fact that a conversation finished where it did, as defining where it could
have gone. And instead, if what is involved is conversation's sequential
organization and the rules for that sequential organization, then the question
is not whether something that we can lay out that went from here to there was
a conversation or not, but whether whatever was done was done by reference
to how conversation gets done, and via that, that it could have more or less
gone on indefinitely. It being done, it needn't have ended this way. The rules
will allow for it to end this way, and for it to end other ways.
That is to say, 'doing conversation' is behaving according to certain sorts of
orderly procedures. And we can notice, e.g. , that "Hi" "Hi" satisfies the
38 Part I
initial observations, i.e. , "Hi" "Hi" occurs by reference to ' one party at a
time' and 'speaker change' occurring. So, if it turns out that the features of
conversation are not 'parts' in that way, but are formal features in this way,
then what happens is, having offered greetings as candidate 'parts' , the shift
that takes place is coming to see that one doesn't want, or need, or have,
'parts' like that at all. It need not be the presence of some lexical items in some
order that is definitive of 'conversation, ' but that there are means for the
preserving of certain features. Where the rules that provide for the preserva­
tion of those features, and the tasks that are done in satisfying those rules, can
permit you to focus on what the potential is at any given point in a
conversation. We're using, then, a much more abstract procedure and a
different set of features than 'parts of conversations' like 'greetings, ' 'endings, '
o r whatever. We can then ask d o we have 'conversation' i n a somewhat
different way.
In its fashion the history I've recounted is a perfectly natural history; i.e. ,
it would be perfectly natural for whatever course of development of analysis
of something that what you're looking for initially when you look at
something - a plant, a social object, whatever it may be - is to find some
parts. One would begin off, then, with things like 'greetings' and in due
course come to things like 'one at a time' and 'speaker change' occurring.
Now I want to talk to the issue of what a solution to the problem, How
is it that while speaker change occurs, one at a time is preserved, looks like.
I'll begin that by sketching out what at least initially seems to be a simple
solution - and a simple general solution, i.e. , one that can hold for any
conversation of any length in some community of conversations. The aim of
that is to give some idea about what in the world it means to say we have a
solution to that problem; what a 'solution' would look like. The solution that
I offer is an adaptation that I made from a research report on a somewhat
affiliated problem, 'Logic, rhetoric and poetics among the Burundi' by Ethel
Albert, in the issue of the American Anthropologist called 'The ethnography of
communication' , 1 9 6 5 or 1966.
For the simple solution to this general problem, what we have to have is
some way, no matter what the number of conversationalists is, and no matter
who that number consists of, i.e. , not only for, e.g. , five conversationalists as
compared to seven, but for any five, to order their speech relatively to each
other for any actual conversation they go through. We need some solution
which anybody can consult so that they don't have to have, e.g. , negotiations
before the conversation - which would themselves be conversation - to arrive
at some way to get through the conversation. And here's what Albert
proposes, reconstructed somewhat. What you have is a single stratification
system in which every member is, for other purposes, ordered relative to every
other member in the society. And everybody knows their relative ordering to
everybody else. When any subgroup gets together for conversation, what is
done is to use their hierarchical positions to generate a first round of
conversation, where a first round consists of each person present talking once.
Highest ranking person goes first, next highest second, etc., etc. When you
 Lecture 3 39
get a first round, then all that's necessary is just repeat the round indefinitely.
What's left out of Albert's account is some indication of how it is that anyone
decides that, e.g. , the first speaker is finished so that the second should speak.
Well, you could imagine that there'd be a particle or word that's used only
and always to end an utterance. Such things exist, e.g. , in radio communi­
cation techniques, "Over," "Roger, " "Over and out. " And then the next
speaker goes.
There are a range of problems that this sets up, some of which seem to be
unsolvable, e.g. , what happens when speaker one stops talking and speaker
two doesn't talk? Albert has a remark to the effect that if a high ranking
person refuses to talk on his turn, the conversation just stops. For other
problems you could get solutions: Such issues as how anybody talks to some
specific other person and how they, then, go about talking back to him. You
could consider the sort of thing that is done in some sort of parliamentary
bodies: If A is talking and A insults B in the course of his talk, then B has a
right to talk at that point; B doesn't have to wait until his turn to talk, to deal
with A's insult.
But in any event, it gives us a stark simplicity we can see, and a fabulous
interest for social sciences, which turns on this: You could predict the in-detail
order of speakers of any conversation in that society without ever looking at
those conversations. And you could find whether there were any particularly
odd events, or anything worth further examination, by simply inspecting the
actual order of some conversation. That is to say, you predicted it would go:
1 , 2 , 3 , 4, 5 ; 1 , 2 , 3 , 4, 5 and it turned out that in some round it didn't go
that way, it went 1 , 4 5 , 2 , 3 or 1 , 4, 2 , 3 , 5 , etc. We might then focus on
that as a problem and try to find out how it happened. Perhaps some change
in status had taken place. But it's altogether unclear what would happen -
and Albert doesn't have much to say about it, she says it doesn't happen - if
somebody spoke out of turn. You might find that what happens is they kill
the guy, since in a way there's a lot invested in its coming off in order.
There do seem to be a series of ways in which it's fragile, and in fact I think
that it doesn't work that way at all, but it gives us some sort of idea about
what a solution looks like. Now turn to our society of speakers. While there
might not seem to be any reason in the world to suppose that there's a general
solution, perhaps the reason that people believed there might be more or less
general solutions turned on the fact that the possibilities of conversation are
enormously widespread. One can talk on the phone, doing what's a
recognizable conversation with somebody one has never met, without any
trouble whatsoever - or at least for some people one has never met. And one
is able to engage in conversation - at least with respect to these sorts of
features - with an enormous range of 'new' people. Which would seem to
suggest that pretty much everybody must have some way which they take it
is the same or similar to others for dealing with the question of how it is that
sequencing in conversation is achieved.
There are a series of issues. One issue concerns the question of the
'completion ' phenomenon: How is it that people go about producing
40 Part I
recognizably complete utterances. And a basic thing that seems to be involved
is that there's a generically available packaging device for utterances, and
that's the sentence. And what we'll be doing is examining the sentence for
those aspects of its structure which are relevant to sequencing in conversation.
The gross point is that the utterances in conversation seem by and large to
occur in integral numbers of sentences, and not fractional, or integral and
fractional, and in terms of units of one. Furthermore, not only is that more or
less roughly so, it's so across rather large variances in the length of the
utterance being produced, i.e. , it doesn't happen only if people are producing
utterances of six words, but they will adapt even rather long utterances to
single-sentence formats. The sentence is a great packaging technique for a
series of reasons, only a couple of which I'll mention. It has a structure which
can at all points be seen as to whether it is possibly complete or not possibly
complete, and people are able to deal with it in such a way as to see, on its
occurrence, that it's possibly complete. And also, from its beginning it can be
looked at to see what it will take to complete it. If somebody begins with
"If, " for example, then there's already strongly usable information as to what
it will take to complete that sentence.
Now the sentences we'll be considering here, we'll have to re-imagine as
they're being produced. That is to say, I'll be talking about what I'll call
'process-sentences, ' and not 'product-sentences, ' and there are some differ­
ences. Mainly what I'll be distinguishing is that process-sentences can be
grammatical in such a way that, dealing with them as they happen, they're
recognizably grammatical. If, however, you take the utterance off a page of
transcript, it will tum out to be an ungrammatical sentence in some way. A
simple way to think of it is, A talking along producing a sentence, and B cuts
him off. Then what A has produced, looked at on the page, is an
ungrammatical sentence or at least a non-fully-grammatical sentence, though
it's a so-far grammatical sentence.
Recall also the discussion about stories, where I mentioned that we have
these 'story preface' phenomena. There I suggested that a reason for the story
preface phenomenon was that if you intend to produce talk of more than a
sentence length, then you want to be saying that in advance, so that people
will not figure that every possible completion is your completion. Now if
you're going to do that, you have to have ways to signal your completion
independently, since hearers are attentive to this formal technique for
recognizing completion, i.e. , the sentence as a packaging unit.
That suggests how people massively go about producing utterances which
are recognizably complete or recognizably incomplete, and how, then, if
others don't talk while someone's talking, you get one-at-a-time until the
transition point. And it tells us when it is that transition points will occur.
Now how is transition dealt with. There seems to be an ordering of solutions.
A first solution - and it's first in the sense that if this one is done, it operates;
if it's not done, the second may be done and if the second is done it operates;
but you only get the second if the first hasn't been done. So, the first solution:
Current speaker can select next speaker. The rule for the various non-
 Lecture 3 41
speakers would then be, look to see whether a current speaker has selected
someone.
The whole business might sound very simple, but much of the work we'll
be doing will be on the various techniques that speakers use to select next
speaker, and the way that that occupies their sentence. That is to say, there is
some work in a sentence besides showing its completeness or incompleteness;
work which is devoted to doing a seleaion of a next speaker. The thing we
would think of first, i.e. , saying the name of the speaker you're selecting, e.g. ,
"Joe, what do you think, " is not at all anything like the only or even the most
common way that people go about selecting next speakers.
So we have 'current speaker selects next speaker. ' If we consider that alone,
we see that we have an altogether different system than the one I sketched
before. Consider only a couple of differences. In the system sketched earlier,
suppose you're Number 5 . While there's a conversation proceeding, insofar
as your talking-turn is concerned, you don't have to listen to anything except
the talk of Number 4 . That is to say, the sort of participation involved
provides that you need to listen to nobody but Number 4, and to Number
4 only to find that he's finished. If you have a situation in which each current
speaker can select a next speaker, then as long as you would be willing to
speak if you were selected, then - forgetting about common courtesy, interest
in the conversation or anything else - you have to listen pretty much to every
utterance in the conversation.
What I want to be locating is the way in which the obligation to listen is
built into conversation. It isn't built in merely in the sense of, be a good guy
and listen to the other people, or, if you don't listen and people see that you're
not listening they'll get mad at you, or, listen because you want other people
to listen to you. It's built into the operation of the system. It's built in, in that
if you're just willing to speak when selected, then you have to listen to each
utterance, since it's each utterance that can select a next speaker. It's not that
now comes in some big shot and he goes about selecting the next seven
speakers. The biggest shot in the world selects only the next speaker. And the
next speaker after him selects a next speaker. That is to say, it moves case
by case.
And in that regard, then, if you wanted to come up with a characterization
for a single conversation of how it is that its actual order of speakers is arrived
at, you would have to study all the utterances of that actual conversation - in
contrast with the system I sketched earlier, where you wouldn't have to look
at anything in an actual conversation. And that's kind of an interesting
side-fact, in that social scientists tend to imagine that they can adapt
procedures to any which world. In that case, the Burundi should be the most
studied group in social science, since - if that's indeed the way the Burundi
talk - they're about the easiest to study, their system the one which you have
to give the least attention to study; you could build the most interesting models
on, and you could do it in a week; you could have a computer program of all
Burundi conversation. But dearly enough for our society of speakers with a
system of case by case selection, it's not the same circumstances.
42 Part I
Again, then, the first preference is: Current speaker selects next speaker
(with a series of constraints which I'll come back to). The second preference
is: Current speaker does not select a next speaker but he selects a next action.
For example, a person will ask a question but not specify who should answer
it. If a bunch of people had seen a movie and you hadn't, you might say,
"Well, was it a good picture?" and then somebody will select themselves to
speak, and when they do so, they will provide an answer to that question.
The current-speaker-selects-next-speaker situation also involves selecting
next speaker's action. While you can select a next action without selecting a
next speaker, you pretty much can't select a next speaker without selecting
a next speaker's action. It would be hard to simply select a next speaker; for
example - leaving aside that it's got a character to it that I can't develop now
and don't want to merely assert - "Well John, you haven't said anything all
night, say something. "
The thing about these two techniques is that the technique is built into an
utterance. It's not an independent part of an utterance that it does selection of
next speaker or selection of next speaker's action. That is to say, you don't talk
along, "My opinion on this is such-and-such-and-such, " then pause and say
" Mary next, do a joke. " And that turns out to be absolutely of fundamental
importance for the study of sentences, since the study of sentences has not
taken it that sentences in speech are occupied with work involving their
successors and predecessors, as formally built into those sentences. The curious
thing in its way, is that a closest natural approximation to the separated-pares
situation doesn't work very well at all. And that is, such things as "John, I
want to ask you a question, what time is it. ' ' What you get is, you say
"John," that's already an utterance, and he says "Yeah?, " ' 'I'd like to ask you
a question, " that's also an utterance, and what you regularly get is
simultaneous talk consisting of your question and his "Go ahead. " And you
don't have to pile up these external pares which announce what you want to
do; there are ways of doing that in a built in fashion. And if it's built in, one
import of its being built in is that to go about choosing either of these two
selection techniques is to constrain what you yourself do in your utterance.
You only have one sentence more or less, and if among the things you're
going to be doing is this sort of work, there's going to be a considerable
constraint on what you can do in that utterance.
Now, we have a third possibility, which like the second, can operate if the
first is not used. The third is open, i.e. , whereas the second involves that a
speaker selects himself but does the action that's been selected for him, the
third involves that a speaker selects himself and selects the action he will do.
But there are a series of other layers that operate so that when situation three
occurs they constrain what it is that the self-selected speaker does. It's not that
the one who speaks says anything in the world. What he says will be closely
ordered with respect to what's been going on. And in that both the first and
second involve next action selection, it seems better to say, not that we have
a next-speaker selection system, but that we have a next-action selection
system, in which next-speaker selection is also one thing that gets done.
 Lecture 3 43
But the idea is that we have a system which operates case by case. I'd say
'utterance by utterance' but by virtue of the connotations involved in the
notion 'utterance' I want to be talking instead of something I'll call an
'adequate complete utterance. ' The basic relevance of an adequate complete
utterance is that it's adequate for sequential purposes. When it's over, a next
should speak. People's business is to produce 'adequate complete utterances'
and if I use the term 'utterance' I use it only out of socialization.
Here's a sketch of further matters to be focussed on. The case-by-case
operation makes one relationship between utterances a central one, and that
is the adjacency relationship. And the adjacency relationship is used in talk in
an enormous number of ways for a series of other layers or orderings that the
sequential organization of conversation has, besides just the issue of selection
of next action. One of the most immediately observable ways in which the
adjacency relationship matters is this sort of thing: A has talked at some point
and he's selected B to do something. Now the way B has of showing, among
other things, that he sees that he's been chosen, and chosen to do something,
is to do that right then and there. And that is analytically a great resource for
us. That is to say, we're put in a position to be able to see what it is that some
speaker A has done by reference to its being part of B's business to show what
he sees that A has done, i.e., to produce an utterance which in some way
exhibits that he sees he is selected, and sees he is selected to do some
thing.
The adjacency relationship will matter an enormous amount since - to put
it in a sentence - the kind of massive integration that conversation can get,
i.e. , with people talking for a considerable while in some way that they see is
related, operates through adjacent relationships. That is to say, suppose we
have four utterances. Utterance 1 and 4 are not directly related. There aren't
formal techniques for locating an n-minus-third utterance as the utterance you
want to be talking to. There are formal techniques for locating the last
utterance as the utterance you want to talk to. Now if the last utterance also
located the utterance before it as the utterance it was talking to, then you can
have some way of locating that utterance as one you are talking to, through
this last one. So you're operating through a series of adjacent utterances. I'll
consider in detail how that operates, in due course.
 Lecture 4
Turn-taking; Complaints about
interruption; Enforcement
I want ro finish some points from last time. First, the fact that there is an
orientation by co-participants to 'completion' as 'transition point' defines not
only sorts of work that co-participants do, but time constraints on when it is
that the product of the work should be available. That is to say, you not only
need to be able to find completion, but, in that completion point is also
transition point, your finding of completion has to be available on the
occurrence of completion. Presumably, therefore, you will be doing work of
attending to the upcomingness of completion while the thing is being
produced, so as to have the results available for use by you on the occurrence
of completion.
Also, I made a point that a gross sort of fact was that utterances are
packaged in single sentences. What is involved for that is generally that the
rule for recognizing completion is that the first 'possible completion' is to be
recognized as the actual completion.
One other thing. I offered as the third possibility in the selection procedure
that there is no selection of action or speaker. Now, what happens there is that
the first starter on completion of prior utterance seems to be the one who
gets rights to be next speaker. That would obviously enough differentiate
the sorts of things we could expect in case 3 from what we would expect in
case 1 , where speaker is selected. Case 2 and 3 can be similar in the sense that
first starter goes, where we can then have 'competitive starting' occurring
there.
I noted with respect to case 1 , that if people are willing to speak if selected,
that can involve a rather pervasive listening to others' utterances, so as to find,
e.g. , if they are selected, and if they are selected, when they should speak. Let
me add that if one wishes to speak next independently of having been selected
or when no one is selected, then if one is going to bring off one's utterance
after someone's and before anyone else does, then that also involves an
obligation to attend the structure of some corpus of utterances, i.e. , those
utterances which you might choose to speak after. So again there's motivation
to listen, which is independent of any rule that would say 'you ought to listen
in conversation, ' motivation to listen which turns on a willingness to speak or
an interest in speaking.
Now the mechanism that I outlined last time serves to show how it might
be generally possible that we have, in actual conversation, the co-occurrence
of one party talking at a time and speaker change recurring. There was no

44
 Lecture 4 45
focus o n either o f those features as having, each independently, regular
structures involved in their preservation. That is to say, I did not consider any
sorts of regulations devoted to, e.g . , the preservation of one party at a time,
or the preservation of speaker change recurring. And there are regulations
which deal with each of those. A basic reason why I did not deal with those
sorts of rules first was that you could perfectly well have a consideration of
those rules and not at all have the mechanism whereby their co-occurrence
was achieved. Those are quite separate sorts of things.
I am going to talk this time about one aspect of one party talks at a time.
That aspect is that not more than one party talks at a time. And I am going
to be dealing with some of the regulations around that feature. The main
point will be to develop one further way, beyond the ways I developed last
time, that these features are basic for conversation. The question that we are
going to be attending is how is it that conversationalists deal with both the
possibility and the actuality of it happening that there is more than one at a
time talking.
There are some perfectly transparent things that happen, one of which is
that somebody complains, e.g. , "You interrupted me. " I want to discuss
some sorts of orderlinesses involved in the occurrence of such a complaint.
A first thing to note is that when it happens that two people are talking at
the same time in a single conversation, a first thing that happens is that one
of them stops. The basic general way that parties deal with the occurrence of
two or more talking at a time is for various people to stop; to stop, that is,
before they have completed whatever it is that they were in the process of
saying. Now, being able to prove that somebody stops 'before they
completed' is an independent sort of task, which we will consider on another
occasion. But stopping is very neat in that if two are talking at the same time
and one stops, that renders the circumstance that it is no longer the case that
more than one is talking at a time - independently of who it is that happened
to have, as it may turn out, brought about that two were talking at a time.
So, if a party is speaking and another starts up, then the party who is
speaking may stop. And such a complaint as "You interrupted me" would
then be placed on the other's completion. Now two things are involved. One
is, he tries to put the complaint into a point at which no one else is talking.
And also, he tries to put it into the first point after the person who he is
claiming interrupted him stops talking. I want to focus on the point that he
tries to place the complaint directly after the event he is complaining of, to
suggest that that fact - that complaints about interruption occur in very
located places - unveils a small part of some rather general facts about
conversation, which have to do with where things are placed. And complaints
are placed in several other rather restricted sorts of places.
A second place complaints can go is a version of the first, and involves that
if you have not raised a complaint, e.g. , on some occasion of your being
interrupted and you are interrupted again, then you may say "You keep
interrupting me, " which involves focussing on the last thing as something
that is non-unique.
46 Part I
A third such place is - and this will turn out to have some rather neat
consequences - after a complaint has been made to oneself. If A at some point
in a conversation complains to B about something he did, then one thing B
can do is, in return, place a complaint to A. Now notice that if the first
complaint is placed in an orderly way, then it will not be just anywhere that
the second complaint will go; i.e. , a return-complaint will not only be relative
to the first complaint, but relative to some other event, relative, e.g. , to the
occurrence of a complainable by the one who then does the return-complaint.
In either case, having not taken some chance to complain about some given
event, one may well yet get another chance to complain about that event;
under the circumstance of a recurrence of a complainable, or under the
circumstance that somebody complains about something one did.
Now I've been talking about a statement like "You interrupted me" as a
'complaint. ' We could, I suppose, give the thing a more neutral character­
ization by saying that it is, e.g. , noticing an interruption, merely making an
observation, or offering some formulation of a prior occurrence. Where, for
the latter, saying "You interrupted me" would be assimilated to saying "You
asked me a question" or "John gave Mary a greeting, " etc. And seeing that
possibility gets us somewhere. You could figure that somebody goes about
offering a formulation of a prior occurrence by virtue of the fact that their
formulation is correct; that is to say, that the way someone happened to come
to say "You interrupted me" is by virtue of the fact that someone interrupted
him. You might then be in a position of saying that people can, as some
utterance they can make at any point in a conversation, assert some name for
a prior utterance. But that clearly gets us results which we do not want to
have, since if one went about saying what any last utterance was, one would
be met with returns that would indicate it was an odd thing that one was
doing. So that we want perhaps to restrict it more sharply than saying 'a
formulation is being made of a prior utterance. ' Perhaps we could say that 'a
formulation is being made of a prior utterance where that prior utterance is
a violation of some sort,' which would restrict the occasions of going about
formulating a prior utterance much more sharply.
One thing suggested by the foregoing remarks is that when one goes about
formulating a prior utterance, one's hearers inspect one's own utterance for
what it is doing. And the fact that one is saying something that may be
'correct' is perhaps not the only thing, or even a thing that they look to. But
where one 'notices that a violation occurred, ' one may be seen to be 'doing a
complaint. ' Now there are a couple of things involved in the selection that
you're 'doing a complaint. ' One is that the doing of a compliant locates, via
the placing of the complaint, what to look to to see whether there was a
'complainable. ' Secondly, the doing of a complaint sets up a sequence.
With regard to the first point, complaints regularly do not say "In the last
utterance you interrupted me" or " In the last utterance minus three you
interrupted me. " They just say "You interrupted me" and things like that.
And participants can know where to look, to see whether it is so that such a
complainable occurred, i.e. , in this case, to the immediately last utterance,
 Lecture 4 47
such that if they don't find it there they may say "No I didn't," or "No he
didn't," though he may have made some interruption somewhere. That is to
say, they use the placing of the complaint to locate the complainable. And just
as it is the case for complaints that they do not need to say what to look to
to find whether a complainable occurred, so the same goes for the various
things that can follow a complaint. That is to say, if you offer an apology like
' 'I'm sorry, " or an excuse or a denial, then those are heard as apologies,
excuses, or denials for that complaint. And they furthermore exhibit that you
saw the statement. "You interrupted me" as a 'complaint, ' and furthermore,
that the complaint was 'well taken. ' That is to say, they exhibit not merely
that you saw that this was a complaint, but saw also that it was a complaint
about this utterance, and that this utterance was a complainable.
Now it will turn out that the placing of an enormous number of things
work in just that way, locating which prior utterances are being dealt with. So,
which prior utterance is being 'answered' is located by the placing of a
possible answer after a particular question. It will be heard as 'the answer to
that question, ' and not, e.g. , the answer to some question that went five
minutes before. And that turns out to be important in another way, in that
for some sorts of things, the very recognition of what the item is turns on its
placement. That is to say, e.g. , for the category 'answers, ' that something is
an 'answer' turns on its placement after a recognizable question, where
answers don't by and large have the sorts of forms that permit their
decontexted recognition. Various sorts of things, like " I went to the movies, "
are seeable as 'answers' via their placement. S o it's not just that they are seen
as 'answers to a directly prior question; ' their placing controls that they're seen
as 'answers. ' That placing should matter is not at all surprizing, given that we
have a serial coordination system if we are going to have any coordination in
a one party at a time structure. I've already said that the adjacency
relationship is very important, and placing is one way that one uses the
adjacency relationship.
With regard to the second point, that doing a complaint like "You
interrupted me" sets up a sequence, the occurrence of a complaint can locate
the sorts of actions that appropriately follow, and who should do them; for
example, that an apology is appropriate, or an excuse or a denial, and should
be made by whoever it is that's 'accused. ' Now that will turn out to be
relevant to considerations of why people sometimes don't do complaints, an
issue that is important in this way: If one is examining conversation for
possible occurrence of violations, or examining social interaction generally for
possible occurrence of violations, then one may have constructed criteria
which permit one to recognize the occurrence of a violation. But independent
of one's recognition criteria, one knows that one thing about the occurrence of
violations is that they can be noticed by participants. One may then be in a
position where one has located some possible cases, only some of which have
been noticed. Now one either has to say, "Well the occasions that have not
been noticed are not violations, ' ' or come to a position whereby one can say
that they may or may not be violations, but they're not not-violations simply
48 Part I
because no one noticed them. And the way one could establish that they're
not not-violations simply because nobody noticed them, i.e. , 'complained'
about them, is to establish that there are reasons for not noticing violations.
And people do both see a violation happening and not complain about it. I
am suggesting that the complaint's starting a sequence will turn out to be
relevant for that sort of issue.
For one, the sheer fact of a sequence being started involves that when the
sequence is over, the last utterance before that sequence is no longer available
for being used to place utterances in the same way it was before that sequence
got started. So: One was saying something, something perhaps fitted to
something somebody just said, and one is interrupted, now there is this
sequence. What one was saying, and what the utterance one had fitted one's
utterrance to was saying are no longer available simply by placing an
utterance. If one's interest is to get one's chance to say something that is
placed by reference to what was just being said, then it is one's interest to not
put in one of these sequences. The sheer fact of doing a complaint selects
somebody other than oneself to speak next, selects them to do something
other than deal with what has been going on, i.e. , to deal with the complaint.
It gives one the floor back after, e.g . , the excuse, to, e.g . , accept the excuse,
like "Okay" after the other says ' 'I'm sorry, " but when one is finished
somebody else may then speak, and one is not then perhaps in a position to
directly continue what it is that was going on. That is to say, insofar as placing
considerations matter, it may be more in one's interest to use the place one
may get to talk, to talk to what is going on, than to start a sequence which
intervenes. And that's one possible sort of account for not complaining, i.e. ,
for not 'noticing' an interruption.
Earlier I mentioned that complaining serves to select the complained-of
person as next speaker. Now, one sort of problem for a complaint is that
apologies, excuses, denials, are not the only sorts of things that they can do.
One thing that a complained-of person can do has already been mentioned -
they can return a complaint: "You interrupted me, " "Well you interrupted
me in the first place," or "Well you never give me a chance to talk. " ' 'I'm
sorry. " Which is to say, for one, if you do a complaint you may end up
apologizing. So that if what you want is, e.g. , for the other person to
apologize, a complaint does not guarantee that you will get that.
Another thing that can happen is, as a complaint can formulate a last event
as illegal in some way, so can an utterance be placed which formulates this last
event, i.e. , the complaint, as illegal in some way, e.g. , "You're always
complaining. " That is to say, what you did can be examined for its possible
illegitimate status, and that finding used as a next utterance: ' 'You inter­
rupted me, " "You're always complaining. " Which then involves another way
in which, having begun with a complaint, one may find oneself in a sequence
that is not the sequence one intended. The sequence that a complaint starts is
equivocal with respect to the fact that a complaint in some way controls what
happens, but does not fully control what happens. In particular, it does not
control that the event it has noticed will be the event that will be dealt with.
 Lecture 4 49
Obviously then, if one knows that one has dirty laundry, one has a basis for
avoiding recriminations. Not any occasion in which one could complain will
be used to complain if that the other has a collection of complaints they can
offer is known to one.
But sequences which tum on the fact of a complaint are, in their way,
overwhelmingly frequent. I leave aside the issue of what sorts of import they
have for where the conversation goes beyond the complaint sequence, noting
only that one can dearly get into, specifically, an argument. And that is a
matter that is exceedingly important, in this way: One question that could be
asked is, is it the case that only some sorts of conversations have a reasonable
potential of yielding an argument, or is it the case that any conversation has
the potential for yielding an argument, independent of, e.g . , topic. And one
can see that, for one, the internal violations to the ways that conversations
proceed can generate an argument. Another issue related to the question of
can any conversation yield an argument, is that of reasonable diagnostic
interest in the following sort of phenomenon: Some people say about each
other, "Why is it that we can never have a conversation without it ending up
in an argument?" And in that it is a thing that is said all the time, it is of
interest to see how it could be sensible. I think fiddling with just some of these
resources, one can get perhaps a glimpse at the way in which 'having an
argument' as a possibility gets built into conversation, and the way in which,
then, considerations about avoiding an argument can be involved in avoiding
raising a complaint.
There is another sort of thing. Leaving aside any issue of later raising a
complaint - recalling that if one does not raise it here but talks otherwise, one
may still be able to raise it later - one can do one of the sorts of things that
are utterly beautiful in their conversational occurrence: One can in some other
conversation, in which, say, a party who did an interruption to you is being
talked of, not only raise your complaint against them, but you can raise your
complaint against them while saying that you did not complain, e.g. , " I
didn't say anything about it, but h e constantly interrupted me, " which i s a
chance to both show your graciousness and get your score.
Now the problems raised with making a complaint can in one sense be said
to turn on the fact that it is the business of parties to the conversation to deal
with the conversation's violations. That is to say, we are dealing with a
particular sort of set of rules. There aren't officials present monitoring
conversations who insert corrective operations or who allow it to proceed to
the end and then asses fines. It is a situation in which there is a self-enforcing
system operating. And given the ways that conversations are done here, there,
anywhere, between whomsoever, it is essential for the workings of conversa­
tion that they have self-enforcing systems. It might be a dream that we could
have a system where there were outside officials who would deal with the
violations. However, if anything like the rules for conversation that are
operative now were preserved, such a dream could be seen to be nonsensical,
in that there is a sense in which the detection and dealing with of violations
is not only the business of the parties and not an outsider, but that the very
50 Part I
detectability may be something that the parties and not outside observers
can do.
And this raises some really interesting kinds of issues. We have in the first
instance, some formal normative features for conversation, which are in a way
a public law for conversation: One party at a time, speaker change recurs, the
selection mechanisms, and a large range of detailed specifications. The
question is, how is it that the parties to a conversation are mobilized in the
interest of society, to monitor their conversations so as to have it that their
conversations satisfiy the general rules. This is really a very classical sort of
sociological anthropological problem. How is it that a society arranges to have
people have a concern with some sorts of rules that in any particular case may
be uninteresting for that scene, but which needs in some way be generally
operative, and which needs that the local participants have it as their business
to do the enforcing if it is going to be enforced.
There is a usual sort of solution, one aspect of which is to fit on to some
generally required mechanisms a series of what tum out to be private rights
and private obligations, and thereby have the possibility that people will
attend to violations as violations of themselves. That is to say, we have a
generalized feature, exactly one party should be talking at a time, which has
as one aspect, not more than one party should be talking at a time, which
turns out to be very crucial for the workings of conversation. All sorts of
mechanisms are built up around it which require it for their working. But
nobody has to learn, e.g. , that those things require it, in order to see the
importance of it. What you get are some norms built up which say, e.g . , that
a currently speaking party has a right to speak to completion. Then, the
occurrence of more than one talking at a time can tum out to be an observable
violation of the current speaker's right to speak to completion. The current
speaker can then be mobilized to see that some right of his has been violated.
And if a current speaker is built in the right way, then he can get aroused at
somebody dealing wrongly with his property - his property being that space
in the conversation in which he is now talking.
Now a current speaker's getting angry at somebody interrupting him
involves that his anger is something one has to consider as analogous to a cop
in the room. That is to say, by organizing emotions such that people will get
angry at, or feel contrite or guilty about doing such a thing as, intruding on
X's time, speaking while he is speaking, interrupting him, then one has the
possibility of having any actual parties to a conversation engaging in enforcing
these sorts of mechanisms for each other. Maybe in some extremely private
situation, off by themselves, some set of people can glory in that they do not
have conversations like this, that they do not treat each others' rights in that
fashion. But it is just that sort of thing, i.e. , indeed it will be reported as a sign
of X and Y' s intimacy that "When we talk together neither of us ever finishes
an utterance, we pick up on each other immediately. " Which is to say, for
one, they haven't got a sense of their private rights being affiliated to that rule,
and nonetheless they can find a way of doing conversation together - though
they're not about to try to use it elsewhere.
 Lecture 4 51
Max Weber regularly says things like, the big problem for any society is
that there are some more or less generalized organizational techniques which
it sets up and which people need to be mobilized to behave in the interests of,
but - and in this I'm not clear whether it is one or the other of the following
alternatives: Either Weber thinks you cannot mobilize people unless you
mobilize them about private interests, or it's that he says that societies 'know'
that they cannot organize people unless they are organized about private
interests. And so they find some kind of techniques whereby private interests
are fitted to 'public requirements. ' It's a theme that occurs again and again in
Weber; for example in his incredible paper 'Politics as a vocation, ' he locates
the political boss as that sort of person who is able to monitor the range of
private interests and use them, and interest in them, to engage in some sorts
of public action. He makes a case for the ethical disinterest of the political boss
and thereby assimilates him to the priest who is engaged in the same sort of
task of monitoring the relationship between an ethic and anybody's ethics. He
also does a similar sort of discussion when he begins The Sociology of Religion
as follows:

The most elementary forms of behavior motivated by religious or

magical factors are oriented to this world. ' 'That it may go well with
thee . . . and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth" (Deut.
4: 40) expresses the reason for the performance of actions enjoined by
religion or magic.

The point being that any religion, he says, is m the first instance needing to
show that it is this world's interests that it has in mind.
With Weber's interests at hand, one of the things one wants to be looking
for is how it is - if it's so - that some sorts of mechanisms which nobody could
be interested in, which nobody could use an interest in to build some specific
actions, nevertheless can be found to be operative. I say 'nobody could be
interested in them' in an extremely serious way. There is a series of things
which, even if you were interested in them, or claimed interest in them,
they're not believable. So, for example, the classical suspicious person is the
public spirited citizen. If you call the cops and tell them that you're just
reporting something because you are a public spirited citizen, then they have
doubts about you. And, as we know from our own circumstances, when you
propose to do something by virtue of its public interest, then that is
immediately doubtable, where, if you take it that you did it for that reason,
if you propose some private reason it is believable. And I'll deal with issues
of 'believable' and 'doubtable' in due course.
What we have then is a series of mechanisms that are built around general
features, and those mechanisms are in general operative. But there is no
particular interest that anybody could have in the preservation of those
general features in any given case. What we get apparently is that the general
features are transformed into local private rights which are affiliated to
anybody by virtue of the fact that they just happen to be talking now. And
52 Part I
emotions are apparently organized around those in very strong ways, so that,
e.g . , in the case of interruption people will become utterly outraged over its
occurrence, in a way that is presumably no weaker than the outrage they could
feel about any other of their private rights.
Now that type of operation gains the extensiveness of its power by
reference to a series of things that are done with the occurrence of an
interruption. What happens is that if somebody does an interruption to you,
though there is the rule about interruptions that provides that they should not
be done, it needn't be dealt with simply as an interruption, preserved
historically as an interruption; it can be assimilated to a class consisting of a
bunch of other things like it. And the organization of that class involves
that each of the cases can - almost like a bunch of kids trying to deal with
a bully - give each other case support. So, if one does an interruption it can
be used in such a way that somebody reporting it does not say "John
interrupted Mary, " or "John interrupted Mary yesterday, " or "John inter­
rupts people, " but "John is rude. " And indeed, when somebody interrupts
you, you can say, not "Why did you interrupt me?" but "Why are you
so rude?"
Now 'being rude' is not specifically, say, a synonym for 'interrupting. ' If
that were so, that would obviously be no gain whatsoever in terms of what
you are saying about someone. But the way it works is, for the variety of
things that stand as cases of 'being rude,' the class can be used and the case
needn't be. That is to say, you can tell somebody that so-and-so is 'rude' and
you do not have to feel that you are telling them only the gist of it; you do
not have to tell them what in particular he does, or he did. And there are a
whole bunch of things that can be done when something somebody has done
has been transformed into 'being rude; ' things which tum out to be relevant
for whether one does anything that can be so transformed. That is to say, what
we have is not simply a situation in which there is some way of dealing
with the fact that, e.g. , two or more talking at a time occurred, but ways in
which the possibility of its occurrence are dealt with in advance. It is by no
means the case that the fact that somebody can complain to you and you have
to apologize constitutes the sorts of sanctions you can suffer if you interrupt
someone. The sorts of sanctions which you can suffer tum initially and heavily
and sufficiently on the transformation of "You interrupted me" (or any of the
other things which stand as 'being rude' ) to "He's rude. ' '
Let me note that, in that the doing of an interruption is a case of the class
'being rude,' when you come to be talking about 'being rude' you are also
talking about the treatment that the violations of a series of other rules get.
We have located a population of events for which we now have, at least as a
proposal, a similarity between them and 'interruption, ' all of which are also
more or less privately noticed, privately enforced violations.
Now there are a series of things that can be done with the determination
that somebody was 'rude. ' Just to assert the name of that thing, though what
we're interested in is what the name stands for, such an observation as that
somebody is rude is usable for 'gossip. ' We then have to consider how it is
 Lecture 4 53
that it is used in gossip, and how it is that, that it is used in gossip matters.
I just have a collection of points, and it is not enormously well organized. But
for one, when someone is being talked of, one candidate item of even a brief
biography is that they are 'rude. ' That is to say, if we are looking for a model
biography that people can offer about somebody in a minute, or in an hour,
i.e. , it does not matter how brief it is, then 'rudeness' is one item, whatever
the other items are. And 'rudeness' is hearsay usable. That is to say, if
someone, talking to you about a person you haven't met, says that he's rude,
then if somebody asks you about that person, you can say he's rude: "I don't
know him but I hear he's rude. ' ' 'Rudeness' occurs, not only in exchanges of
gossip among co-conversationalists, but in brief biographies in newspapers. I
have the suspicion that, of the things that you remember about somebody
whom you don't know, one such item is that they're rude. And if it's known
about somebody that they're rude, then if you meet them and they do an
event which can be conceived of as rude, then that event can confirm that
they're rude.
For one, then, 'rudeness' is a feature of a 'personality,' and that somebody
is rude is one of the things that is preserved in the constituting of that
personality. One of the deep problems with trying to deal with interaction by
reference to a notion of 'a person' is that it would seem obviously the case that
a thing like 'rudeness' as a 'personality trait' turns on the construction of a
person such that various sorts of enforcement mechanisms can be operative.
And the types of things that stand as 'personality traits' constitute ways of
making it operative for anybody that they behave in some way or take the
consequences.
And if you have an interest in your biography, then you have an interest
in being or not being rude insofar as you care that that item be known to some
indefinite set of others who know you or don't know you, where some others
whom you don't know may encounter people who've never met you, who
know some very small amount of things about you, and one of the things they
may know is that you're rude. Which is to say, some distant operation is
being performed on the fact that you interrupted somebody. Further, it isn't
simply your biography with respect to which 'rudeness' can be used. Rudeness
can also be used by reference to various sorts of identifications which involve
you, but yet not 'you,' uniquely. It's not simply that one can preserve "John
is rude" when John has done one of some series of things that involve
somebody in some way coming to say that he is rude and passing it on, but
"John" can be transformed also. For one, "John" can be transformed into a
last name, i.e. , "The Smiths are rude. ' ' So that, leaving aside your own
biography, if you are concerned with your sister's biography your rudeness can
serve to constitute a part of her biography, say, as a transformation from
"They're rude" to, when she is being talked about, "She's rude. ' ' And again,
her behavior can be monitored by reference to whether it turns out that she
does what it is that confirms 'rudeness. ' And there's a series of other
transformations: "People in that neighborhood are rude, ' ' "The younger
generation is rude, " whatever.
54 Part I
What we have then is an enforcement system for conversation which
operates on transformations of a series of violations made to whomsoever, the
knowledge of the operation of which serves in part to provide bases for not
doing those things - or doing those things if you'd like to have that
reputation, or your sister or your mother or your neighbor or your friends to
have that reputation. I say that, in that it seems to be plain that people know
that they can indict others via such actions of their own. And of course
they're specifically socialized so as to know about such things, i.e. , they're
specifically told not to do certain things as will reflect not on them alone,
but on others.
So that we have really enormously elaborate and apparently powerful - if
not overpowerful - sets of regulations operative about the classes for which
'interrupting' is a case, fitted onto the general feature 'exactly one party talks
at a time. ' And of course the same enforcement structure will be operative for
a series of other features, fitted to other parts of this general structure.
And when we ask, as we might reasonably ask, "Why in the world would
a society be built in such a way that such a big deal is made of that somebody
interrupts someone? Why are there these enormous machines ready to operate
on such a fact? what we've done is to misconcretize the phenomenon. That is
to say, we've asked "Why is it such a big deal that somebody interrupted
someone?" where what we have is a mechanism designed to get at the general
way of preserving whole classes of things. So that besides the private
enforcement we get all the rest of this business of the transformation to
rudeness, the usability for gossip, the generalization of personality traits, etc.,
all of which I suppose would look like some absurd irrational fear, were we
to have started out only with the notion that it's all designed by reference to
a rule that says 'don't interrupt. ' But when we have more or less some picture
of the way in which 'one party at a time' works, such that the communication
system turns on it in many, many ways, and also that we can at least consider
that for other things about conversation the same mechanism is operating,
and consider what the possibility of operation would be of a series of
independent mechanisms, you might see that it's not as irrational as all that,
or as weird as all that, or as overbuilt as all that.
Now, I introduced this whole business in the first place so as to make the
point that there was another way in which the co-occurrence of 'one at a time'
and 'speaker change recurs' was basic. Forgetting about the latter things I
talked about, that other way to see that they're basic is this: It can be said
about the rules of sequencing in conversation that their enforcement proce­
dures turn on the operation of the rules for sequencing in conversation. They
are self-organized in that sense. That is to say, the fact that one places one's
complaint about an interruption in a silence; that a complaint serves to select
the complained-of to speak; that he speaks next; that he speaks to the
complaint and speaks to the complaint by reference to the candidate
interruption, all this proceeds by reference to the rules of sequencing. And I
take it that that's an extremely natural criterion for some rules being basic;
that is to say, when you reach them, you reach the ground. There are no other
 Lecture 4 55
rules which deal with how to deal with violations of them. And if those rules
for dealing with the violations of them aren't operating, then there is no
dealing with the violations of them.
A further way to see the basicness of the rules of sequencing is to ask what
domains of violations, for example, or of other things, turn on the operation
of the rules of sequencing in conversation. Any domain that turns on them
requires for its operation the operation of conversation, which can then again
suggest the reasons why these rules would be subject to the sorts of
enforcement possibilities that are involved.
 Lecture 5
Collaboratives; Possible utterances;
Utterance pairs; Greetings and
introductions
In the last two lectures I gave some rather general considerations about
conversation. I introduced some suggestions about orders of organization,
e.g. , that the adjacency relationship would tum our to be very important. And
also we began to see some small, primitive sequencing, and to see that
sequences could get fitted to adjacency considerations. So we're beginning to
build up some further types of organization operative in conversation. This
time I want to shift gears somewhat, moving from a rather generalized
consideration of conversation to some specific material. What I want to do is
to go through a consideration of how it is that we come to tum some
particular materials to technical interest. I want to do that by reference to
some problems that we're now ready to handle, having to do with the
sentence as a packaging technique, with utterances, and with completion, and
also in due course, one party at a time.
Turning to the data handout, I want to focus on aspects of three parts of
it. The first part is:

Dan : Jim,
( ): hhhjjhh
Dan : This is uh AI,
jim : Hi.
Dan : Ken,
jim : Hj ji
Ken : [ Hi,
Dan : -an' Roger.
Roger : Hi.
jim : Hi,
Dan : Jim Reed.
The second part is:

Ken : We were in an automobile discussion,

Roger : -discussin' the psychological motives fer
( ): hhh/jhhhh hh
AI : -drag racing on the streets.

56
 Lecture 5 57
And the third is:

Ken : I still say though that - If you take, if you take uh a big fancy car
out'n the road, - - an' yer hotoddin' around, yer- yer bound to
get- yer bound t'get cau: :ght, and yer bound t'get shafted.
Roger : ("Bound to, " I I man-)
Ken : W'l look. Now II I'm gonna-
AI : Unless yuh do it right. II THAT'S THE CHALLENGE.
THAT'S THE CHALLENGE YOU WANNA TRY AN' DO
IT RIGHT SO YOU DON'T GET CAUGHT!
Roger : That's the problem with society! heh heh

I'll start off with a phenomenon which one might or might not find interest­
ing - and I suppose it's something that anyone could conceivably notice, and
perhaps even be able to make something of, though I'm not sure about that.
What we want eventually to do is to show how it's interesting, and then also
to see what kinds of work we have to do to get at a local explanation of it -
where the issue of its interestingness will turn out to be much more general
than the explanation of its occurrence here. The phenomenon is in the first
instance available in the second fragment. That is to say, a gross thing that this
material just exhibits - exhibits at least for the right sort of attention to it -
is that there are three people producing a single sentence in concert. It is at
least to be supposed that they're not doing it with a script, but that the first
person intends to produce a sentence and the second brings off a continuation
of that, and the third brings off a continuation of the second's. The name I use
for this is either 'collaborative' or 'joint productions. '
An initial reason to be interested in them might have been that we have the
initial gross fact that utterances are packaged into single sentences. So if we
got variations on that thing, I suppose that we would find our usual
expectable variation to be a person producing a series of sentences, not a series
of persons producing a single sentence. As soon as you raise the question of
methods about it, i.e. , how do they do it, then you can immediately come to
see that you have something that is technically of great, great interest. It's
really one of those sorts of things that is a naturalist's dream. There, in nature,
is the sort of thing you would dream of having, if you could dream that well,
but you'd never figure would be given to you whole.
I gave a consideration in the third lecture about how it is that if people are
willing to talk if selected, or want to talk when they get a chance if no one is
selected, then they ought to be 'hearers. ' They ought to listen for completion
and they ought also to listen for selection. One could, by just thinking it
through, figure if they're going to talk on completion, then they have to have
been listening for selection, to have the selection results available before
completion. They would have to be listening to something that somebody was
saying, and analyzing that, for some purposes anyway, while the thing is
being said. They'd have to do that if they're going to have some result of that
analysis available, first of all to see that 'completion' has happened, but also
58 Part I
to have available the results of the analysis on selection, to be used, e.g. , to
start up speaking, to pick a right action, on the completion's occurrence and
not an hour later. So we more or less have the idea that they must both be
listening to and analyzing an utterance while the utterance is being produced.
Now that's an argument. Is there some way to go about proving that
people are listening to and analyzing an utterance in the course of its
production in such a way as to have the product of their analyses available,
e.g. , on the completion of the utterance? While you could try to figure out
experimental techniques for showing that, it turns out that there's an ideal
procedure available in nature, and that is: One thing that people sometimes
do is, e.g. , someone is talking along, producing a sentence, and they may
pause with an "uh . " And somebody else puts in the last word.
If you know anything at all about syntax, you know it's not so much an
issue of getting the correct last word - via syntactical considerations that would
be almost magical - but it's a sufficiently interesting thing that somebody has
so analyzed a sentence that they know that the next word at some point
should be, e.g. , a noun of some particular sort. That is to say, given the
structure so far - where the structure as it develops is setting continual
constraints on what sorts of syntactic object can go at each particular point -
that they're able to put in a syntactically coherent part is then direct evidence
that they have been listening and analyzing in the course of the utterance, and
have the results available to use so as to fit in a part right then and there. That
is then to say that they have a way of proving to the person they're talking
with that they're hearing and understanding what he's saying. So there's that
phenomenon which might be a thing you could be amused by, or have
happen many times and not even notice, which is technically of great interest.
And we'll have a lot to say about some aspects of it in due course.
The second utterance in this fragment, ' '-discussing the psychological
motives for, " is rather a different sort of thing because "We were in an
automobile discussion" is a perfectly good sentence. It's not an incomplete
sentence that's continued, it's something that is in its fashion even more
interesting - a complete sentence turned into an incomplete sentence, as is
"Unless you do it right" a completion to " . . . you're bound to get caught and
you're bound to get shafted, " though again that one looked like it was a
complete sentence. We do have a case of an incomplete sentence which gets
finished by some other in ' '-drag racing on the streets, ' ' where that is a
completion to the whole thing. And we want to notice that they're not
finishing off an idiom, e.g. :

Roger : Kids don't drive long. They start off when they're si- by the
time- when they're sixteen, by the time they're eighteen they're
back walk(hh)ing hehh through circumsta(hh)nces hehhehh
Dan : -beyond their control.

That is to say, "through circumstances beyond their control" is a packaged

phrase. Given various other considerations, if you see the beginning of it you
 Lecture 5 59
could fit 'beyond their control' onto such a beginning.
Now one thing we can say, where a possibly complete sentence is
continued, is something like this: For utterance completions, one doesn't want
to say that the end of a sentence is, or can be treated as, a recognizable end
of an utterance, but one has to talk about 'possible sentence ends' and
'possible utterance ends. ' One has to talk about it that way because, among
other reasons, it may well be that people treat even the ending that an actual
speaker uses for his sentencejutterance as only a 'possible ending. ' That is to
say, having engaged in some analysis of the sentence structure of an utterance
while it's being done, one is engaged in seeing what possibilities are open at
any given point in it - at least from some point into it, i.e. , I'm not in a
position to say that when you say "We . . . " that anybody could finish that
one off, though they may be able to finish it off in some way. But there are
points at which people have some sense of sets of possibilities. Apparently
they need not treat what you choose as the necessary, but they treat that as a
possibility so that they still have possibilities available to them, and they can
if they choose go on with the 'same sentence; ' that is to say, they pick another
possibility. Or, for example - and this is a perfectly familiar occurrence - if
you're speaking along, and you produce a sentencejutterance and nobody
starts up immediately, then, even though you've done what you figured to be
the end of what you were doing, you don't necessarily 'start again' if you take
up speech. What you do is, you 'continue' the sentence which you had been
engaged in producing. You can treat your own initially intended end as only
a possible end, and hearers can do the same thing.
Of course the question is why in the world would people ever do it? Why
would they ever mobilize the energy and resources required to engage in an
analysis into possibilities and then using it to fit a continuation? Or is there any
reason why they would? Is there a 'why'? Maybe even if there isn't any 'why, '
as long as we know they do it. In fact, when I first found "We were in an
automobile discussion" I was absolutely awed. I thought "God, look what an
amazing thing these people are doing. " And then something like, "Does it
ever happen?" And we searched around and found that it had some literary
use; some high literary use, like in some recent plays, and it also occurs as the
normal form of speech in Donald Duck cartoons. And then it turned out that
in ordinary speech it's really extremely common, not some arcane art at all.
The gain is something like this: If we say that utterances are packaged via
the use of sentences, then there is a way in which we could say that a sentence
is a unit of social organization. If, however, it turns out that people can
collaborate in the production of sentences - now, not of sentences that they're
repeating, like the collaboration on an idiom - but collaborative production ·

of new sentences, then there's a different sense in which the sentence is a unit
of social organization - the sense in which a sequence of sentences is a unit of
social organization. Where that is our usual, comfortable sense of something
being such a unit, i.e. , that the coordinated activity of a set of people is
involved in its production. And one doesn't think of a sentence as being that
sort of object at all. At most you'd figure, well, a sentence might be that sort
60 Part I
of object in the sense that while somebody is doing it others are attentive to
it and are silent. It's used as a building block for conversation in the sense that
each person does one or does two or whatever, and not that for all we know
if they wanted to, they might have a conversation system - even our system
with our capacities - in which it was a norm that people engaged in the
production of sentences which, say, tended to be of a mean utterance length
of three. Which would be kind of an earth-shaking fact for various disciplines
that take the sentence as a unit and are concerned with, e.g. , the psychological
explication of how it is that people produce a sentence, treating the fact of
single sentence equals single utterance as very, very important.
So we're talking now about 'possible sentences' and 'possible utterances, '
and furthermore we're not just talking about that a s a kind of statistical caveat
(i.e. , we could talk about actuals but we're not going to venture that far);
what we're saying is that for producers and for hearers, an actual sentence is
' one possibility, ' or some actualization of possibilities. And they have as a
capacity that they can actualize other possibilities. And that stopping is
'stopping a possibility at some point. '
One other thing that we might want to consider in that regard is the first
fragment, which has this guy Dan producing a sentence, ' 'Jim, this AI, Ken,
and Roger, ' ' over a series of provided-for insertions of other people. Again,
it's a natural fragment. I didn't make it up, it just happened that way. In
order to get into a position to deal with these particular occurrences, we need
to engage in a consideration of the circumstances. It's a group therapy session,
Dan is the therapist. It's been going on for something on the order of an hour
and 20 minutes of a two-hour session before Jim, a new patient, comes in.
The others know, by the time he enters, that a new patient is coming. He
opens the door and we get the following:

Roger : On Hollywood Boulevard the other night they were givin'

tickets for dirty windshields.
((door opens))
( ): ((whispered)) ( )
(jim) : HUnh!
(Dan) : (Hi Jim, c' mon II in)
(jim) : (G'momlling)
(Dan) : (Whyn'tcha close the door)
(jim) : (Ok,)
((door closes))
( ): hhh
( ): ((snifHe))
Dan : Jim,
( ): hhhllhh
Dan : This is uh AI,
jim : Hi.
Dan : Ken,
jim : Hili
 Lecture 5 61
Ken : [Hi,
Dan : -an' Roger.
Roger : Hi.
jim : Hi,
Dan : Jim Reed.

Perhaps a first thing to mention is that the initial greetings betwen Dan and
Jim followed by the introduction sequence with greeting exchanges, stand in
some disjoined relationship to what's been happening in the conversation, i.e. ,
it's not something in the conversation beforehand that provided for this
sequence happening. Which is to say more generally speaking, that there are
some sorts of things, anywhere, that have their placing accounted for not by
reference to what's been taking place in the conversation, but by reference to
other sorts of events.
That is to say, there are some conversational occurrences which have sorts
of priorities. And that has an interest to it, in thise sense. It may be
somebody's business, and an etiquette book might tell you that it's
somebody's business to, e.g. , greet Jim and to, e.g . , do the introductions. An
etiquette book would say 'when a new person comes into a dinner party (or
a meeting, etc. ) it's the business of a host to greet them and introduce them
to the various persons present. ' That's fine and dandy as far as it goes.
However, one of the things that needs to be considered, and that makes the
character of the rules in an etiquette book not the sorts of rules that, as
sociologists, we need, is this sort of problem: When Jim comes in there's a
conversation going. It stops. It stops and this sequence gets going. Now the
rules in an etiquette book tell you whose task is what, when there's some task
at hand like greetings or introductions. It doesn't tell you what other people
should do, and it doesn't tell other people what they should do. And it's not
sufficient to have a rule which says 'the host should greet the newly entering
party' when one wants there to be some control on what other people do. Not
merely that they don't greet the newly entering party, but that they, e.g. , stop
to allow that sequence to take place. For each rule of the form 'X should do
Y, ' one apparently needs some rules which tell other people what they should
do, and that would probably be a rather complicated task if you set out to
include that in an etiquette book.
Eventually I'll have something to say about this exchange, "Hi Jim, come
on in, " "Good morning. " I avoid it now because it may seem to put too large
a burden of investigation on a sort of thing that looks like a 'that's just the
way they happened to do it' occurrence. The thing I will get to is this
difference: Dan uses Jim's name, but Jim doesn't use Dan's name. And that's
a real difference. It's a difference that matters; it's a difference that's an orderly
thing. Roughly speaking, if a person names the person they're talking to in,
e.g . , a greeting, then which sorts of people do or do not name somebody in
return? 'No-naming' of people is a very big business, and it has rather notable
sources of its occurrence. Roughly, a source of its occurrence is the problem for
the returner of choosing what name to use. Should he say "Hi Dan"? "Hi
62 Part I
Dr so-and-so"? "Hi Mr so-and-so"? etc. And I want eventually to get back
to that.
I talked about adjacency placing. Now I want to introduce one type of
organizational object that's used in conversation. It's a thing I'm going to call
' utterance pairs. ' Various sorts of things come in pairs, specifically in adjacent
pairs, such that if a first is done to somebody, then the somebody to whom
the first is done does a second in return. Greetings come in pairs. For
greetings, the pair consists of a first greeting and a second greeting. For other
pairs that's not at all the way they work. For a pair like question-answer, the
first item is a 'question' and the second is an 'answer, ' and for various others
there are other combinations. Also about greetings: Greetings are complete
utterances. That is to say, we can notice about the timing of greetings that
there is an occurrence of a second " Hi" right after the first with no wait to see
if one is going to talk some more. Which is to say that greetings are
sequentially adequate. On the completion of a greeting the sequencing rule
operates; the selected speaker speaks and does the return.
Now, someone having been addressed with a greeting, selected thereby to
speak next and specifically to do a greeting in return and do it right then and
there, its absence is noticeable, commentable on. So you get occurrences where
somebody says to a kid, "Hi Johnny," and after a rather short time, if Johnny
doesn't say anything his mother says "Didn't you hear somebody say hello to
you?" or the person who said "Hi Johnny" will repeat it, " Hi Johnny. " I'm
not going to talk about 'repeats' but let me just note that, that something is
a 'repeat' is itself noticeable. Which is to say, for one, a ' repeat' will be done
in a different way than the original item is done, and you get a funny thing
that sometimes happens: "Hi Johnny" ((pause)) " Hi Johnny,' ' "Oh I didn't
hear you. ' ' Where you might figure, well how in the world does a person say
" Oh I didn't hear you," it's only a puzzle if one doesn't see that in fact
'repetitions' are recognizable. Someone recognizing this as a 'repetition, ' they
can thereby realize that this was a ' second' greeting, and thereby that they
failed to return a first.
So far as I can tell there is a considerable freedom in at least some parts of
the culture for what sorts of things you return a greeting with, but it may well
be that that's a regulated matter in some places. There's this guy Ross who
wrote a famous article called 'U and non-U speech' which is about upper-class
and non-upper-class speech in England. He reports that upper-class people in
England normally repeat whatever greeting they've been offered; non-upper
class people may not. So, you might figure that "Hello" is not upper-class,
and upper-class is "How do you do. " If somebody says "How do you do, "
upper-class people say "How do you do,' ' and if somebody says "Hello, "
they say "Hello. " S o that sort o f thing, a s 'nothing much' as it may seem, can
be an object for regulation.
So we have the exchange of greetings and then the introductions. And if
we're going to have both sequences, it's going to be in this order. One might
not have the greetings, or the greetings could be done without a verbal
greeting exchange; with glances, nods, waves, etc. But, as between the two
 Lecture 5 63
sequences both of which can happen, one of them goes first, i.e. , Dan is going
to exchange greetings with Jim before he does the introductions. So now we're
talking about a relative organization of sequences in conversation, aside from
the issue of the priority status of the insertion of these sequences into the
conversation that has been taking place. Notice that we don't get, on the
completion of the exchange of greetings, people starting to talk. Silence is
maintained except for those who are selected to talk throughout the sequence
until it is completed.
One thing that is kind of neat is the ordering of the prepresent persons as
they are introduced. There seems to be a right way, or alternative right ways,
to introduce some person to a series of persons. How is it that the order of
persons is selected? Apparently, if the ecology of the room can be used, then
the ecology of the room is used. The way the room is set up, "AI, Ken, and
Roger" is a clockwise going-through of the persons. "Roger, Ken, and AI"
would also be an orderly procedure in the sense of going through adjacent
persons, as compared to going from AI to Roger and then to Ken. And I don't
know whether clockwise and counterclockwise are equivalent. I just haven't
been able to have the presence of mind to see it when it was being done. It
may well be that it's always clockwise, or that it varies with the position of the
introducer, but it is something to look to. I have a suspicion that either way
may work, by reference to the "uh" in "This is uh AI; " i.e. , the "uh" is not
by reference to Dan not knowing Al's name, but if clockwise and counter­
clockwise can work from himself, then there would be an initial choice for
him, i.e. , should he start with Roger or should he start with AI, and it may
be that issue which is involved in the hesitation. That's again something about
which I don't know. But it's something that we might be able to guess.
In any event, it goes through in a clockwise order. There would be grounds
for doing other orders, i.e. , if you wanted to specifically point someone out
first. And one of the neat things in its fashion about this is that, e.g . , that
you're picking out someone especially, in an order of introductions, is
something that can be seen from one sequence. You don't have to see the
same person introduced over a series of sequences to see that. In this case, the
use of the clockwise movement through adjacent persons provides that
nothing is particularly being done aside from introducing the people, i.e. , they
are not being differentiated. The fact that AI is first doesn't mean a thing; it
is not to be information for Jim that, e.g . , Al's status is higher than the others.
We have, besides that, that they're all first names. Again, that could be
differentiated: "Jim, this is AI, Ken Goss, and Mr Roger Mandelbaum. "
That is to say, it's not always the case that if you get one first name you'll get
another first name. You can perfectly well get "Jim, this is Mr so-and-so" or
" . . . Dr so-and-so. " And that has, at least initially, the import of having
somebody telling the various participants not merely what each's name is, but
what it is that they can call each other. That is the work of the item used in
the name part of the introduction, and one way that, as an introducer, you can
go wrong, make people angry, be yourself embarrassed; if, e.g. , you say "Dr
Jones meet Mr Smith," and the first thing Dr Jones says is "Just call me
64 Part I
Jake. " Or you introduce him as Jake and he wants to be called Dr Jones.
Etiquette books are full of information about the way you make decisions on
that sort of a matter, and the way, as a person to be introduced, you inform
others as to how they should introduce you. Emily Post has a big discussion
about dinner parties where, if people are differently aged so that there are
younger couples and older couples, if you don't want to be called Sam by
somebody your daughter's age, then there's a strategy which can get him to
call you Mr Smith, and it turns on introductions.
And it's important to emphasize that it's not a matter of what it is that the
introducer calls the introduced people. Somebody may call two people they're
introducing Jim and Al, and nonetheless not introduce them to each other as
Jim and Al. You can watch that in operation, and it's very lovely to see, e.g. ,
when somebody is talking about somebody, the way in which they go about
finding the name to use to talk about the person, which is a name that has
some independence from what either of them call that person when they're
talking to that person. The character of names as property is something one
can very easily find, even in our egalitarian sociery. If you collect that set of
names that, e.g., your mother is called over the day, you'll find that it's not
a small collection, and people own the rights to do various names, and those
rights to use various names can change.
We can note also about the introduction sequence that it goes to
completion. That is to say, it's not only that he goes around clockwise, but he
also takes them all in. He doesn't introduce only somebody, or leave out
somebody. And that's again a thing about which etiquette books and other
sorts of regulations talk, e.g. , for what size group do you introduce somebody
to each, as compared to saying, "This is Joe. Joe, this is everybody. " Those
things vary not only with reference to the size of the group, but with reference
to who it is that you're introducing. Some people come into a group and you
may just introduce them to "everybody. " Others come in and you may do the
introductions one by one.
There is, by the way, no "hi" from Al. I just don't know whether Al in fact
said something that we couldn't pick up on the tape, or whether he nodded
and didn't say anything, or whether he didn't do anything. I have no
particular guarantee on it, i.e. , from what I know about these sessions it's
perfectly conceivable that Al refrained from returning the greeting on
purpose. He may have or he may not have. In any event, with the others we
have these definite greeting exchanges.
Now there's a neat problem. If people are introduced in pairs, what sort of
attention is each giving to the sequence in which somebody else is being
introduced? We could imagine that, introductions and greetings and things
like that going in pairs, then it's nobody else's business to hear, or they can
hear but that's up to them. And what one wants to see about this sequence
is that for the later speakers in it, i.e. , Ken and Roger, the way it comes off
shows that they were engaged in attending to its earlier parts.
In particular, the work of the word "Ken" as an introduction of Jim to
Ken turns on that it follows "Jim this is uh Al. " The word "Ken" is not
 Lecture 5 65
necessarily a way that one 'introduces. ' The word "Ken" can be, e.g . , a way
of getting Ken's attention. Ken gets that he's being 'introduced' via the fact
that he knows that an 'introduction sequence' has begun, and the sequence
comes off as requiring that he show that he knows it, which he does by his
way of dealing with "Ken. " He's not, then, an overhearer to this first part,
he's a proper hearer, and he should and does use his hearing of this first part
- and so does Roger: We have an utterance, "-and Roger. " If we took this
utterance and asked what is it for, and how the hell does Roger know what
to do, then we have no way to handle it but by reference to the fact that it is
organized with respect to the prior utterances.
So, that this is a sequence of introductions and not, e.g., merely a list of
paired introductions, is something that the way it's done brings off. He could
bring off a list of paired introductions: "Jim this is Al. " "Jim this is Ken. "
"Jim this is Roger. " Where, for the participation of the parties to the specific
occasion of their being introduced, that they participate in it would require no
attention to the other parties' being introduced . Here, the thing is brought off
coordinatively.
Let me make one brief remark about "-and Roger, " about 'and' as a
conjunction. One tends to have a picture of 'and' being used for just conjoined
things, like items on a list. Now, while it is used that way, it has a specific use
here. It isn't only or particularly used in lists to locate that something else is
going to follow that's also on the list, but it's used specifically to signal that
the thing that follows is the last thing on the list. So you will regularly see that
'and' placed, not in each spot or any random spot, but placed before the last
item on the list. (Now I say "placed before the last item," and that's a
transformation from "it signals that the last item is coming. " That's a kind
of thing I do all the time, but it has to be sceptically viewed. It may be a
'signal,' I don't know, but I treat it as that. If it has that sort of association,
then I tend to treat it as doing that kind of a job. Now it may be that that's
not reasonable, and when I think about it I don't know if it does that kind
of a job for some of them, and I would like to prove it for some of them. But
I say things like that, and will probably continue to.)
Now, the fact that you can go around a table so to speak, provides that the
fact that there is an order to introduction sequences is something you can see
in pre-operation. One sort of way you can make such observations - and if
one learns to make them one may learn to like them - is to watch, when you
see a sequence about to happen, e.g . , people are sitting around a table and
somebody comes up who knows somebody at the table and now they're going
to be introduced around. It you watch the others, then you can see that there
are characteristic ways that they prepare to be introduced; characteristic ways
they behave before they're introduced. Things like: Before they're introduced
they avoid eye contact with the person that they're going to be introduced to,
but when they're about to be introduced they may keep their head in a
particular way, ready to turn, i.e. , they don't keep it in any which way, but
ready to be just turned up. The order of introductions is important, then, in
the sense that you don't get " Al , " and then he realizes he's being introduced,
66 Part I
and now they sit around waiting to see who, if anybody, is next. But if now
it's AI, then Ken knows he's next, and Ken prepares to be introduced, and can
then lift his head in such a way as to catch Jim's eye when Jim looks at him,
so it doesn't then happen that Ken gets introduced, offers his eyes to Jim but
Jim had already looked at him and has passed him by, or he offers his eyes
and finds himself being stared at. The timing is kind of a nice thing, where
you want to arrive at the exchange at the same time. And you can watch heads
for that sort of thing. I've heard it said about our society that all the old graces
are lost and people are just not the way they used to be. But if, e.g. , you watch
them moving their heads in an introduction sequence, then you'll see some of
the old graces.
Coming back to the issue of producing a sentence across a series of other
persons' insertions: If we consider the task of introductions, and consider that
if what the guy is up to is to do an introduction of Jim to 'the members of
the group' as compared with an introduction of Jim to three people, then to
organize the production of that introduction in such a fashion that it comes off
as one unit within which they have all attended to it as a unit, may be the
elegant way to do specifically introducing somebody to what you want to be
' members of a group. ' To pack it into a sentence structure can perhaps make
the fact that there is a relationship involved, a something that you are able to
bring off in a way that you might not have as a specific thing you're bringing
off otherwise. I'm not saying that if he'd said, e.g. , "Jim this is AI, " "Jim this
is Ken," that people would figure that they don't have any particular relation
to each other. That's not the issue so much as that there are ways of doing it
so that their relationship is built in via, e.g . , that they all are shown to be
attending to other than their own introduction; that he's addressing each of
them in this sentence, and in a way, he's addressing each of them in each
utterance.
 Lecture 6
Greetings and introductions;
Orienta tiona! utterances; Ultra rich,
infinite topics; Being �honey'
I'll continue for a bit on the greeting-introduction sequence. What I want to
do now is to consider what sorts of things serve to occasion an introduction
sequence, and what relationship there might be between the occasioning of it
and the work it does once it's occasioned.
The occasioning of an introduction sequence can in the first instance turn
on certain formal co-participant considerations, having to do with just such
things as that some people are in a possibly public place and somebody comes
into view who's known to only one of them. If, for the one to whom they're
known there's rights or obligations to have even a brief exchange, then
engaging in an introduction sequence may be thereby occasioned. That is to
say, if the newcomer who is acquainted with one of some pre-present group
has occasion to start talking at all, then it may be felt that the pre-present
acquaintance should introduce the others to him. And that can matter with
respect to future possibilities. People can be seen to attend to the possibility
that they will be put in a position of engaging in such a sequence, so that one
thing that they will do when they're with some given other is to monitor
where they will go in an attempt to control the chances of coming across an
anybody that they know, for whom they thereby may feel obligations to do
an introduction. And this suggests that they use such formal considerations as
'the co-presence of an acquaintance who was not originally with you' as
grounds for doing an introduction.
Now I'm not here referring to the possibility that you won't do an
introduction, because whether you do or don't do an introduction is in its way
irrelevant, since if it's the thing that's appropriately done, then that you don't
do it can just stand as a notable event on the part of any of the other parties
to it. The person who came into the view of you and your acquaintance can
go off and comment, "He was with somebody but didn't introduce me, " or,
e.g. , people you're with can say "How come you didn't introduce us to that
one?" etc. And they do. Indeed, with an exchange of greetings, immediate
introductions is a normal and perhaps normative thing, in just the way it
happens in our case - which would seem to be perhaps a much more special
case, bur it probably isn't very special.
So there's that sort of way in which introductions come to be done. The
sheer fact that people of certain sorts of relationships come into each others'

67
68 Part I
presence suffices to occasion them. That means that these things can be rather
massively used, insofar as, e.g . , people operate in relatively public places and
insofar as there's some 'underlapping' rather than overlapping, I suppose, of
acquaintances, i.e. , that there's some chance that when you're out walking
with X, the Y that you meet will be a Y who doesn't know X, who you know.
Or the reverse; when you're out walking with X, some Y appears who is
known to X but not to you.
The question is, what do these introduction sequences do. Well, one
thing they do is, at least in some rapid minimal way, put the two people
who are introduced into a state of talk together, a state of talk which has a
legitimate source for its occurrence, the introduction. The state of talk you
put them into may be a very minimal one, but one thing that I've already
at least suggested is that states of talk once having gotten started have, at
least with regards to the sequencing structures, indefinite possibilities of
continuation. And the question of once it gets started where it will go, even
for this conversation, is not particularly constrained by how it got started,
i.e. , that it got started this way does not particularly constrain future
possibilities.
And you give them certain resources whereby to conduct that state of talk
you're putting them into. The basic resource in this regard is, not giving them
each other's names, but giving them names that each can use for the other.
That takes some work on the part of the introducer, i.e. , determining what
name each should use requires sorts of analysis on his part. And apparently
that choice is not the introducer's free choice, i.e. , it's not just that he has a
task to do and however he brings it off, that's okay. He can do it badly and
he can do it well.
What sorts of things seem to be involved in what names you pick? Let's
consider that a bit. When you put people into a state of talk with their names,
are you giving them nothing more than a name to use, or is it that the choice
of a name is already informative to them of more that they can use in
conducting their conversation? Each of them knows you, and there may be
some rather specified ways in which they know you, i.e. , they know you as a
this or as a that; as a neighbor, a colleague, an old friend, etc. And they may
know whole bunches of other things about you. And the fact, then, that
somebody is with you can, before you've made the introductions, set up
various kinds of constraints on who they figure that other person is. Not 'who'
in the sense that it's your cousin from Milwaukee, but that it's a 'somebody
like you' in some way, for example. Where, if they each have various such
properties as the right age, appearance, etc. , it may well be that each can
figure that the other is 'a friend of yours' and then they are perhaps potential
friends of each other's. Which is to say that they can perhaps use your
presence with the other person not merely as something that occasions their
introduction, but as informative about each other and each's possible
relationship to the other, i.e. , what they could possibly have to talk about.
And the sort of introduction you give them, even if only the exchange of
names, may be something that allows them to see that such is the case. For
 Lecture 6 69
example, introducing them to each other via nicknames may be saying to
them that they are the same sort.
So the idea is that the fact that an introduction may be brought off puts one
in a position where each of the parties to the introduction are engaged, before
that's taken place, in some attempt to determine not merely who the other is,
and not merely who the other is with respect to you, but perhaps as well, who
the other is with respect to them. And they can use a range of information to
set up possibilities on that, which, in the way you bring off your introduction,
can be delivered or not.
Now, as one limiting end of this, you may determine that while the
conditions have otherwise been satisfied for an introduction, the people don't
belong to meet, by reference to, e.g. , the possible status relationships of the
two. And you may decide not to do an introduction, or that an introduction
is to be a purely pro-forma thing. So, e.g. , Emily Post gives instructions on
how to introduce your neighbor to your gardener so as not to set up a
conversation, or to set up a conversation of a rather delimited sort, in which
she wants to know when she should cut her tulips.
So the way in which you bring the introductions off matters by reference to
what sort of a fix you put these people into. You could put them into a
conversation in which one or the other doesn't want to be or shouldn't be ­
leaving aside that you put into conversation people you don't want in
conversation, etc. Or you can put them into the conversation they want to be
in, as compared to a conversation that they don't want to be in, where they
only discover after an hour of talk that in fact they have gotten into a
conversation that they could have had, but you didn't let them know that
they could have. So that regularly, besides an exchange of names, you can give
them that sort .of information which can 'get them started; ' such things as
"You're both from the same town, " "He was in the same class as your
brother, " "He's been dying to meet you," etc.
Now it's in the way that the information you announce informs the various
parties of things like their respective positions, presumably based on some
determination you've made, that the detailed character of each actual
introduction sequence turns out to count, where one has in the first instance
a rather general structure which is just, as I say, occasioned by the fact of
co-presence for anybody. It's not that this holds for rich people, poor people,
high school kids, pairs of people under a formulation that the initial pair
walking together down a street are acquainted for more than a year or barely
acquainted, or that there are two people and one enters, or three people. That
is to say, this is really an extremely formal kind of situation. One person
comes into the presence of some collection of more than one, where now, for
the collection of 'more than one plus one,' some two are acquainted across
those lines. That can set up the possibility of an introduction sequence taking
place, given that it sets up initially the possibility of at least greetings and
perhaps a conversation, across the lines. However, there's this specific work of
the introduction sequence. And it's in terms of the specific work of an
introduction sequence for some actual group that we have all these elaborated
70 Part I
kinds of workings being used, in which who you introduce first can matter,
the names can matter, and all the rest.
One way to think about it is to consider that a way to simplify the task of
doing any introduction would be, e.g . , to constrain the occasions under which
introductions could get done. You could say, for example, introductions
should go 'first name to first name. ' That can operate to constrain the initial
use of an introduction to only people you can introduce that way. But notice
that that already sets up a problem, and anything other than the actual one
creates problems, in this way. As you're going along, you're initially going
about the business of exchanging greetings and perhaps getting into a
conversation with somebody who comes down the street whom you know.
Now that is to say that the doing of the introduction is contingent on
something else happening which is regulated independently of any consider­
ation about whether you should do introductions. It's a more general thing,
that walking down the street or being in some public place, whether you're
with other people or not, if you come across somebody you're acquainted with
you can get into a state of talk with them. The addition of other people only
serves to provide what may then or ought then happen in the conversation
that can have been generated independently of their presence.
So that if you wanted to simplify the kinds of tasks that have to be done
on each occasion in which you're doing an introduction by constraining where
you're going to do introductions, then you come up against the structure of
the ways that conversations get started. A situation can then arise in which
you have a possible conversation taking place between two people in the
presence of others who were already in a state of conversation with one of
those two. And in that one person is overlapping as a co-participant in two
conversations, there's some business of 'bringing the whole thing in, ' which is
apparently obliged. So it's that the introduction sequence occurs upon the
occurrence of the greeting phenomenon, and the greeting phenomenon is
occasioned independently of that there are others with you, where the
introduction thing turns on that there are others with you, that implicates this
involvement of work in how you do an introduction sequence.
What this amounts to is, if you were to figure that an introduction
sequence is merely a ceremony, then it would be an awfully elaborated sort of
ceremony, in the sense that it's not one ceremony which you do time and
again, but for each use of the ceremony you have to engage in some work of
analysis in order to bring it off right. One wants to know why is it built in
such a 'complex' way. Transform that terminologically into an 'adaptive' way.
That is to say, it's built in such a way that if a person who needs to use it
knows how to use it, it can be used on any occasion of its invocation, where
its occasions of invocation are specified only in extremely weak, i.e. , general
ways - only in terms of things like ' more than one person plus another person'
plus ' acquaintanceship' plus a conversation getting going, where a conversa­
tion getting going is provided for independently of the addition of others.
So the thing is really geared in very nice detail to the conditions for starting
conversation. And that involves then that one isn't to view the properties of
 Lecture 6 71
the introduaion sequence as some sort of indication of the fantastic lengths to
which people went in the old days to make elaborate ceremonies. That is
to say, it's not only that it's adapted to the sorts of work it does, it's adapted
to the conditions of occurrence. Its work of getting people into a state of
conversaton could be done quite differently under different conditions of
occurrence. For example, you might have a rule which says ' for two people
who are to be brought into a state of conversation in a situation like this one,
then it has to be the second or third time that they encounter each other, and
they have to encounter each other via passing you in both positions. ' That is
to say, if A knows B and C, then one time A is walking with B and meets C.
And another time A is walking with C and meets B. Then the third time, A
can bring B and C into conversation, having had, e.g. , time to inform each of
them about the other. Or you could carry around letters to hand out, about
the various people that you know. The point is that you don't have those sorts
of preparations set up in principle, but you have to be ready, and perhaps in
code of some sort, to tell them what they can do together and various other
sorts of things as well.
In that regard, it's not incidental that introductions use names, in the sense
that if you're using names in an introduaion, then it's one property of names
for introductions that names are adequate to any round of introductions.
('Any round' means that it's not as though you will have an expectation that
you will have to introduce a thousand people to each other, but that any two
or three people you introduce to each other will have a name.) And there's lots
of other identifications you could use which would not be adequate to any
round. If, for example, you went about introducing people via their bridge
scores or their grades or, e.g. , via the position they play on a baseball team ­
which you do sometimes - then you might find that you would on some
occasion be introducing people and have nothing to introduce them with, i.e. ,
they don't have a bridge score. But there are some sorts of identifiers which
have a value for everybody; like you could introduce everybody by their age.
Eventually we could introduce everybody by their telephone number or some
such thing as that. That introductions take place between anybodys,
anywhere, involves them in having as an item that information can be fitted
to, something that anybody would have, anybody could exchange, etc. A
name is one. (And now the name gets fiddled with so that you end up having
eleven or three or six different names, which the various people who know
you use.)
Now I want to deal with 'part two ' :

Ken : We were in an automobile discussion,

Roger : -discussin' the psychological motives fer
( ): hhh 11 hhhh hh
AI : -drag racing on the streets.

I want to be able to locate where, i.e. , at what sort of layer of organization,

the joint production is operating. We can get a bunch of general points about,
72 Part I
see a lot of interest in, the joint production phenomenon. That's something
separate from locating, for each occurrence of one of them, what order of
organization is it operating out of, i.e. , what is the faa of collaboration doing
there, or what is the faa of a joint production doing there. The question is,
then, what's being done in that they're bringing this thing off in just the way
they do, as compared perhaps to allowing "We were in an automobile
discussion" to be a sentence, and if Roger wants to talk, he'd be producing
another sentence.
Let me more or less outline the course of the discussion hereafter. I want to
propose that the first utterance in this series is what we could call 'orienta­
tiona!. ' I'll have further things to say about how it goes about being
orientational, but one aspect of that is its placing, i.e. , its placing directly on
the occurrence of an entry, greetings, and introductions, into a conversation
that has been ongoing. There is that order of sequencing which operates to
provide that where greetings and introduction-rounds take place on an entry
of a new party into a conversation, then the introductions being over, some
orientation is an appropriate object to do. There is, then, an aspect of "We
were in an automobile discussion" which is operating at the organizational
level of 'introductions' and things like that; in terms, then, of an overall
sequential organization of a fairly general sort, where that sort of sequence is
really quite recurrent, and placing a candidate in such a place can involve its
being recognized.
So, then, we have needed at least some sort of consideration of the prior
materials because we can't find what this thing is doing without them. It isn't
an inspection of this line that tells us what it might be doing - where we have
to know some sense of what it might be doing to find out what they're then
doing to it. And furthermore, it's not just an inspection of this thing plus the
utterance before it; but in order to find what that was, one has had to see the
sequence it was involved in. So that it's via attention to the sorts of sequences
that have been proceeding that we can get a beginning handle on this. And
its understanding by the various parties is presumably the same sort of
phenomenon. It locks into a sequencing potential that their attention to the
prior sequence as an 'introduction' makes relevant. And we saw that the very
way that the introductions were brought off involved attention by the various
parties to a 'round of introductions' as something that each will have shown
the other that they were doing. (For example, I mentioned last time that on
the doing of each greeting pair, the parties to it stopped talking. Normally
when you're introduced and you do a greeting pair, upon the completion of
the greeting pair you do some more talk. So that the enclosure of these
greeting pairs within the introduction is handled by such a thing as that they
don't begin to talk, but that they stop and each next pair starts up; apart from
that it's organizationally brought off by Dan through his use of a single
sentence.) And the next item stands in a sequence to the introduction round,
as compared to being just some next item which may be related to prior things
but which has no relationship to them in terms of that order of organization.
As, for example, a question "What did you say?" might be related to a last
 Lecture 6 73
sentence, s o when he says "Jim Reed" somebody could say "What did you
say?" Now that's related to what was last said, but it's not related in the way
"We were in an automobile discussion" is.
I'm suggesting that you can try to get an idea of an order of organization
and see the sense in which some aspects of an object are operating at one order
of organization while others may not be. I am proposing that "We were in an
automobile discussion" is operating at the same order of organization as the
introductions, and is something placed 'after introductions. ' Now let's
consider some aspects of it as an 'orientational' utterance so as to get some feel
for the sorts of work involved in such an utterance.
One very characteristic way that an orientational utterance is done -
though the formulation I'll give will sound simpler than it is - is to name a
formulation of the topic that was being engaged in before the entrant came.
That is to say, upon the entrance of a newcomer to the conversation, even if
you don't have an introduction sequence, i.e. , with people who are already
acquainted, upon greetings being done somebody can orient the new party by
saying 'what we were talking about. ' I say it sounds simpler than it is by
virtue of a rather complex problem of the ways in which the topic name is
chosen. There are a lot of options involved in the choice of topic name. And
the choice operates in some independence of whatever the pre-present parties
may understand is the topic they were talking about. There are some sorts of
analyses that such a speaker as the one who is here doing the orientational'
·

utterance should do in determining what topic name to use. And one sort of
analysis that he should do involves some consideration of alternative topic
names in terms of some identification he makes of the entrant, and as well,
some sorts of identifications he claims for himself and others. The choice of a
topic name can be the product of such a determination. For example, if a
bunch of ladies are sitting around talking, then if somebody enters they may
say "We're talking about the new breed of petunias" under some determi­
nation of what the new person is like, or they may cast what they're doing into
quite different sorts of terms, e.g. , "We're talking about the garden club" ,
etc . , having to do with, among other things, that they figure that the person
who's entered knows about the named topic in such a way as they could join
that topic.
Another sort of thing is that the entrant can see that they do or do not
belong in this conversation. One sort of thing that is specifically done by these
orientational utterances is to inform an entrant that they should stay,
participate, or leave. So that the person who's making the orientational
remark engages in a determination of such a thing as would the entrant like
to join this conversation, would they be able to join it, or not. They then don't
use the product directly, e.g . , "You wouldn't be interested, go away," but
some formulation of what's being done which tells them that they don't want
to be there or that they don't belong there. And this can be done in a variety
of ways. For example, there is a terminology which does that work
specifically. Somebody comes into the room and you look up and you say
"We're talking shop talk" or "We're talking girl talk" - not that they're
74 Part I
talking about girls, but, e.g. , two women are sitting and talking, the husband
of one of them comes into the room, and now they say to him "We're talking
girl talk. " Or, for example, one can say "We're talking about . . . " some item
which is known by the other to be, e.g. , 'shop talk. ' That is to say, they know
nothing about that item, but it's a term in some business that they don't
know anything about and are known to be uninterested in. Any technical
term for any field, offered to a non-specialist, serves as information that you
take it they're not interested.
Now if you're going to use some possible descriptor of a topical sort, e.g . ,
"We're talking about the new breed o f petunias" a s compared t o a
characterization of the topic, e.g. , "We're talking girl talk, " that has a
problem in it. That problem is the kinds of information you have available to
you about the person to whom you're offering this thing, i.e. , what do you
think you know about it with respect to what you think they know about it,
where the choice of terminology may exhibit your intended position with
respect to the matter, and also your understanding of their intended position
with respect to the matter. If somebody says "We're talking about gardens, "
then somebody who doesn't know much about gardens may figure that they
could perfectly well get along in a conversation about gardens, i.e. , that they
know as much as anybody who isn't a bug about gardening. But if they're
told that what's being discussed is some new breed of petunia, they might
figure that they wouldn't be able to handle themselves in this crowd. But then
again, if you tell somebody that you're discussing some new breed, it may
tum out that though you think you're an expert on it, you're a novice
compared to them. So you have to make those sorts of determinations, which
are classically famous sources of amusement, embarrassment, etc. , i.e. , you
pick a technical term to show your expertise to somebody you meet at a party,
and they tum out to be the authority on that thing while you know little more
than the name of it.
There are, then, those sorts of orders of work involved in an orientational
utterance. And the last thing in the world you want to find yourself saying is,
"He says 'we were in an automobile discussion' because it's true, " i.e. ,
because that's a correct characterization of what they were doing. That it's
true couldn't be more irrelevant. The fact that something is true is not
grounds for saying it, i.e. , not grounds for saying it in any given place. But
naming a topic is one way of doing an orientation, and the choice of a topic
name counts in a variety of ways.
Let me just note that the use of a topic name to do an orientation has, aside
from the work it does by reference to the recipient, that it gets that topic up
on the board again. And in that regard, this sort of orientational utterance is
a case of one way of dealing with interruptions, i.e. , it's a case of reassertion
of topic, where reassertion of topic works not just to announce what we were
doing - i.e. , an announcement of one does not provide now for a list of others,
e.g. , "We were in an automobile discussion and last week we were talking
about high school dropouts" - but it works to reinvoke a topic. And they do
reinvoke the topic, or they can be quarreled with, " No we weren't, we were
 Lecture 6 75
doing something else. " But again, lt s via the fact that the thing is
'orientational' that to whom it's directed can be found; indeed, seeing that it's
orientational is crucial to seeing to whom it's directed. And seeing that it's
orientational involves seeing its sequenced position with respect to the
introduction sequence.
I want now to suggest that an 'automobile discussion' is a special sort of
topic for the sorts of people that are doing it here, i.e. , these teenage boys.
There are various ways to develop the sort of topic it is. The way I'm going
to talk about it is as a topic 'for them, ' a topic for teenage boys - not that it's
a topic, and it can be a topic for teenage boys and for others, but 'automobile
discussion for teenage boys' is one name because the way in which it's a topic
for them is different than the way in which it's a topic for anybody else. Let
me give one way to show that it's a special sort of object - and at least
incidentally we may see whether my formulation of it is acceptable or not.
There has been a bit of literature about special topics for a culture. In a
book called The Nuer by E. E. Pritchard, an anthropologist of a slightly
earlier day, he talks about cattle for the Nuer; how cattle for the Nuer are
a topic of a very special sort, and how you can't talk about anything with
the Nuer without it ending up being about cattle. This is from Chapter 1 ,
pages 1 8- 1 9 .

We have seen in a brief survey of some Nuer institutions and customs

that most of their social behavior directly concerns their cattle. A fuller
study of their culture would show everywhere the same dominant
interest in cattle. For example, in their folklore. They are always talking
about their beasts. I used to sometimes despair that I never discussed
anything with the young men but livestock and girls. And even the
subject of girls led inevitably to that of cattle. Start on whatever subjeas
I would, and approach it from whatever angle, we would soon be
speaking of cows and oxen, heifers and steers, rams and sheep, he-goats
and she-goats, calves and lambs and kids. I've already indicated that
this obsession - for such it seems to the outsider - is due not only to the
great economic value of cattle, but also to the fact that they are linked
in numerous social relationships. Nuer tend to define all social processes
and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom.
Consequently he who lives among Nuer and wishes to understand
their social life, must first master a vocabulary referring to cattle, and to
the life of the herds. Such complicated discussions as those which take
place in legal disputes, can only be followed when one understands the
difficult cattle terminology of colors, ages, sexes, and so forth.

Now, he wants to make a case for the central status of cattle in the Nuer
society but I'm not particularly involved in that. The question is that you can
make a case for the central status of cattle conversation among the Nuer. And
we want to make a case for the peculiar status of automobile talk for teenage
boys. And I want to talk about the topic as being 'ultra rich' for them. I
76 Part I
suppose it's something that I could just say, but I'd rather not just say it if we
can get anything out of a discussion of it.
One sort of thing we can mean by 'ultra rich' is that it's in some literal way
an 'infinite' topic. Imagine that we're talking about a car. A car has a finite
set of parts. Any part can be talked of, for some amount. Then you can
imagine that talking about the parts of a car would involve you in reducing
the amount of talk you can make about that car's parts as you proceeded
through the conversation, i.e. , you would be getting into a position where
you'd have less and less to say. In the first instance this situation is rather
simpler for adults, in that, e.g. , for some car you have, not any part is an
object that you could talk about; there may be very few parts and there may
be very little that you could say about them. But we can begin to get a picture
of the way in which automobile conversations for kids are not at all
constrained in the way they are for adults, by considering what sort of an
object a car is for a kid, by reference to its parts. A car for a kid has an infinite
set of parts. That's an assertion. That assertion doesn't turn on that there are
a lot more parts than you think, but what I'm saying is, for one, any part of
a car can be replaced. And any replaced part can be replaced. You can have,
then, infinite conversation, in that you can replace a part, announce that
you've replaced a part, discuss the replacement of some replaced part, etc.
And there are very nice relationships in that replacing a part leads to
considerations of other parts to be replaced so as to keep the car organized
now around the new part.
The dramatic difference is if, e.g. , an adult happens to announce to another
adult that they just replaced the engine in their car, or the tires, etc. there are
extremely few sorts of reasons why that could have happened, e.g. , the engine
died, the tires wore out. While such reasons could exist for teenage kids, their
reasons are in no way constrained like that. The replacement of a part has to
do with, e.g. , making it a better car. And there is no issue of economics, i.e. ,
it isn't that the part is replaced instead of replacing the entire car, but one
replaces a part as a way that one keeps one's car in model shape. The idea
being that the ways in which kids treat cars have as their consequence that
they can have talk about cars, not merely of much more technical sorts, but
of a much more elaborated sort than adults could have.
Now there's a phenomenon like the following involved. If a bunch of
people go to a restaurant and they get the menus and somebody says "Gee I
think I'll have roast beef, " that is not treated as merely their choice, it's
treated as a proposal. So that somebody else will say, "Oh I just had roast beef
last night, ' ' or something like that. If the first statement were not heard as a
proposal, the relationship of the second to it might be obscure. But you get
that a person's proposed thing that they will eat is treated as a proposal for
others. And people say why they will or will not have that thing, or engage
in some discussion about what this person ought to have other than roast beef.
That's a way in which what might seem in the first instance to be personal
proposals get treated for some rather small group. Now for kids, cars have the
same sort of status. If you propose, e.g . , "I want a Chevvy 409 , " then that
 Lecture 6 77
proposal will b e treated in the same sort of way. Another kid will say "I don't
want a Chevvy 409 " and say why, or that you shouldn't want a Chevvy 409 .
So there's that sense of anybody's 'want' being a community affair. And
again, it's a sense in which a proposal is conversationally generative. That is
to say, if you say "I want a Chevvy 409 , " if that can be turned into an issue
of whether everybody else ought to have one or you ought not to have one,
then the way in which it can produce talk is different than if you say "I want
a Chevvy 409 " or "I want a steak" and the business of anybody else is to just
list their desired item.
So there's that sense in which this is a kind of special item for conversation.
We could just begin to consider, as one criterion of possibly interesting items
for conversation for different sorts of groups, what sorts of things which you
offer as simply a personal proposal, are treated as intended as otherwise. I
suppose to some extent for students, course selection might be such a thing.
If you go around at certain times and say ' T m going to take this, " then
perhaps your friends will treat it as something they should consider,
something you should reconsider, etc.
Now with respect to car parts there is again that character, for at least some
teenage boys anyway, that the parts are replaceable, that conversation can be
about replaced parts, parts to be replaced, parts to be replaced after parts that
are to be replaced have been replaced, i.e. , "After I get the new aluminum VS
engine, I'll do X, Y, Z. " So you get a picture of conversational possibilities
that are really immense. And again, that sort of format, of 'after I get what
I don't have now, what I will then do' is, I take it, something rather
constrained in its use.
Another thing that allows for the kind of extensions it has is the scope of
the community involved. For lots of things, to introduce them comparatively
operates within very restricted lines. So, for example, if we're talking about
bridge playing and we're not professional bridge players but just occasionally
play bridge, then I pretty much can't use any bridge player for comparison
apart from the people we play bridge with. If I'm talking about how
somebody cooks and we're not listed chefs, then I can't talk about anybody
for comparison as a cook except somebody that we know. Now as our status
shifts on those things, the constraints on to whom somebody can be compared,
can shift. In that regard, even negative comparisons can be a major indication
that people figure you are in a different league than they figured that you were
before. When they say you're worse than X, X being some sort of professional,
that's a lot better than being better than Y who's just a neighbor.
Now it's a character of comparison of cars, that a kid hotrodder can
compare his car or somebody else's car to some car of somebody that neither
of them know; some car they've heard of. Cars which haven't raced can be
compared. And the community of stories about cars can be passed with
considerable hearsay. So that it's not just your car compared to a friend's car,
but your car within a community of cars.
I wanted to suggest that we can say in interesting ways that an automobile
discussion is something special for kids. And we've found some ways of
78 Part I
showing it's special which are themselves interesting. The point is it's not
simply that kids talk more about cars than other people talk about cars, it's
how they talk about cars that's interesting. And how they talk about cars may
provide for that they talk more about cars. Now how kids talk about cars may
be undifferentiated from how other people talk about other things, or how
kids talk about other things. It just may be that there are some cultural objects
for a group, 'ultra rich conversational topics. ' And for some conversation
system there's a way in which something can operate as an 'ultra rich topic, '
so that any 'ultra rich' topic gets talked o f in more or less the same way. I
don't know if it's so, but it's at least possible.
Now it's perfectly possible to be a teenage boy and talk about cars in the
way that anybody else talks about cars. But then one wouldn't be in a position
to engage in talk about cars with those for whom it is special. For one, you
simply wouldn't be able to understand what they're talking about, i.e. , you
might not know what the terms mean. What are 2 0-inch slicks? You don't
have any idea. There are other sorts of things involved: If, for example, at
some point in the conversation somebody says "I can get you ten seconds for
500 dollars, " you might not know whether that was good, bad, cheap, too
much. If somebody proposed that the engine weighed 340 pounds, then you
might figure that its weight was relevant, but you might not know whether
it was particularly light or particularly heavy, or that's just what it weighed.
Where, when they talk about that thing they would have no reason to state
the value of the variable when that variable is asserted. And that is a
characteristic way that they're doing 'member' talk about something. That is
to say, when people know the values of items, they don't attach that value to
the assertion, "It weighs 340 pounds and that's very light for an engine of
that sort, and that it's light is a good thing. " You wouldn't even know that
you wanted a light engine.
So there's a whole range of ways in which the talk can be opaque. And
while you may figure that you're perfectly well interested in having a
conversation about cars, that conversation about cars, with its opaque terms,
etc., may be specifically uninteresting. And that it's uninteresting can be a way
in which you find yourself left out, and left out of something that can matter
for such as you. There are certain sorts of things which one can be quite
uninterested in, have no feelings about, and nonetheless know that 'people
like you' do. The classical sociologist Simmel introduced a concept which he
called 'completeness, ' which had to do with the extent to which some group
formulated as a group-within-a-group was able to make members of all of
those, or only part of those, located as eligible. So that, e.g . , the fact that you
work in a factory may make you, for some people who also do it, eligible for
being a union member though you may not want to be a union member; you
may see that some people will figure that you should be a union member
and that you have to take a position, say, with respect to whether you're
going to be a union member or not. And he employs the notion as a way of
assessing organizations. Any organization which claims some population as
its eligibles, to what extent did they want completeness - some don't want
 Lecture 6 79
completeness - and to what extent if they wanted completeness did they
get it.
And one can at least approach the way in which persons within some group
orient to the fact that there's some claim that they ought to be a member. So
teenage boys may, whether or not they are interested in cars the way, say,
'hotrodders' are, know that that's a thing that they have to take a position on.
That is to say, it's of such relevance that they either are or they are not.
Whereas there can be things which if you aren't, you don't figure yourself as
a 'not such-and-such, ' there are some things which gain such relevance within
a group that you can be a 'not such-and-such. '
In that regard, then, the topic that Ken proposes with "We were in an
automobile discussion" is one that is not at all incidental for Ken to be
proposing that we were engaged in. It's a topic about which it can be expected
that there is some considerable identificational interest in on the part of Jim,
the new entrant. Now I take it that it's not too much to say that their
knowledge that somebody new was coming into the group, that he was a boy,
was relevant to the projection of this topic as something that they could
continue until he came in, and indeed have going when he came in, as
compared to other sorts of topics that they could have going. That sort of
inference can be made in that it is altogether relevant to parties that when
somebody comes in, that they be caught in a characteristic pose.
There are all kinds of funny things involved in that. If, e.g . , you're sitting
in your house and watching TV, watching some serial at 8 : 3 0 at night and the
doorbell rings, then the first thing you would do is tum off the TV so as to
not be in a positon of having somebody who comes in seeing you watching
that TV program. Where, although you may claim "I never watch it, I just­
this is the first time, " they can nonetheless figure that when they catch you
doing anything, they catch you doing what you characteristically do.
Knowing that some people are coming may, then, involve you in arranging
things so as to have a 'characteristic appearance' evident. The import of this
sort of characteristic appearance on the entrance of somebody is really
profound. And it has some very neat sorts of throw-offs. Suppose, for
example, that people are coming over to your house. Now, you have
magazines on your coffee table. And the magazines you have on the coffee
table are legitimately treatable by them as ways of determining, e.g . , what
you read, and via what you read, what you're like. Or rather, they can use
some magazine that you have, to make an initial determination of what you
claim to be, so that they can say later on, "He's a phoney" though you
haven't asserted any claim, in the sense that you haven't said ' 'I'm a real
intellectual. ' ' But by virtue of the fact that you have that magazine there - ·

even though you might say ' 'This is the first time I ever bought it' ' - they can
figure that you put it there for them to see and are thereby claiming that
you're the sort of person who has that thing. And of course it's classically
known that people specifically arrange things so as to locate who they are, to
others. That initial appearance is, then, something that is known to be
projectable, and can be treated as projected whether it's projected or not. By
80 Part I
that I mean that somebody can say "He's a phoney, at first I thought he was
an X but then I realized he's not, " where the person being talked about 'never
claimed' to be what he isn't,
It's something that requires attention, that people pick something that
matters; in our case, that they may have engaged in such a conversation as will
allow them to be in the position to say "This is what we're doing" when
doing such a thing as this can matter. And that's one sense in which it's
misguided to say "They say 'we were in an automobile discussion' because
they were in an automobile discussion. " They may have arranged that they
are in an automobile discussion so as to be able to say "We were in an
automobile discussion. " That initially used orientational item isn't to be seen
as simply chosen by reference to what they were in fact doing, since for one,
if they weren't doing something that they wanted to use as an orientational
item, they could use some other orientational item; they could do other
things, e.g. , discussing who they are, or who he is, or something else. And
of course it's perfectly possible that one will say, not what one was doing,
which is true, but say what one might well have been doing, which is more
useful.
Now let's notice one feature of 'an automobile discussion for teenagers'
which begins to invoke another aspect of this orientational usage here, and
that is that these people were in an automobile discussion is specifically
interesting in that they're not just 'teenage boys' and this is not just a 'teenage
boys' conversation; ' it's a group therapy session. And there can be for the
entrant quite a question as to what in the hell do they do in here? And the
claim involved in "We were in an automobile discussion" may well be
"There's nothing special here at all. We do what we always do. " That is to
say, it does not in any way whatsoever differentiate the talk done here from
such sorts of talk as teenage boys do, independently of settings. Consider that
you really would have no idea what in the world they'd be talking about.
They could be talking about things that you have no knowledge with respect
to. Or one might have one's imaginations about what people talk about in a
group therapy session. They could be talking about things that you absolutely
don't want to get into, etc. Is he going to have to talk about his fantasies with
respect to his mother? It's perfectly plausible for him that when he enters,
that's what they're talking about. So there's perhaps this enormously
comfort-offering character to this statement.
One feature, then, is that the proposed topic does not locate the setting that
is transparently involved here, or the status of the boy as is transparently
involved, i.e. , that they're 'patients. ' Instead, it locates - at least by naming
it - that it's a thing that such people as we do wherever. One further rather
neat aspect of it is, as I said, it's special for teenage boys. Which is to say that
they're going to be talking about something that they're experts in. Which is
to say that they're going to be talking about something in the presence of an
adult, in which he's not an expert. Which is to say that they're going to be
talking about something in the presence of the therapist in which he's not an
expert. Which is something perhaps peculiarly safe. He's coming into a
 Lecture 6 81
position in which there's an expert there, a therapist, knowledgeable in ways
that he's not knowledgeable and he would figure that the other patients are
not knowledgeable, i.e. , they're going to be saying things which they don't
know the sense of. That's one thing everybody knows about therapy; you're
going to be saying things and you don't know what they mean, but the
therapist knows what they mean. Now a topic is proposed that is such a topic
as he knows that he and the others will know what they mean, and the
therapist won't be able to understand them - not in the sense that it will be
psychiatrically dense for him, but that he's a culture-outsider for it.
Also of course, remember the early point that automobile discussions for
teenagers can go on forever. You could have a topic announced which would
clearly provide for, "Well, where are you in it, the beginning or the end?" For
example, "We were talking about Psycho. " Psycho could be talked about for
a while, and if you've already been talking about it, I'm probably in at the
end of the conversation, maybe it'll go on another ten minutes. If we're in an
automobile discussion, there's no sense in which it is relevant that we just
began or we've been going on for an hour. Whatever length it's so far had,
it can have an indefinitely continuing length. So he doesn't have to figure
' ' Well God damn it I came in at the end of just the sort of thing that I'm able
to handle. ' ' And that possible extendedness of a topic from where we catch it
is in principle an important issue, in terms of the view you have of what's
taking place.
So he's being invited, perhaps, into a situation in which what's going to be
done is that sort of thing that he is possibly most comfortable with, done with
colleagues, done in the presence of an adult who might be expected to be
peculiarly knowledgeable about what he says in ways that he couldn't control,
but where the adult is perhaps not at all in that position, and for such a topic
as can go on indefinitely. Not only go on indefinitely in the sense that it can
continue until the end of this session, but it can go on in the next session just
as well. And a topic for which, whatever it is he already knows, has had
conversations, experiences, etc., about cars, he is stocked with material that he
can tell them. He doesn't come into a position in which he's told that he's
going to be speechless.
So it's a very powerful topic choice used orientationally. If one considers the
options of attractive orientational topics, I would venture to say that there is
none better for them. That is to say, the alternative favorite topic that you
might come up with would not have the kinds of attributes this one does. Sex,
which would be a great teenage boy topic, is hardly the kind of topic that
could proceed with the kind of ease that it could with the absence of a
therapist. A sex conversation here would be quite different than a sex
conversation outside. And whatever other topics one might come up with
would not have the peculiarly neat status that this one does. It is, then,
orientational in a large range of ways beyond 'what we're now going to talk
of here. ' It's orientational about who we are, what we talk about, the sorts of
ways we talk about it, etc. I would particularly single out things like the
expertise relationship for the item with respect to the therapist.
82 Part I
That having been said, we can at least notice that, the introductions having
been finished, it is one of the kids who goes about doing the orientation, as
compared to leaving that for the therapist to do. That is to say, if there is that
sort of job to be done, then they take over that piece of work, where there
could be questions about who does it, and what's involved in one or another
of the potential doers doing it. If the therapist spoke, would he say "We were
in an automobile discussion" or "They were in an automobile discussion"? If
he'd said either of those, what sort of a reinvoking of the topic would that be,
i.e. , would it be voluntary or would he be instructing them to go back to their
conversation? I don't mean that in the sense that if the therapist said it, it
would oblige people to talk, because you can't oblige people to talk, but it
would set up the import of their talking or not talking. And of course,
whether he would pick that sort of orientation at all is another issue. In several
ways, then, it can indeed matter who does that sort of thing.
Now, I'm not trying here simply to give information about teenage boys
or favorite topics of teenage boys and things like that. I want to be pointing
out something like this: If one were asked to say something about that item
"We were in an automobile discussion, " one might find that it was utterly
dense, and utterly dense specifically because it seems so "Well, that's what
they were talking about, so it's true, isn't it? What else should they say? So
what can you say about it? " But we've been able to marshall a bunch of ways
of getting at this thing that permit us to say a lot about it, and a lot about it
that makes us eager to look to other conversations in which, e.g. , a topic gets
named, so as to see what that's doing. What one might do, then, is review the
character of my discussion, not for what it says about automobile discussions
and teenage kids, but for the sorts of attacks that were made on this utterance,
i.e. , the various kinds of attacks that were made on this utterance, i.e. , the
various kinds of starting and restarting that have been done to locate the kind
of work involved in a thing like this.
Now I'll shift ground altogether and begin to get back to the continuation
that's done. And when we come back to it now, we have at least the idea that
perhaps there's a lot going on in that thing, so that if there's a lot further
happening it's not surprizing. Again, the point I want to make is that what
we want to do is to lock in on where, organizationally, is the doing of the
collaboration accomplished. Is it accomplished at the same organizational
level as, e.g. , that it's 'orientational' or is it involved in other sorts of matters?
I want first to note that there's an aspect of the form of this collaborative
that's extractable so that collaboratives like it can be built, and in fact,
utterances can be built by single speakers as well, which use this form, i.e. , its
form is perhaps one that is not altogether unique. Let me give another
instance and the relationship will be obvious: "We were at dinner, dining on
roast beef and mashed potatoes. ' ' So that you have here this kind of
relationship between a noun and a participialization of the noun which
permits you to treat a possible sentence as only the 'independent clause' of a
sentence that has an independent and a dependent clause, via the use of just
participializing the noun. "We were in an automobile discussion" "discussing
 Lecture 6 83
the psychological motives for . . . " The construction clearly could have been
used by Ken himself, and it doesn't involve some really arbitrary fitting.
We can note that Roger's starting up clearly preserves the orientational
character, though there's obviously some modification involved. And we can
note that, that Roger's utterance is a continuation of Ken's is something that
Al then shows that he saw. Al could have built an utterance which would
involve transforming Roger's from a continuation to a new beginning:
' 'discussing the psychological motives for' ' ' 'drag racing on the streets, is what
we were doing. " Had Al provided that last utterance, he would have turned
Roger's into the beginning of his. So what he actually does is relevant to what
Roger will have done, just as what Roger has done turns Ken's from a
perfectly good sentence into a clause.
That of course doesn't tell us at all why Roger does this. Now we had an
initial feature which was that if Ken's is an orientational utterance, then it
locates Jim as the recipient. If it locates Jim as the recipient, then Jim should
speak next. And I want to propose next time that it's by reference to dealing
with Jim speaking next that we can deal with what Roger is doing here. 1

1 None of the subsequent Fall 1 968 lectures was transcribed.

 Part II
Winter 1969

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 1 Lecture
Announcements; Touched-off
utterances; Noticings; The makings of
conversation; Local resources
The following fragment occurs about six utterances into the first of these
group therapy sessions that I've been fiddling around with. Roger has been
talking, and I put the last bit of his talk in for a reason which I'll get to
shortly.

Roger : . . . of the desk that 'e lijjkes.

AI: Hey you have a hole in yer shoe,
Roger : heh Do(hh)n' tell me. hhh heh
AI : This place co:s' too much money. Can' afforda buy shoes.
(2 . 0)
Roger : ' S breaking my folks.
(2 . 0)
Roger : My insanity's breaking their bankb'k.
Dan : Have yer folks said anything?
(0 7 ) .

Roger : Nah(h)
(4. 0)
(Roger) : ((very soft)) (They ain't sayin nuttin' . )

I've been collecting notes on this thing for a long time, kind of a
conglomeration of things. I'm starting to talk about it now in that it has some
rough relationship to at least some aspects of 'weather talk. ' 1 It may be a
relevant predecessor to considering weather talk by virtue of this sort of issue:
Where do people place announcements, noticings, in conversation? That's one
sort of thing. Another sort of thing is more in point for weather talk in
particular and concerns the 'makings of conversation, ' which is something I've
worked on a bit with regard to a conversation in which a piece of news, ' 'I got
a raise,' ' is used to make certain sorts of talk, i.e. , is used in the making of
conversation. And I want to deal a bit with the makings of conversation by
reference to this fragment.
But I'll start off by just grossly saying something about that first matter, the
placing of announcements - leaving aside for now some sorts of noticings,
including the one in this fragment, "Hey you have a hole in your shoe. "
1 The class had been given materials to consider, on talk about the weather.

87
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
88 Part II
It appears that there are, maybe, three sorts of places that announcements
go; two of which have one sort of orderliness to them, and the third, another.
First of all they go in what is in its way a 'free space' for announcements - at
the beginning of conversations. When you say to somebody "How are you?"
or when you begin a call, then one of the things that's done at that place is
to make some sorts of announcements: "How are you feeling?" "Lousy, my
wife just had an operation, " or, "I just called to say I have to have an
operation. " So that's one place that announcements go. However, not all sorts
of announcements should go there, and indeed announcements which you
may want to make, you may not want to put there because in putting them
there they are thereby given a kind of status.
There appears to be some sort of hierarchical relationship among an­
nounceables. Putting an announceable at the beginning, you might be seen as
claiming one order of importance for it, i.e. , treating it as 'initially
mentionable' or as a 'reason for a call. ' It may perfectly well be an
announceable, but not an announceable that should be treated as initially
mentionable or as a reason for a call. So even if you have a bunch of
announcements and you get a chance to make an announcement, you may not
make the announcement in that initial place. Of course for the dealing-with
of an actually occurring announcement there is the problem that for those two
people that thing that should not go first could, for some other people or on
some other occasion be placed in, e.g. , 'reason for the call' status.
Again, then, first there are the sorts of things which are useable as reasons
for a call or gotten by "How are you?" Second, and in a way related to this
type of first, is a place that occurs when somebody signals that perhaps the
conversation should close. There, one regularly gets somebody saying "Oh by
the way . . . " and then putting in the announcement. Now I haven't talked
about 'closings' but I'll just say for now that one of the big things about
closings is that closing is not something that's done like 'greetings' in that you
say "Hi" and you've done a greeting, but closing is something that's
collaboratively done and takes a sequence itself, so that there are closing­
beginnings and then closing-ends. And in conversations people go about
getting together to close. So one second place for an announcement is after a
dosing-beginning with somebody saying "Oh by the way . . . " and putting
in the announcement.
Third are announcements that are placed in the 'middle. ' And if you take
a collection of announceables that are placed in a conversation, the ones I'll
talk of now do not seem to be so easily interchanged with the first two. The
character of announcements placed in the 'middle' is this: They're a sort of
thing that occur as ' touched off ' utterances. And by that I mean something
like this: In one of these group therapy sessions we get the following sort of
occurrence:

Ken : Hey put your shoes back on c' mon I can smell you all the way
over here.
Roger : It's good for I I you.
 Lecture 1 89
AI : It's your problem. It'll grow hair on your chest.
Roger : Yeah and all that good stuff.
Ken : heh heh God any more hair on my chest and I'd be a fuzz boy.
Roger : 'D be a what?
Ken : [A fuzz boy.
AI : Fuzz boy.
Ken : Fuzz mop.
AI : Then you - then you'd have to start shaving.
Ken : ehhehh
Roger : Hey I shaved this morni - I mean last night for you.

What you have is the occurrence of the mentioning of shaving occasioning

Roger's announcement that he shaved. That announcement is not, perhaps,
the sort of thing that he would do at the beginning of the conversation - or
if he did announce it at the beginning he would be claiming for it some sort
of status that he might not want to claim for it. Now some things shouldn't
go as touched off utterances in the middle of a conversation. If, for example,
they're talking along and somebody says "Harry and Mary just had a baby, "
then you wouldn't at that point say, "Hey I just had a baby. " A thing like
that should have gone at the beginning, it shouldn't be ' merely' touched off.
But for some things, if you announce them right up front, people can ridicule
them, like "What's the big deal about that?" which happens in one of the
group therapy sessions. Ken's first utterance in the session is "I was at the
police station this morning. " That's an announceable. Somebody else says
"Big deal. " That is, it's seen that not only is he making an announcement but
that, in that he places the announcement where he does, he's making a claim
about it. Were the talk to come down to, e.g. , a discussion about cops, he
might then say, "Well I was at the police station this morning and . . . " and
launch into whatever he wants to say. And it might perhaps be treated quite
differently. The question of how the things get treated, depending upon
where they're placed seems to be relevant to where they get placed.
Now what's interesting is that one of the ways in which you don't have to
put announcements in at the beginning of a conversation is that the course of
a conversation can allow for the 'natural placing' of announcements by virtue
of whatever it is that happens to come up. So if you have a bunch of
announcements you don't have to figure that if you don't get them in right
at the beginning you'll never get a chance to say them, but you can simply
introduce them as appropriately placed, more or less, given what's just been
said - given that the character of the conversation is that it may wander over
this and that. (And if it doesn't happen that way, and you still want to say
something, then you can put it into the dosing section, after a dosing has been
begun.)
Of course if you're using the touched off mechanism then there are ways
of setting up that you might be able to touch things off. But then there are
also topics that, for some set of people, you may be able to feel fairly assured
that something like it will come up and you can mention your news. To take
90 Part II
a dramatic instance, in these materials one topic that is invariable is talk about
cars. And it happens in one of the sessions that something really godawful
happened. Roger had sold Al a car which then "blew up" shortly thereafter,
and that was a rather touchy sort of thing. Al doesn't announce it. What
happens is that the conversation - as it invariably does - gets around to cars.
Roger's car club is working under his direction, and there is discussion about
how they may be being exploited. 5

Roger : And I'm not using other people to do it. They're enjoying it
too. I'm just I'm just enlightening 'em to my uh method of
enjoying themselves.
Ken : heh
(4. 0)
Ken : Now Al. Al likes t- likes II t-
Roger : 1' m opening new channels for II eight out of the thirteen.
Ken : Waita minute wait.
Ken : Al likes to uh t-to ride sailboats or- or something II (
Roger : Not any more bah hehh ah bah heh
Ken : Why? What happened?
Roger : She's gone hehh
AI : She is sold. She's gonna be sold.
Ken : Oh. Well, he used to.
AI : [Mm hm,
Ken : Or-he-he still does in-in the back of his mind probly.
Roger : Now he likes to drive fast Austin Healys now.
AI : Not any more.
Roger : What happened?
--AI : It blew up.
Roger : Didju really?

And that may be more effeaive than if he had just started off with an
accusation. These touched off things are technically very elaborate and all I'm
saying now is that we can watch for them.
One thing about the touched offs is that if you're going to make one, then
the placing of that item upon the occurrence of the utterance that touches it
off is crucial. What that involves then is that that's a place where you can find
somebody really trying to get the floor, cutting somebody else off, interrupt­
ing and the like, with their touched off announcements. Now some sorts of
noticings, e.g. , 'environmental' noticings like "Hey you have a hole in your
shoe" and all sorts of things which occur in conversation and which involve
the noticing of, e.g. , the passing world ("Hey your cigarette's gone out,"
"What was that noise?" "Did you see that?") are similar to the touched off
announcements in that - again as for most sorts of things that happen in
conversation - the timing of their occurrence is one integral part of their
occurring. And with environmental noticings one of the ways that one tends
to go about showing that what one is asserting, one has just noticed, is to do
 Lecture 1 91
it by reference to, e.g. , an interruption of somebody else. So we regularly find
that these sorts of noticing announcements cut into someone else's talk. It isn't
then, perhaps, an altogether incidental thing that this "Hey you have a hole
in your shoe" does start up while another person is talking. That's kind of a
characteristic thing for noticings.
Now I take this to be a weak assertion in that I don't really know that it's
so that noticings are specifically interruptive. I raise it as a possibility. It is a
matter of some interest for us, in that any place we can cut into and locate
specific classes of things which occur as interruptions means that we are
reducing the random disorderliness of the occurrence of interruptions. There
are bunches of different things, and each one is something we would want to
consider.
Another weak but possibly so feature, which is a feature here, is that "Hey
you have a hole in your shoe' ' announced by AI, interrupts Roger and is
directed to Roger. That is to say, it is perhaps the case that that sort of a
noticing is a sort which would be directed to the person just talking. And if
that's so there's a good reason for it which is, if Roger is talking then one
legitimate - if not somewhat obliged - thing that AI can be doing is looking
at Roger. And that then involves that while not in any way topically related
to what Roger has been saying, that AI has been paying attention to Roger is
something that announcing the seeing of the hole in his shoe can involve. So
it might turn out that, e.g . , noticings of things like the physical features of
persons in the room are placed by reference to the talk of the person whose
feature is noticed. And that is an offshoot in its way of that attention that one
might, should, be giving to the speaker, and involves then that one isn't just
announcing any noticing, but announcing a noticing which in its fashion
turned on an attention to the speaker. That is so here, it may be so elsewhere.
And if we're looking for aspects of the orderliness of noticings, then that they
are interruptive and that they are directed to a current speaker are two
possibilities.
Now that doesn't tell us anything in the world about why AI says "Hey
you have a hole in your shoe" - where the fact that Roger has a hole in his
shoe doesn't account for Al's saying it - and why he says it is one sort of thing
I want to give some attention to. I want to make a partial lesson out of the
talk about the hole in Roger's shoe because involved there is a kind of thing
which, if you are an analyst of conversation who is a knowledgeable member
of the society whose conversation you are analyzing, could trip you up. That
is, it would not lead you to see a sort of thing that a cultural stranger might
see, but which in any event I guess we can come to be in a position to observe.
What's involved is this: When you're thinking about this hole in the shoe and
what's being done with it you may tend to start off with, as your primary sort
of fact, that in the world - as apart from in the conversation - the shoe is
Roger's, and use that possessional relationship as central. Whereas if you're
going to use that sort of a fact, what you want to do is to ask, Well how does
that fact, that an object is somebody's, conversationally matter? And you may
get one immediate sort of payoff. Whereas in the world, that it's Roger's shoe
92 Part II
matters in that, e.g . , if it's Roger's shoe then Al can't walk off with it, that
doesn't say that Al can't talk about it. But that it's Roger's does matter for
Al talking about it in this way: If Al's going to talk about it, e.g. , notice a hole
in it, then he has somebody to talk to about it - Roger. And he can figure that
if he talks about it Roger's going to talk back. That is to say, the possessional
relationship turns out to mean that that's a thing which serves to locate who
it is that will talk if you raise a topic, so that if you raise as a topic, an object
that is owned by somebody, then you can perhaps pretty well figure that
they'll be willing to talk in turn about it. So that fact that Roger owns the shoe
controls some sorts of uses in the world, but doesn't in any way prevent
somebody from, e.g. , talking about it - though it happens that in some
cultures, and for some objects in this culture, the fact that somebody owns
something serves as a perfectly adequate constraint in a conversation for
anybody talking about it, e.g . , when they're present.
Now the lesson is something like this: With respect to, say, things being
conceived of as "That's X's, that's Y's, that belongs in the room, that's Z's,"
etc. all those sorts of things are possible makings of a conversation, where the
fact that it's somebody's can count in various ways, but not automatically as
something which says, e.g. , that only they can talk about it. So you want to
think of bringing a bunch of possible conversational equipment to a
conversation with you. Think of Show and Tell in grade school as a model;
where, however, while it's perfectly obvious that some things are specifically
brought to a conversation for their possibly being noticed and remarked on in
some occasions, it's not just the particular thing that you want to talk about
that you bring, but you bring a range of things - some of them unavoidably,
e.g . , your body and attributes of your body, its odors, etc. What you want in
the first instance to do, insofar as we're talking about the organization of
conversation, is to think of the collection of attributes a person has, as possible
features of the conversation. This one happens to be brought by X, that one
happens to be brought by Y, but it's a collection that one might as well
imagine as being brought and thrown into the middle of the room.
And in its fashion one of the striking sorts of facts about people's talking
together is what they can make do with. You might figure that ]ohnson and
Rusk have lots to talk about, but me and my girlfriend, we see each other
every day, nothing much happens, what the hell do we have to talk about?
And it's just not so. It's specifically a trained sort of thing, i.e. , one takes
delight - and sees it as perhaps quite different from one's own life - in
watching a little kid make a morning out of a piece of string and a tin can.
You say "Look what a kid can do. Just a piece of string and a tin can and an
odd pair of shoes lying around, and he's able to have a morning's play. "
The point I'm getting to is that the local resources are what people make
conversations out of, what they can make conversations out of, and endlessly.
And the only way you can begin to think about, well, how in the world can
they do it; how in the world can they take whatever's at hand and make
conversation after conversation after conversation out of it (and of course
weather talk begins to come up as a thing at the back of our minds), is by
 Lecture 1 93
seeing that whatever they happen to bring in with them is available for
conversation. And on some occasion you will have found that your T-shirt
and your sweater and your shoes and somebody else's, and your glasses and
your ears have been turned to use. It's in that sense that you want to see that
whatever anybody brings into a room, they bring as possible makings, to be
turned to use. And where things like 'who owns it' matter for, e.g. , what
your're doing when you talk about it, who you're selecting to talk, what the
chances are of getting anybody to talk, and things like that, but not so much
in the way in which 'who owns it' matters for other sorts of events.
So a shoe is then a perfectly good ordinary object to make some talk about.
The issue is to find a way of turning it to use under the various sorts of
constraints that there are in conversation, which involve that you pretty much
can't say "Hey you're wearing a shirt" or things like that just anywhere in a
conversation. That is to say, you have to be attending the things everybody
brings in and piles up in the room so to speak, for now-sayable things about
them. So if the shoe has a hole in it, that may be noticeable. If you weren't
wearing a shirt before and now you are, then "Hey you're wearing a shirt"
may be now-sayable. And when we come to see that it's things like the hole
in the shoe that are used, or that you're now wearing a shirt or that you're
wearing a new shirt, then we can see that a vast amount of conversation is
devoted to those makings that everybody brings with them, and that even
though people don't make an altogether only topic out of those makings, they
nonetheless show, again and again, that they're attending those things,
awaiting their possible use, so that when something happens, then they can
use it. And we can see that, furthermore, the fact that such a thing was talked
of last time doesn't mean it isn't to be talked about this time. The fact that
it was talked about last time can set up its being talked about this time, e.g. ,
"You look better today than you looked yesterday, " where yesterday I said
"you don't look so good. "
Okay, so for the question 'why did he talk about the shoe?' what I attacked
was 'what is it that makes anything like a shoe talkable-about?' where, for the
discussion so far, 'shoe' could be replaced by anything that somebody brings.
It's really worth trying, insofar as we're thinking about social organization, to
attempt to reconceive all these objects as just piled in the middle of the room
and available for talk, and then to try to reconceive how it is that things like
whose it is matter for the organization of conversation. You can then get to
things like how whose it is turns what you might say about it into some
conversational action. That is, to say this about that, given that it's so-and-so's
means that I'm doing an 'insult' or that I'm doing a 'compliment' or that I'm
'flirting,' etc. One wants to see the way in which those conversationally
implicative doings turn on treatments of this collection of things piled in the
room, available for making conversation out of.
Now another sort of thing to be considered is that Al didn't invent that
particular noticing. A hole in a shoe is a noticeable, mentionable thing; it's
been noticed and mentioned before Al came up with it. And secondly, with
respect to the issue of what's going to happen upon the mentioning of the hole
94 Part II
in the shoe, a hole in the shoe is something about which there can be some
sorts of controls on what will happen, by virtue of the fact that 'a hole in the
shoe' is specifically a symbol. By that I mean it's not just that I'm saying it's
a symbol but that it's known to be a symbol, i.e. , there is a collection of things
like a hole in the shoe that are specifically treated as symbols, e.g . , a frayed
collar, shiny pants, etc. And that is to say, it's known to be a symbol with
respect to money, though it's not only a known symbol with respect to money
- it can be a symbol with respect to other things as well, but related to money,
i.e. , that somebody doesn't care ;lbout his appearance. Somebody who can
walk around without holes in their shoes may walk around with holes in their
shoes as a way of, e.g. , exhibiting to others that they don't care.
And when you're talking about something as being a symbol, then there
is the issue of its cultural dispersion. And a hole in the shoe is a symbol in a
more dispersed way than, say, wearing shirts with button-down collars is a
symbol. I read once where Jack Kennedy was commenting on Bobby
Kennedy and said, "You want to know what kind of slob he is, he still wears
button-down collars. " That is to say, for some colleaion of people at the time
the comment was made, button-downs were no longer worn. And for some
collection of people the shirts that are worn can be symbolic of either that one
can't afford to or doesn't know enough to keep up with what it is that we
wear. But that hole in the shoe is a different order of symbol than that.
Now in asserting there's a hole in someone's shoe, that it can be a symbol
specifically used with respect to money-talk is relevant to its use. There is,
then, a kind of natural sequence involved in noticing a hole in a shoe and
getting money-talk of a particular sort - that sort being complaints about
expenses. Where the complaints about expenses serve as one way to deal with
an aspect of the sequence involved in the initial noticing, i.e. , given that sort
of a noticing, a sequence can be done in which an explanation of the noticed
phenomenon is offered. Here, the complaint about expenses serves to explain
the hole in the shoe, where what might be independently 'an explanation' and
'a complaint about expenses' can be combined, i.e. , it is 'an explanation by
reference to a complaint about expenses. '
Given those possibilities, another order of quesiton is, what is it that's
going to be complained of to produce the explanation? Or, more abstraaly
asked, how is it that people go about getting what it is they're going to use
to make the explanation? For one, one may find that there is a considerable
regularity between "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" and thereupon some
explanation involving a complaint about expenses, but where the explanation
will vary across uses of "Hey you have a hole in your shoe, " i.e. , on some
occasion it's one explanation and on another occasion it's another. And the
question is, is there some way that people arrive at which one they use or do
they just use any one? That is, in its way, one particularly interesting issue in
that it looks like it's kind of an orderly thing as to how the particular
explanation-item is arrived at.
Focussing now on the explanation-item in our data, ' 'This place costs too
much money, " let me make some points on it, particularly about "this
 Lecture 1 95
place. " And what I want from those points is that we collect some features of
the use of "This place costs too much money" which recommend its use here
to produce an explanation/ complaint with regard to the hole in the shoe. One
thing is of course that "this place" costs money - without regard to whether
it costs "too much" money, it costs money. A second thing is that it costs
money for both parties involved; the person noticed to have a hole in his shoe,
and the noticer. That this place costs money for both is relevant in at least
these sorts of ways: If, as is the case here, the noticer is going to produce the
explanationjcomplaint, then there's a question as to how he can come to
know why the other might have a hole in his shoe; what kind of expense
might be involved which prevents the other from having decent shoes. That
is to say, he could pick such an expense as, while it might be true, the question
is how would he know? It's after all the other guy's shoe and the other guy's
expenses that he's talking about.
Well, one obvious sort of thing is that he can pick such an expense as he
also has; where, then, given that he knows what the import of that expense
is for himself, he can perhaps find in part that he has some view about what
that expense is for the other. So, that he picks an expense which he also has
is perhaps not at all incidental to the particular explanation he offers. And it's
an explanation which involves not only that it's an expense which AI and
Roger both happen to have, but that AI knows that Roger has, and that AI
knows that Roger knows that AI has. It's not merely that they both happen
to have that expense, but that they each know that the other has it. So, for
example, suppose that Roger is an alcoholic, and perhaps AI is also an
alcoholic, but AI doesn't know that Roger is, or Roger doesn't know that AI
knows that Roger is. Here what we have is that AI knows, and Roger knows
that AI knows, that they have this expense, i.e. , the cost of therapy.
It's also perhaps so that Al's using an expense that he has as well can be
relevant to Roger's accepting that candidate explanation, i.e. , that Roger
doesn't have to be embarrassed about that expense. And again, it's not so
much the hole in his shoe, but remembering that the hole in the shoe is a
symbol; it's not an issue of explaining only the shoe by virtue of the cost of
therapy, but explaining such things for which a hole in the shoe is a symbol,
i.e. , that going here is affecting what it is that you might spend on things like
your shoes. And such issues are perhaps relevent to Roger's being willing to
acknowledge the item. That is to say, there might be a thing which AI knows
that Roger has an an expense, where, say, AI doesn't have it as an expense,
and if that were offered Roger might say "Well that's not the reason, " i.e. ,
then you could have issues of the embarrassability of the item.
So that's one order of considerations having to do with, if an expense is
going to be used, what some constraints are on the selection of an expense,
where the expense is, say, selected by the noticer of the hole in the shoe. If you
watch the use of noticings like this one, you'll find that if it is the noticer who
offers an explanation, he offers one which can hold for him as well. Where,
then, one of the most characteristic things that go in a place like that is taxes.
"Well, taxes are just too high. " What makes things like taxes such a
96 Part II
magnificent item is that if you just meet somebody, then you can feel assured
that taxes is an expense for whatever they might complain about; a thing for
which you can legitimately suppose that they suffer from, as also they can
suppose that you suffer from.
There are quite separate sorts of further considerations involved in "This
place costs too much money" which appear to be relevant here. One such
order of consideration is this: Without regard to the issue of expenses and
complaints, 'this place' and aspects of 'this place, ' of which only one is that
it "costs too much money, " is a thing that we can talk about in this place.
Which is to say that the therapy situation is something that is talkable-about
in therapy. So that with respect to producing talk that is, say, continuable,
appropriate to the occasion, etc. , talk that has 'this place' as a subject is
appropriate to this occasion. Not perhaps for any 'this place,' but for such a
'this place' as a therapy session. Where, then, for other things that the two
might have going for them, know about each other, etc. , 'this place' is an apt
topic in general. And for a range of things other than its expense, 'this place'
comes up throughout the conversations.
And that, again, has to do with the makings of talk. If you leave aside the
issue that the cost of therapy is or is not a good explanation for having a hole
in the shoe, the fact is that for all sorts of things, when explanations are
needed local materials are usable for the making of the explanation. And one
indeed tends to think most directly of what, locally, is to be used to explain
something when something explainable occurs, even though on reflection you
regularly know that it's a ridiculous explanation. If you're sitting with
someone and they look glum, then one of the things you routinely do is try
to figure out what it is about here-and-now that they might be glum about.
If you call somebody up and they say " Hello" in a lousy voice, the first thing
you think is "What are they mad at me for?" although you may perfectly well
know that somebody can be mad about anything, it can have nothing to do
with you, now, here, etc.
I'm suggesting that local explanations, for whatever, are preferred expla­
nations if they can be used. And for a large range of expenses, across places,
'this place costs too much money' will be used. And then, forgetting about
just money explanations, when you have an explainable, then 'this place + X'
(where X is a feature of 'this place' that explains the explainable) is used. And
that turns on 'this place' as an utterly apt object for use as an explanation, i.e. ,
on the topical appropriateness of 'this place. ' And although it may have
nothing particular to do with the availability of 'this place' for 'money
explanations, ' the two unusually recommend each other. If you think of
looking for a money explanation, looking for a money explanation which I
have in common with him, looking for a money explanation which I have in
common with him that we both know about for each other, then you may get
a collection of eligible items, where 'this place' has much to recommend it
along lines of just the sheer usability of 'this place' in talk at this place.
There's another sort of thing which also helps to recommend that usage of
"This place costs too much money. " And that is, if one is looking for an
 Lecture 1 97
explanation having to do with expenses, then local expenses are the best. So,
for example, if somebody is deciding if they should buy some item, then the
best way to decide that you shouldn't buy it is by reference to something that
you just bought, and ideally that you just bought at this store, i.e. , 'this place. '
So that 'this place' as an excuse can then be used by reference to that sort of
preference for the most local expense to be used.
 Lecture
2
Safe Compliments
I'm going to take off on a point that several people made about 'weather talk'
- that weather is a ' safe topic' - by reference to where one might go with that
as an initial possibility. 1 I will sketch out some stuff I did a while ago on
something which had the modifier 'safe. ' I did some work on 'compliments, '
specifically on what I called 'safe compliments, ' the idea being to see what it
was about some compliments that made them 'safe' compliments, i.e. , to rum
an initial observation into an analysis. The initial material went like this:

Ken : So did Louise call or anything this morning?

Dan : Louise? No.
Ken : No?
Dan : Why, didju expect her t'call?
Ken : No, I was just kinda hoping that she might be able to figure out
some way t-to come to the meetings and still be able t'work. C'z
she did seem like she d-wanted to come back, but uh she didn't
think she could.
Dan : D'you miss her?
Ken : Well in some ways yes, it's-it was uh I I nice having­
Roger : (No he thinks if uh-)
Ken : -having the opposite sex in-in the room, you know, havin' a
chick in here
I was playing with 'it was nice having a chick in the room' as a compliment,
and specifically a safe compliment. The question then is, can we extract from
the sort of thing this one is, a set of fearures which will locate a class of
compliments like it, which are also safe compliments? Where that is a test of
the fact that we had some generative features. And also, whether when we get
those features what we get is something which in its fashion recommends the
use of such compliments. So, among other things, I want to be able to
discriminate between 'safe' and 'unsafe' compliments, consider the kind of
treatment that safe versus unsafe compliments might get, get criteria of them,
and see then whether, e.g. , the treatments that they might get can serve as
grounds for choices between them. That is to say, one might well choose
'unsafe' compliments, but the choice could be directed to what transpires
given the alternatives.
In order to make the analysis I have to deal - in rather simple terms - with
1 Most of this session was given to an untranscribed discussion of 'weather talk' based on
materials the class had been assigned.

98
 Lecture 2 99
an area of work which I haven't talked about yet, having to do with the
organization of identifications of people. We can note that the term used,
'chick,' names a feature of the person complimented - that they're female,
which is used for the compliment, which also differentiates that person from
all others present. That is to say, the set of people present is, by reference to
'femaleness' which has female-male as its alternatives, (M, M, M, MjF},
where a characteristic has been picked that isolates the complimented person.
I take it that that is a really non-incidental sort of fact for a compliment, and
I'll try to say how it's non-incidental. I'll also suggest that a procedure of
producing compliments by finding some attribute of a person that discrimi­
nates them from all others present can be employed rather more widely than
in just this way.
One of the reasons we can go from the fact that he picked ' female, ' to
locating 'male' as an alternative - apart from the fact that 'female' and 'male
are obviously in alternation for the compliment in this case - turns on a way
that compliments get dealt with by parties present. If one says, e.g. , "It was
nice having her here because she's got a good sense of humor, ' ' then
apparently what one sets up is the possibility that someone could say, "Well
what about me? I'm pretty funny aren't I?" Or if you say "It was nice having
her here because she's smart, ' ' again they could say "What about me?" And
even if they don't say "What about me? " apparently they can take it that you
are saying something about them as well. Now, why they can take it that
that's so, and why they come to say that that's so, are independent sorts of
issues of interest in themselves. But the first sort of fact is that they regularly
can take it you are saying something about them when you say, e.g. , "It was
nice having her here because she's smart. " That is to say, they can take it that
a compliment to X can be, by virtue of the item it picks, thereby an insult to
others.
Now that raises interesting sorts of issues in this way: If, when we were
talking about multi-party conversation we had, say, a model of a two-party
conversation, then we might figure that if, e.g . , somebody is being addressed
in the multi-party conversation, then only the person being addressed is being
done something to. That is to say, e.g., if A is offered something, then nothing
is being done to C and D. If A is promised something, if A is insulted,
questioned, argued with, etc., then nothing is being done to C and D. That
is to say that C and D don't see anything done to them or that B, doing
something to A, doesn't see that he's doing something to the others. Then we
should have a view that to whom an utterance is direaed is to whom
something is done.
It's quite plain, and quite important, that that's not so. And it raises some ·
rather neat technical issues that it's of interest for. If there is a possibility that
in doing an action in conversation to some party one may thereby be doing
actions to others as well, the question then is how is it that others find out
what is being done to them. Are there any sorts of systematic relationship
between doing X to A, and how C finds that something is done to him? Can
he find that just anything is done to him? Is there some procedure whereby he
1 00 Part II
finds what's done to him? Is it perhaps that doing an X to A permits C to see
specifically that a Y is being done to him? If that's so, then that sets up as an
interesting possibility that one way of doing a Y to C is to do an X to A. That
is to say, you might have no particular interest in doing the X to A; what
you're interested in is doing something to C in some way, and that you can
do it by doing an X to A.
Let me make this very concrete. Consider the case of two guys and a girl
in a place together. If she flirts with B, then she may be seen as teasing C; C
may see that she is teasing him; her way to tease C may be to flirt with B. That
is to say, she may have no interest in flirting with B, she may be interested in
teasing C. That's one sort of obvious situation. Let me give you some other
data, again from the GTS material. The first fragment goes like this:
They're talking along, and at some point Ken, in a low voice, starts talking
to Roger.

Ken : Roger.
Louise : Well, he mentioned II 'bout talking I I freer.
Ken : ((very soft)) Dju wanta-
Ken : ((very soft)) Dju wanna come over after uh school t'day I I
an' I'll give yuh the (radio),
Louise : We c'd all get rea(h)lly II free then.
Roger : Okay,
Louise : hh
Ken : It's almos' done. I think it'll take me 'bout II two­
-Dan : Ke:n,
Ken : -two more I I hours ( ),
-Dan : Y- why don'tchu make these arrangements out of here,
huh?
( 1 . 0)
(A/) : ((very soft)) Oh-oh
(2 . 2)
Yes teacher.

Where we could ask why does Al say "Yes teacher"? Nothing was said to Al.
Another thing we can consider is a sort of recurrent sequence in these GTS
sessions, which involve threats from Al to Ken in which Al ends up saying "If
you don't do X by the time I count to three I'll beat your brains out," and
Ken does whatever the X was that Al had threatened about. At the end of
which, Roger will say to Al, "You're so damned vicious. " And we can ask is
there any orderliness to that kind of event. We would want to know if there
is some orderliness involved in the production of what we could call ' third
utterances' after a sequence in which two other parties are involved and
where, as the first part of that sequence, one of those two parties specifically
does something to the other of those two parties.
I take it that we could come to see that there can be some relationship, of
maybe a vague sort right now, between these materials and what happens in
 Lecture 2 101
them, and something like "I like her because she's so funny" "What about
me?" So that, in terms of the sequential organization of conversation, we're
asking about some orderliness in the production of talk after a sequence, by
somebody who is not involved in that sequence. Where what we're saying,
among other things, is that those third utterances are perhaps produced by
reference to their speaker engaging in an analysis of what the first speaker did
to the second, and using that analysis to find what's being done to him, and
using what he finds being done to him to produce an utterance in return to
the first speaker's.
Taking the case of "Why don't you make those arrangements out of here,"
there can be a way in which Al sees that the warning that Dan has done is a
warning not only to Ken but to the others as well, and is replying to that
warning. And for the case where AI is threatening Ken, what we may have is
that insofar as relative power is being dealt with in that exchange, that Al can
exhibit his power over Ken makes the question of Roger's relationship to AI
with respect to their mutual power also an issue. If Roger does nothing, that
doesn't mean that he's less powerful than Ken, but it can allow that he's less
powerful than AI, whereas if he then takes on AI and AI gives in, then that
AI is more powerful than Ken, and Roger is more powerful than Al, puts
Roger in a position in which he is, for now, on top.
Now one aspect that's of technical interest is this: The initial condition -
that an utterance directed by A to B needs to be analyzed by B to find what
B should do, but is of no interest to C and D - tells us what sorts of analyses
of that utterance C and D need do; for example, that C and D can stop,
having found what it is that A has done to B. The suggestion I offer now tells
us that that's just not so, and also tells us something about the order of
analysis that C can do, given some utterance by A to B. Suppose that C is
going to do an analysis of an utterance from A to B, an action done by A to
B. How is he to proceed? In principle we could imagine that what somebody
does on any utterance is to find out, say, what it is doing to them, i.e. , that
they look at it independently of to whom it's done. I suppose that's a
possibility but I just don't have any good way of seeing how it could work.
An alternative, and workable, way to proceed is this: What you do is find
what it is that A has done to B. Then you use that result to see what his having
done that to B involves him in having done to you. That is to say, produce
the first analysis and then use its results to find what he's done to you.
Then the question is, how do you find what he's done to you? And to find
what he's done to you can perhaps proceed by reference to issues like: If, for
the action he's done, he's classified B in some way, e.g. , possibly inferior,
smart, etc. , then you might ask, am I eligible for such a class? If I am, I may
be involved in one way; if I'm not, then I may be involved in another way or
not involved. That is to say, you use the categories involved in the classification
of B to see how you stand by reference to those categories. You then use how
you stand to find out what he's done to you. So if A is a female and she's
flirting with B, a male in the room, and you are a male in the room, then
you're eligible for being flirted with, and if you're not being flirted with, what
1 02 Part II
are you being done, by reference to the fact that you're eligible for being
flirted with. If B is being threatened, and he is being threatened by reference
to the fact that A is a therapist and B is a patient, and you're a patient too,
then what is being done to you by reference to the fact that a patient is
being threatened?
The point I'm making is that on the one hand it does appear that people
produce third utterances to sequences in which they're not, so to speak,
involved; that they do it in an orderly fashion; that they do it by reference to
a consideration of the initial utterance of that sequence; and that they do it
involves then that they examine those sequences. All this is in the first instance
to the point that when somebody is being complimented others can assess
what's being done to them. And if someone can find that nothing is being
done to him, then that is one way in which you can be producing a 'safe
compliment. ' This holds, of course, not only for compliments but for a range
of other things. But that is one aspect of a safe compliment, i.e. , it isn't
anything about which anybody else in the room would feel that they have
been slighted by your making it; they're not going to use your compliment to
somebody else to produce a comeback. I take it that's a rather natural sense
of 'safe,' and also a sense that is employable within the sequential organization
of conversation.
Now this compliment is not only safe, it's weak. And 'weak' is another
feature that such a thing can have. It is weak in this way: While it
compliments the person in this safe fashion, it also provides that, on what it
compliments them for, they are easily replaceable. All it locates is that she's
'a chick. ' It doesn't locate some feature which is both absent from the others
and also rare. I suppose one could construct some way of complimenting her
such that the loss is magnified by reference to the fact that she's relatively
irreplaceable, given the features presented. And of course compliments often
specifically deal with issues of the relative replaceability of the person
complimented.
We can build this particular compliment up in other ways with regard to
its making. It may well be, e.g., that insofar as he employs something like
' male' - 'female' for something on which we have a situation of (M, M, M,
MjF}, then it's 'safe' not merely in the sense that he picks a Y and there are
only X' s present, but also in that it's a sort of thing that any X could have
done, using that Y. That is to say, he hasn't put himself in a position where
the fact that he picked that feature is useable by the other X's - now, not by
reference to what he's done to them but by reference to what he's said about
himself, distinctively, e.g . , for having, say, an interest in that feature, for
which he could then be twitted. But the particular compliment used here is
the sort of thing that 'any male' could say, such that he's not particularly
twittable by another male for it. They are all similarly situated; they are all M
with respect to F. Though of course, suppose now there's a bunch of males
and they are differently situated with respect to age; then, should one who is
60 produce that compliment, somebody younger might say, e.g. , "What
could you do with her?" That is to say, they could differentiate them and him
 Lecture 2 1 03
to produce something which turns on his compliment and turns on his doing
it. So that the sheer fact that they're all males, while providing for one sort of
safety of 'chick, ' can nonetheless involve for other things about the males, if
they are differentiated on those, that they can use that differentiation to deal
with the compliment.
A compliment can, then, serve to partition people into categories. A thing
we want to look for, then, by reference to the way the compliment will get
dealt with, is how the various people are aligned by reference to the
partitioning. And a criterion of a compliment's safeness is that it picks an
attribute on which others are not in a position to figure they stand differently
than the complimentor, and are in a position to see that they do stand
differently from the one who is complimented, so that they are not also judged
and therefore are not judged in a negative way by the compliment's
formulation. And of course, safe insults can be produced in a similar fashion,
i.e. , so as to discriminate the insulted person from the others present.
Now the question is, with respect to 'weather talk, ' what do we need, to
be able to show that ' the weather' is a ' safe topic'? What we need is to develop
a notion of ' safe' for 'topics' so that we can have said something when we say
'weather' is a 'safe topic. ' The discussion on 'safe compliments' was to give a
sense that something could be done with a notion of ' safe, ' something of a
formal sort, i.e. , it doesn't have to be merely an intuition, but what's involved
in something being 'safe' can be laid out.
I specifically do not know what it is that we'd want to be saying about 'safe
topics' that would capture how weather talk is safe, or at least discriminate
between safe and unsafe topics. It may be that there aren't too many safe
topics other than weather, but that there are lots of unsafe topics. And how
they're unsafe needs be seen. I can't even say that this is a model for a notion
of ' safe' for topics. It is offered as a way to see that it's at least a possibility
that something can be done with weather as a 'safe topic. '
 Lecture 3
'Patients with observers' as
'performers with audience'
I'll be talking this time about a fragment which almost directly precedes the
"Hey you have a hole in your shoe" exchange which started off lecture 1 . It
is specifically the beginning of the first group therapy session that I observed.
What happened was approximately this: I came a little early and got
introduced to the guys, and they were informed that I would be there. I was
in a room, sitting behind a one-way mirror, and they were in an adjoining
room. We met in the observation room and then they went out because it was
a little early, then came back into the adjoining room. There was a
microphone in the ceiling, and the following took place:

Roger : Tum on th'microphone.

( 1 . 0)
AI : T(h)esting,
Roger : We're about to sta(hh)rt. hehh hh heh
((thump))
AI : We ah gathuhd heah(h), on this day(hh) ,
(4 . 0)

This has a series of sorts of interest, some of which are my basis for going
through the description of the preceding events, and I'll get to those.
In terms of the organization of conversation, I became interested in this
sequence because it looked like a different sort of sequence - while surely
being a sequence - than those I had primarily focussed on. In earlier work I
had come upon and considered things like the utterance pairs - utterances in
which somebody does something of one sort directed to a present party who
then does something in return. In this sequence there appear to be no pairs.
Nor do the utterances seem to be sequenced by virtue of being tied together
in the way that earlier lectures have talked about ' tied utterances, ' i.e. , having
syntactic relations to each other across utterances or across sentences. 1 The
question then was, since it is in the first instance plain that this is a sequence,
what sort of a sequence is it? How is it a sequence?
Another type of interest this fragment has turns on the way in which its use
involves the exhibiting of an attention to the presence of observers. I will talk
at some length about that.

1 See Fall 1 96 5 , lectures 4 and 5 , and Fall 1 9 6 7 , lectures 1 1 and 1 2 , in vol . I.

1 04
 Lecture 3 105
A third sort o f interest is, when it gets considered i n detail, related to the
first two. On the one hand we might say that insofar as what they're doing
is exhibiting an attention to the presence of an observer, why do they do it in
the way they do? That is, why do they do it in a play-like fashion; 'play'
having two different senses, both of which I think are appropriate: 'play' as
in a game, and 'play' as in a performance. Why, that is, do they enact their
attention to the observer as compared to, e.g. , talking about it? If they're
going to deal with the fact of an observer being present, I suppose it wouldn't
be particularly strange were they to begin by talking about how they feel
about there being an observer. And occasionally, in this session and in others,
they talk about that. They notice, for example, that some people seem to be
attentive to the presence of an observer; that someone keeps looking toward
the two-way mirror, or someone seems to be 'on; ' they sometimes say that
they're hesitant to talk, and things like that. But that's not the way they in the
first instance deal with the presence of an observer. On the other hand, with
regard to the type of sequence it is, it's 'a piece of play, ' again in the two senses
of a game sequence and a performance.
Now dealing with the presence of observers and producing a piece of play
can be quite alike things and need not be a merging of disparate things, in
that it's not at all peculiar that people do, e.g. , 'playing in the presence of
observers, ' specifically behaving in ways that deal with the fact that there are
observers. And one needn't restrict that to professional sports, there are all
sorts of other things which are types of play which take place in the presence
of observers. We'll consider how it might be kind of a play sequence, and how
it might be a play sequence by reference to the presence of observers. And
also, what might be involved in doing their exhibition of an attention to
observers in this way as compared to, e.g . , talking about it - which I
introduced in the first instance because it is a way that is usable and that they
do use.
We might notice in the first place that this isn't just any possible play
sequence that could exhibit an attention to observers (I'll talk about it as a
'play sequence' - we'll leave the question of whether it is that aside for now);
it's a play sequence that has other virtues to it: It's a play sequence that
specifically works as a 'beginning. ' And while it may perfectly well be that one
could begin right off conversationally, with the topic of there being an
observer, this thing is 'a beginning' in independence of that sort of fact. That
is to say, if it does 'attention to the observer' it also does 'a beginning; ' or, if
you want to put it the other way around, it's 'a beginning' and it also does
'attention to an observer. '
There is reason to say that some things, of which group therapy sessions are
one, can specifically have 'beginnings' as compared with just getting started in
any which way, where 'any which way' is, in its way, 'a start. ' I'm talking,
then, about a 'beginning' as a 'part,' recognized as a 'beginning part,' perhaps
not to go anywhere else, and accomplishing 'beginning. ' Instead of going over
the reason to say that some things are beginnings, etc . , I would recommend
a paper that a friend of mine has done, which is about beginnings of such
1 06 Part II
group therapy sessions. It's Roy Turner's paper on therapy beginnings. He
deals in some detail with how therapy sessions begin, and that they have
specific ways of beginning. The way he gets into the phenomenon of their
beginnings is that what tends to happen is that people arrive one at at time,
more or less, and the therapist comes into the room, say, last; and while if at
least two patients are there they talk together, there is a way that the session
'begins, ' i.e. , they begin to do therapy talk or they begin in particular sorts
of ways.
In this colleaion of therapy sessions there are other occasions in which an
attention to such a thing as 'a beginning' is done. It's worth some
consideration in that, e.g. , in one session they're talking along for, say, a
minute or so, and Roger says "Shall we commence?" Now one might note
that the term 'commence' is not only a term that is synonomous with other
terms for 'begin,' but it is particularly a meeting-type way of referring to
beginnings. And one of the things we find in these sessions is that participants
use a terminology appropriate to things that have structures in ways that, say,
one might not use when just conversing where, if we're already talking, it
might be queer to say "Well, shall we begin?" But a 'beginning of a therapy
session' is an attended part of the therapy session, as compared to just drifting
into therapy talk, or 'therapy talk' being undifferentiated from any other talk
that gets done while these persons are more or less together.
In that regard, then, this fragment is a 'beginning sequence; ' a pre­
beginning and then a beginning. Sequences like it are used specifically to
begin performances, i.e. , when a lecture or some other sort of performance is
being done, people go through a sequence like this. And anybody who's seen
one of those things more or less knows that such a sequence is gone through;
you needn't have done it yourself to be in a position to do it some time. Now
there are some immediately interesting aspects of this fragment as a beginning
sequence which are related to its known, standardized use. For one, someone
just does this first thing, "Turn on the microphone, ' ' and that first thing,
occasions a second which occasions a third which occasions a fourth. That is
to say, at least so far as I can tell, we're not dealing with this sort of sequence
in its normal environment, in which it is somebody's business to say "Turn on
the microphone" and some particular other person's business to then go
"Testing, ' ' etc. When Roger goes "Turn on the microphone" he's not
invoking a bunch of jobs that have been pre-assigned. What he's doing
is making a first move which is also a proposal to have a series of such
moves.
So, for example, there are various ways to begin a game. You can begin a
game by having some negotiations: "Let's play X" "Okay" "You be this and
I'll be that . " Now there are other ways of beginning games which people use.
One of them is to make a first move in what could be a game. Then, that
we're going to have a game is something that others can accept, not by saying
"Yes let's play that game, " but by doing a second move. You throw a ball
to somebody, they can catch it and then do something with it and a game can
get started. It isn't unheard of to both propose and start a game in the same
 Lecture 3 107
move, though to do it is to put oneself in a position of having one's move left
in the air. Others might not do a next move that involves acceptance - they
might not choose to, they might not know to.
What we have, then, is such a thing done which, for it to come off, involves
some collaboration on the part of others present. And the character of their
collaboration is sharply defined. That is to say, the character of their
collaboration is that somebody makes a second move, and not anything they
might do stands as a second move for this beginning. And from among the
sorts of things that they might do that could stand as second moves for this
beginning, the alternatives matter a good deal. For example, one perfectly
reasonable second move to "Tum on the microphone" is "okay" or "It's on; '
i.e. , rather than taking a performer job one might take a co-laborer job, and
produce, then, an action which involves that you have taken some piece of
work that is consistent with the sort of jobs available if another person has a
job which involves him in saying "Turn on the microphone. " But given an
acceptance of some sort of gameplay that the first has chosen for himself, then,
in choosing one for himself he's constrained the sorts of ones you can take for
yourself if you're going to play some such game as he's made a first move for.
How then do you go about choosing which sorts of moves to pick, if you're
going to pick something consistent with his first move, that turns his first
move into a first move in a developing sequence?
One wants to note, then, that the thing thereafter proceeds with reference
to what these first moves have involved, i.e. , with reference to the jobs that
each has picked. A second move having occurred, a third is done; a third
having been done, a fourth is done, and they're done in some consistency with
the position each has taken in the first two. The person who says ' 'Testing' '
also does the speaker-beginning "We are gathered here on this day," and the
person who does something like directing, "Tum on the microphone," does
that sort of thing again with "We're about to start. " There would be nothing
particularly interesting about that if it was done by reference to some job
assignment that had been given to, e.g. , co-workers, but that is not the case
here. And in that regard one wants to ask not only how does Al choose a
particular second move, and such a second move as locates some position he
has with respect to the sort of game Roger has begun, but also, how does
Roger come to choose such a game as a way to do beginnings?
I intend to deal with both those questions, i.e. , given what Roger does,
how does Al come to choose what he does? And how does Roger come
to choose this particular beginning (leaving aside that he can venture it
with some hope of success, i.e. , with some hope that somebody will pick it
up)?
The question, how does Roger choose such a beginning, has as the
relevance of its answer that it is by reference to the features of the thing that
it begins, that he can, with the help of others, bring off a way of exhibiting
an attention to the observer. Let me try to lay that out now. Here's the
situation: An observer has come to watch a group therapy session composed
of patients and a therapist. The patients know that that's so, and also perhaps
108 Part II
know that it is they, the patients, who are to be specifically watched, their
activities to be made out. So they're in a situation where they're talking to
each other, not to the observer, and while talking to each other they're being
listened to by somebody to whom they're not talking. That somebody is
legitimately listening to the talk of others who are not talking to him is a fairly
peculiar situation, i.e. , one does not normally have rights to overhear, nor does
one normally have to bear being overheard.
Now the question is, can one find situations in which one has just those
features - talking to others in the presence of someone who is legitimately
listening and making out what is going on, but is not participating in the
sense of talking? There is at least an obvious place where that occurs: the
theater. The circumstance of the theater is specifically that people are talking
to each other onstage, but what each of them is attending as the thing that's
interesting is what somebody to whom they're not talking is making out of
their talk, i.e. , the audience. So there's a very nice, formal relationship
between the circumstance of the therapy session with an observer and the
properties of the situation that Roger adapts the beginning from, i.e. , the
theater. And that at least raises the interesting possibility that this beginning
was picked for that relationship.
And there are some rather neat results of its use. For one, they're talking,
there's an observer present, the observer is engaged in making out what
they're saying to each other; using it, so far as they might think anyway, to
make some assessments about them. That is to say, they've had observers
before. The observers before tended to be other therapists. They might well
figure that what an observer is doing is listening to what they say in a similar
way to that of their therapist, e.g. , to figure out what's wrong with them. It
might be an aim that they could have, to put the observer in a position of not
being able to be assured that what they say in this session is to be read by him
for its therapeutic interest, i.e. , to be read by reference to what each of them
is like.
How might they go about complicating the work of an observer? If they
can bring off for the observer that while they're talking to each other it's an
attention to the observer in the way that it's done in the theater that they have,
then that makes a reading of what they say to find what they're like,
complicated. It does so because in the theater, while the only people who talk
for the audience are the actors, there are perfectly serious senses in which the
actors are not talking to each other. The actors are talking with each other's
talk; cuing each others' talk, i.e. , you could perfectly well have an actor get
up there and do his entire part, and then each of the others do it, though when
they aa it out it gets meshed as 'talk to each other. ' Each of the parts are
written out, somebody memorized one, somebody else another, and the
completion of an utterance by one occasions the utterance that should go there
by someone else. But they are not listening, producing, etc., by reference to
what another one says except in the sense that the other cues them or is cued
by them. Nor would one sophisticatedly figure that what they say says
anything about them in particular - they're actors.
 Lecture 3 1 09
So by using this theater format they deal with the question of the
readability of their particular statements, since that readability turns on that
they're saying it to each other, and that each is producing, on his own, what
he's saying, and producing it for the others and not for the audience. And that
seems to be a really neat sort of thing to do. You then tell the observer that
something he might make out as said each to the other, you may well be
producing for him. Which would be a quite different task of understanding.
In that regard, the enacting of it is far better than the saying of it. That is to
say, if somebody were to begin by saying, "Since there's an observer here I'm
not going to say what I really think, " that very statement could be subject to
a usual kind of reading by an observing therapist. That wouldn't be 'acting'
it would be 'clamming up, ' etc. , and would be just as good material as if they
produced talk, e.g., without knowing that there was an observer present. So
there's a way in which this enacting of a theater sequence is a rather subtle sort
of address to the observer.
And when we turn back to some of the details of this thing, what we can
see about it that now becomes interesting is that none of these utterances are
addressed to each other and nonetheless they're in a sequence that is orderly.
That is to say, "Tum on the microphone" is addressed to whoever it is that
could turn on the microphone. It occasions the utterance "Testing, " which is
again not directed to any of the people present. That occasions "We're about
to start, which occasions a 'start, ' "We are gathered here on this day. "
They've now exhibited that they can talk in a theatrical fashion, i.e. , in which
the utterances are not directed to each other but are directed to someone who
is not talking to them, and they nonetheless can talk consecutively and in close
order. And I mean 'consecutively' in a strong way, i.e. , Roger begins right off
after the utterance "Testing," which is one word. Now one-word utterances
are not the most normal sort of thing, and it might well be that Roger, were
he not treating it as a 'cue' could, e.g. , wait for its completion. But he sees its
completion. So the way that they bring it off is a nice exhibit of their capacity
to talk in a sequenced fashion while talking, each not to the other, though
each is hearing and using what the other said to then produce a next.
Let me add that in picking the analog of the theater as a way to begin, they
choose jobs for each other, from the theatrical repository of jobs, that are
consistent with their position in the therapy situation, i.e. , they pick
'performer' jobs. They are going to be the ones who will be talking to an
audience in their circumstance as patients with an observer. That is to say,
they've picked the theater and mapped its categories of performerjaudience
to patientjobserver, but they could also have picked the theater and then
proposed about themselves that, say, they're the audience, thereby perhaps
assigning to the observer the possibility that he's the performer. They could
come in and say "Well, I wonder what the show's going to be like today. "
That they pick those categories which will allow them to do whatever it is that
their business here is to do, under the auspices of those categories (i.e. ,
'performer' where their business here is to be 'patients') is one aspect of their
selection of the theater.
1 10 Part II
We have, then, a rather nice way to see that their circumstances are being
used to locate analog structures which have similar properties, which can be
used to do work for them, where they then pick positions from that analog's
categories that preserve some features of their initial positions - where for each
such picked analog they could take categories which didn't stand in that
relationship. And one will routinely find that when persons in some stateable
circumstance pick an alternative collection of categories through which they're
going to operate, they pick such a collection as preserves some features of the
initial circumstances. So that, e.g. , when at one point the therapist sanctions
one of them he gets "Yes teacher, " which is to say that the collection
'teacher-student' is being used to deal with 'therapist-patient. ' If one wanted
to characterize what that is, it's something I talk about as 'partitioning
consistency' and I gave some instances of 'partitioning' considerations when I
talked about 'safe compliments. ' By 'partitioning' I mean putting objects into
various classes which stand in some relationship to completely different
collections of categories and their internal relationships. So not only do they
pick the theater but they pick jobs in the theater that have a nice relationship
to the circumstances they're dealing with in beginning a therapy session with
an observer.
Furthermore, that the theater is picked and its beginning used has as its
virtue that, a first move made, others know what a next move can be, i.e. ,
they have picked something that - whether anybody has done it before - is
familiar. So the choice then is presumably, in part at least, constrained by
what can be brought off with a first move; what first move can be recognized
as such a first move as can be replied to then and there, in such a way as to
bring off a sequence. And this ties back to the issue of why this beginning, and
how does Roger get something that can be used by the others if they want to.
If they're going to do a kind of play sequence, one of the things that really
does matter is the order of moves, that they get done in just the right way -
though of course there could be some variation on it. And to do a first move
which is an invitation to play can work by virtue, in part, of the fact that one
of the things that people know about 'play' is, e.g. , that the moves occur in
alternation (A goes then B goes then A goes, or A goes then B goes then C
goes then A goes, etc. , etc.), such that if this is a play move though it isn't
addressed to anybody present, then they ought to go next and do a move that
should follow this first. Order of moves is a crucial phenomenon for games,
and alternation is one of the most usual patterns that games have. It's that sort
of fact that sets up the issue of whether it's going to be picked up and tells
how it should be picked up, independent of content. For many possible game
first moves you know that you'd better try to make a second move if that
thing is to get going.
Let me say specifically what I take to be one of the central sorts of points
that this discussion has. If this analysis is anything like right, then what it
means is that people - kids like Roger who is 1 8 years old or something like
that - have their circumstances available to them in an abstract way, such that
they can use the abstract characteristics of their circumstances to locate other
 Lecture 3 111
circumstances that stand in a strong abstract relationship to their current
circumstances. And they use the concrete features of those others to signal that
they see an abstract relationship, and to invite other people to see the same
and to then produce actions by reference to their abstract analysis of their
circumstances - and they accomplish all this rapidly.
That is to say, a question might be, what sorts of abstract knowledge do
people have of their actual circumstances? Well, they may know that being a
patient is one sort of thing and being an observer is another sort of thing and
when the patients talk to each other what we say is being made out by the
observer, etc. Okay, suppose they have some abstract knowledge of that. How
can they use that abstract knowledge? They are able to use such knowledge to
locate circumstances which have features that stand in a strong relationship to
the initial circumstance, and those features are then used to project actions by
reference to those other circumstances, which actions have some hope of being
picked up. It's not just one person who is by himself capable of that, but he
can have hopes that others can see what he's doing, see it fast, and collaborate
with him.
Now one might say, Well how do you know it's going on there? At least
in the first instance what one wants to see is, is it a feature or two features, or
a whole collection of features all of which are presented here - actually
brought off by these people, which stand in what is a discoverably nice
relationship to particular thing that they are using, like the theater. Then, if
it's a whole bunch of features, the notion that it's accidental that he picked the
theater, or, if it's not accidental that he picked the theater it's an accident that
he picked that he's going to be a performer, or it's an accident that he picked
the theater when there was an observer present, etc., etc. , might seem too neat
to be accidental. Also, if they can do this here, i.e. , use the theater with their
circumstances as patients with an observer, and we're considering that it's an
abstract capacity that they have, then that suggests, well, look to other
circumstances. Do they do a similar sort of thing elsewhere? If so, then in
considering the initial instance you don't need so much to rely on collecting
a list of features that they've preserved in their enacted performance. If they
do a similar sort of thing in other circumstances, with other analogs, then you
can see that it isn't that they happen to know a lot about the theater and
they've thought a lot beforehand about the relation of being a patient and
being an actor.
So that's the main interest of such a thing as they're doing here: It raises
a possibility which is intrinsically interesting; 'intrinsically' because we want to
know what sorts of abstract knoweldge people have of their circumstances,
and what they can do with the sorts of abstract knowledge they have.
Let me just throw out a suggestion that I can't really develop here. The
question is how it is that people are prepared for these sorts of performances,
not only with a first move generating next moves, but also for the knowledge
that if you pick some situation, you can and ought to bring off a sequence that
all actions are part of, i.e. , you don't have something that's not a part of
such a sequence. You might well have "Tum on the microphone, "
1 12 Part II
"Testing, " and then Roger puts in something which has nothing to do with
theater beginings and then returns to it after a while. That is to say, aside from
being orderly and alternating, etc. , the whole thing comes off with all its parts
being parts.
I think some case can be made for it being at least a specific feature of
children's imitative play (playing house, playing doctor, playing ship, playing
school, etc.) that in that sort of work they gain a command of producing
sequences of actions within a particular framework, and orienting to it move
by move. A sort of instance of what I'm talking about, I pull out of a book
called Intellectual Growth in Young Children by Susan Isaacs. It's an old
psychology book done in the thirties or thereabouts, when people used to sit
around in grade schools, kindergartens, and nursery schools, trying to study
children's intellectual and social development by just watching them. And
there's lots of more or less raw material in the book. One piece goes something
like this: The class is playing that they're in a boat and the boat is going
somewhere, and the children in the boat are doing boat jobs. One of the
children is a passenger and he's working on some sewing that the class had
been doing over the course of the day anyway, and he runs out of thread. The
teacher says "Well, why don't you go get some thread?" He says, "I can't,
because the boat's still moving, " and he then goes through a sequence which
involves asking the captain to bring the boat to the dock, the captain docking
the boat, announcing that the boat is docked, the kid now getting off and
getting the thread, coming back, and the boat taking off again. The boat of
course is just a bunch of arranged chairs.
Now attending to the sort of thing you're doing and how that thing is
done, is then an exploration of what's involved in using, collaboratively, some
set of categorized terms, and how one then produces a correct sequence of
actions for some set. Kids are constantly playing with what sorts of actions
belong in a game and what are outside of it, and how the fact that you're in
some game constrains and permits collaborative sequences of actions within it.
So it's at least a possibility to be considered, that things like imitative play are
a considerable ordering resource for people learning the sorts of shifts from
one structure to another, and then the orderly procedures within a new
structure that they're for now adopting. Where the key thing about the game
situation is that people who do imitative play do it interestingly when they
produce a series of analogs, doing them separately so that there is one
sequence in one situation, another sequence in another, etc.
Another point is relevant for our materials here; that here we have the
starkest instance of what is otherwise less apparent but also more or less so,
and that is that the way Al has of showing that he sees what Roger is doing,
is to do something that fits there. Not to say, e.g., "I understand, " or to say
' 'What you said was . . . ' ' but to produce an action that fits there, and that
sets up another which can fit with it. That is to say, probably from the kind
of academic training one gets, one has acquired the idea that what
'understanding' means is to be able to paraphrase, or to be able to say what
somebody means that they didn't say. Now, I think that the natural place for
 Lecture 3 1 13
the notion 'understanding' is in something like this. In terms of sequencing in
conversation and many other things, you do 'showing that you understand
something' when what you do is, not talk about it, repeat it, paraphrase it,
etc. - that would normally mean that you're puzzled. When you say "What
you said is . . . " or "What you mean is . . . , " then that's how you show that
you're puzzled or doubtful. The way that you go about exhibiting your
understanding is just to produce another that you intend belongs, given what
has just been done. You can put another item in that is consistent with the sort
of thing you figure they're doing. And then, that we're playing it out right,
is the way each of us sees that we're 'grooving,' as they say.
Another sort of point turns on similar considerations. If we ask, What does
what Roger says mean? then at least one thing we really have to come to terms
with is What is Roger doing? Where what Roger's doing is ' making a first
move' and what AI is doing is 'making a second move,' and that what they're
doing is really, specifically, something in a sequence. It is not that it's
incidentally in a sequence, i.e. , that it happens to be in a sequence but it could
perfectly well be the same thing and not be in a sequence; it is that what
they're doing is 'doing parts of a sequence. ' And that's relevant because
people might well figure when, e.g. , they're studying talk, that you could
perfectly well examine, say, what "Tum on the microphone" means, without
reference to the fact that "Tum on the microphone" is a first move in a
sequence. But for various sorts of issues like its effectiveness, its being
understood, and such sorts of things, that it's 'a first move' is what it is.
 Lecture 7
Alternative sequences; Challenges;
Claiming membership
Ken : Hey - Hey check this: I went down to uh H-Hollywood All- ­
- down to the Holla- Ho:llywood, ( 1 . 5) uh Automotives?
AI : Mm hm?
Ken : And they told me how I could stick a th-uh: : Thunderbird
motor? ( 1 . 0) - in my Jeep? And I bought a fifty-five //
Thunderbird motor.
Roger : Not 'motor, ' '�ine. ' You speak of // electric 'motor' and a //
gasoline 'engine. '
Ken : Okay
(A/ ) : ( )­
AI : Yer nojjt.
Ken : 'Engine. ' // Okay-
AI : , Internal combus-tion. '
Ken : Alright, so // lookit,
( ): mhhh
Ken : I moved this thing in the Jeep, yesterday, an' it took me all day
to do it.
Roger : Why the // hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep.
Ken : (An' nen I)
Ken : This thing is the hottest thing in town!
Roger : Fords aren't hot,
Ken : That Ford- In comparison to that old four cylinder I had in there
it's hot,

Initially I'm interested in this data via an interest in what types of things have
a set of permutations as a real set of alternatives, where this thing seems to
present one type. What I mean by a set of permutations is that beginning
with one type of question, of which ' 'Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in
a Jeep" is an instance, and, alternatively named, they could be 'challenges' or
'requests for explanations' or 'requests for justifications' - beginning with
that, one can get several different types of sequences.
So you could get some sort of an R (request) and then you could get a
candidate explanation, and then a treatment of that explanation, done by the
requester. That's one sequence. That might characterize this sequence here. Or
you could get R and then some sort of a question in return, then an answer

Lectures 4, 5 , and 6 of Winter 1 969 were not transcribed.

1 14
 Lecture 7 1 15
to that question, and a treatment of the answer. Here what I'm thinking of
is, e.g., "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" "Why not?" or
"What's the matter with that?" or "Wouldn't you? " where the requester may
himself then do something akin to an explanation. Or it could go on from
"Why not?" to "What do you mean 'why not'?" Alternatively you could also
get something that is not a question but is a peculiar kind of explanation for
this environment. That could be a thing like:

A: Why do you have a gun?

B: Well, everybody does.
A: They do? Well maybe everybody where you live does.
B: Well I don't mean that, but I mean it's not unusual.

That is, you get an explanation of the sort "everybody does," which is closely
related to "Why not?"
Now I take it that those sequences stand as kinds of alternatives to each
other. And what sort of things are alternative to each other is a matter of
interest. It's also particularly a matter of interest when what stands as an
alternative to, say, an answer-explanation is some sort of question. That is to
say, we're not talking about the sort of alternative as, instead of "This thing
is the hottest thing in town, " "This car is the hottest thing in town, " or some
other explanation for it, but that one not make an explanation is an
alternative. So that "Why not?" is an alternative. Perhaps you could say
"Why not?" is an alternative to anything. But that we can locate how "Why
not?" is an alternative here, as we specify what is going on here, is one sort of
interest for this sequence.
There is a large range of further interests that this material could have,
some of which I'll mention, others of which I'll be forced to mention, others
of which I won't deal with at all. As an example of things I won't deal with
at all, we might note that, having been corrected about his usage of 'motor, '
having acknowledged the correction via " 'Engine. ' Okay," on its next
potential place he uses "thing. ' ' I would venture that that sort of usage may
be recurrent, i.e. , having used a wrong word and having been corrected on it,
the next situation where you should use one or the other, you may use
something else.
Let me get into the details of this sequence. I suggested that "Why the hell
you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" is a 'challenge. ' Let's say we think it's a
challenge. How could we go about deciding it's a challenge; specifically that
it is seen as a challenge? We might examine its characteristics. We might
alternatively examine the return to it, ' 'This thing is the hottest thing in
town!" where a consideration of this return is relevant to seeing that Ken sees
that he's been challenged. In a nutshell, it's a 'password' answer. That is to
say, it is a 'correct answer' without regard to whether that is Ken's reason.
Now challenges and passwords are of course closely related sorts of things.
The way you respond to a challenge is with a password, and passwords are
correct in some independence of what that 'question' might have as a correct
1 16 Part II
'answer. ' So that you could have as a challenge that a guard gives, "What day
is this?" and the password-answer might be "Christmas, " where that might
have nothing to do with whether or not today is Christmas. So I'm proposing
that "This thing is the hottest thing in town" is a password-answer. And I'm
suggesting, then, that for the issue Does Ken see ' 'Why the hell you gonna
put a Ford in a Jeep?" as a 'challenge, ' that he produces a password-answer
is a way of establishing for the candidate challenge that it's seen as a
challenge.
Now we have to make a case for it being a 'password. " One thing about
passwords of course is that they are passwords for some group. That is to say,
a password-answer to a challenge is correct for them where, again, correctness
of the answer in independence of its being a password-answer is irrelevant.
Roughly what I want to propose is that for Hotrodders the password­
explanation for replacing one engine with another engine is that the product
is "the hottest thing in town," in the sense that the motivation for building
cars, changing cars, etc . , is to produce, as an intended product, "the hottest
thing in town. " There are materials where that is posed in a series of different
ways. At one point when they're talking about cars, talking about somebody
else's car than Roger's, Roger says " I want to build the hottest street machine
in West LA" And at other places such sorts of statements are offered, and I
take it that's a prototype 'good motive. '
Now that's of some interest in locating the following sort of thing. When
Roger asks his question, the question's status as a challenge turns that he asks
what would otherwise be, i.e. , for lay people, non-hotrodders, a kind of
peculiar question. Ken has proposed, without any justification in the first
place, that he just put a Thunderbird engine in his Jeep. And I say 'without
any justification' by virtue of the fact that if I were to be telling somebody that
I just put a new engine in my car, then I suppose I would say something to
the effect of, "Jeez I had to put a new engine in my car, the old one blew and
I can't afford to buy a new car. " That is to say, lay people, straights,
non-hotrodders, don't replace engines in cars except for 'good reason' having
to do with two sorts of things; the defective character of the engine they
initially had, plus that there is some reason for not replacing the car. But Ken
doesn't say anything about why he's putting in a new engine by reference to
the defectiveness of his old engine, and Roger doesn't ask why Ken is putting
a new engine in his car, e.g . , "What happened to the old one?" And indeed,
the state of Ken's old engine is not raised until the end, and even then it's not
raised with respect to the old engine's being shot, but rather it's proposed that
it was not as hot as the new one. So what we have is the picking of a quite
peculiar - though not for such people - question; the question itself, then,
locating the world in which the talk is going on.
That order of consideration locates this question, "Why the hell you gonna
put a Ford in a Jeep?" as, for these people, not an alternative to " Why are you
putting a new engine in your car?" or "What happened to the old engine? "
or "Why are you putting in a fifty-five engine?" Now, aside from the
discussion so far offered about how this question would be, within that world,
 Lecture 7 1 17
for them, a candidate 'challenge, ' there are particularities of the utterance
itself which are relevant to its status as a 'challenge. ' One, which is not a
particularity for this challenge, has to do with the use of "the hell. " And of
course that form, "Why in the world are you doing X?" "Why in the hell are
you doing X?" "Why in God's universe are you doing X?" , etc. , is a way of
turning some question, "Why are you doing X?" into a challenge - or a
request for explanation in any event - in which one doubts the correctness of
the action being reported; not doubting that it is being done, but doubting
that it should be done. "Why did you do that?" is one sort of question. It says
'this sort of thing perhaps should be explained. ' "Why the hell did you do
that?" says 'you shouldn't have done it, why did you do it?' It doesn't merely
request an explanation, but also a justification. So that insertion, "the hell,"
is relevant.
Relevant also is a transformation that is made in the question. Roger says
"a Ford. " Ken didn't talk about a Ford, he talked about a "Thunderbird. ' '
Now aside from that Thunderbirds are Fords, there is the issue that Fords are
not necessarily Thunderbirds, and insofar as you're classifying Fords, then
Thunderbirds are the highest kind of Ford, and in that regard, then, "Ford"
is on the one hand the result of some operation performed on ' 'Thunderbird, ' '
and also an operation that does not elevate or retain the status of Thunder­
bird, but specifically lowers it.
Now, all name uses are very relevant sorts of things, and for hotrodders,
the quality of engines for hotrod use can be in such terms. A Ford engine's
hotness is something which can be compared with Chevvy hotness, etc.,
without respect to whether it's a particular Ford or Chevvy engine that's being
considered, though of course that is modified by things like which year, i.e. ,
some year's Ford may be acceptable, whereas without regard to equivalent
power a Chevvy for any of those years might be acceptable and a Ford not.
In any event, the way that engines are referred to, and the way that cars are
referred to, is quite elaborate. A particular feature, for example, of the special
status of cars for hotrodders is that for hotrodders, and for hotrodders rather
uniquely, cars have names. Not just names like ' 5 9 Ford Fairlane, but also a
name that you give it, e.g . , Voodoo.
Regularly the sorts of things people give names to the particular objects
of, involve kinds of criteria for the special treatment of those sorts of
objects. There are some things which everybody more or less gives a name
to each case of, e.g. , their pets. There are some things which pretty much
nobody gives a name to, e.g. , their TV sets. There are things like cars
which only some people, e.g . , hotrodders, give names to. In that event, the
choice of how to talk about a given object of a given class of object is a
rather sensitive issue. It's a much more sensitive issue by virtue of another
sort of consideration: That what my car Voodoo is, is something that the
way in which anybody would normally refer to it would not tell you. If
Voodoo is a ' 5 5 Chevvy, if its name is Voodoo you can be sure it's not just
a ' 5 5 Chevvy. It's a ' 5 5 Chevvy with "a three twenty-seven 'Vet in it, dual
quads, full roller cam, four-speed neon hydrostick, four fifty-six positraction,
1 18 Part II
big slicks, " or "with a three ninety bored out to four ten, two four barrels,
straight ( ) cam, four-speed closed spline, four fifty-six, big slicks, " etc. ,
etc. That is, it's a conglomerate of various brands' products. It's not just that
we're giving it a name so as to avoid calling it by the name that everybody else
is calling it by, but that what anybody else would call it wouldn't be correctly
naming it. I take it that the name ' 5 5 Chevvy has this sort of character: It's
what it is that I started with. And that could end up having almost no
relationship to what the parts of the car now consist of. The point is that the
way it came off the assembly line defines an initial way of characterizing it. It's
not, then, simply a matter of "I call my TV set Charlie" but actually I'm
differentiating it from any RCA 2 3 -inch TV . If a car has such a name as
Voodoo or whatever its name might be, then it should be absolutely differen­
tiated from anything else that came off the same assembly line it came off.
Again, then, all name uses are very relevant, and the operation of
transforming the proposed Thunderbird into a Ford is not doing nothing. For
one, it's setting up "Fords aren't hot . " Again, then, "Why the hell you gonna
put a Ford in a Jeep?" and "Why did you put a new engine in your Jeep?"
are just not alternative questions. If one was asked, the other would never be
asked. Specifically, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" is asked
by virtue of hearing a claim being put forth by Ken that maybe he is building
something that he wants to have recognized as a hotrod. It is that that
provides for the challenge, not that Roger couldn't say in some other
circumstances, "What was the matter with the old engine?, " i.e. , were Roger
talking to his mother - or even were he talking to Ken, where Ken didn't
seem to be proposing that he was building a hotrod.
Now one question is, on what basis does Roger see a claim being made? For
Roger seeing a claim being made, we want to look to the way Ken goes about
characterizing what he did, how he characterizes that replacement, in part by
reference to how people characterize replacements. And again, it's my
suspicion that people will regularly talk of the state of the object being
replaced and why they didn't buy a new one, where the reason for
replacement will have to do with things like price. So, that Ken is making a
claim of building a hotrod turns on perhaps such a thing as that he offers no
account of the Jeep engine's failure in his characterization of the replacement
he's made. Where, for building a hotrod, nothing in the slightest needs to be
wrong with the engine; the engine could be perfectly magnificent - for that
engine - and yet be replaced. That Ken doesn't mention anything the
matter with the engine is, then, the right way to be talking about building
a hotrod.
So the occurrence of the challenge can turn on it being seen that Ken is
claiming to be building a hotrod. Now that then involves claiming some sort
of membership, which membership is challengeable by somebody who figures
that they for sure are such a one, and who is then going to stand as guard to
whether anybody else who claims to be such a one is such a one. And this is
in itself kind of an interesting matter. The question is, who's business is it
 Lecture 7 1 19
whether or not Ken is, thinks he is, decides to be, a hotrodder? Why should
it be Roger's business? Is it any hotrodder's business whether somebody else
wants to pass themselves off as a hotrodder? And if it is their business, what
are their means for dealing with those attempts of others to pass themselves
off as hotrodders?
One wants to begin to notice that the range of resources are not in the first
instance terribly large, though they may be terribly relevant. That is to say,
one may presume that hotrodders don't drive around the neighborhood
looking for people who are passing themselves off as hotrodders, and write
nasty letters. Nor do they send notices to a central office where there are some
officials for deciding the claim, as, e.g. , if you were claiming to have some
lineage, someone might write a letter to the DAR and say X is claiming that
' '

his family came over on the Mayflower, is that so?" and the DAR could find
out, and they could take some action, i.e. , they are a central organization
devoted to that sort of thing. And I'm not kidding, they stamp genealogies,
"Passed on by the DAR that this is a true geneology. " Now hotrodders don't
do that sort of thing and yet they do care that people do not successfully pass
themselves off as hotrodders. The question is, how do they go about dealing
with that they care? I'm not sure about that, but I take it that one way that
you're recognized as a hotrodder by a hotrodder is by being given a challenge
to dragrace. If you're stopped at a light and a car pulls up next to you, and
he figures he's a hotrodder and looks you over and figures you're a hotrodder,
then he can offer a challenge by, e.g . , revving his engine. If he doesn't figure
you're a hotrodder he can decline to challenge you. Of if he challenges you,
you can refuse.
Now you could figure if hotrodders like to drag, why don't they drag with
just anybody? Some of the reasons for that being an issue have to do with the
kinds of structures that hotrodders are operating within, i.e. , it is not just a
matter of a person judging another person but may have to do with that
hotrodding is socially under pressure in a series of ways. One import of the
whole change in the character of automobiles is that they're vastly more
powerful than they were when hotrodders began to do hotrodding. You can
buy an awfully powerful car right off the assembly line, and you can also buy
awfully powerful modified cars. And if all that counts is any sort of speed that
you might want to use as a measure, on a drag strip or on the street, then
hotrodders couldn't beat everybody. So the hotrodder is operating within a
situation in which, insofar as kids are building cars to be hot, others can have
hot cars built for them - and better ones.
That competition, unfair as the hotrodders see it, can be by 'rich kids, ' not
that hotrodders can't also be rich, but somebody who could just buy a car that
could give competition, where a 'hotrod' is something that you yourself, or
you and your friends are doing. But primarily the competition is by adults.
Now kids invented hotrodding and kids want to keep hotrodding for kids.
What that means, among other things, is that perhaps old hotrodders are now
competition, i.e. , not seasoned hotrodders but ex-hotrodders, now adult
120 Part II
competitors. 1 So, kids other than hotrodders have gotten interested in
worked-up fast cars, and persons other than kids have gotten interested,
and ex-kids remain interested. That any given hotrodder tries to put down
somebody else as merely claiming to be a hotrodder is, then, a relevant
sort of thing for that given hotrodder to do on behalf of hotrodders in
general.
One thing that one wants to be aware of is that the structure of these
activities has nothing to do with hotrodding. One could substitute many
many sorts of things for which people have memberships, etc. , and they
operate in similar ways. Hotrodders reinvent procedures, problems, concerns,
orientations, etc., which a range of other social organizations have as well.
That hotrodding is one of those sorts of things only locates the type of
materials that they have available. So, for example, one of the materials that
is obviously fundamental is their technical language. But that is of course
fundamental for a whole range of those sorts of things that one can be a
member of. You have to have at your command a technical language, and it's
the sort of thing that people pick you up on and correct you.
Why do they have to bother to correct you? After all, many times people
say the 'wrong' word, as long as everybody knows what they mean, what's
the difference? The sheer fact of their correcting you is telling you that they
know what you meant. Now it is not just that everybody likes to correct
everybody else, but that when they correct, something particular is going on,
in that the sheer action of correction is something that operates under
constraints. Correction in public is a sanaioned event. Adults can correct
children in public; adults shouldn't properly correct each other in public. You
can say afterwards, "You said X but you should have said Y," e.g. , "You said
it happened Tuesday, it happened Wednesday. " But you don't, at the time
it occurs, say "No. Wednesay. "
The sheer fact of a correction, "Not motor, engine. You speak of elearic
motor and gasoline engine, " even it if weren't specifically a put-down, would
be some sort of evidence for the issue that Roger at least takes it that he's a
hotrodder and he hasn't (yet) decided that Ken is. That is to say, for anything
that has that kind of ranking, the higher ranked person can correct. Teachers

'Sacks doesn' t use the word "seasoned . " Now and again there are words and phrases in the
edited transcripts that Sacks did not actually utter. Sometimes they were used to make new
transitions, fill gaps, etc . ; sometimes they were used in an attempt to clarify or bring out a
point Sacks is making which, in the spontaneously produced wording of the lecture, is unclear
or latent. In this case, in the unedited transcript, Sacks notes that the "competition" is
"primarily adults" and a bit later goes on to say:

There are some fascinating aspects to it, which have to do with that kids invented
hotrodding and kids want to keep hotrodding for kids. What that means among other
things is that perhaps ex-hotrodders are now competitors; i.e. , not 'old hotrodders , ' but
adult competitors. [Winter 1 969, unedited lecture 7, p. 1 2}

Inasmuch as 'ex-hotrodders" and " old hotrodders" seemed problematically synonomous, the
contrast was reorganized, now with the addition of " seasoned hotrodders. "
 Lecture 7 12 1
can correct students in public; students don't correct teachers. (Regularly
students will come up after class and say "You said X but you meant Y, " and
you have to go through a whole thing to get students to correct in public. ) So
that phenomenon is absolutely unparticular to hotrodding. That it's there in
hotrodding is nonetheless interesting; a resource that hotroddders have, not
only for the business of dealing with cars, but also for dealing with setting up
prerequisites for acceptance.
Many kinds of groups take a considerable amount of work to become a
possible member, e.g. , work like learning enough about cars so as to be able
to talk about cars in the way that they talk about cars. That obviously has a
great virtue if they don't want their group turned into something that if you
just happened to take a fancy to it yesterday, you can consider youself a
hotrodder today. You can't become a hotrodder overnight. And that is to say,
for seeing the serious kind of object that some group is for kids, you could
perfectly well appreciate that for any group that they might set up, if they
were concerned about the size of membership, i.e. , they wanted to be large,
one thing to do would be to reduce the cost, the work involved. Now when
you find that they build up the work involved, then what's going on is that
they're putting barriers between the initial interest of somebody in becoming
a member, and that they can become a member. So, for example, one
question about the hippies is, is it possible to become a hippie overnight? You
can take such a thing as the requirement to have long hair, as a thing that
could put somebody two months away from being a hippie at the moment
they decide to be a hippie. Hair, in that regard, is work. Having hair of that
length evidences not only that you haven't cut your hair in two months but
that you withstood any attempts to get you to cut your hair in that two
months. Which is to say that for kids of a certain age, the length of your hair
can evidence that you've been through fights with your parents, the school,
etc. , and withstood the pressure, so that three months' , six months' , etc.
growth of hair is evidence of some sort of work you've done, even though you
may have just arrived on the scene. And hippies of course do talk about
'weekend hippies,' and they are seeable and are in a different status, etc.
What I want you to see is that it's sociologically nice that the signs of
possible membership, the stigmata of candidacy, are things that can evidence
work having been done between the time that you might have decided that
you want to be one, and your being a candidate. And it's fascinating to find
for kid groups that those sorts of operations that the society otherwise uses,
that many groups in it use in one or another fashion, kid groups also use. Like
these sets of tests. And in the case of some sorts of groups, including these kid
groups, they make it a work and time test rather than simply a money test.
Money tests are characteristic for adults. All you have to do is send in your $ 5
or $ 1 ,000 or whatever it is, and you're a member of whatever it is. Now, that
you have the money is a test of other things, but it isn't a ' character test' like
learning hotrodder language is a character test, i.e. , you have to do it yourself,
you have to make a commitment and spend X amount of time before you
could ever make the conversation go. Though of course for many kids it
122 Part II
happens naturally in that when they're 1 3 and 14 they're talking with kids
who are 1 3 and 14, i.e. , they know the language a little bit and then learn it
a little better, etc. But, e.g. , joining the President's Advisory Club which costs,
say, $ 5 ,000 a year, doesn't take the kind of character test which being
hotrodder or a hippie does.
It's in parallel interesting that some of the things which work for kids'
groups, e.g. , to be a hippie you have to have long hair, and things like that,
are the sort of things such that you could be an acceptable hippie today and
tomorrow an acceptable middle class kid, i.e. , you go get a shave and a
haircut and some new clothes. This can be compared to those sorts of
memberships whose conditions are such as to make it not only work to get in,
but work to get out. Various sorts of organizations set it up so that the kinds
of signs that are required for being in, are not easily removed, e.g. , if you
became a Hell's Angel for which you had a collection of tattoos. Whereas, for
all the work it might take to learn hotrodder language, people are enormously
sophisticated at 'code switching' as they call it. Every kid who comes to live
in a dormitory presumably has the occasion of, when he's home, speaking in
a way that he didn't speak before, and being embarrassed, but the order of
shift that he's able to make over the weekend is fabulous, and absolutely
characteristic. People are really adaptive in terms of language capacities.
Certainly some things are not easy to get out of, e.g. , if you were brought up
as a Negro slum kid, how easy would it be for you to get accepted as a bank
clerk, i.e. , in terms of that sort of language. But that's a different sort of thing.
I'm talking about adolescent socialization into some kind of language. Now
presumably if you used it a great long time you might not know what the
other words were, e.g., how to express excitement other than to say "Wow. "
But then, words like these are so generalized in their use that your unique
usage of "Wow" is not seeable as a sign that it is your only term for
expressing excitement by virtue of being a long-time hippie.
So kid groups are designed so as to allow their members, at the end of their
stay, when on the one hand they're no longer welcome in the kid groups by
virtue of being an ex-kid whether they like it or not, and in any event they're
now graduating, to have that thing be cheap for them, i.e. , they can leave
easily. Now any time a kids' group claims to be more than a kids' group,
presumably one of the ways it can bring that claim off is to increase the cost,
not of getting in but of getting out. And that is to say, not of 'getting out' in
terms of leaving the group, but of getting back into something else. And I
suppose one could look at kids' groups in that light.
And it is these sorts of cost considerations that are in part involved in why
somebody would want to be a borderline hotrodder. That is to say, to want
to be recognized as a hotrodder by hotrodders and not recognized as a
hotrodder by others, e.g. , cops. And since hotrodders know that hotrodders
are the specific objects of cops' attention, some people's ideal is to be a
hotrodder in the sense that any hotrodder could recognize them but not to be
a hotrodder in the sense that a cop will recognize them. And that's terrible for
other hotrodders; if they drag you, they can be arrested and not you. Like,
 Lecture 7 1 23
here's what happens: Two cars take off from a light. They don't go very far,
and they slow down very rapidly. If you're within a ten-block range you hear
the sound. So a cop has been around the corner, he's heard the sound, knows
there's a drag going on, and now he comes out. There might be five cars on
that block of traffic and now he's engaged in picking out the cars that have
been dragging. The hotrod was clearly doing it. If you have a car which is just
a powerful new Pontiac, then you're not particularly a suspect object. Not to
mention that if you're a hotrodder you might be stopped any time, where if
you're not in a hotrod but you pass as a hotrodder with hotrodders, you won't
be stopped when you're not engaged in a drag race.
And that is the classical problem, e.g . , the problem of the promiscuous
homosexual is that he wants to be recognized as a homosexual by other
homosexuals but not by cops. And that is his job, to accomplish that. So one
of the ideas is to see that the character of this fragment could absolutely be
replicated for a series of other phenomena than cars.
Now, I've gotten altogether off the track of where I initially wanted to go.
What I initially wanted to deal with was the alternative ways that we deal
with a challenge, as 'alternative: ' Such issues as that the relationship between
claims and challenges is close, so that Roger, seeing Ken doing a 'claim, ' could
be doing a 'challenge. ' And that Ken can recognize a challenge in a series of
ways; for one, he knows he's doing a 'claim. ' Also, from the character of this
question, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" not being, say, the
question his father asked him about how come he put a Ford engine in his car.
Also from the particulars of the way that the challenge comes off.
Then we have the password-answer, "This thing is the hottest thing in
town! " And I offered, as an alternative to the password-answer, the question
"Why not?" It is specifically an alternative here because the other is a
password-answer. As it happens, he has offered a password-answer and it's
been shot down as to its appropriateness for the materials at hand, i.e. , that
password didn't cover the work he'd done. Now, that it got shot down is not
the point. The point is, if it is a password, then you could invoke the password
by a thing like "Why not?" If you took it that you were perfectly well a
member, and you were not about to let the other person put your
membership in question, then your way of showing, e.g, 'how could there be
an issue about that?' could be via a "Why not?" kind of question, which
would say 'Look, I know there's a password, and what the password is, and
your asking me makes me doubt that you know that there is an obvious
explanation for what I did. ' Then you put them into a position to have to
justify their question, and you in a position to comment on their justification,
as compared to the way it runs off here, which ends up with Roger
commenting on Ken's justification with "Fords aren't hot. " Whereupon we
get a fabulous reduction and change in character of the claim from ' 'This
thing is the hottest thing in town!" to "In comparison to that old four cylinder
I had in there it's hot. ' ' And I should tell you that the sequel is that not long
after, he comes in to a session and says "How do you put a Chevvy engine in
a Jeep?"
124 Part II
Roger : I did a helluva lot of work last Saturday. I put three different
engines 'n three different cars plus a brake job.
Ken : Y' wanna do a brake job?
Roger : Hm? No, I don't wanna do a brake jo(hh)b hhh
Ken : I gotta Jeep that c'd use a good brake job, heh heh mhh eheh
Roger : You don't think that's a Iotta work? I'm proud I I a' myself.
Ken : No I- I know that's a Iotta t-work to put a set of brakes in
that's why I keep hesitating,
Roger : I put three engines in three cars.
Ken : You wanna put a new engine in a- in a new Jeep?
Roger : For money.
-+Ken : Okay, fit a Chevvy Two into a Jeep. ( 1 . 0) I've been trying to
figure out how for the last two weeks hhh

And they more or less accept that question and give him advice, and nobody
asks him what happened to the Thunderbird engine.
What I want to pick up now is that the sort of choice makeable between
"This thing is the hottest thing in town! " and, e.g. , "Why not?" matters in
this sort of way: It is a sequencing problem. Now, I mentioned that, given the
question "Why not?" we could get "What do you mean 'why not'?" And of
course we could then get "What do you mean what do I mean why not?" The
question is, why would we get an extension like that, i.e. , of questions
building on questions? Well, if what you do is offer an answer to the
challenge, then what you're setting up is that the other person operates on
your answer. You know that they're in a position of being doubtful, and that
if you produce an answer they are thereby put in a position of being able to
do a critique on your materials. A way to switch the thing around is to
attempt to get them to offer such sorts of materials as that then put you in the
position of commenting on their candidate explanation. That is to say, we
have here an occasion of battle for which sequencing considerations are
operative, where the position of commenting on the answer is an ideal
position to be in, a position one may want to achieve. And these attempts of
people to get into a position of being the commentor on the answer of the
other can be done via the production of actual sequences from a set of
sequences that are alternative to each other.
So the possible answer to the question, why would we get an extension
made up of questions building on questions is, we get that sort of thing where
an 'answer'j'comment on answer' relationship is one in which the comment
will have considerable power. Then we want to ask where do we get this
' question building on question building on question' sequence going? Could
it get going for any kind of question? Does it get going only for a special kind
of a question? Can we say something about its populational positions? At least
one place where it occurs is with initial challenges: "Where were you last
night?" "Why do you ask?" "What do you mean why do I ask?" And there
are other things to be done at any point than just building up a question
sequence. You can give an answer that's a useless answer: "Where were you
 Lecture 7 125
last night?" "Why do you ask?" "Oh, I just wanted to know. " Where "I just
wanted to know" doesn't give the person anything to make a good comment
on.
What I'm attempting then to do is to deal with a distributional question
in a way. Where does this 'question on question on question' sequence occur?
Where does the attempt to get into a position to do a comment on the answer
occur? Do they have some locus? Do they occur everywhere, anywhere, or do
they specifically occur somewhere? Where one wants to get from that some
determination that some sequencing positions are 'better than others, ' or that
people figure that that's so, and figuring that that's so has involved them in
evolving a really elaborate set of ways they can move from a given position,
where there may be a much more elaborate development of possibilities in one
sequential place than in others.
Now we're not talking about what can somebody do given the question
"Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" in the sense of 'what set of
possible things could they do, since they could do anything?' That is, Ken
could say "Good morning, ' ' i.e. , one could do 'anything' that has nothing to
do with the question. We're asking what sorts of things are in sequence with
some given object, and is it possible to develop a comparison between the
kinds of permutations that have been developed off of one object as compared
to the kinds of permutations that are developed off others. If a comparison
can be developed, then the sorts of permutations, their character and their
import, would be a matter of interest.
 Lecture 8
'Identification reformulation; ' Pairing
off at parties; 'Abstract' versus
'concrete' formulations

I want first to talk about problems that I 'll call ' identification reformulation . ' 1
I haven't dealt much with materials on identification so far, but I would like
to give a glimpse of the niceness of the materials involved in that. In the
following bit of data, Nancy is a lady who is taking a class at college. At the
end of the course she goes out with some of the people in the class to a place
where they have beer and pizza, and now she's telling a friend of hers about
it.

Nancy : . . . so a bunch of us went over, and there were three of us gals

and five or six fellas. And then one of the girls had to leave,
about half an hour later 'cause she had to go home and let her
roommate in. And uh, one of the other girls had to leave for
something. And there I sit with all these young fellas. I felt like
a den mother.
Agnes : Are you the oldest one in the class?
Nancy : Oh by far.

What I mean to notice by 'identification reformulation' is that we have here

an initial formulation of the population: " . . . three of us gals and five or six
fellas. ' ' Then something happens, some people leave, and what we get is not
a restatement of that formulation by reference to the now current situation,
i.e. , "So now there was just one gal and five or six fellas," but a different
formulation of the population: " . . . young fellas" and a "den mother" -like
person. We want to see why a reformulation is done, and whether there is any
basis for the particular reformulation. We might also see if we can say
anything about the initial identification.
Now, core to at least one sense of the situation is that while in the
reformulation there are different identifications used of the various personnel,
the personnel identified in that scene were all present in the initial situation
and were already identified. It's not as if some new people arrived and now

1 The actual "first" consideration, of a phenomenon Sacks talks of as a ' constructed

explanation' , has been omitted here. It can be seen in Spring 1 97 0 , lecture 6, pp. 263-6.

126
 Lecture 8 127
a new set of identifications are employed to deal with the new people, where,
e.g. , that calls for a shift in the characterization of earlier people as well. The
people identified in the reformulation were all identified earlier. Each person
was identified via the two classes, 'gals' and ' fellas. ' And we can offer some
considerations about the usages of those initial identifications. The issue isn't
simply that any way would have done to identify who went to the beer place,
e.g. , "eight or nine people" or "a bunch of us students" or, in that these
fellows later become "young fellas, " she might have used sex plus age: "Me,
two young girls, and five or six young fellas. ' ' There are combinations,
alternatives, and you could get a range of different sorts of things being used.
We want to know why those particular ones were used.
I would like to note two sorts of things. First, with respect to going off
together to a beer place and with respect to being together in the beer place,
then sex is a relevant way to characterize how these people come to be
co-present. That is to say, 'gals and fellas' is a way of formulating people's
co-presence for such a place; which is not to say that 'students' isn't also, but
'gals and fellas' may discriminate between being in this place together and,
e.g . , being in the classroom together, which is where they started from. They
started, then, as 'students' and they became 'gals and fellas. ' And that's not
quite all, because the numbers matter. For the issue of their co-presence in the
beer place, that they go out in the group as 'gals and fellas' is one thing, but
also relevant to how they are together is the relative numbers. That there are
three of one and five of the other, and not three of one and three of the other,
is an important sort of fact for the report of what was happening - where we
don't want to forget that she knows at the outset of the narrative how the
evening turned out - in that three of one and three of the other, any equal
number, can tum into pairs. The issue, then, of what could happen over the
course of that evening, which is initially potentialled by the formulation 'gals
and fellas' and would not be in the same way raised by 'eight of us' or 'a
bunch of the students, ' is partially modified by the fact that there are three
of one and five of the other. That is to say, under the circumstance of three
gals and three fellas, the story would tum on the suggested possibility that
pairing up is going to happen, and a natural history of the evening would
then be a matter of how it is that I ended up with the one I ended up with.
Three and five do not make pairing up a potential, i.e. , a natural historical,
thing.
Alright, then the two girls leave. Now the issue is that when the two girls
leave, that she does an identification reformulation is not an incidental sort of
fact. That is to say, that event occasions an identification reformulation for at
least some possible reasons turning on that two girls having left, the issue then
for her is how is it that she is still there. It's now just her and the five or six
guys. Should she leave? If she shouldn't leave, how is it that she can find a way
to stay? There are several things involved in this issue. One is that she can
figure that if anything of a sexual sort was to be coming out of the evening,
then that possibility has now been undercut by the potential sexual objects for
the guys leaving. She may then be simply in the way of the five fellows, i.e. ,
128 Part II
they could go out to do something else; they are in any event not going to do
anything with her.
There is also the issue of, two girls having left, how, specifically, is the
evening to be brought to an end? There's now one and five or six. There
clearly is not going to be any pairing off, unless it turns out to occur by virtue
of the fellows drifting off and leaving her with one of them - where, then, she
has either a pleasure or a problem as it may be. With the girls having left, is
there some way of arriving at a way of finding where we are so that we can,
having found where we are, find a way to end the thing? For example, we
could find where we are in such a way as to have the thing end by leaving all
together rather than, e.g. , the guys just drifting off.
Another sort of issue is that when there are the two other females there is
a crowd of an undifferentiated sort for, say, any observer. There's eight or nine
people of various ages and sex, and she is in no distinctive relationship in that
place. When, however, there is only her and the five or six fellows, then an
issue which she can figure that others observing the scene are attentive to is the
question, What is she doing with them? Where it is transparent that for
combinations of people, members of some combination in some public place
can be attentive to what any unknown observer figures that a person like them
is doing in that collection. She can then be looking for some identification
which could yield various sorts of results. She could, for example, search for
an identification which yields a kind of legitimacy to this combination in this
place.
Now the initial identification had that kind of characteristic for some
collection of people being in a beer hall. That they're 'gals and fellas' accounts
fot their co-presence, makes their co-presence not a problem. The events that
then happen have as contingent for them that she either can come up with
such an identification as locates them as legitimately co-present, or she can
leave and make that not a problem. Should she not leave, not having found
an identification which makes their co-presence legitimate, and should some
of the fellows drift off, leaving a pair, then, as a pair it might be noticeable
as persons of cross sexes and marked age differences. In a place where
they're not supposed to be, pairs like mother-son, father-daughter are
noticeable.
It's in that light, then, that "I felt like a den mother" is an appreciateable
reformulation. Her reported feelings are not that she felt 'like a movie star' or
'like the center of attention, ' but "like a den mother, ' ' i.e. , someone who
properly belongs with five or six young fellows when that person is female but
not anything like the same age. And with that formulation also, if it was
presented at the time, the event could be transformed into kind of a meeting,
where, then, that everyone should leave together could be thereby implied.
And she might perfectly well have presented her reformulation, e.g . , "God I
feel like a den mother. " It's also worth noting that it's rather important that
she would have presented that reformulation, i.e. , it would not be the sort of
thing that one of the fellows could delicately propose to her, e.g. , "God it's
like having a den mother here. " That is to say, their way of keeping her
 Lecture 8 129
present would not involve that sort o f identification as the legitimatizing
identification.
Now it's really neat if it's the case that that is what she felt like. That is,
she was not searching for some way to find, do I belong or don't I belong, but
the product of a search which located how they could be legitimately
co-present over those changes in personnel, just popped into her head. So,
while there is a lot of work involved here, it is not work from which anybody
gets sweated up. It is not a problem for which she has to particularly search
out a solution; it is not a solution to a problem that she had in the first instance
proposed to herself in order to see that she needed to solve it. But nonetheless
you can find that on occasions of an initial formulation of a population,
changes in personnel of that population will provide that people will go about
reformulating that population. And they will do the reformulations in various
such ways as to yield, e.g. , the continued legitimate co-presence of the people
now present, or to find that "Gee, I'd better go. " Where one thing that "Gee,
I'd better go" is dealing with is that they cannot find a way to rationalize their
continued presence given the change in the personnel. And of course the very
statement "Gee, I'd better go" is often treated as something like this: A
request on the part of the person who said it, for such a reformulation as the
other parties will offer, as will yield that the person should still stay. So it
routinely happens at parties that some collection of people leave; somebody
will say "Well we'd better go, " and then the host will say something like,
"Now that all the guests I had to invite have gone, we can have a party with
the people I wanted to be with . " That's a prototype of the kind of work one
can do, and not any identification will do that kind of work.
Let me turn now to another sort of matter. There's a place in the book Deep
South, a wonderful ethnography of the south in the thirties, where they're
talking about upper-class life. And one of the things they do is give a
characterization of an upper-class party. The situation for this group that
they're studying is that maybe five couples gather very frequently during the
week at one or another's house for a party. They're all married couples, and
pretty much all of the couples are having an affair - whatever that meant for
those people then - with somebody other than their spouse. But they arrive
with their spouse and leave with their spouse, though the evening involves
them in not being with their spouse at some point in it. Now, generically
there's a problem, but in that material it's a nicer problem; and that is, e.g. ,
a party having gotten going with something like everybody in the living room
and one or some small number of conversations going, how do a series of
multi-party conversations get transformed into two-party conversations of the
right sort? I ask it that way because two-party conversations are an essential
in-between stage for other two-party events. That is to say, if a given pair who
haven't come together and who don't start off in a situation of him talking
with her, are to end up in his car or their bedroom or wherever else, then
arriving at a two-party conversation is crucial.
The reason you have to end up with two-party conversations is that
two-party conversations are stable in a way that multi-party conversations are
130 Part II
not. If a two-party conversation is going, two people of the opposite sex, then
nobody has the business of joining them. If a three-party conversation is going
then anybody may be able to join it and also, anybody may be able to leave
it. Furthermore, it's much harder for either parties in a two-party conversation
to get out of it than it is for any party to get out of a multi-party conversation
- or indeed, than it is to get into a two-party conversation. So, although if a
two-party conversation is not cross-sex then others are not locked out of it, if
you have a cross-sex two-party conversation then others are locked out of it.
Furthermore, what is involved is not that these two persons arrive at a
two-party conversation, but that the collection of people somehow arrives at
two-party conversation. That is, given the various etiquettes involved, you
just don't have eight people sitting around and then A and B, who are not
married to each other but are married to others also sitting around, get into
a conversation together or go off together. What that involves, I take it, is that
for the study of the natural history of a party in which a collection of people
end up in pairs - whether they came in pairs or not, but if they came in pairs
they end up in different pairs - the organization of conversation is a crucial
phenomenon. And the particular problem that the organization of conversa­
tion has for this situation is, how is that multi-party conversations can get
transformed into two-party conversations.
I have no particular good ideas about how those multi-party conversations
get transformed into two-party conversations, but there are of course a
collection of events that are relevant to that. One problem is arriving at
appropriate physical arrangements with the person you need to have a
two-party conversation with in order to get where you want to get eventually.
And there are a series of ways that that can be done, which are not obviously
just doing that, i.e. , a bunch of people are sitting around and somebody ­
characteristically a male - can get up and say "Anybody want a drink?" At
that point, some other person, e.g. , the relevant female, could say "Yeah, get
me a scotch. " Now when he gets the scotch he brings it back to her. That can
then allow that he stays where he happens to have arrived. So that things like
who accepts the offer to get a drink can allow that one is placed in physical
proximity with another, in a quite random-appearing sort of way, i.e. , it just
happened that that guy asked who wanted a drink and you just happened to
want a drink; where, that he ends up in direct physical proximity to you, and
that, e.g. , the various sets of persons eventually get into the right sort of
physical proximity, can allow the peeling off into two-party conversations.
And the various sets of persons can get into the right sort of physical
proximity in that, e.g. , when somebody goes to fix a drink he leaves a spot
vacant next to his wife, to whom somebody can offer a cigarette, and take that
spot, leaving his spot available for someone else. /

Now, I don't have a Disney-like picture of them playing that thing, and
I have no idea that they get cued in like that. But it seems plain that there are
mechanisms that allow for people changing their physical proximities in large
ways as compared to, e.g . , you're sitting here talking to three people and the
right conversation emerges so that one of them is no longer interested and
 Lecture 8 131
they drift off into another conversation, so now two of you are in conversation.
And obviously a key thing is that you have to arrive at mechanisms which are
delicate, i.e. , you don't have a system which works simply by reference to
somebody coming in, sitting down with his wife, and then getting up and
walking across the room and having a two-party conversation with somebody
else's wife in the presence of everybody else. Presumably in these southern
parties, the simplest kinds of mechanisms were, e.g. , dancing, where, for a
bunch of friends, switching partners in dancing is an appropriate kind of thing
and allows for people to drift off, and at the end of any given dance the people
who were dancing together can sit down together, etc. Then there are those
places where people can go one at a time, though they don't necessarily come
back from or end up in a place where only one person is, like, men can go to
the bathroom and women can go fix their make-up, and those provide ways
that people can disappear, without specifically going where it may well be that
everyone knows that they're going.
And there are a bunch of other ways that pairing offs can happen.
Regularly, people discover who it is that wants them that evening by virtue
of things that don't happen at all in two-party conversation format, but can
happen by reference to just the ordinary multi-party conversations' features.
So, if A tells a joke, who it is that laughs most, or specifically last, or
specifically takes up some remark of his - somebody who isn't his wife - is
somebody who could be telling him what's going on with them. And people
apparently notice that, "Well it was right at the beginning of the evening that
I said this, and she found it so interesting; she had had the same kind of
experience. ' ' Where, then, two-party conversations can be set up by virtue of
the fact that you say to the crowd, ' 'You know what happened to me the
other day," and then a half hour later, standing somewhere, she says "You
know what you said before? That happened to me also. " That is to say, the
materials you drop out in a multi-party conversation can be things that are
picked up by somebody for later use. And people will regularly pick up on
items which weren't specifically directed towards them.
It's a matter about which you have to be really sophisticated because
people are vastly smarter than you'd ever imagine about these sorts of things.
I offer you a sort of thing I found in my favorite magazine. Cosmopolitan. It's
the most extraordinary magazine; it's been taken over by Helen Gurley
Brown and turned into an unmarried girls' technical manual. And what I
mean by sophisticated is advice of the following sort. How do you meet a rich
guy in New York? A cheap way is, you put an ad in the New York Times for
a slightly used Astin-Martin. You get phone calls from guaranteed rich guys,
and you say, "Gee I'm sorry, I sold it, " at which point the conversation can
go wherever the conversation goes. Now that takes ingenuity. So the kinds of
sophistication that people can bring to bear on problems of pairing off may be
quite something.
Q : I don't see why they take such elaborate pains, if everybody knows
what's going on.
HS : Well, what everybody knows, and what everybody knows by virtue
132 Part II
of that the others have let you know it, are altogether different sorts of things.
What everybody knows, more or less, is different than if the people involved
force it on you. So what's done here is that while everybody knows, everybody
is also engaged in concealing the thing among themselves so that nobody
among the group is behaving scandalously. And let me just note in that
regard that the gossip is as important as the relationships. That is to say, the
wives and husbands are utterly interchangeable. I take it that there's no
interest in each other by virtue of the fact that Mary and Sarah discover at the
same time that for each of them the other's husband is really the guy they
were interested in in the first place. The interest is that it's somebody different,
in the context of its being something they can occupy themselves with talking
about among each other. So, e.g. , any two women can talk about the fact that
a third woman is having an affair with somebody else's husband, leaving aside
that either or both of them are. In such conversations, it is routinely the case
that people will talk about somebody else's illegal behaviors though the two
people who are talking are 'doing the same thing,' without their then saying
"Well I don't see what's so odd about her sleeping with X, I'm sleeping with
Y. "
So there's this texture of keeping it somewhat under cover. And indeed, it's
the keeping it under cover that operates to locate who you have an affair with.
The law in America is that you have an affair with your best friend's wife, and
vice versa. Because that's the only person you can routinely be with, without
it being "What are they doing together?" And that's what set up all these
people being routinely together and not having to acknowledge what's going
on. Whereas, e.g. , if a guy brought home his secretary and her husband to a
party, then it might be a thing for which his wife and the neighbors would
have to consider what's going on.
Q : The thing that puzzles me though is, in even an affair where two people
are involved, four people are really collaborating, and there sort of has to be
permission.
HS : That's why this thing is so interesting, because, e.g. , you've got to end
up without having somebody's wife sitting there by herself, or somebody's
wife sitting alone at one end of the room and somebody's husband sitting
alone at the other end of the room, with everybody else having vanished.
In any event, parties are a great thing to study, and anybody who cared
about making themselves a major reputation in, e.g. , sociology or anthro­
pology would find that's one ideal thing to pick up, for these reasons: First of
all, one of the greatest of all sociologists did a study of parties. It's a rule of
course in academic life as in sports, that if you can beat the best you thereby
become their equal. So if you could write a better paper on parties than
Simmel wrote on parties, that's one way. Also, one of the most famous
contemporary sociologists attempted to study parties, and failed. There are a
lot of people who tried to study the structure of parties and couldn't do it. So
that if you wanted to pick a topic that, if you could crack it, would put you
somewhere, parties are a great thing. And you should be able to see why
they're interesting. They're ideal sorts of social objects in that they have an
 Lecture 8 133
obvious organization though nobody knows what it is and it isn't laid out in
advance. That is, one party is like another party and yet nobody knows how
in the hell they move. Now, parties are obviously, manifestly, objects which
should be studied as sequential objects. And the notion that the structure of
conversation is relevant is possibly a way to deal with some of the sorts of
things that sequentially happen in parties.
Here's another piece of data:

Louise : He was defending you.

Ken : Well he was defending certain rights that everybody should
have, I mean- not in the way of driving across golf courses, I
admit that was wrong, but certain- certain rights of uh being
able to do what you want.

The interest in this thing comes up as follows. A guy is doing a dissertation

on topic in conversation, focussing on the following sort of process. He's
got a set of conversations in which he was a participant when he worked at
an insurance company. He was trying to get people to engage in what he
called 'abstract conversation, ' and found that it's terribly difficult to get
people to engage in this kind of conversation. So, e.g. , he brings up the
topic of draft card burning and he wants to get into a conversation in which
they talk about, e.g. , the morality of draft card burning. But the conversa­
tion turns into one in which the issue is, do all the various parties have their
draft cards in their wallet, and each one takes out his draft card and they
discuss it, and then they go through the rest of the cards they have in their
wallets.
So the difference is between a discussion of the morality of draft card
burning and a discussion of "Do you have your draft card?" "No I don't,"
"Yes I do, " "Here's mine, " "Look, I've also got a this card, " ' 'I've got a this
card and a that card," "Do you have a that card?" "No I don't. " And he
talks about that sort of difference as 'abstract' and 'concrete, ' where the shift
in topics, when they are normatively concrete, would be different than the
shift when they are possibly abstract. That is, the 'draft card burning'
conversation would lead to a different sort of topic than the ' 'Do you have a
draft card?" conversation. The latter could lead to other cards you have and
the former could lead to other sorts of morality issues.
So that was the problem within the context of which this material seemed
to be interesting. And that may be seen quite directly, i.e. , what's involved
here is that Al, the person being referred to, did some talk occasioned by
something that Ken had done. Louise gives it a 'concrete' formulation and
Ken gives it an 'abstract' formulation. My specific interest is in this question:
Does it appear, at least for some sorts of things that can happen in
conversation, that there are bases for it being difficult to have abstract
conversation, and it being a rule-governed fact that concrete conversation is
preferred, i.e. , takes place? The matter has an obvious large-scale interest in
that if it were the structure of conversation that got in the way of having
1 34 Part II
abstract conversation, then the unsuitability of conversation for abstract talk,
abstract thinking, etc. , might be found.
What are the sorts of things involved? We have here two alternative - and
as it turns out, competing - formulations of the same event. Both agree that
it was 'defending' that was going on. The question is what was that
'defending' about? Ken? Or rights that everybody should have. Do those
formulations at all turn on the way in which the defense was constructed? I
think that they are quite independent of the way in which the defense was
constructed. If the issue somehow got going as to whether Ken was right in
driving across the golf course, then AI could be seen to be 'defending Ken'
without regard to the abstractness of Al's defense. That is to say, were AI to
have said "I think anybody has a right to do anything they want, " people
could nonetheless see that he was defending Ken and not defending anybody's
rights to do whatever they want to do. So, even though AI formulated his
defense abstractly it could be seen to be doing something concrete - though
it might well be that had he formulated his defense concretely he might not
be seen as doing something abstract, though someone else could propose that
there's really an abstract issue involved, i.e. , if AI said "Well I think that Ken
has the right to do that," somebody else could say "What he means is that
anybody has a right to do things like that. ' '
It is not, then, a situation in which the formulation of AI' s defense, or its
terminology, controls whether it will be dealt with as abstract or concrete.
And ruling out that the terminology is criteria! has a lot of importance because
the very issue of 'which one is abstract and which one is concrete' thereby
poses some kind of question, whereas on the one hand, if we just had Al's
statement, ' 'I think anybody has a right to do whatever they want, ' ' we might
say "That's an abstract statement, " and on the other hand, it might be never
understood that way except in isolation. It would perhaps be otherwise
understood as a way to defend Ken's rights, or to formulate Ken's action as
not wrong.
Now one of the things we've learned is that a way people have of
interpreting an utterance of somebody else's is in terms of what sequentially
relevant action it is doing. Not only is that a way, but it's an obliged sort of
thing to do. For co-participants in a conversation, what they want to find out
is what, sequentially, is this fellow doing? It's their business to find that out.
That's what they're obliged to find out. And they're obliged to find it out so
as to use their results in an utterance appropriate to that one. So, interpretation
in sequential terms is done and required. And one aspect of interpretation in
sequential terms involves the issue of 'to whom is the action that the utterance
is doing done?' Where the collection of co-participants defines the population
of 'to whom it could be done. ' He's saying it to one of us, no matter how he
may be saying it. And the question then is, which of us is he saying it to, and
what is he doing to that one that he's saying it to? Those are the kinds of
obliged problems that hearers deal with. That means that the initial
formulations of actions are in terms of sequential objects, and sequential
objects by reference to co-participants, without regard to terminology, i.e. ,
 Lecture 8 135
they're initially transformed into that sort of phenomenon: Insulting Joe,
complimenting Sam, etc. He may say "I've known lots of nice white people
in my life. " The question is, who is he talking about here?
What that may mean is, however abstract the terminology, arriving at that
he is doing something abstract - if it's done - follows on a transformation of
what he's doing into concrete terms. It's not, then, a matter of if it's an
abstract utterance give it an abstract interpretation, but whatever utterance,
give it that sort of concrete interpretation. Then maybe you could re-give it an
abstract interpretation. So that finding that he's doing something abstract
awaits finding what concrete thing he's done. Now I think you can go a fairly
long way in establishing relative order in terms of what sorts of interpretations
are done.2 And insofar as we use the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete,' the
sequence interpretations are concrete - which is not to say that they are
concrete aside from that issue of 'abstract-concrete. ' Once having arrived at
the 'concrete' interpretation, the issue now is to see whether the utterance that
you found to be this sort of thing should be considered also or alternatively
something else. And that involves questions of whether in the ordinary course
of affairs you need to bother seeing that, or if it's raised, how it's dealt with.
It could be raised as it is done in the materials here, or it could be raised by
the speaker himself, e.g . , by saying "I don't care either way about what Ken
did but . . . " or "I don't want to be speaking in Ken's favor but I think
everybody should do what they want to do. " One can then be attempting to
give instructions as to how the action of their utterance is to be appreciated.
And there the question is, are there any assuredly successful ways to bring off
that it will be heard as an abstract thing?
Some sorts of consequences of its being heard as an abstract thing are that
the range of normal conversational resources are lost. It is not then something
which locates somebody who should talk next, somebody to whom it's been
done, etc. That is to say, there are then no selectional considerations - unless
you could in fact get an argument going; then you can do agreeing and
disagreeing. But the issue of getting it going is itself a conversational
phenomenon with regard to the issue of whether you're doing that. And the
question of whether you're doing that or not is one that has a natural
sequential paradigm in the way that this one doesn't. And even when gotten
going, the question is whether there aren't then routine ways in which it
would just drop back into concrete talk.
It's a terribly interesting topic for a variety of reasons. One of them is that
abstract versus concrete has a lot of psychiatric interest. The inability to do
abstract thinking and reasoning and talking is treated as a characteristic of

2 Here followed two discussions which were not transcribed. One was a consider­
ation of a mis-hearing of the word " agreeing, " where sequencing could be seen to
determine the very hearing of a word . See Fall 1967, lecture 1 2 , in vol . I. The other
discussion focusssed on sequence for understanding reference, vis-a-vis the phenom­
enon of ' intentional mis-identification. ' See Spring 1 966, lecture 2 1 , pp. 4 1 7-20 and
Winter 1967, March 9, p. 544, in vol . I.
1 36 Part II
some kinds of psychiatric disorders. So, if that's a particular kind of defect, an
extension of what is in a way, normative, rather than something that is really
peculiar to those birds whereas everybody else does abstract talk, that's of
interest.
 Lecture 9
Sound shifts; Showing understanding;
Dealing with 'utterance completion;'
Practical mysticism
The first thing I'm going to discuss will not very likely have its import clear,
though I'll sketch it. I have a fascination with a difference in the way things
that have 'you' after them, and the 'you,' get put together. Things like
"didje" and "wantche. " There are obviously other instances, "wouldje" and
"betche, " for example. Let me try to give some characterization of the
problem to which these might be relevant. There are, in linguistics, theories
that go by the name of 'transformational. ' What in its simplest way it
involves is that in trying to account for the syntax of some actual sentences,
where that sentence is part of a corpus of possible sentences, what's done is to
posit the existence of a finite and relatively small corpus of alternative
sentences, and then account for the production of the actuals - though the
primitives can perhaps be actuals - by operations performed which combine
and otherwise transform the primitives. So at least to some rather considerable
extent any proposed set of transformations have a kind of hypothetical
character to them. Nobody knows whether there are, really, some finite
corpus of primitive sentences in people's brains, and whether or not they start
out with one of them and then perform the operation on it. But there could
be extremely convincing theoretical reasons for urging that some sentence was
arrived at by some sort of transformations, or that transformations in general
are the way that sentences are arrived at.
That's the context. Now when I noticed this difference between "didje"
and "wantche" as a class difference, it seemed to me that that phenomenon
can be relevant to the status of the phenomenon of transformations in this
way: Suppose we asked, what would be convincing evidence that people
make some actual transformations? Or suppose we asked a related question,
are there things to look at which are to be explained by reference to there
having been a transformation? Then we might be engaged in looking at some
phenomenon for how it might evidence a transformation having taken place.
We'd look at it to see what it is the product of. And an obvious way to look
at something to see what transformations it evidences having been done,
would be to see if we could find in it residues of its earlier status. That's quite
an obvious way to look at natural objects. If you're given a rock you might
well find youself looking at it to see, not what its current state is, but to see
evidences of its prior states. Now for things like a sentence, the 'earlier' would

137
138 Part II
be something like a hopeful analogy, since the sentence itself doesn't have
prior statuses. If you had a page which is partly ripped, you might be able to
see the prior status, or inquire into its prior status to find what's missing and
things like that, which are the kinds of problems that archeologists face when
they're dealing with ancient fragments. But perhaps there are places where
you could do that for actual talk. So the strategy is not at all arcane. The
question is how could it seriously be applied to a piece of talk - and by that
I don't mean, e.g. , a tape recording to find out what was erased.
Now we have "didje" and "wantche, " and the way I operated was to
notice this thing about them: Whenever 'did' and 'you' are not in the
environment of each other, they have a particular form or a range of forms,
i.e. , 'did' and 'you,' and 'want' and 'you,' and there are a great many places
where 'did' is said and 'want' is said. And we also would say that when they
get combined in adjacencies of "did you" and "want you," i.e., in adjacencies
of that order and not the reverse order ("you did" and "you want"), you get
"didje" and "wanche" (you don't get "je dij" and "che wan") And that holds
for various other things and 'you,' and various other things and various other
things.
So we have what might be reasonably seen as an initial state or a normal
state, and then another state which might be an end product. Now what
happens when the two, 'you' and 'did' or 'you' and 'want,' are combined in
the 'did' plus 'you' and 'want' plus 'you' order is that the combination yields,
not a retention of their sounds but other sounds where, however, those other
sounds are not new sounds but other sounds in English. The 'j' is used in, e.g. ,
'judge' and the 'ch' occurs in, e.g. , 'church . ' So the 'd' plus the 'y' might be
said to yield 'j. ' And the 't' plus the 'y' yields, 'ch. ' And that is an absolutely
simple transformational argument: In the environment of 'd' plus 'y' where
'y' follows 'd,' the yield is 'j. ' If 'd' is followed by 'y,' say 'j. ' If 't' is followed
by 'y, ' say 'ch. ' The question is, what kind of evidence would there be for that
happening? Does the argument of 'originally' hold, i.e. , that 'j' was originally
'd' plus 'y'? Or is this just a different thing?
I want to make the following argument about the evidence for transfor­
mation, by reference to the notion that you can still see, in the end product,
features of the original item. That is to say, in the worn out stone that was a
statue, you can see a smoothed down face and you can say it wasn't originally
done as a smoothed down face, it was originally a full face but age, water, etc. ,
smoothed it down. Then what is it that these things might be said to preserve
from the original although they are different? To make that kind of argument
you need contrasts, i.e. , you need to have different cases so as to be able to see
what is being aruged. That's why I picked two cases to use, and indeed it was
noticing the two cases that set the whole thing up. I started with the case
'didje' and 'wanche' and noticed several diferences between them, and then
constructed an argument to see what could be done with those differences. So
what's preserved from the earlier state or the hypothetical earlier state or the
possible hypothetical earlier state? What we want is that if things were
different in the earlier state, that difference is preserved. Then we can say they
 Lecture 9 1 39
got transformed, and they got transformed in an orderly way, and what
differentiated them in the earlier state still differentiates them. And that
obtains here. Among other differences between 'did' and 'want' is that they
have a specific orderly set of alternative sounds, 'd' and 't, ' which differ in only
one way: 'd' is voiced and 't' is voiceless. Now notice that 'j' and 'che' preserve
that difference: 'j' is voiced and 'che' is voiceless.
So you get the daimedly 'product' sounds preserving that there is a
voicedjvoiceless difference, and preserved for the right cases, i.e. , the
argument would fall apart if 'did' plus 'you' became 'didche' and 'want' plus
'you' became 'wanje. ' Another possibility, which would provide that the
argument would never have gotten constructed in the first place is if 'did' plus
'you' and 'want' plus 'you' became cases of the same product, 'didche' and
'wanche' or 'didje' and 'wanje. ' Instead, the voicedjvoiceless distinction is
preserved, and preserved for the right cases. Then you can see that there was
an original sound, which in any event we know to exist - 'd' and 't' - and new
sounds were picked, where the new sounds evidence the old sounds by virtue
of having the voicedjvoiceless features in them, and in them in the right way.
That pretty much holds for the range of 'd'j't' endings. So then, when you
look at 'didje' and 'wanche' you can say that in the voiced/voiceless
distinction you can see the earlier state evidenced in them, where i ( you were
just going to have a new pattern of sounds there could presumably be any
pattern of sounds if it weren't that the original sounds governed the choice.
You can say, then, that there was an original sound and features of it governed
the outcome.
I stopped with 'didje' and 'wanche' but the point is that one can ask if
there are other places to look, to find in some state of the materials a
history of transformation. And sound shifts are an obvious place to have
looked, since those people who work on the history of a language do
specifically study sound shifts. That is, the way in which languages develop,
the emergence of German from Indo-European for example, is found by
positing a collection of sounds in Indo-European and seeing how they
evolved. And they get, then, laws of sound change - which for all I know
might have that 'dy' and ' ty ' were the original sounds and 'j' and 'che'
emerged from them. The question of 'didje' and 'wanche' would then
presumably be partially historical; it may be an evolutionary phenomenon
that you got 'didje' and 'wanche. ' I suppose that the notion of sound
transformation, with sounds being explorable for their status as the product
of transformation, provides that talk is an obvious place to look at the
phenomenon of transformation.
The second little exercise concerns the utterance "You went up further ·
then" in the following fragment.

A: Didje have a nice time?

B: Oh, wonderful.
A: Goo::d,
1 40 Part II
A: [ Good.
B: Just wonder/ jful.
A: Where'dju go: : .
(0.6)
B: We were in northern California, up- (0. 2 ) weh(hhh)- (0.4)
way up in the mountains too.
(0.4)
A: Oh well we wen' up there oh: : about thr- 'hh I'd say about
three weeks ago we was up at Maripo:sa, 'hh/ jhh
B: Uh huh,
A: -an' up in the Mother Lode country en we jj wen' all through
those ghost tow:ns.
B: ( �
B: Oh: : I see,
B: Well we were up uh 'hh intuh Red (0. 5 ) Red Blu:ff?
(0.4)
A: Oh: : .
B: ( // )
A: You wen' up further then.
B: Yes.
A: Uhjjhuh,
B: Uh huh,
One kind of issue that we could be interested in - though I'm sure it sounds
peculiar to have an interest in it by virtue of these sorts of materials - is the
phenomenon of understanding. I say 'peculiar' because we might figure that
that's what talk is all about; one thing that talk involves is understanding; if
understanding isn't there, then there's nothing much going on. Are there then
ways that we could specifically justify the study of understanding; of how
understanding is shown? It's in the light of that issue that I wanted to see what
would be a simple, obvious way to begin to study the phenomenon of
understanding. I began to locate some materials which are on point. The
simplest direct instances which start us off are things like this: 1

A: How long are you gonna be in town?

B: Uh, til about Monday.
A: Oh it'll be just a week then.

1 Those are not actual instances, but versions of the following two:

Goldie : HQw long are you gonna � he;re, =

jessie : = 'hhhh Uh� it' s ( ' ) not too lo:ng. Uh: : Jgst until: uh: : I think MQnday.
( 1. 2 )
Goldie : Til, o h you mean like a week tomgrrow,
(')
Jessie : y�
 Lecture 9 141
and

A: Where are you staying?

B: In Pacific Pallisades.
A: Oh at the west side of town.

Now the relevance o f those things is that when we take the third utterance in
each of those fragments what we can see is that those third utterances
specifically involve their producer performing an operation on the second
utterance, and using some of its materials. In that we can lay out those
operations, we can say that what's being specifically done there is 'showing
understanding. ' And if it's so that people do that sort of thing, we can then
say that a warrant for the study of the phenomenon of 'understanding' is that
it's specifically a thing that is achieved, and it can proceed employing
conversation, and have places where it gets exhibited, etc. We need not say
we're interested in 'understanding' by virtue of, e.g. , some humanistic bias
about the nature of conversation, or by reference to some theoretical
supposition that people understood each other, but by virtue of the fact that
one of the things people do in conversation, as they do 'questioning' and
'answering' , etc., is, specifically, 'showing understanding. '
Now one might figure there was a simpler procedure than performing
some transformation operation on the initial item, e.g . , repeating.

A: Where are you staying.

B: Pacific Pallisades.
A: Oh. Pacific Pallisades.

That can work, but it's of interest to note that some repeating may well show
understanding, but repeating is equivocal. Repeating does not guarantee that
you thereby show understanding. The materials in point for that are: For the
sort of thing the doing of which specifically involves repeating, that you
understand can, for that thing, be questioned. And by that sort of equivo­
cality of repeating, I mean to refer to, e.g. , telling a joke. That you repeat it
is of course crucial since, while there are some changes which would preserve
the joke, many would not. And one may be seen to be 'repeating a joke one
has heard' over a series of modifications one makes. The point is that jokes are
specifically objects done as repeats, and they are specifically objects the telling

Goldie : Now you tQld me you eh-uh-where are you . = Are you at uh: Puh-ih: C) Palos
uh:
(0 . 4)
Jessie : eh-No in ah: : : : :uh: 0 't M!!rina del Rey.
(0.9)
Jessie : Marina del Rey. =
Goldie : = Oh Marina del Re t Y·
Jessie : Y!!h.
1 42 Part II
of which does not evidence that you understand it. So, where there's an issue
of whether a person understands a joke they tell, that they told it doesn't solve
the problem. The materials on this are rampant, and a characteristic case is
where somebody's 1 2-year-old son or daughter comes home with a dirty joke,
and the recipient can find that he has no idea whether or not the kid
understands the joke and may then engage in an examination to find whether
the kid understands it and may find that he perfectly well doesn't understand
it as the examiner figures it should be understood. Sometimes the kid has no
idea why it's funny though he laughs, other times he may have a perfectly
good idea of why it's funny although it stands as an alternative to what the
joke is about.
So, although there is a great range of things involved in the equivocality of
repetition, it is the fact of repetition that is equivocal, though any given
repetition may be fairly dear. That is, repetition doesn't tell you that they
understand, but the way a repetition is done may tell you that someone
specifically doesn't understand. In any event, that someone is doing a
repetition may leave one as much in the air about whether they understand as
one would have been had they not talked. Repetition, then, is not a 'simpler
case' of showing understanding than the transformation operation under
consideration.
Notice that the operation on some prior utterance can fail; i.e. , it perfectly
well can be that you produce an understanding utterance that involves that it
is a misunderstanding, e.g . :

A: Where are you staying.

B: In Pacific Pallisades.
A: Oh in the center of town.

Then it can be taken that you don't know where Pacific Pallisades is. And,
that understanding utterances can fail would seem to be related to the fact
they could succeed. Now repetitions can fail also, but when they fail what fails
is not the understanding but the hearing, e.g. :

A: Where are you staying.

B: In Pacific Pallisades.
A: Pacific Boulevard?

In that same data there are some nice little things involved in repetitions. Let
me give you some discussion on it because it evidences something related to
understanding: 2

B: Now you told me where you are. And you're uh, Palos- uh,
A: Uh no. In La Marina.
B: La Marina. Oh La Marina. Yeah.

2 See p. 141, n. 1 above for the actual fragment.

 Lecture 9 143
B says "Palos-" as a rememberance of what she was told, and it's corrected.
What she was originally told was "La Marina. " "Palos-" is the first word of
a place in Los Angeles, 'Palos Verdes Estates. ' I think that may be fairly
uniquely what it could be the beginning of, in that that's not the place that
was told her. Nothing like that was in the name originally given her, i.e. , 'La
Marina. ' However, if you were told La Marina and didn't remember that
name, then you might well come up with Palos Verdes Estates as the place
that was told you, by virtue of this sort of thing: If you're given a name like
that, and you analyze out of it and preserve some features of what it names,
then when you need the name again you use the features to find the name.
Palos Verdes Estates is quite substitutable for La Marina, i.e. , they're both
specifically Western Los Angeles beach cities, relatively snazzy beach areas. So
if what you did when the person told you ' 'I'm staying in La Marina" was to
say to yourself, "Where is that?" or "What is that?" then you would come
up with such features as not only located it, but located it, e.g. , in contrast to
where you live. So for B, who lives in a not very snazzy section of middle Los
Angeles, such features would be distinctionally relevant. If that's what's
happened, then the recovery operation, though wrong here, does exhibit that
it was not the name that was remembered but properties of the thing named,
i.e. , though it's wrong, it's also right in many aspects. And it specifically is not
an error via sheer use of terms, i.e. , had B said "Mariposa, " then there is the
issue of the 'M-a-' preservation.
So in this case, where B has been given the name on the prior evening, it
is not so much that she is now attempting a 'repeat, ' but that she is doing an
operation of recovery from an analysis. And there is a range of evidence for the
sort of thing I've proposed actually being correct. Over the years we've been
collecting what we call 'gist preserving errors, ' where one is trying to recall
something and finds that one recalls not just anything else, but something else
which stands in a very nice relationship. Titles of things is a main area that we
used, and we get things like The Yellow Rolls Royce when what was meant
was The Solid Gold Cadillac. These are very common; an error-of-sorts in
which you remember the features of the item and find another item with that
collection of features, where the other item might well be the right one except
that it happens to be wrong. This is the sort of phenomenon that, given one
instance, you might figure it's a very rare case, but you could collect a bunch
of them in a week.
So, even the case of 'repeating' or 'redelivering, ' where we're talking about
remembering in a way, can be rather more complicated than it appears. And
even with local repeating you can get similar sorts of problems involved.
Someone who does what they figure to be a 'repeat' having heard and
understood something that was just said, will turn out to have heard
something quite different than was just said, but what they hear is something
that could have been said given, e.g. , what they were talking about. I don't
have any instances with me, but I've collected some in which the thing heard
bears no describable relationship to the thing said, where what may happen
is that a conversation is going along; somebody in some way switches topic
1 44 Part II
without specifically signalling that they've switched topic - which can
happen, e.g. , if there's a pause, or e.g. , if somebody notices something and
talks about the thing they noticed - and what's heard is a perfectly okay thing
to have said on the ongoing topic.
Returning to the earlier materials, I want to focus on "Oh well we went up
there oh: about thr-"hh I'd say about three weeks ago we was up at
Maripo:sa. " I want to try to locate a problem for which this utterance has
interest. One topic that is fundamental to the study of conversation is
'utterance completion. ' It is fundamental in a whole range of ways and I'll
mention just a few. If you're going to have a conversational system which
operates with speakers talking one at a time, and if you're going to have a
conversational system in which not only do they talk one at a time but in
which there is - as an ideal - no gap plus no overlap between adjacent
utterances, and if there is not some specific definitive way that completion is
signalled, e.g . , a particle that signals that the utterance is over, then there is
a problem of completion which has these implications: A speaker needs to
speak in such a way that others can see that he has not yet completed so that
they don't start up so as to have him talking and them talking, and he needs
also to be able to signal completion in such a way that they can see on its
occurrence that it's happened so that you don't get his having stopped and
they not having started.
The question then is, what are the mechanisms whereby completion is
signalled and recognized? The basic structural unit in terms of which
completion is dealt with is 'possible sentence endings. ' And possible sentence
endings are something that people can see as forthcoming so that on the
occurrence of one they can start up. (The reason for saying only 'possible'
sentence endings and not 'aaual' sentence endings is that perhaps any possible
sentence ending but at least most possible sentence endings are also not
necessarily sentence endings in that that sentence could be continued. )
Attention i s then directed t o employing 'possible sentence endings' which
has a consequence that speakers go about producing, with exceptions (I don't
mean exceptions in any given conversation, but that there are conversations
which are exceptions), utterances of sentence-long length. And they do that
though the utterance-sentence length varies considerably. That is, they may
produce an enormously long sentence within an utterance or they may
produce an enormously short one, but where, e.g . , the enormously long one
is easily transformed into or is maybe a transform of a series of small ones,
they nonetheless produce a long sentence rather than a series of sentences. And
they may be said to avoid series of sentences, since if they have something they
want to say, any possible sentence ending within the series could be treated as
an occasion for someone else starting to talk.
That means not only do they produce multi-clause sentences, but they also
produce multi-claus sentences of one sort as a preference over another sort.
That is, there are two sorts of multi-clause sentence; one that indicates right
from within the first clause that it's going to be a multi-clause sentence, and
one that doesn't indicate that it's a multi-clause sentence until some second
 Lecture 9 145
clause occurs. Those are formally distinct in this way: I f somebody uses 'if ' in
the first clause of an utterance then a hearer can see that the sentence of which
this clause is a part will at least have another clause and can be monitored
until the 'then' clause occurs, where the 'then' clause will indicate that it's the
last clause. That can be compared with such a sentence as, "I went to the
movies but I saw a lousy picture, " where 'but,' which makes it a multi-clause
sentence, doesn't occur until after the first clause of the sentence is over. Were
one monitoring the talk for first possible ending, intending then to talk, one
could have started simultaneously with 'but. ' Now notice that you can get a
transform of that sentence which will have this indication at the beginning,
e.g, "While I was at the movies I saw a lousy picture. "
Now there are reasons for doing the 'but'-type thing. These reasons are
indeed relevant to the issue of a one-sentence utterance. One reason is,
suppose you produce a one-clause, one-sentence intended complete utterance
and nobody starts talking, where you haven't required that they start talking
by, e.g. , asking a question. Seeing a pause, you may then take it as your task
to continue talking or to start again. If you take it that it's reasonable that it's
your fault that there's a pause, then a way to deal with that pause as not
'nobody's talk' but 'a pause within your own talk, ' is to tum what you say
thereafter into a specific 'continuation. ' And when you make a specific
'continuation' you get certain other virtues, one of which is that the
'but' -clause provides that it was correct that somebody did not start talking.
You also signal that when the 'but' -clause is finished you will have finished
the utterance, and it will have been a one-sentence utterance. So at least it
needs to be looked to see whether multi-clause sentences in which the signal
of multi-clausedness doesn't occur until the second clause, tend to be done
where a one-clause sentence has been done and there was a talk gap. If that's
so, then these second-clause signals are not inconsistent with the argument
that if you're intending to produce what could be a two-sentence utterance,
then you can make it a two-clause, one-sentence utterance.
Those, then, are the sorts of things involved in the ways that people go
about dealing with the problem of signalling completion and incompletion,
and giving that information as early as possible so that others will not see a
possible completion when they shouldn't, or fail to see a possible comple­
tion when they should - where of course I'm suggesting that things like 'if '
are attended for their status as completion signals. So the mechanisms for
dealing with completion and incompletion are quite delicate sorts of things,
and the sentence-utterance we are examining here may locate a rather nice
technique with regard to the issue of completion. I say "may" because I'm
not altogether convinced that I have a finding here. Again, here's how it
goes:

B: We were in northern California, up- (0. 2 ) weh(hhh)- (0.4) way

up in the mountains too.
(0 .4)
1 46 Part II
A: Oh well we wen' up there oh: : about thr- 'hh I'd say about three
weeks ago we was up at Maripo:sa,
And we're focussing now on A's talk: "Oh well we went up there oh: : about
thr-" and she stops and does a correction. Now, what kind of thing can that
correction-occasion serve as? Why indeed does she need a correction here?
Well, suppose that at this point - if not at the beginning - she sees where that
utterance will go, i.e. , she sees that she's going to say something about
Mariposa, in alternation to "up there. " If she were to do that in a grammatic
fashion it would end up as two sentences, i.e. , "Oh well we went up there oh: :
about three weeks ago. We were up at Mariposa. " Two sentences. I f she were
to do it that way, then at "about three weeks ago" would be a possible
completion and a possible point for the other to start talking. And the other
might start talking by reference to the fact that it's not only a possible
completion, but also a perfectly good return to her initial remark, and could
occasion a number of appropriate returns, e.g. , "Oh isn't that a coincidence?"
"isn't it lovely up there?" etc., etc. So it's not just a possible sentence, it's a
possible utterance by virtue of its relation to what occasions it. And that's a
problem.
Now if, within the first sentence of your own utterance you start to do a
correction, whatever sort of correction, you're still within that sentence. If you
can produce such a correction as indicates that, from the correction on, now
the hearer needs to remonitor for sentence completion, then what you can do
is produce almost a complete sentence and start a correction that allows you
to do now another complete sentence. Then you don't face the two-sentence
problem. You end up having in effect done two sentences, but there's never
been a chance for a hearer to find a first possible completion of the first. The
correction allows for hearing that the sentence, and the utterance, is still open,
and a first possible completion has again to be watched for.
While I wouldn't dream of saying that this stands as a technique that one
could use from the outset to produce two sentences without it having occurred
that there was a possible completion between them, what it means is that
having begun a sentence and having discovered in the course of it that you
need two, you have a means for getting to do two without possible
completion having occurred. Furthermore, she's gone far enough in the first
so that it isn't just that she is replacing the first with the second, but the second
adds to the first, since the first is quite available already as to what was said
in it, i.e. , she didn't cut the first off in such a way as to provide that the first
is simply replaced by the second in terms of what the first meant. By virtue
of that, it would not do to just say that she's replacing a bad start with a good
start. She is in fact here achieving two sentences without having any place
occur in the course of those two sentences which could be seen as a possible
completion.
Turning to another matter, what interested me in the first place about this
data was the sequence of places, in terms of, a place is named, then it appears
that the other was there too, and then it turns out that they weren't in the
 Lecture 9 147
same place. And questions come up like why pick 'northern California' in the
first place? Why not pick what gets used eventually, 'Red Bluff? And, is there
any lawfulness to such a sequence? I'll start off with a discussion of 'northern
California, ' and try to give some characterization of its use.
There is one obvious basis for it, they are southern Californians. A southern
Californian knows what northern California is, i.e. , pretty much any southern
Californian can tell another southern Californian "I was in northern Califor­
nia" successfully, i.e. , without the other saying "Where's that?" as compared
to, e.g., "I was in Red Bluff " where someone might well say "Where's that?"
And if you started with that and they said "Where's that?" then you're likely
to say "In northern California. " Now if they were northern Californians they
wouldn't say "I was in northern California, " they might say "I was up in
Kern County" or something like that. The place name they choose turns on
where they are, where they're from, and what they know about each other; at
least in that they know each other is a southern Californian.
You could extract a general rule from that, the general rule being: When
you are doing a description (much more generally than places), in the first
instance pick, if you can, such a description as you know that the other knows.
Let me give now a really neat result of that. Here's the data:

A: I'm reading one of uh Harold Sherman's books.

B: Mm hm,
A: I think we read one, one time, about life after death'r something,
B: Mm hm,
A: And uh, this is How Tuh Make uh ESP Work For You.
B: Mm hm,
A: And it's excellent.

Let me here make a parenthetical remark. Lots of people are amazed at

people's gullibility. "Imagine all these people who believe in ESP. " Now,
one has to come to appreciate the way in which people believe in ESP. I
want to introduce a term, and it's not to be heard in the way, e.g . , a title of
a how-to book would be heard. The term is 'practical mysticism. ' What I
mean when I say that people are 'practical mystics' is available as the talk
goes on:

A: And it's excellent.

B: Well, when you get through II with it,­
A: And he talks about-
B: Is it yer book?
A: No, Eloise uh brought it by, she was going away for a couple of
weeks, and she brought it by with a note on, that s' d- it was a
book she thought I would like, and uh, uh: : if I could, uh she'd
like to have it back in two 'r three weeks.
B: Mm hm.
A: Uh I'll be through with it before she gets back.
1 48 Part II
B: Uhjjhuh,
A: But uh,

Then there's a bit of talk about the book, the author, etc. And then:

B: Is it an expensive book?
A: I would guess it is, but the- the price has been dipped off of the
cover, you know
B: Mm hm,

Now, 'expensive' means 'expensive for a book, ' where 'expensive for a book'
is grounds for not buying it but borrowing it. Now, imagine yourself a really
serious believer in ESP, and then consider the sorts of uses that ESP would
have; like obviously you could use it on the stock market. And suppose I
came to you and said "You really believe in ESP, well here's a book, I
guarantee it. I want $ 5 0,000 for it. " Whatever I asked, it would only set up
the task of getting the money. For people who believe in ESP in the sense that
they operate with it, they use it all the time, the way to see the special
character of their belief in ESP is that a book about ESP is still a book, and
you'd just as soon wait two weeks to borrow it than to buy it even if it was
$ 2 .9 5 ; or if it costs $ 8 . 00 you'll get it out of the library.
The lesson is that when you go about disparaging people who believe in
ESP, you have to try to figure out what does it mean to believe in ESP. It's
probably quite different than believing, e.g. , that the car that's bearing down
on you doesn't see you. You don't then figure, e.g . , well what's it going to
cost for an operation, but you jump. And I'm sure that these ladies would
jump. That is, for things that anybody knows are practical, they'll behave
practically; and indeed they behave practically with respect to ESP. Which is
to say that while they say they believe in it and they talk a good deal about
it and they go to meetings and they use it all the time, they're not staking any
money on it. So, at least insofar as believing means putting your money where
your mouth is, the character of their believing is obscure.
Okay, returning to ' 'I'm reading one of Harold Sherman's books. I think
we read one, one time, about life after death or something. " And by the way,
the whole character of the state of religion in our day is evidenced by that "or
something, " as though it could be about life after death, or not. What could
the "or something" be? Anyway, the question I wanted to deal with was, why
in the world does she say ' 'I'm reading one of Harold Sherman's books" ? It's
not the way in which one would regularly identify a book, i.e. , one might say
' 'I'm reading this book, How To Make ESP Work For You. " However, if the
rule 'pick some way of identifying an object which will permit the other to see
that they know it' operates, then there is a real elegance to her selection. She
finds a way to formulate that book which permits the other to see that the
other knows, not that book but a book of the same class, i.e. , ' Harold
Sherman, we read one of his books. ' That then locates this book in the way
in which a title does not.
 Lecture 9 1 49
That she goes through that kind of work to find a way to refer to the book
is a most elegant sort of evidence that one does work at finding a description
for something, and does have a preference, if one can use it, for building such
a description as will permit the other to see that you know that they know
what you're talking about. "One of Harold Sherman's books" specifically
involves just that sort of a thing, and involves going out of your way to do it
in a way that saying "northern California" doesn't. But 'northern California'
is a simple instance of the same phenomenon, and it's in that way that one
picks 'northern California' before 'Red Bluff. '
 Fragment
Verb uses; 'A puzzle about pronouns'
One kind of curious thing about some verb uses is, suppose you go to a
luncheon and you meet somebody there who is serving. They are likely to
describe what they're doing as ' 'I'm helping X. " That is to say, what you get
is 'helping X' as an operation over a scope of jobs you could be doing. If X
is hosting then you can be 'helping X,' if X is washing dishes you can be
'helping X,' etc., where what you report is how you come to be doing what
you're doing; where, in a way it's obvious, I suppose, what you're doing.
People can perfectly well see what you're doing; you're washing dishes or
you're serving or you're doing something else. And what you report is how
you come to be doing that, by reference to somebody else's responsibilities. In
reporting what you're doing, you preserve who's business it is to do it, and
just report your own actions by reference to that you're doing it for them. And
it's of interest that those sorts of terms involve that a description of what
you're doing is not, for example, observable by somebody who was to see you.
That is to say, if you were to offer a description it would be "Yesterday I
helped Mary" rather than "Yesterday I washed dishes. " Now that means, of
course, that there's some complication in attempting to arrive at a description
of what somebody is doing, by virtue of the fact that what they figure they're
doing and what you can see them doing can turn out to be independent, in
the sense that what they figure they're doing turns on their relationship to
somebody else and what that other person is doing.
Here's a same sort of thing. "Her house is beautiful, I'll take you up there
some time. " The 'take' is a similar sort of thing. In characterizing what we're
doing as Til take you up there," that preserves the relationship between me
and that other person, and you and me, as compared to "We'll go up there
some time. " If two people are together and they're asked what they're doing,
they will often say, not, e.g., "We're going to the movies, " but one of them
will say ' 'I'm taking X to the movies. " And that can be a point of humor, if
you do a reversal on it. If it's a man and a little kid, then if the man says "He's
taking me to the ballgame" or "He's taking me to the movies" or "He's
taking me to Disneyland, ' ' that's just to say ' 'I'm taking him to Disneyland. "
Which is also different than "We're going to Disneyland. "
And I guess that, that the description is 'taking to, ' not 'going to' matters,
since, e.g. , people complain, not that we don't go anywhere, but "You never

This fragment was not among those Winter 1 969 lectures that Sacks decided to have
transcribed. It just happened to be one of the few surviving tapes, and was transcribed after
his death. One source of its interest is that it may represent the sorts of lectures that did occur
but which Sacks didn't think warranted transcribing.

150
 Fragment 15 1
take me anywhere. " We may 'go' a lot of places, but "You never take me
anywhere" allows for a complainable position. So, for example, there's a point
in people's lives at which X takes Y somewhere; that is, by virtue of 'X takes. '
Then there is a point at which they need no longer use that; if, say, they have
a joint budget. Then X is no longer 'taking Y' somewhere, they're just 'going'
to those places, and it apparently remains a complainable by reference to a
past. That is to say, the romance is out of the marriage when they only go
places together, he never takes her anywhere. X and Y going somewhere is
not, then, necessarily equivalent to X taking Y somewhere. And of course X
taking Y somewhere is not the same thing as Y taking X somewhere, whereas
X and Y going somewhere doesn't make a choice on whether X is taking Y
there or Y is taking X there.
And those are obviously issues that turn out to matter, so that if X is in fact
taking Y somewhere, and X is female and Y is male, then X may sometimes
give Y the money to pay, rather than pay, so that it shouldn't be seen that X
is taking Y there but will be seen as Y taking X there. That is, who turns out
to pay is read by the cashier - or in the mind of the parties is read by the
cashier - as who is taking whom, and that's something that they want to
bring off right, for whatever reasons. And people will specifically go through
a business of transferring money before they enter, or secretly transferriqg
money, so as to have that end up the right way - though it's not anybody they
know that's receiving the money, but it's nonetheless an embarrassable sort of
thing.
The problem is, of course, that romance is defined as something that
operates in pre-marriage, where everything is 'taking to, ' so that if you
want to preserve romance, you have to preserve some of those things which
are hard to preserve. And there are, of course, a whole set of efforts that
people go into, to preserve that sort of a thing. The movie Eight And A Half
deals with one of the classical themes, that sex should be a lovers' relationship
and not a married couples' relationship. And couples play at that all the time;
that is to say, having their evening sex is something that came off as a
seduction, and not routine. There's a very large orientation to that sort of
phenomenon, and I guess people can become fairly adept at achieving for
themselves the observability of that they're doing something other than just
going to dinner, just going to bed, etc.
Here's another sort of thing, that's of no large consequence, maybe. It
involves things like "I imagine, ' ' "I guess, " "I suppose, ' ' and things like that.
Where these involve not only the issue of whether you know or not - where
they're saying that you don't know - but they also have a sequential import.
If you say "I imagine" or "I guess" or "I suppose" and things like that, then
you're characteristically inviting the other party to also take a position. That
is to say, you get a differentiation when you use those things, where, if you say
"I suppose," then the other will say, for example, "Yes, that's true" in
distinction from, for example, just ' ' Uh huh. ' ' And they may be done, indeed,
where you take it that the other knows something, as a way of getting them
to tell you what you figure they know. Here's one:
152 Part II
A: And it left her quite permanently damaged, I suppose.
B: Apparently.

Okay, let me talk a little bit about "have to. " First of all, "I have to do X"
is a way of making a rejection of something else, so that "I have to do X"
relates X to Y; Y being something that somebody proposes: "Do you want
to come over?' ' "I have to do X. " Now, "I have to" can, when it is being
talked of, be referred to as "He says he had to" or " He had to. " And those
involve how it is that you accept the excuse. If you believe the excuse you say
" He had to do X" (or just " He can't come"). If you doubt the excuse you say
" He said he had to do X. "
And it's curious that a bunch of things are pretty much introduced as "I
have to. " So you can perfectly well turn down a proposed evening's
engagement by saying "I have to work," whereas you don't quite do the same
thing when you say ' 'I'm sorry, I want to work. " Indeed, there are a bunch
of things which are just not properly said with " I want to, " of which 'work'
is one. If you want to achieve being odd, then you make that combination as
a way of talking about certain things. Now it's of course the case that for any
Y that you are invited to, while you may be able to say "I have to do X, " not
any X will do. So when somebody sends you an invitation to a wedding on
Sunday morning, you can't write back and say ' 'I'm sorry, I have to wash my
car. " And if somebody calls you up and says "So-and-so died, the funeral is
tomorrow, " you can't say "I have to go to class. " And that's relevant to how
it is that certain sorts of formal situations operate to involve you in avoiding
having to even say what's involved. That is to say, for a large class of
engagements, 'prior engagements' - whatever they are - are offerable as
excuses for turning down next engagements.
One other small thing. Here's a line that goes "One night I was with this
guy that I liked a real lot. " The only thing I want to point out about it is that
it's not exactly clear, when "liked" is used, whether it means 'exclusively
then, and no longer. ' It's one of those things for which there is a choice
involved, such that one can use, though talking about a past event, " that I
like a real lot. ' ' That is to say, for that sort of thing you can use the present
tense. The choice of tense, then, can be informative, and you have, then, two
options.
There's an interesting parallel, in a way (this is a wrong thing to do, but it's
a way of exposing a kind of ambiguity) . In English, for example, 'you' is
obscure as to whether it's singular or plural. A phone call goes like this:

A: Hi Judy,
B: Hi.
A: What are you doing? Why don't you come over?

Now, in French it would be very hard to leave it to her to say whether she'll
come over, or whether she and her husband will. As it happens in this case,
 Fragment 153
she says "Well, we're going out," and then he says "Well, I thought you and
your husband might come over. "
Another minor sort of a point has to do with the use of 'do . ' It's a very
interesting term in English, by virtue of the fact that it is one of the few things
that are, in English, pro-verbs. Like pronouns. 'Do' is, quote, a substitute for
other verbs. So there are a lot of things that you can say with a particular verb
that you can also say with 'do . ' In some languages there are well-developed
pro-verbal systems. In English, 'do' is supposed to be the most prominent,
though I think, and others think, that there are other pro-verbs in English, of
which 'say' is a prominent case; 'say' being, for one, the pro-verb for the
'performatives. ' But one small interest of 'do' is that it can be, for some
things, a way of indicating that what it's being used as a substitute for is
routinely done. A guy says, "One day some guys and I were doing houses. "
Now "doing houses" is a way of saying "we were out robbing houses. " And
you can say "One day some guys and I were out robbing houses , " where you
make no indication of whether it is that you rob houses routinely or not. If
you say "doing houses" then you're making a statement of a different order.
And that usage is rather more general than that; indeed, I was surprised that
it's there, because its main use in that routinized fashion is academic. That is
to say, "They do philosophy" rather than "They're philosophers. ' ' The 'do'
is a way of indicating a professional attitude, as I suppose "doing houses" is
a way of indicating that you're at least not altogether amateur at robbing
houses. The choice, then, of the pro-verb versus the verb may be non­
incidental.
With respect to these performatives there are some things you want to
differentiate, so that, for example whereas "I promise" does 'promising,'
something like 'I mean" doesn't do 'meaning;' what it does is ' correcting. '
That is to say, when you say "I mean" you're asserting that what you're
saying now stands in a relation to something you just said, and could stand
as a correction to what you just said. And that can go with "he means" just
as well.
I'm sure there's a vast pile of further things you could say about verbs, but
now let me give you a nice little puzzle about pronouns. Here's a quotation
from the book The Development of Logic written by John and Mary Kneale
(Oxford University Press). It's the authoritative, as they say, history of logic.
It's really extraordinarily good. The quotation is from page 6 1 .
The method of exposition in the Prior Analytics differs in two notable
respects from that in the De Interpretatione.
Prior Analytics is one of Aristotle's treatises on logic, and De lnterpretatione is
another, earlier of his treatises.
In the first place, Aristotle uses letters as term-variables, that is, as signs
to mark gaps which may be filled by any general terms we choose,
If P, then Q. Alright?
1 54 Part II
provided gaps marked by the same letter are filled by the same term in
any one statement.
This is a new and epoch-making device in logical technique. It is used
for the first time, without explanation, in the second chapter of the Prior
Analytics, which deals with conversion, and it seems to be Aristotle's
invention.
In earlier works, generality is indicated by a rather clumsy use of
pronouns, or by examples in which it is left to the reader to see the
irrelevance of the special material. Both methods are used by Plato and
Aristotle.
An example of the former, from the Republic, is: "When things are
of such a nature as to be relative to something, then those that are of a
certain sort are relative to something of a certain sort. ' ' The latter is used
by Aristotle in De Interpretation: "The denial proper to the affirmation,
'every man is white' is 'not every man is white; ' that proper to the
affirmation 'some man is white' is 'no man is white' . " Plato's statement
would be almost unintelligible without the illustrations which he adds,
and Aristotle requires the reader to understand that the particular terms,
'man' and 'white,' are irrelevant to the point he is making. In both cases
the use of variables would have given greater clarity and conciseness. For
the statement of more complicated logical rules, such as those of the
syllogism, their use is almost indispensable.

The point is that at one point in the history of logic, generalizations are done
by these pronouns. It was a great invention to replace pronouns with letters.
Now, could we come up with some thoughts on why pronouns were used in
the first place? Why they were a good first attempt? And why they then
turned out to be lousy? It can't be solved just by logical considerations; you
have to give some thought to the nature of pronouns as linguistic phenomena.
There is a bit more about it on page 6 1 of Development of Logic, but they
don't come up with an answer. In due course I'll give some thoughts on it.
 Part III
Winter 1970

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 1 Lecture
Foreshortened versus expanded
greeting sequences; Voice recognition
tests; Reason for a call; 'My mind is
with you;' Tel/ability
My idea is to give a bunch of lectures under the title 'Overall Structural
Organization of Conversation. ' The title names a type of organization of
conversation which is discriminated from other types of organization that I
figure conversation has. This type deals, roughly, with beginnings and
endings, and how beginnings work to get from beginnings to something else,
and how, from something else, endings are gotten to. And also the
relationship - if there is one - between beginnings and endings.
I figured I would first off do something that has two sorts of lessons to it.
First, I would seek to give some idea that it's not the case that overall
structural organization of conversation is at all the same thing as comprehen­
sive analysis of a single conversation and, in particular, that it doesn't pay to
try, it isn't a pointed thing to do, to attempt a comprehensive analysis of a
single conversation. Secondly, in contrast perhaps to the first point, it
nonetheless pays to work at some single conversation as elaborately as one can.
So I'm saying it doesn't pay to attempt a comprehensive analysis of some
single conversation; I'm not saying pull out what you can and forget the
conversation that you happen to have pulled it out of. I think it does pay to
do as elaborate and extended a working on a single conversation as you can
bring off.
To instance those points I thought I would take some single conversation
that I've spent some amount of time on, that I also think is kind of a simple
conversation, and consider it here. There will be some discussion of its overall
structural organization, but we'll see that there are a lot of other things. And
maybe we'll see that the task of comprehensively analyzing some single
conversation may not have any particular point to it. My strategy for
suggesting the unpointedness of a comprehensive analysis of a single
conversation will be to show the enormous range of disconnected materials
that one gets into in studying some single conversation. So, for example, if
you thought an analysis of a single conversation in book form would look
something like The First Five Minutes, in which you have a running discussion
paralleling the conversation, then I would hope to have you see that there

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 157

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
1 58 Part III
might be at some places discussions running to hundreds and hundreds of
pages and other places that were thin, and that the connectedness of the parts
would only be guaranteed by the way the pages were put together.
Furthermore, for the sorts of problems that any piece of material in any
conversation happens to pose, that piece of material is only incidentally likely
to be the appropriate material for investigating the problem that it poses, and
therefore you would regularly find that you want other stuff to do the
investigation on. It would then be just slapped into the running commentary,
and in no sense would you be able to say that some analysis developed on
some fragment was developed on that fragment; it indeed had to be
developed on something else and just put in here because the issue gets
touched off in some fashion. On the other hand, a command of the intricacies
of a particular conversation will permit all sorts of its parts to be dealt with
much better than they would be if the fragment that you were interested in
were simply isolated for consideration.
So I'll be going through a range of things; some kinds of topics that were
in fact generated out of a study of this conversation, some that might well
have been but weren't, others that this conversation implicates but that were
developed completely differently and I can't conceive of how I could have ever
gotten them from this. There will be some awfully neat things and some
things that are extraordinarily crude.
Let me say a little bit about this conversation, to locate it by reference to
some of the things I may then say about it. It's part of a three-part sequence
in some serious sense, in which Estelle calls Jeanette, and out of that first
conversation Jeanette comes to call Penelope, and in the third conversation,
out of the second, out of the first, Jeanette calls Estelle. Each of the
conversations runs about the same time, some two minutes, and they all more
or less deal with the event at Bullock's department store that's talked of in the
first conversation. I'll start with something which falls under the title of the
course, and that is the beginning of the first conversation. 1

jeanette : Hello,
Estelle : Jeanette,
jeanette : Yeah,
Estelle : Well I just thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happen'
at Bullocks toda::y?

I've been studying greeting sequences for a long time, and the characteristic
ways that greeting sequences come off; by which I mean such sorts of things as:
Greeting exchanges, name exchanges, then how-are-yous, then things
coming out of how-are-yous. And there is a whole range of familiar things
that we might bring to our minds as to how greeting sequences come off. A
thing about greeting sequences - taking only what is perfectly obviously a
'greeting sequence; ' i.e. , without getting into any issues as to 'is that part of

1 The class was given copies of the transcript of the first conversation.
 Lecture 1 1 59
the greeting sequence or not?' - is that they are characteristically not as brief
as the one here. That is to say, a greeting sequence generally looks like a six­
or seven-utterance thing, and this one is then kind of brief.
Given that kind of fact, I began to focus on this sort of question: A greeting
sequence can be considered by analogy with a chess game in that it has certain
sorts of at least simple features that are very similar to a chess game. For one,
there is - and in an even stronger sense than in a chess game - an utterly
normative first move, "Hello" (as compared to 'pawn to queen four').
"Hello" is, say, essentially universal with very very small special exceptions
for telephone calls, e.g. , in an interrupted conversation or in an immediately
returning second conversation (like in the third conversation here, which is a
return conversation between the same two parties and is expected, the phone
answerer goes "Yeah? " instead of "Hello"). Other sorts of exceptions have to
do with business situations where an answerer will do some identificatory
announcement (e.g. , the name of the business, a telephone number) instead
of "Hello . "
The brevity o f this sequence i s not at all the crucial thing, but i t permitted
a focussing on what gets done within a greeting sequence, and how it gets
done, and how that is related to moving from the greeting sequence to
something else, like a 'first topic. ' I will eventually argue that the phenom­
enon 'first topic' is a part of the overall structural organization of
conversation - or at least getting into a 'first topic' is a part. So that 'first
topic' is not merely a way of talking about some topic that happens to be first,
but is in fact a thing that we can give an analytic name to. And I'll develop
bases for saying that in due course.
Now thinking in terms of 'moves,' one could ask what kind of thing can
be done at any given point to, e.g. , foreshorten the greeting sequence and then
perhaps get into a position to do something else yourself, or extend it and
leave open the possibility that the other party will do something else, or just
allow it to go along and see what will happen. That is to say, one can think
of the tactics in the greeting sequence as possible ways to, e.g . , control who
gets a first chance to raise a 'first topic. ' And a first question that leads you to
ask is, who among the parties - now differentiated into 'caller' and 'called' ­
has, say, the first opportunity to make such a move as does some sort of
control of the length of the greeting sequence and its consequences, and who
gets to do its consequences. And in that regard, then, if "Hello" by the called
is normative, we would want to know whether the first utterance of the caller
can be used to start a move toward making the first topic, and how they could
do that. And if caller has first position to possibly start a move towards topical
talk, then we could say that called only gets the possibility of doing that ·

themselves if caller doesn't. That is to say, called's possible first position for
moving towards, say, topic control, will only occur in the third utterance of
the conversation - if it can occur there, depending upon what's happened so
far. There is, then, a differential position with respect to getting a first chance
to move towards getting into a first topic. I'll try to show some ways that
callers can do it and some ways that calleds can do it if callers don't, and
160 Part Ill
I'll also discuss some basis for neither of them doing it, or one, or the other,
etc.
The argument I'll develop will say that the sequence here is an instance of
caller taking their first chance to generate a minimal greeting sequence; one
that puts them in a position to make first topic. Now, there's the initial
"Hello" as a required first thing. That simply gives the caller a chance to do
something, for which there is a not very large set of alternatives: He can return
" Hello, " do variants on "Hello" like " Hi," do things like called's name as
is done here. If caller does the called's name, or at least some intended
recognition of the phone's answerer, then that gets dealt with by a couple of
variants. "Yeah" is obviously one, and another obviously is "Yeah?" with an
intonation rise. I think those are quite different sorts of things in terms of the
discussion I'm developing, i.e. , in terms of what that puts the caller in a
position to then do. It's a difference involving that "Yeah?" seems to have as
its import that it's caller's business to now, e.g . , identify themselves and not,
e.g. , to move to topic beginning. So you might get:

Jeanette : Hello,
Estelle : Jeanette,
Jeanette : Yeah?
Estelle : This's Estelle.

And then you go into another greeting sequence:

Jeanette : Oh hi!
Estelle : Hi.

Or "Hi, how are you?" etc.

We don't yet have any reason to say why somebody might be interested in
not having the how-are-yous done, for example. For one, if they are arrived
at, then, one how-are-you being done and answered, another is appropriate,
i.e. , " How are you?" "Fine, how are you . " And there are - just to make the
thing kind of intuitively plain - perfectly dandy reasons for avoiding how­
are-yous. Suppose you're calling somebody up to tell them that their husband
died. You don't want a sequence including the caller saying "Hi, how are
you?" "Fine," and then "Gee I'm sorry to tell you the bad news . . . " That
is to say, there are occasions - and it doesn't have to be that dramatic at
all - in which you don't want to elicit some such statement as "Fine" from a
party you're calling. It may be that you have bad news for them, or bad news
about yourself - and if you're going to deliver bad news about yourself, you
might not want them in a position of having said "Fine; " i.e. , of having
already been put in an embarrassing position relative to the news that you're
now going to deliver. So at least in that way one can see that how-are-yous are
possibly something to be avoided, and that there are perhaps then also ways
that they can be avoided. And it's one way in which one can come to see the
package of "Hello" and " How are you" and all the rest of that, as containing
 Lecture 1 161
parts that people can attend the separation of and may have differential
interests in the use of.
Now, plainly enough the use of "Jeanette" as a first utterance by the caller
does a series of jobs. It claims recognition of the answerer and, as well, informs
that person that its user feels entitled to address them in the way they have
just done. So that, leaving aside whether the called can, from its enunciation,
recognize the caller, "Jeanette" is markedly different in the information it
gives the called than would be, say, "Mrs Jones. " As is perfectly well known,
names of address are not freely exchangeable and, leaving aside the issue of
why names of address are used as compared to "Hello" or something like
" Hello, " its use puts you in the position of choosing among such things as
you can use with respect to the recipient. And by that choice you then inform
the recipient about what you take it your rights are with respect to them, e.g. ,
that you know them well enough to call them by their first name; that you
recognize who they are. And it's not only that "Mrs Jones" would be an
alternative to "Jeanette," but it might come off with a question intonation,
indicating perhaps that one is not even knowledgeable as to whether the
person who picks up the phone is she.
But at least for the beginning of phone conversations, not much later than
first or second move, another altogether independent thing that's going on,
besides these kinds of declarations of what my rights are with respect to you,
or what my obligations are with respect to you, is the kind of information that
the sheer saying of something gives to the other, i.e. , the chance to do a voice
recognition of the caller. And let me introduce some parenthetical kinds of
considerations about this matter of voice recognition. It seems to me that kind
of an interesting question is, what sorts of investigations do people do of the
properties of new institutions? Do they try to find out, e.g. , what its distinctive
features are, what its distinctive virtues are? Under that general kind of a
question one might bring the telephone to bear, to see a kind of neat thing:
It seems at least plausible that while people have for a long time played
recognition games with each other, until the telephone they could not perhaps
have played voice recognition games with any seriousness (they might have
been able to play some small versions of voice recognition games, e.g. ,
through a closed door). But a thing they came to do with the telephone was
to use it as a vehicle of voice recognition tests. That is, we know that what a
party has with respect to somebody over the phone is only their voice. And
what they do is to employ this feature of the phone that you only hear the
voice to build an institution in which they test out 'Do you recognize me? '
from the voice. A great deal of phone beginnings are, then, either specifically
or in effect voice tests in which the other parry is now supposed to show that
they know who it is where you're not telling them. And therefore the sort of
thing that you say right off can constitute that sort of a challenge to them.
And of course, furthermore, we've all encountered people who specifically
make it a test, i.e. , who from right off will not allow you to go along listening
and talking until you find out, but who will say "I bet you don't know who
this is, " and then you've got to come across with a name.
162 Part III
Rather elaborate other information gets developed as well, having to do
with, e.g., the timing of a call. That is, call timings will get used by parties
to exhibit their attention to each other as an intimate matter. Everyone will
have had the experience of hearing the phone ring and saying to themselves
or somebody else in the room that they know who it is, and then announcing
to the person on the phone once they find out who it is, that they knew it was
them. So that people also use the scheduling phenomena around a call as
kinds of information. For each of them, the fact that the call occurs at some
time permits them to have developed, and on each occasion to show, sorts of
intimacies.
Now, I raise that as I say parenthetically, only to say that it kind of suggests
that an examination in which the modes of interaction were considered and
the telephone's distinctive features were located, was then used to develop
something that could deal with things like 'intimacy. ' It may well then be that
institutions could get examined for their unique possibilities, and when their
unique possibilities are found, they're employed. We might then look to other
developed institutions for which we can have some handle on their history, to
see the sorts of work done on them which have nothing particularly to do with
'what they're supposed to do' or anything like that, and which then get
elaborated on to make them both formally analyzed and comfortable
institutions.
So in this case anyway, with "Jeanette" used in second position, we get
something that is in effect a voice-recognition test by Estelle - she never does
give her name. The use of "Jeanette" also does such things as claim that I
know who you are, that I can call you by your first name, etc. It also has, apart
from those sorts of jobs, the sequencing job of providing that the next piece
of talk should be something like a "Yeah. ' ' That is, "Jeanette, " seen
sequentially, is to be treated as a kind of a guess, and gets then some return
which says at least 'that's correct. ' It can also get a return that says 'that's
correct' plus perhaps a request for the name to be returned, as with "Yeah?"
(And we can note that "Yeah?" leads us into a different sequence than
"Yeah," i.e. , it leads to a recycling of greetings.) If you get "Yeah" after the
name, then it's possible to move into a first topic if you care to - and I'm
differentiating a 'first topic' from, e.g. , "Hi, how are you. ' '
So what we can say about the Name - "Yeah" exchange put right after
"Hello" is that the caller's use of a name may constitute his first chance to
possibly control the length of the greeting sequence and also control that he
will be in first position to raise a topic. That is to say, "Yeah" will be coming
in one or another form, and if "Yeah" comes as contrasted to "Yeah?" he can
then move into a topic, i.e. , his first chance to do that will be in the fourth
position. Thinking of the thing in terms of moves, then, what we want to see
is that there is some strategy for getting into the first topic by the fourth
position, i.e. , by the caller's second move.
We can then look to see whether there are ways that a called can do that,
or better. I have a sequence that goes something like this:
 Lecture 1 1 63
A: Hello,
B: Good morning.
A: Where've you been!

"Where have you been?" in the sort of discussion I'm offering, seems to
involve us in some rather elaborate sorts of things. For one, what's plainly
involved is a use of a recognition of who it is that's calling, and also a move
from a greeting sequence into some other sort of talk - here done by the
called. Now, if I can just suggest that calleds are not in the first instance in a
position to get to do first topic talk, then how and why calleds go about doing
that would be something we would want to focus on, and I think I can say
a bunch of things about why they would. That is to say, there are developable
bases for "Where have you been?" being done in the called's second
utterance - the first utterance they could have done it with.
Roughly, at this point something like this is involved: A kind of
fundamental thing for telephone conversations in particular, though it may
sound on introduction to be nothing of import, is the distinction between
'caller' and 'called. ' A thing that called can hardly ever get out from under is
that they are the called and the other is the caller, and that there are all kinds
of things affiliated with that. For some sets of people it's a funny consequence
of that each has free rights to call the other, each should call the other, that
it's an embarrassment to the one who receives the call every time he receives
the call, i.e. , I should call you as much as you call me, therefore every time
you call me you embarrass me because I haven't called you. Now what
something like that generates is that such recipients attend sometimes to see
if they have the makings of transforming a call made to them, to a call that
wasn't really made to them. And a way they do it is by right off, as fast as they
possibly can, attempting to indicate that they've been trying to call the other
party all day, all week, etc. , so that it's just incidental that you called me
because I've been trying to call you, and let's just forget about it if we can,
that you're the caller. So things like "Where have you been?" which might
get followed by "I've been here, " "Gee I've been calling you all day," " Oh
right, I was out for a minute" or whatever, are attempts to transform
caller-called into something else, and those attempts are non-trivial. And
aside from the possibility that they're done in special circumstances I think
they're done by reference to the kinds of logic that I laid out.
Among other ways that caller-called matters is for whole ranges of things
that get done in the call. If, for example, I have some news that stands as
grounds for my calling you, e.g. , I just got engaged, and I haven't called you,
and you call me after some delay, and I deliver that news to you in your call
to me, for all you know I'm delivering that news only because you called me
and I wouldn't have called you to tell you. That is to say, there is a
phenomenon which I will give a good deal of attention to, which I'll call
'reason-for-a-call call. ' I want to suggest that it's a very important phenom­
enon, in that there's a problem which that phenomenon will help us to solve:
1 64 Part III
Somebody comes up to you and says " How's Joe?" Joe's some friend of
yours, they know him more or less. And you say "Oh, he's great!" You say
that in full confidence, and nonetheless you haven't talked to him in a month.
Now how in the world is it that you can go about feeling full confidence in
how Joe is though you haven't spoken to him recently (it might be only two
days since you've talked, but that wouldn't effect the issue of how in the
world do you figure that you know he's okay) . The answer to that may be
something like this: If persons are in such a relationship that they know that
as between them if there's a reason for a call then a call will be made, then the
fact of an extended silence is as informative as some call. That is to say, they
may have calls that come from time to time, but they know that if there are
no calls, that means there's no reason for a call. And since the class 'reasons
for calls' has known members (marriages, new jobs, binhs, deaths, divorces,
etc.), then silence can tell you for somebody with whom you stand in a
reason-for-a-call relationship, that no such things have happened and you can
therefore know that they're fine.
By vinue of that, it's a very tender thing for a call to occur and one of the
panicipants have a reason that they haven't used. Because what that says is
that there may be some things that we consider a reason for a call that you
have not told me. And therefore I may not know what's up with you when
we're not conversing. If somebody were thereafter to ask "How's Joe?" I
might say ' Tm not sure," where it's not a matter of greater or lesser time
elapsed, it's just that I'm no longer in a position to feel sure that you will call
on reasons for a call. So if you catch people with reasons for calls that they
haven't used, that's a criteria! thing for the status of your relationship and for
your confidence in the fact that you know how all sorts of people are whom
you haven't spoken to over varying lengths of time, for whom what you need
to know is that they will call when there's a reason for a call.
And that kind of thing can then be relevant to the types of beginnings in
which calleds attempt to deal with that they are indeed the called, i.e. , if they
can't say ' 'I've been calling you for days!" "Where have you been!" they will
do a thing like "Isn't that amazing! I was just about to call you. I've got some
great news!" And you can get elaborately detailed stuff like, "I was waiting
for the prices to change on calls, so while it's eight o'clock in New York it's
not time yet out here . . . " etc.
In going through a thing like this I think it may be wonh pointing out that
the explanation can be bought without having any feelings that it's intuitively
correct for you that that's what's involved. That is to say, one doesn't have a
feeling for 'an organization of reasons-for-call-type friends. ' You don't classify
your friends that way. Nor when you're engaged in doing these kinds of
strategies do you conceive of them as ways of dealing with that he would
wander around later on feeling that I don't call him when I have a reason for
a call. But I think you can come to see that there are two sorts of things,
reasons-for-call-type calls, and also relationships which turn on the occurrence
of reason-for-call-type calls. And once you have reason-for-call-type calls, and
relationships around those types of calls, then you can begin to see what kind
 Lecture 1 165
o f an interest there i s in the caller-called status, in attempts to change i t or
weaken it or whatever, in the course of a call.
Further, you can come to see the relationship between reason-for-a-call­
type calls and the strategies for getting from the greeting exchange to
something else, where that candidate something else is at least for some calls
the reason-for-the call as 'first topic. ' It can be done overtly, "The reason I
called was . . . ' ' or there are other ways to do it. But - and now I'm going to
make a weird argument - there can be attempts to avoid the occurrence of a
'first topic. ' What's weird about this argument is that I'm making a thing,
'first topics, ' and then saying they're variously dealt with, rather than taking
it that whatever topic is done first is a 'first topic. ' So: There can be attempts
to avoid the occurrence of a 'first topic. ' ' First topics' are special in a whole
variety of ways, including that in reporting on a conversation in another
conversation, some item from that conversation can be reported specifically as
"The first thing he said was . . . ' ' Now, you don't have lists, preserving the
sequence of things raised in a conversation, which you can use in other
conversations, but you do have a preservation of 'first topic' status. So you
don't say "The fourth topic raised when I was talking to Joe was . . . " but
you do say "The first thing he told me was . . . ' ' So if there is interest by
people in doing such things as taking items from one conversation and using
them in subsequent conversations, then by putting something into first
position you can thereby do something about its reusability in further
conversations. That is, if you put something into first position, use it as 'first
topic, ' then you can achieve some sorts of immortality to it or movement to
it. You make it available for later use as a 'first thing he told me. '
But as well, we can come to see that a thing that people do in conversation
is to provide that they do not have a 'first topic' item. So that though they
indeed talk about a bunch of things, they avoid giving something as a thing
to be so marked. There may be things one is willing to say, wants to say, but
one may be unwilling to have any of those things be seen as the reason for the
call or as something distinctly important. One way that is managed is to build
up the beginning of the conversation in such a way as to have nothing in it
markable as 'first topic, ' 'reason for call, ' etc. So, for example, in the 'how are
you' sequence we can get "How are you?" "Fine" "What's going on?"
"Nothing, ' ' where "What's going on can be an occasion for putting in the
item of news which would then be treated as 'first topic, ' 'reason for the call,'
etc. You can say "Nothing" and then later go on to say a bunch of things that
are going on - where when you say "Nothing" it does not occasion hanging
up.
And there are bases for that: As there are reasons-for-call calls, and
reason-for-call-type relationships, so, too - and in some ways they are the
same people who are in relationships that involve them in being required to
call when there is a reason for a call - are there people who may be required
to call when there's no reason for a call. Persons are often in a position, when
they are calling, to bring off that they're calling for no reason, "I just felt like
calling. ' ' Now, you may also have news. And that can be a problem in this
1 66 Part Ill
way: There are routinely occasions in which you pick up the phone, the party
at the other end is identified, and you then and there know that there's
business of some sort, i.e. , you know that they are people who only call you
when they have business to do. That can become a problem as between some
people if they know that they should have a relationship in which they call
when there's no reason, but somehow they always get into a position of calling
only when there is a reason. And such sorts of people can elaborately attempt
to avoid the reason for the call being in fact placed as 'reason-for-call, ' but
mentioned somewhere in passing, perhaps. And plainly you can achieve
'personality characteristics' by doing that, i.e. , achieve being 'phlegmatic' by,
only well into the call and 'in passing, ' giving some announcement that others
would figure that they would have made right off. Of course there is also the
possibility that the candidate 'first topic' or 'reason-for-call' item, when it is
put elsewhere, is seeable when it occurs as having been ' delayedly placed, ' i.e. ,
placing it elsewhere might or might not bring off that you don't think much
of it; it might be seen as, that you're 'trying to bring off that it's nothing very
much. ' So there are other possibilities than sheer issues of what kind of
classifying you're intending to do, which have to do with how you bring off
who you are with some item of news.
Now when we have at hand things like 'first topics' and 'reasons-for-calls,'
their positioning, how you get to them and how you avoid them, we can see
that talk about strategy for handling a beginning is important, and we have
real motivation for looking at the organizations of greeting sequences relative
to these things. We want also to see that there can be differential strategies,
since the two parties can have quite different interests in getting rapidly to a
first topic, avoiding a first topic, having themselves control that first topic, etc.
We can begin to think of somebody attempting to solve this sort of technical
problem: The phone rings, I pick it up and say "Hello, " and the other party
speaks, and now I know right then and there that it's somebody for whom I
have a reason-for-call status to whom I should have made a reason-for-call
call, and I haven't. How, right now, do I handle that? And then, what kinds
of moves can I do to bring it off? And it's extremely important to see that
when we do something like "Hello, " "Joe, " "Wow! I was just about to call
you, ' ' that that solution is available at just that place, though presumably
when in fact you're called, even if you were thinking of calling the person or
just about to, it was not the last thing you were doing before the phone rang.
So you want to think of the rather elaborate analytic job that they're doing to
find the sorts of things that they have to do in a next utterance. It's an
extraordinarily compact operation where, whatever problems you get as
'called, ' you're able to solve them within utterance time - which is extraor­
dinarily rapid within these first series of utterances.
Now, in the middle of a conversation, we know well, in some ways, who
it is we're talking to. And there are enormously elaborated ways in which we
bring off that 'my mind is with you' - I use that rather loose sounding phrase
and you might figure that it could get shot down, but we'll see in due course
that people really can achieve showing that 'my mind is with you. ' And the
 Lecture 1 167
question is, at the beginning o f a conversation, how rapidly can parties achieve
that sort of a thing? Of course the question in the first place is, what sort of
a thing is it? It's something as extensive as this: Let me give some
non-phone-call kinds of things, to give some idea of the kind of job that's
going on; a job we want to think of as an analytic task of sorts. Let's say
someone visits your house some nth non-first time. And they walk through
the house and say, "Gee that's new isn't it?" And you say "Yeah, I got it a
couple months after the last time you were here," or "I just got it, " etc.
Consider that as one of the ways in which, as between two parties, one goes
about showing the other 'how much you're in my mind, ' i.e. , on any given
occasion of looking through your place, I can see the sorts of changes that
have been made since I last visited you, and show them to you. I can find
things that have changed in 'our time,' i.e. , time that is only marked by our
relationship. And you too can see, even though maybe lots of people come
over to your house, that this item was purchased, not 'in February 1 9 67 ,' but
'after your last visit, ' whenever that was. And it's neat in all sorts of ways,
since one doesn't say "Gee that's gotten battered since the last time I was
here, " or "Gee you've gotten battered since the last time I saw you, ' ' and
things like that, but one finds things like a new something-or-other.
So you keep these kinds of calendars and objects in mind, and you can
bring your mind to focus on that sort of a thing, i.e. , of all the houses you've
been in in the last six months, you have them in such a way that you know
what's in this one's house, and in that way you keep an attention to them.
What you're doing, then, when you're 'bringing your mind' to somebody, is
somehow bringing 'our file' to their attention. And in a phone conversation
what's going on is that my mind, by a very early point in the conversation,
is turning to the history of our particular relationship, and I have ways of
showing you that. "How's your mother?" can be a thing done right off, as a
way of saying I know who you are and I know that the last time we talked
your mother was sick.
You want to see things like the beginning of a phone conversation as that
kind of 'bringing my mind to you. ' And you can then see all sorts of little
things that you don't obviously attend as such; things equivalent to noticing
the furniture, like noticing the voice, noticing whatever else, as products of an
effort to 'bring my mind to us. ' And it's a thing done by the called without
any available preparation, i.e. , the caller can in the first instance, in some way,
bring their files to bear before they make the call. But the called is just there,
waiting for people in the world to demand a focus on 'the two of us and our
history, ' right off, by the fourth or fifth utterance. And people can of course
do it with enormous rapidity even though they talk only occasionally, where
the issue is that they're doing indefinite numbers of other interactions in
between but they're able to keep those things separate. Now obviously they
can mess up by asking something which reveals that it's not you I'm thinking
of, it's somebody else. But on the other hand, they have ways of asking
questions which can be heard as pointed though they're not; i.e. , they would
work for lots of people, and if I don't remember yet - not so much who you
168 Part Ill
are but what's up with us, I can throw out such remarks as will not reveal
that, while I'm working my way into finding out.
Again, I think it's difficult to appreciate the kind of job we're asking people
to be able to accomplish within utterance time, which involves no gaps. So
that although the called has been doing God only knows what before this call
came, they are recognizing a voice, not just as a name of somebody in the
world, but of somebody with whom they have something going, which they
now have to bring to bear with enormous rapidity. To make the point in a
slightly different way, consider that a bunch of people call you in series, with
a 2 0-minute break between. A calls: "What's new?" "Nothing. " B calls. For
B there's an item of news which did not at all pop into your head with A. For
C there's another item of news which didn't pop into your head with B. That
is to say, you're apparently able to keep the news items that you have around,
in such a way that it's not that they occur to you and you censor them, but
that they just don't come into your head in one conversation and become a
first thing in mind in another conversation.
You're classifying your experiences, then, by reference in some way to who
potentially is to be told about this, so that they're immediately available for
the telling to that one. And again, it can fail. We all have experiences, which
you might now see the sense of, where you have a conversation with X, and
after it you remember "Gee I should have told him such-and-such. " What
is remarkable is that you are able to do the job as well as you do it, and over
a series of calls, i.e. , it's not that you tell the first three people who call you
the same item, but that for each call you have some items to use, and they're
different. And how those things come to be picked tum on the ways you find
what's for them and what's not for them; not necessarily what they shouldn't
hear, but what would be of no interest to them.
There is, then, this enormous amount of work that you're doing right off
when you get a call, which you might even start doing when the phone rings.
And that then makes it of interest how the initial sequences get handled so as
to permit you to find, for the party at hand, if there is some first item that you
want to use, that you should use, that if you don't use now it'll be too late
later on, etc. , as compared to the caller who can already know that there's a
first item for the called, and can begin right off to use the ways to get in a
position to produce it. I'm hoping that these utterly bland sequences, like
"Hello, " "Jeanette, " "Yeah, " can be seen by reference to the kinds of work
that parties are engaged in when such a thing happens as that the phone rings.
They're doing sorts of jobs that they can fail to do, do wrong, etc., and for
which 'first topic' is a central object that they have to make decisions about,
for which, if they're the called, they can't have plans about.
We might consider what's been said now by reference to what is required
for us to be in a position to do an analysis of the initial sequence. That is to
say: To come to the notion that, e.g . , this is a 'minimal sequence, ' and a
minimal sequence in which caller made a move to control its length and also
to control her chance to get into first topic position, we need not merely a
series of other calls in which we could, say, establish 'normal call beginnings'
 Lecture 1 1 69
and then consider those versus 'foreshortened call beginnings, ' but we need
also a whole range of analyses of later parts of conversation, which would tell
us why in the world anybody would have some basis for attempting to do the
moves which produce a 'foreshortened beginning. ' Further, we would need
materials to tell us things about reasons-for-call and reason-for-call relation­
ships, no-reason-for-call and no-reason-for-call relationships, first topics,
avoidance of first topics, etc., as kinds of materials required in order to turn
this small sequence, "Hello, " "Jeanette, " "Yeah, " into the kind of objea I
begin to have the idea it is.
We also want to think of that particular sequence as really one machine
product. That is to say, it's not this conversation as an object that we're
terribly interested in, but we can begin to see machinery that produces this as
a series of moves, and to appreciate it as a series of moves among the potential
sets of moves that are otherwise to be actualized for some people - and we
don't care who they are.
In a way, our aim is just that; to get into a position to transform, in what
I figure is almost a literal, physical sense, our view of what happened here as
some interaction that could be treated as the thing we're studying, to
interactions being spewed out by machinery, the machinery being what we're
trying to find; where, in order to find it we've got to get a whole bunch of its
produas. We can come to know that they can really be thought of as
produas, and that we can really think of a machine spewing them out. We
come to have the idea that there is this 'group mind' or 'culture' or whatever
you like, that's producing these things. We come to some decisions that we're
going to talk about things like a 'group mind' or a 'culture' producing
events - when we don't have that at all to begin with. That is, we needn't at
all suppose, to begin with, that these are other than two people doing some
interaction, rather than the actualization of a series of techniques otherwise
produced in other ways, etc. Where all of them can be considered as a sample
of sorts, that can be comparatively investigated to find out that they're all
doing something, and how they're doing it. And this would be another way
to be interested in the whole thing as some actual sequence, i.e. , as an
assembled set of parts that could be otherwise fitted together.
Returning to the data, we in faa next find a reason-for-call announcement
(which is also a first-topic announcement and a 'story preface'), "Well I just
thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today. "
Now there are ways to show that it's a reason-for-call, and more than that, it
can be shown that Jeanette recognizes the status of this item. The argument
will eventually be something like this: It's perfectly possible to produce what
you figure is a reason-for-a-call item, and for the one you're talking to to
respond to it as not a reason for a call. And that is a specific issue in a
conversation, and there are ways of proving that you recognize and accept its
status. In this case, the way that Jeanette goes about proposing 'I agree with
your classification of the item as a reason-for-call' is, at about 4 5 seconds into
the call, when Estelle says "so find out tomorrow and let me know, ' ' Jeanette
says " Oh I'll call Penelope right now. ' ' Which is to say, 'You treated the item
170 Part III
as the basis for a call. I show you that you were right by myself treating the
item as the basis for a call. '
Now to see that that's so, and that the co-classification matters, one need
only to refer to the second conversation where Jeanette calls Penelope (who is
a co-worker of Jeanette's at Bullocks, and was there) . Penelope says that it was
nothing, and makes a point of saying that in fact she didn't even say anything
about it to her husband. And that's an important thing for Penelope to do in
the second call, because she is, in a way, up against a problem. Jeanette, who
wasn't at work today, has called Penelope to find out about this exciting
event, which is to say that Penelope hasn't called Jeanette to tell her about it,
though they are people who do that for each other. Penelope has then got to
have some way of dealing with that she has not made a reason-for-call call
when Jeanette figures that a reason-for-call call should have been made. And
what Penelope does is not merely to say 'I didn't call you because I didn't
think it was anything, ' but 'I didn't even tell my husband, ' for whom she
doesn't even have to make a call to do it, i.e. , it was such a minor thing that
it wasn't mentioned, where, coming home from work, anything you could get
your hands on to tell about what happened in the day would be delightedly
presented.
We see, then, that reason-for-call status is a kind of contingent status that
one can claim and that can be accepted or denied. We just happen to be lucky
with these data, in that the reason-for-a-call status is specifically dealt with in
these different ways, i.e. , it's accepted by the called, and accepted in the
perfect way to accept such a call, i.e. , to say ' Til call X and tell them. " Next,
it is rejected by a called, with a perfect rejection, i.e. , "I didn't even tell
someone who was right here, not to mention making a call about it. " So, the
status of "I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks
today" as a reason-for-a-call announcement is one that gets verified in what
would seem to be the right way to verify it, i.e. , use it in the same fashion as
it was used. And not only is it so used, but it is told to the initial teller that
it's going to be so used, where we want to differentiate between the use of
some reaason-for-call item also as a reason-for-a-call, but not telling the party
that offered it to you that you're going to use it that way, as compared to
telling them that you're going to use it, which tells them that they did right
by you, and they should keep doing just what they did.
Reason-for-call status is not, then, something you assign to anything you
choose, but seems to have normative classificatory importance. And we can
see why it would, i.e. , people who are hysterical or lethargic about
determining what is a reason-for-call are not keeping their correspondence in
proper form, and people will either figure ' ' he only calls when something
really terrible has happened, " or "he calls all the time about things that don't
matter, " " . . . so I really don't know what's going on anyway. " That you in
fact pick items that others will see as 'a real reason for a call' is a way, then,
that you can show them that you're doing your job about, e.g. , keeping them
in mind or watching the world for them, or watching for things that are
properly told to others. And we can see from this sequence of calls that if you
 Lecture 1 171
go wrong, people can even overtly make it their business to let that be known.
In this case, Penelope specifically says "Tell Estelle I just thought it was
stupid, " though when Jeanette calls Estelle back she doesn't tell her that
Penelope thought it was stupid, but attempts to preserve Estelle's investment
in the story, which, as it happens, Estelle is kind of sensitive about. It might
be seen that these things are being treated as instantial for interactants, where
their assessment matters for further considerations about their relationships,
their conception of the party that they're dealing with, etc., so that one will
be careful about making something a reason-for-a-call item or not.
Now one thing we can ask is, are there components to a thing's status as
a reason for a call? There are some sorts of obvious things, such as that what
happened at Bullocks happened "today. " If you wanted to be altogether
systematically naive about the matter, you might figure that "today" is just
the name of a day, such that if it happened on some other day you could say
' 'I'd better report to you what happened . . . Thursday, last Wednesday,
January 1 2 , 1 962 . . etc. " Those items are not exchangeable, and we get
.

into some very important issues with this, which I will talk to somewhat. That
is, we are happy to buy a picture of terms which involves that some term that
is actually used should be treated by us as one among a contrast class of such
terms from which it's chosen, such that, it's being chosen, we consider the set
of terms to decide what features this term has and then ask why it was chosen
from among the members of this set. That is to say, 'today' is a 'time
reference, ' consider the set of time references. Why was this one chosen as
differentiated from all the others? And there are whole ranges of things just
like that. Just to give a trivial instance, at one point Estelle says "There was
a policeman there with a great big long gun! He had it in his hand . . . and
he was standing on the side so he could see everybody. " Now we could say
'standing' is a term, one of a contrast class with 'sitting, ' and that in saying
he was standing she is also saying he was not sitting, and she picks 'standing'
because . . . etc. One of the things I'm going to argue in due course is that
whatever the merits of these contrast-class arguments are, a really deadly
problem with them is that it turns out that where some member of a contrast
class is usable, if another member was correct, that other member would not be
used. It's not as though he's either standing or sitting; since he's standing I'll
say he's standing. If he's standing I may be able to report it; if he's sitting it
may not be reportable. So, to take a rather obvious instance, Estelle reports
that the policeman was standing there and "he had a gun in his hand. " That
may be reportable. If he had a gun in his holster, you might not even notice
or report that he had a gun. And for things like the time, if the time is not
'today, ' then you may not report the time. Indeed, if the time is not 'today'
then you may not report the event.
So one doesn't want to suppose that what's being done is picking a term
from a collection, the alternative members of which tell you what the picking
of the term does. Each of the terms will have different conditions of use - at
least under this rather narrow sense of 'contrast class. ' One might well work
at a more elaborate sense, i.e. , semantic, in which you specified the conditions
172 Part Ill
of uses of terms and then tried to see whether they had some conditions of use
which were alternative, i.e. , if either were correct, one or the other would be
used. Though very characteristically their conditions of use are really
independent, i.e. , if one could be used, the other could not be used if it
were true; if the other could be used, the first could not be used if it were
true.
'Today' is not, then, naming some day on which the reported event
happened; it's doing a bunch of other things. For one, 'today' is not
equivalent to the series of other days in the sense of being just some day.
'Today' in part constitutes the warrant for the report, i.e. , to say it happened
'today' is to claim it as potential ' news, ' if it's a newsworthy item at all. And
that's a part of the way in which it's a reason-for-call item; that what I'm
reporting is news. Now plainly there can be an item that's news today, in the
sense of its being worth reporting in that it happened today, which would not
be mentionable tomorrow, not because it's no longer new, but because unless
you tell it today it's not 'news . '
I mention that because it has a n enormous consequence to it, which is,
roughly, the following: A classical puzzle that we all more or less know about
is, how in the world is it the case that people you talk to every day, you always
have something to talk about whereas people you talk to every three months
you have nothing to talk about. Why isn't it the case that if you talk to him
every three months you have all the things to talk about that happened over
the three months. The solution in part being that a whole bunch of things that
you can mention the day they happen or the day after, are 'news. ' If you don't
mention them that day or the day after, they're nothing. You can't then tell
them to somebody you haven't spoken to for three months. What you tell
such people are things that stand as worthy of mention over a three-month
period. If you don't have them, you may have nothing to talk about. I have
a friend whose solution to this was that although we only talk to each other
every three months, when he talks to me he tells me what happened today.
So it's as though we have a continuing friendly conversation over coffee. But
by and large that is a massive sort of problem, and the 'today' aspect is a way
of warranting that this is an item tellable at least for some sorts of people, e.g. ,
people who talk to each other all the time. The fact that it is tellable by Estelle
to Jeanette by virtue of 'today' doesn't mean that it would be tellable, even
if they were talking on the day of the event, by people who only talk every
six months.
In this particular conversation, 'today' happens to have a much more
delicate use than merely claiming the tellability of the event. I'll try to develop
how that works. We need some information: Jeanette works at Bullocks,
Estelle does not. Jeanette has her day off on the day of the event and the call,
and Estelle knows that Jeanette has her day off. Estelle also knows that the
event is a newsworthy item, i.e. , at one point she says "So find out tomorrow
and let me know. ' ' Now we could ask how in the world can she figure that
it's going to be an item that will be talkable-about tomorrow? She shows this
in a rather lovely way, by reporting later on, something she noticed which is
 Lecture 1 173
on point to that, i.e. , that there was a crowd of employees standing around
watching this event. In that those people were watching the scene, you can
then know that they have an investment in telling about 'what happened at
Bullocks' since any such organization as Bullocks is event-poor in certain
ways, i.e. , not that many things happen at Bullocks that are reportable by
Bullocks employees to any Bullocks employee, as compared to that somebody
in the dress department can say something of interest to somebody else in the
dress department by reference to, e.g . , the last customer who walked by, but
that would not be of interest to just any Bullocks employee. Any event that
can be figured to be one that makes us all Bullocks employees together, i.e. ,
that I can say to any Bullocks employee " Did you see that?" "Wasn't that
amazing?" "Were you there yesterday when . . . ?" is an event that one can
know will be used throughout the place - if you can figure that there was any
noticeable number of people who saw it in the first place. So, knowing that
there were a dozen people watching, you can figure that by tomorrow it will
have spread throughout the store.
The kind of argument I offer is that it can be seen as a Bullocks Event,
reportable, then, between any Bullocks employees. The kinds of materials
that are relevant are: For large institutions, occasions like this become events
in which people who are co-located only as employees of the institution and
otherwise not available to each other, can talk to each other about that event.
The vice-president of Bullocks could perfectly well be engaged in conversation
about that event by a janitor. And if you read through stories of disasters,
tragedies, exciting events, then you'll find reports of just that sort of
thing - people who otherwise have no business to talk to each other take these
as occasions to talk to each other. Whereas, something happening, conceived
of as having happened in the dress department, doesn't do that. So Estelle's
noticing of the crowd was her seeing the initial cohort from which the news
would be diffused throughout the place.
The consequence of that is not just that Estelle is able to see that people at
Bullocks will treat the event as news, but she's able to see several other
important things relevant to the interaction. One of them is, she's able to see
that if she doesn't call Jeanette today, then she will not be the first person to
tell her. If she waits until tomorrow, Jeanette will have independent
information about this story. For her to be the first to tell, she's got to do it
now - though she may not even by now be the first to tell. And 'first to tell'
is a special status with respect to news.
And this begins to get at the following sort of question: If Estelle knows
that Jeanette's going to find out tomorrow, why does she have to tell her?
Why isn't it enough to know that Jeanette will find out tomorrow? For one,
Jeanette might bring it up in a conversation with Estelle; "Oh you can't
imagine what happened yesterday, I wasn't at work and all these exciting
things happened . . . " then Estelle is in a bad position, i.e. , of saying "Yeah
I know, I saw it. " Which is to say, 'I saw it and I didn't tell you . ' People can
get annoyed if you don't tell them something that they nonetheless find out;
they say "Well why didn't you tell me?" And if you say "I knew you would
174 Part Ill
hear anyway' ' they nonetheless figure that you were somehow derelict, that
you weren't monitoring the world for them as you should.
There's another sort of thing with respect to her having seen the crowd, and
it's utterly wonderful to behold. And it's quite unrelated to what I've been
saying so far. Picture the scene: Here's Estelle driving by. She sees these events
happening; she sees some cops and some kind of excitement about the cops.
Now a kind of problem is getting some idea that what she sees happening is
what's happening. A way that you have of becoming assured that what you
think is happening is in fact happening, and of establishing it for others in the
telling of it, is by seeing that there's a crowd there. The crowd serves to make
the event the public event that you think it is. That a crowd is gathered means
that they see what you see. Whereas if you're walking along and a bunch of
people are walking along who aren't seen as a crowd, then one thing you
don't know is what they're seeing. They're walking along minding their own
business; they may be seeing things, not seeing things, seeing what you're
seeing, or whatever, and you have no idea what's on their minds. If you see
a crowd standing and looking, you're able to know that the thing you see as
notable is there. The crowd's existence confirms for you that you saw
something really happening. Conversely, people can become awfully nervous
where they figure that something really extraordinarily notable is happening
but nobody's looking at it, they're just passing by. And you get, then, a frantic
attempt to get individual eyes, though you don't know the indivduals whose
eyes you're seeking, to have them tell you "Yeah, it's really happening. " So
the very characterization that something is happening, is aided by saying
there's a crowd watching. It not only says that others saw it, but that it was
what I saw it to be.
I'd like to make a small comment about the word 'report' in "Well I just
thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today; " again,
because we might have the idea when we think of word meanings, that if we
could give a list of things that 'report' is synonomous with, then we'd get
'tell,' 'say, ' and things like that. I want to suggest that there's a class of what
we could call 'co-participant verbs, ' where some word is a word that should
be used as between these two. And in the doing of the activity 'showing I had
my mind on you, ' a word like 'report' is relevant. Specifically, I 'report' to you
things about which you are concerned, where it's not particularly in my
interests that I'm telling this. Estelle might have seen cops and crowds in
many places and not thought a thing of it, but this one matters to Jeanette
because she works at Bullocks, and to her, then, the telling is a 'report. ' In the
very smallest parts of Estelle's story about Bullocks, then, that she's telling it
to 'you who work at Bullocks' is done. There are more than a few such terms
which we can isolate out to see that they do some interactional job. And a list
of 'synonyms' are not equivalent, at least when one focusses on that they may
or may not have some interactional distribution.
 2 Lecture
Conveying information;
Story-connective techniques;
Recognition-fype descriptors; 'First
Verbs; ' Understanding;
Diffe rential organization of
perception

I'm going through some of the matters that can be raised by a consideration
of some actual conversation, treating it in a kind of unmotivated way, i.e. ,
whatever can be found in it is to be given some consideration, as compared to,
e.g., dealing with the overall structural organization of conversation. I'm
doing this to suggest that a comprehensive analysis of some conversation is
not in point and that on the other hand it pays to subject any particular
conversation you happen to have your hands on to investigation in any
direction that can be produced off of it. The idea was that I would go through
a range of such any-direction considerations for this transcript, 'Trio I ' , and
then turn to the theme of the course, not particularly by reference to Trio I.
Now, it should be apparent that the arguments developed or alluded to
here wouldn't conceivably have been developed out of Trio I, but Trio I is
relevant to them. That is to say, I had been collecting points about greeting
sequences for lo these many years, and I had a large collection of rules for
them, and I was kind of contented with the ways I had of dealing with
greeting sequences. But essentially until I came upon Trio I and a couple of
other conversations, I hadn't turned the analysis of greeting sequences into a
tactical problem for parties. And I hope I've been able to suggest some of the
ways in which the length and components of greeting sequences could be
considered a tactical problem in which issues of how soon and who controls
when you get out of a greeting sequence into something else, and to what, are
in part handled within the greeting sequence. Now those sorts of things are
obviously unavailable from just:

J: Hello
E: Jeanette
175
1 76 Part III

J: Yeah
E: Well I just thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happen' at
Bullocks toda: :y?

but require a consideration of some collection of greeting sequences, to

consider them, e.g. , in terms of their rules for working, and then what can be
done with a greeting sequence as a known-in-advance object that can be
possibly manipulated. Where, then, an attempted comprehensive analysis of
a single conversation will oblige you to study masses of other material to find
how the sorts of things you've got work.
Returning now to the data. Going on from the greeting sequence, I
mentioned that the "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what's
happened at Bullocks today" serves jointly as a reason for a call, a proposed
first topic, and a story preface. Now we have this question-answer sequence:

E: 'D you have the day off?

J: Yeah

placed after "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at
Bullocks today. " The question is, can we say anything about the placing of
"Did you have the day off?" I want to suggest that the information conveyed
in that question is important to have conveyed. That is, with respect to the
issue of what Estelle is doing in making the call, if she did or did not ask the
question, if she did or did not know the answer, then the call stands as a
different sort of event. Let me try to explicate the differences.
The situation is something like this: Estelle is a friend of Jeanette's. Jeanette
works at Bullocks, Estelle does not. Estelle sees some event take place at
Bullocks and calls Jeanette to tell her about it. Now if Estelle is calling not
merely because she saw some events taking place at Bullocks which she
figured Jeanette might be interested in, but because she saw these events and
pretty well knows that Jeanette wasn't there that day, then she's doing
something like informing Jeanette about events that Jeanette is interested in
and could not have known about on her own, i.e. , she's specifically doing a
favor, acting in the interests of Jeanette. In making the call, Estelle can then
be acting in Jeanette's interest, as compared to, e.g. , simply telling Jeanette
about something Jeanette probably already knows about, so as to get a
conversation going about that something, which is quite a different sort of
call. So that's one sort of difference; doing a favor or just talking about
something. Further, Estelle can also intend that it be seen that she is acting in
Jeanette's interest, as compared to, even if she figures Jeanette doesn't know
about it, not making anything of that she is now giving her information.
Now if it's Estelle's aim to show that she's calling not merely because she
saw this event, but because she knows that Jeanette wasn't there, then a
question is, how and where does she do that? She could simply say "I called
because I know you had the day off, " in which case she would have made it
overt that there is an obligation which Jeanette has to her, and Jeanette's
 Lecture 2 177
business would then be to say "Why, thanks. " But Estelle might want to
bring off that her action was motivated, without particularly giving Jeanette
the chance to deal with the whole thing by saying "Why thanks. " And a way
to prevent Jeanette saying that (while perhaps feeling grateful), is to not make
an announcement but ask a question, since, while Jeanette could glean from
the question that 'she knew I had the day off, ' the question form will tell
Jeanette what to say in return to it, i.e. , "Yes . " It will not give her a free
chance to say anything she might, nor require that she do something like
"Thanks. " So, she ought to say "Yes" though she may have captured the
information being provided, i.e. , 'I know you had the day off and I'm calling
by reference to that knowledge as well as my knowledge of the events that
took place. '
We could of course have a reverse sequence, i.e. , "Did you have the day
off?" "Yeah" "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what happened. "
That kind of thing would appear to make Jeanette's "Yes" answer the
condition for offering the information, i.e. , if she were to say "No" then the
news that's offered wouldn't be the sort of news it was intended to be. If she
first indicates that she has news to offer and then places "Did you have the day
off?" she can perhaps make it more apparent that she knew Jeanette had the
day off. At this point things get complicated to pull out, and the argument
I would make has this difficulty: "Did you have the day off?" must be treated
via a consideration that, having done the question, contingent on its answer
she might not have been able to do the announcement, and that in doing
either a question or an announcement there's a decision as to which, and as to
its placing. But the details of that argument aren't now givable. Its rough
possibility, however, locates such things as: There can be a choice between
making an announcement and using a question, where the question controls
what the other will do in the next item, where your interest is to tell them
something you convey in the question, which they are then placed in a
position to not respond to.
That isn't something you could necessarily pick up from this data, and my
materials for it run something like this:

A: Hello,
B: Happy Thanksgiving from Balboa.
A: Why thank you dear,
B: Did you just get up?
A: Yeah,
B: Did you get your newspaper this morning? Mac saw it out in front
of your house and put it up on your porch.
A: Oh, why thank you.

The basic thing here is that we have a technique, not for telling A how her
newspaper got on her porch, but for saying 'My husband, whom you know
left me, came home. ' And telling that in such a way as to not require that it
be responded to right now. Just consider, it's not particularly a great favor to
178 Part Ill
pick up a newspaper from the lawn and put it on the porch. But among the
things that happened when B's husband was away was that A's husband
would bring over their newspaper to B, in that B doesn't get the paper. So the
newspaper and the husband have become affiliated in such a way that this
announcement, burying the information that B's husband came home, but
allowing for it to be picked up on, can be seen as really an elaborately
designed event. So, a way was found to design a presentation of the
information that the husband is back, without requiring that it be responded
to, since responding could be kind of sticky and you may be willing to have
the other person respond if they wish, but you may not want to require them
to respond, i.e. , to make it then and there a topic: "Oh that's nice" "Yes it
is" or "Well it's not so nice" or some such thing. Or, "When did it happen"
or "How did it happen" and " So you're together" or "Are you together" or
God only knows what. But in this sort of sequence the information is
specifically buried, and in this case it gets picked up on later on, which is
something that can be done with information buried like that, when A says
"Well I'm glad to hear he came down . "
I f one can accept the so-far unseen data and the sketched argument, then
you can suppose that it's at least something like a routine possibility that one
may use the technical sequential cons�derations to convey information that
need not be immediately responded to, where the way you do it is to give
them something else to respond to, while allowing them to see what you want
them to see via a question, e.g. , "Did you have the day off?" which you
would never dream of asking unless you knew about it in the first place. That
is to say, a person may have one day off a week; you wouldn't figure that any
given day is their day off unless you happen to know that that's their day off.
And a similar sort of sense holds for the question "Did you get your
newspaper this morning?"
I offer these materials to indicate that there are large differences between
things the call can be doing, turning on whether the person is, e.g. , saying 'I
know you had the day off, ' or really doesn't know whether the other had the
day off or not - where that's important to such a call.
Let me just make a couple of remarks about the story itself, talking to the
story as a unit in the sense of how its parts are bound together, and the way
that a story can be designed to allow for various binding-together techniques
to be used. One class of such techniques is used here, that class being set up
by the initial formulation ' ' . . . what happened at Bullocks. ' ' Bullocks is a
place. And the initial formulation of the story as being about something
happening at a place provides that it is thereafter possible to mobilize a series
of place-indexical terms (things like 'across the street, ' 'in front of the store,'
'on the other side,' etc.) which are read as applying to the initially named
place. Such place-indexical terms are used in pretty much every utterance in
the story:

Well I got out to my car at five thirty I drove around and at first I had
to go by the front of the store . . . And there were two police cars across
 Lecture 2 1 79
the street, and a colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there
where the silver is and all the (gifts and things), and they wouldn't let
her go in, and he had a gun. He was holding a gun in his hand a great
big long gun . . . And then over on the other side, I mean to the right,
of there, where the employees come out, there was a whole, oh must
have been eight or ten employees standing there, because there must
have been a- It seemed like they had every entrance barred. I don't
know what was going on. Some kind of a killer was in there.

So the story parts are arranged around these places, which are conceived as a
collection of places for this named place, each one of which is to be read back
to the named place. The terms have no particular reference, but there's an
organized set of those things that can hold for large classes of such terms. That
is, there is an organized set of terms like 'the front, ' 'the other side, ' 'the main
entrance, ' which can hold for a range of things like stores, schools, stadiums,
etc. , that can be used to organize a story now delivered as a story about the
place.
The story could be delivered 'about' quite other sorts of things than a place,
but a place is a good thing to do a story about, by virtue of these
organizational components being usable to link the story together as a
connected series of events. Consider such a connection as "And then over on
the other side, I mean to the right of there, where the employees come out,
there was a whole, oh must have been eight or ten employees standing there, ' '
as a way to connect up the employees with what's going on in a just-that's­
the-way-they-are fashion. That is, the way to bring these other people and
these other events into the story, connectedly, is to put them as being "on the
other side' ' - as compared, perhaps, to not putting them in the story at all. So
the place-indexical terms bind the story together such that whatever takes
place in the course of the narrative is taking place in this story. Such
techniques may not be required, nor may it be required that the technique be
used as massively as this one is, but it's nonetheless a non-incidental sort of
technique to use. A couple of years ago I did some stuff on place and
memory, 1 and given those sorts of considerations, place is a kind of ideal
object to use to hang a story together around, now having to do with the
organization of memory.
So that's a way that a story can be partially dealt with, i.e. , in terms of how
does it have its organization built into it, as compared to its organization being
found by some hearer. In this story it's built in, and built in via these place
terms which are in pretty much every utterance. And such a technique can be
contrasted with, e.g . , temporal narrative features, where you get stories held ·
together by temporal terms like 'and then, ' 'before that, ' 'after that, ' etc.
As a kind of side issue, the place organization sets up some further rather
nice possibilities which are exemplified in, say, such a fragment as: "and a
colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the silver is and
1 See Spring 1 968, April 1 7 lecture, pp. 7 5 9-60, in vol. I.
1 80 Part Ill
all the (gifts and things). " Recall that this is told by Estelle to Jeanette, who
works in the store. Now there's a format which exists and which, again, isn't
found from this utterance though I think it perfectly well could have been
found from this utterance, which I think can be coldly laid out. It involves
that among the types of descriptions one can offer, are ' recognition-type
descriptions. ' And the business of a recognition-type description is to get from
its recipient something like a ' 'Yeah, ' ' where it will run on until it gets the
"Yeah: "

E: An'there was two p'leece cars across the street, anleh- colored lady
wan'tuh go in the main entrance there where the silver is an' all
the [(gifts an' things,)
]: Yeah,
E: And they wouldn' let'er go in,

That is to say, you can start with one characterization of an object, 'the main
entrance, ' and keep elaborating until you get a "Yeah,' ' which says 'I know
what you're talking about. ' And where, however, one can then put various
sorts of information into that elaboration. This is routinely done on names: "I
met John, you know, the guy who works in the office next to me, his wife just
had a baby . . . " etc. "Yeah. "
The neat thing is that in producing a recognition-type description when,
e.g. , a place is used, you're enabled to put in information that has as its heard
motivation that it enables recognition to take place, but where you can also
put in information that you want to convey for the story. Now that's
impottant in this story where you have " . . . the main entrance there where
the silver is and all the (gifts and things). " 'The silver and all the gifts and
things' is plainly an elaboration on 'the main entrance. ' Also, however, it now
permits it to be suggested that perhaps the colored lady wanted to go in to
where the silver is and all the gifts and things, where what is being suggested
then is that she may have been involved in a robbery of the store. If you get
the chance to put in what could be there that she could be interested in, then
you've used the recognition-type description for the business of the story, i.e. ,
to convey that there may have been a robbery going on. And that can be done
where you after all have no idea that the colored lady had any idea what was
in behind that main entrance, or that she was going through the main
entrance to get to what was right in the main entrance area - in contrast to,
for all anybody knows she was going into the store, up to the second floor.
After all, Estelle is sitting in her car across the street and watching this lady
at the main entrance. She, not knowing the lady, can't know where the lady
is going, even if she goes into the store. As it rums out in Trio II, Penelope
in effect points out "That was no colored lady, that was an employee! " And
it's not that she's trying to get into the store, she's playing around with the
cop outside the store. But, in the building of the story, that she's a 'colored
lady,' and that that's 'where the silverware is, ' can be put into the story by an
elaboration on 'the main entrance, ' and can be done, not in a nasty fashion,
 Lecture 2 181
but simply out of an interest in building a recognition-type description. Place
features, with place-affiliated terms, are used, then, to convey information
here about what's going on, that 'the main entrance' will not tell you.
Here's another thing. There is no overt information in the data by which
I can know that Estelle doesn't work at Bullocks. Aside from a general
conviction that Estelle doesn't work at the store, my basis for saying it is that
Estelle refers to "the main entrance there where the silver is and all the (gifts
and things), " and 'gifts' is not a way, as it turns out, that Jeanette talks about
them when she talks to Penelope who also works at the store. In that case she
calls it "the giftware. " And that's a marked difference. 'Gifts' is the way
someone who doesn't work at the store refers to what those who work at the
store call 'giftware. ' I kind of figure that's enough basis for saying that Estelle
doesn't work at the store, but that may be kind of extravagant. At any rate,
it might be seen as a kind of co-participant term (recall the talk I did last time
about 'report' being a 'co-participant verb') 2 which is used by reference to
some formulation of who it is that's talking to whom; producing that term as
the appropriate way of saying something that, the same sort of thing taking
place between others, they would use another way of talking about it.
Let me just note another type of organization; it has nothing much to do
with stories but is present here: ' 'A colored lady wanted to go in the main
entrance. " The term 'wanted to' is an instance of a class of terms I call 'first
verbs. ' By that I mean, it having been used, it says that sequentially for this
sentence another clause with another verb will come. That is, 'wanted to' is
not used unless you're going to say something like 'and they stopped her' or
'they tried to stop her. ' It's not, then, just a 'first verb' but one that will
indicate that she failed, i.e. , it tells that when the next clause comes it will
involve that she failed. Now when you begin to talk about something like
"She wanted to go in the main entrance and they wouldn't let her go in, " you
can begin to really attend to the independence of the perceived sequence of
events and the story structure. That is, the way in which the story structure
is altogether after the fact even though it's delivered as a sequence of events,
can be evidenced from the fact that a term turns for its use on the failure that's
already known and is used to characterize a failure that has not yet been
announced. And you don't get "she wanted to go in and she walked to the
door and she went in. " It's just not done. If the lady got into the store with
no problem it might simply be reported "and there was this colored lady
going into the store. "
So the sequencing terms do not reflect the perceived sequence of events;
instead, they deal with things like the sequential organization of the format
being used. So, for example, when somebody says ' I thought X, ' by and large
they're saying 'I thought X and now it turns out I find it's wrong, ' i.e. , ' I
thought X and then I realized Y' - though routinely when they say 'I realized
Y, ' they didn't 'realize' it but they 'thought' Y and it turned out later that Y

2 See Lecture 1 , p. 1 7 4 .
182 Part III
was correct, so that for the story, Y was 'realized. ' 'Thought, ' then, is another
'first verb. '
'First verbs' have their interest in this kind of a general problem: A
problem for parties talking in conversation is how they go about signalling
that some utterance that they're producing will or will not be complete on its
'first possible completion, ' which is relevant to telling the other that they
should or should not be prepared to start talking on a first possible
completion, where by 'first possible completion' I mean completion of a first
possible sentence. If there is a rule, as I argue there is, that says 'First possible
completion can be treated as actual completion, ' then it's a problem for
parties to produce multi-clause sentences. It's a problem that they solve by
indicating within the first clause of their intendedly multi-clause sentence that
this is but the first clause, that a second clause will follow. A way to do that
is to use in the first clause a 'first verb, ' to indicate that more follows, that this
is just a clause not a sentence. And it's not particularly a syntactic phenomenon
because, e.g. , "A colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance" is a perfectly
good sentence. But hearers know that 'wanted to' is going to be followed by
something else, e.g. , an account of her failure to get in.
Having gotten onto a bunch of small items, let me talk about ' ' . . . and
they wouldn't let her go in. " Conventional grammatical analysis would say
that 'they' is a plural pronoun. It's plain, however, that in this case, and
commonly, 'they' does not have to be used to refer to more than one person.
"They wouldn't let her go in" may not mean that several people stopped her.
Some one person could have stopped her and 'they' can perfectly well be used.
A typical instance of this is you're driving down the street and a lady driver
cuts you off and you say "They always do that. " Where that you're talking
about that woman is perfectly hearable, where the point is that by using 'they'
you make that sort of categorization of the person that says I'm talking about
that person as a member of a class. And in this case the 'they' presumably
refers to that single policeman who stopped her, being characterized as 'a
policeman. ' 'They' is in principle a pronoun not for plurals but for categories
(cops . . . ladies . . . etc.). It can work as a pronoun for categories indepen­
dently of working as a pronoun for plurals.
Let me go through one more technical thing about the organization of
conversation as it comes up in this material, which we're just lucky to have
tum up in this conversation, as it's of really large import for other sorts of
things. The material is as follows:

E: U(h)h h(h)uh so fin ' out tomorrow an' let me kno::j jw.
]: Oh I'll ca:ll Penelope right no:w. ehh/jheh heh heh heh
E: Call Pen an' call me ba: :ck.
J: Ye:h heh,
E: Tell'm- 'r a:sk 'er if they fou:nd the ki:ller: : ,
J: Wha'/ /time was thi:s.
E: heh!
(0. 6)
 Lecture 2 183
E: We: :ull, ih wuz- -- (0 . 7) -- twunny (tuh) five minnits tuh
s1: :x,
J: Oh this e:vening.
(0. 6)
E: Wel I told you I 1- I leave at fi:ve thirdy,

M y interest i s in the sequence from "What time was this. " Recall that some
temporal indication of the event was given right off with "Well I got out to
my car at five thirty. " I raise there having been an earlier mention of time so
as to get into what happens here. And that is, after the agreement that
Jeanette will make a call to Penelope, Jeanette asks "What time was this" and
Estelle now produces an answer, "Twenty-five minutes to six. " I take that
answer to have been produced by reference to her figuring that Jeanette asked
the question remembering that Estelle had said 5 : 3 0 . In that light Estelle now
produces, not just a repeat, but a 'better' time reference than she had given
before, i.e. , a 'more precise' time reference.
Her problem is, 'What in the world is Jeanette asking? I told her the time
already. ' Since the time that she told Jeanette, 5 : 30, can be conceived as a
'merely approximate' time, Estelle can find that Jeanette must therefore be
asking for a more accurate time than she'd been given. The issue is that the
time Estelle gave, 5 : 30, is not the same sort of time that "twenty-five minutes
to six" is. Estelle didn't need a clock in order to say it was 5 : 3 0 , that's her way
of saying 'when I got out of work, ' i.e. , 'approximately 5 : 3 0 . ' Now there are
'approximate' numbers and 'precise' numbers, one sense of which is if you
were to say to someone ' 'I'll meet you at five twenty seven" and you arrive
at 5 : 29 they might well say "You're late. " If you say ' 'I'll meet you at five
thirty" you may well arrive at 5 : 40 and they won't figure you're late. Or, if
you tell them you'll meet them at 5 : 2 7 they might ask why you're being so
precise - where, in terms of just a series of numbers, 5 : 30 is no less precise
than 5 : 2 7 . It's just a different class of object. But 5 : 3 0 in this case is not
merely that sort of approximate time, it's also saying 'the time I got off work. '
So, in the light of that approximateness feature of 5 : 3 0 , Estelle can produce
an answer to "What time was this" as a 'corrected' time, involving that the
prior time was 'approximate' and what is wanted is the 'exact' time, where,
then, she doesn't hear that Jeanette forgot. And it's important to stress that
in her natural thinking about the question Estelle hears it so as to allow
Jeanette to be one who hasn't yet been found out to have forgotten. She hears
it as a correctly asked question, though it takes work to do so. And that will
tum out to be a fundamental kind of thing, hearing the 'best sense' of
someone else's utterance, i.e. , that they have in mind all the things they
should have in producing it.
Now, following Estelle's 'best sense' answer, Jeanette performs an opera­
tion on it; one I talk of as ' showing understanding' of the answer. In this case
it turns out to show she misunderstands the answer. But it is specifically
produced to show understanding, and it's a routinely done thing. A typical
instance is something like this:
1 84 Part Ill
A: How long are you going to be here?
B: Til Monday.
A: Oh, just a week.
All that's done is to process the answer in such a fashion as: From today to
Monday is a week. Then announce the product, which is a way of saying 'See,
I was able to perform that sort of operation so I heard and understood what
you said. ' And that's what "Oh this evening" is. The problem is that "Oh this
evening" shows that if that's all she got out of "twenty-five minutes to six"
then she in fact forgot that Estelle told her it was 5 : 3 0 before. That is, she
shouldn't have gotten " Oh this evening" out of "twenty-five minutes to six"
if she had asked "What time was this" in the light of the earlier mentioned
5 : 30 . And Estelle's re-producing the 5 : 3 0 in her next utterance, "Well I told
you I leave at five thirty," indicates that she did do the work of trying to find
how Jeanette could have asked the question in that light, thereby produced an
answer, and then was able to monitor Jeanette's 'show of understanding' to
see that Jeanette hadn't produced the question in that light.
Seeing that Jeanette failed to remember that fact, Estelle becomes queasy
about the whole thing and now goes through the whole story again, Jeanette's
failure to remember the time being apparently sufficient to her to raise the
possibility that a good amount of the story was forgotten. Now this matter is
of some interest in a bunch of ways, one of which is that it tells us that we can
re-look at Jeanette's techniques for showing that she is hearing the story - her
"Yeah"s, etc. - and say that they are perfectly well usable though the story is
not being registered, i.e. , she can make it through the story without Estelle
knowing that she wasn't registering. But now Jeanette has taken on the
business of retelling the story to Penelope, perhaps finds that she doesn't know
it, and has a way of trying to get Estelle to retell it. But it can be seen that her
initial responses are absolutely not to be read as saying 'I understand what you
said, ' but are to be considered some other kind of object, like understanding
that a place for comment has occurred. So that the operation directed to
showing understanding, "Oh this evening, " becomes a central focus for the
retelling of the story, in that the operation flunks - though the way it flunks
is separate from the way Estelle works to find an answer that is a good answer
given that Jeanette remembers 5 : 3 0 . And that piece of business of Estelle's is,
I suggest, monumental in its import, in terms of how, e.g . , people suppose
that what we've been talking about all along, you know in the way I told it
to you, and I suppose that in producing any next thing I say. And without
thinking about it, the work I do is to find for any item you say - no matter
how grossly it misunderstands what I say, how well it understands what I say.
Now let's look at the materials in quite a different way, keeping the events
in mind, thinking out what was happening and playing around with the talk
by reference to some way of considering what was happening. I have in mind
something like this: When Estelle interprets the events, she interprets them so
as to find how, that the cops were there involves that they were legitimately
there. And we can notice that at least nowadays that's become kind of a
 Lecture 2 185
distributional phenomenon, i.e. , whereas Estelle is able to use the presence of
the cops to find what was going on - where the cops belonged there, others
might see the same scene with the same parties by reference to that the cops
were doing something which they had no business doing. That is, if this took
place in a black neighborhood, watched by black people, then 'the very same
scene' would perhaps tum into, for the perception of the parties, an altogether
different phenomenon. There are places where the cops can count on the
presence of two of their cars to provide for their visible, legitimate presence,
such that others will then search the scene to find what the cops might be
doing that they should be doing, and, e.g . , pick up on that someone is 'trying
to get into the entrance where the silver is' or that they can imagine a killer
is in there, though they of course can't see into the store. Whereas there are
others who will not at all see the events in that way, but, seeing two cops on
the scene, may now look to see what kind of bother the cops, by being on the
scene, are producing - as compared to what kind of bother they are properly
responding to.
That sort of differential organization of the sheer perceiving of an event is
of considerable importance for, e.g. , the way in which the fact of the police on
the scene tells people that although there is a trouble things are okay - or that
they're not at all okay. For example, that this lady can drive right by the scene
knowing that things are more or less well in hand, that something is
happening but that the cops will take care of it - rather than that something
is happening and the cops are making it happen.
A rather different sort of thing, but again having to do with the status of
the thing she sees, is that which particular scene Estelle has seen is relevant to
that she could have paused to watch it and could have reported it. That is, it's
not that we have a scene seen and described independently of the actual scene.
It's by virtue of the fact that it takes place in a public street, involving officials
seeable as such at first glance, seeable as doing their business, that Estelle
could pause to watch and then report it, as compared to the bunches of scenes
that, catching them out of the comer of one's eye, one knows that he
sh011ldn't be watching. It's none of your business, you shouldn't be watching,
you shouldn't have seen it. To have captured it in your eye is to already have
embarrassed yourself, and you'd better not tell anyone you saw it because they
might well say "Why the hell were you looking?" or "What kind of person
would notice that?" "Why are you so fascinated by that sort of thing?" etc.
So one of the things that the features of the scene described in the report tells
the hearer is that what was seen was something that the person who saw it had
rights to see. It's not that she saw a scene and described a scene, but that the
described scene carries with it the legitimacy of her having seen it.
And in that regard, Estelle is perfectly comfortable as a witness to the scene.
Yet you can perfectly well imagine how she wouldn't see herself as a witness
at all. In her report there's, e.g. , no hint of any interest in stopping and
helping out, or getting worried about what's going to happen. More
importantly, there's no hint that she had any fear that somehow, e.g . , that
policeman was about to tum to her and ask her what she was doing there. The
1 86 Part Ill
massive comfort in her innocence, and in that legitimate audience status that
she has, is something that we should give real attention to, in at least this way:
It's the kind of thing that we know can be readily shaken. There are times and
places where some Estelle would not feel all that comfortable, but, passing
such a scene - and you can readily imagine it - she would figure "Oh my
God here I am, the first thing that happens is they're going to figure I'm
involved. " And that never dawns on our Estelle. And until it dawns on her
she can have no sense of an empathy with, e.g. , a kid in the ghetto. Her sense
of innocence affects the whole way she sees the scene. There's no fear on her
part at all that anybody's going to mistake her for a party to the
scene - though she's perfectly willing to assign others a non-witness, party­
to-the-scene status.
And again, there is no feeling on her part that she ought to do anything,
and pretty much nobody would figure that she ought to feel that she should
do anything. And that sort of trust in the ability of the cops who are there,
to handle whatever needs to be handled, and that they will handle it well, is
another aspect of the way in which, being a witness she can sheerly be a
witness. And one might consider, when one is doing being a witness to a
scene, the conditions under which your witness status could be transformed in
a series of different ways, one of them being into someone who could be seen
by others, e.g . , the lady in the car next to yours or the man across the street,
not as a 'witness' but possibly as a 'car moving away from the scene, ' i.e. , as
the escaped robber. Or, not that you're a witness to a scene which is being ably
handled, but you're somebody who is callously passing it by.
I raise these possibilities because if you read the story you can feel utterly
sure that no such issues crossed her mind. You can then think of scenes in
which you or others have been involved, in which such issues do or do not
emerge, and then focus on what are the conditions that would lead somebody
like Estelle here to at least have it cross her mind that somebody else might
see her and wonder what in the world is Estelle doing there, or that when the
cop turns around with his gun he's going to shoot her or tell her to halt.
Given the markedly distributional character of that sort of phenomenon,
you ought to learn to appreciate the difficulty involved in groups talking to
each other where each of them figures that all they did was to see what was
happening. That is, the notion of there being arguable issues involved is
unavailable to either group by virtue of the fact that all they're doing is
scanning a scene to see what's happening. They're not arguing anything,
they're not imagining anything. They're seeing the scene in some organiza­
tion. And to tell them that they're imagining it or that they're making a
case - since you perfectly well know what was there to be seen by virtue of
what you saw - is to put them in a position where they could not readily come
to understand what you're talking about.
That turns on the fact that each group is specifically committed to a trust
of vision, without any conception of what they understand by 'vision. ' This
lady is not designing a right-wing report. All she's doing is reporting what she
saw. And to tell her that it isn't what happened is to attack a kind of trust that
 Lecture 2 1 87
she has, and should have, in what she simply sees. It would be undermining
something which an enormous mass of, say, Western ideology has led her to
believe she should in fact trust. The point is, roughly, that it's a culturally and
temporally distributional thing that people do or do not trust their eyes, and
even such people as those academics of sorts who figure that they are attuned
to the 'ideological foundations of perception' may not use that sort of attuning
to come to appreciate the distrust of vision that some cultures have - which
they see as a kind of anti-empiricism. It may not at all be anti-empiricism, but
that in the light of the kinds of troubles that people get into when they take
a culturally-ordered orientation to vision seriously, a focus on other senses
might seem to pay off better. And the fact that people systematically distrust
what they see might well be approached, not as " How in the world do they
survive with that magical view of things?" but as a perfectly empirical
position.
 Lecture 4
Greetings.· Adjacency pairs;
Sequential implicativeness; The
integrative function of public tragedy
I'm going to talk about 'greetings' in conversation. I guess this is my second
or third report on greetings, and the basic new thing I learned about them,
that occasions the relevance of saying something more about them, is that
whereas in the past I thought that greetings begin conversations, I now think
that has to be modified to say that greetings begin the beginnings of
conversations, and that they are the initial part of the beginning sequence in
conversations and by no means the whole part of the beginning sequence. And
it's by virtue of their status within the beginning sequence that a good deal of
their interest lies.
I'll begin the discussion with a restatement of sorts, of some facts,
problems, interests, etc. of greetings, starting with some initial sorts of
orderlinesses
. one can observe about greetings - and now we're talking about
thmgs l"k 1 e "He11o " "H e11o, " "H"" 1 "H"1 , " etc., o r "] oe.! " "H"I1 . , " " M"k
1 e.I "

"Harry!," etc. If anyone has an interest in what I have to say about greetings,
they can look at a paper called 'Everyone has to lie. ' I won't by and large go
through stuff I've dealt with there.
A first thing about greetings is their placing. They go right at the beginning
of the beginning. Though that may sound like nothing of any interest, it can
be turned to a bunch of interests. Putting that into productional terms we
could say that for greetings their placing is of highest priority. And greetings
have highest priority for initial placement in a conversation. Among the
things that means is that when we look at the beginning section of a
conversation - and it remains to be seen what the 'beginning section' consists
of and what sorts of things, if they're not part of the beginning section, should
nonetheless be done early on into a conversation - it can be seen that a whole
bunch of things that look like part of the beginning section are movable
relative to each other. For example, an exchange of 'how-are-you's might be
considered a normal second part of a begining section. However, how-are­
yous are movable and can be placed later into a beginning section.
Now a central question about the organization of the beginning section
concerns what are required parts of it and what sort of ordering do they have.
There are a bunch of variable things that can go into a beginning section and,
Lecture 3 of Winter 1 9 7 0 was not transcribed.

188
 Lecture 4 1 89
if and when they're used, we want to know if there is some ordering for their
relevant placement. For example, a variable part of the beginning of a
conversation is something like "Where've you been!" Taking something like
that, as compared to an exchange of how-are-yous, "Where've you been" can
precede or succeed how-are-yous, and we want to know if that's open to all
parts of a beginning section, or are there fixed parts of a beginning section. We
also want to know how fixed are the fixed parts, i.e. , if you take the closing
sequence of a conversation, we find that the final parts, e.g. , things like an
exchange of 'goodbyes, ' need not occur adjacently but can be separated by
some other utterances, whereas for an exchange of greetings it doesn't appear
that they are separatable but should be placed adjacent to each other. We can
then ask why are they unmovable as compared to other things which are
movable; why are they unseparatable as compared to other things that are
separatable.
So, to say that greetings are placed at the beginning of a beginning section
of conversation is to say something other than the sheer inspectional fact that,
e.g. , "Hello" - "Hello"s occur at the beginning of the beginning. We are
saying something analytically about some sorts of objects. We then want to
know, e.g. , if we could classify as 'alike' the beginning of the beginning
section and other things. So, for example, I would say that greetings are
instances of a class of objects which I call adjacency pairs, and while there are
ways in which greetings are quite the same as other adjacency pairs, it seems
to be that the other pairs have separatable parts, e.g. , for question-answer
there are lots of things that can be inserted between the question and the
answer, and I've already mentioned the separatable character of an exchange
of goodbyes, whereas that doesn't seem to be so for greetings. And that gives
an order of relevance to such a question as, Does the first greeting pair item
have a fixed place? And then, Given the first, is it the business of somebody
to do a next pair item right then and there as compared to using the slot to
do something else and then later doing the next pair item for the greeting? So,
placing is one sort of transparent inspectional orderliness which nonetheless
needs a lot of work on it to find out what exactly is involved, and how general
to other things is that sort of a feature.
A second, which I've sort of mentioned, is pairing. Greetings come in pairs.
The pairing of things matters in various ways; for one, that by virtue of the
pairing conception, ' first greetings' and 'greeting returns' are different objects.
It's not that there are two greetings, but there is a first greeting and a second
greeting, and they're quite different. A simple way to see that is, whereas a
first greeting gets a second greeting, a second greeting does not work in the
way a first greeting does, to get another greeting in return. The observation
that that point plays off, I found in Goodenough's monograph on property
among the Truk, where he observed about some phenomenon that it's
different than letter writing among Americans where, if you write a letter and
someone returns a letter then you owe a letter to the person who returned your
letter. That is to say, letters are chained in an indefinite fashion. And there are
other things that operate that way, i.e. , where you give them one and they
1 90 Part Ill
give you one in return, but the one they give you in return sets up that you
owe them one. Greetings don't work that way.
(To this there is at least inspectionally contrary data: " Hello," "Hi Joe,"
" Hi!" And in a telephone situation one routinely gets that sort of thing - but
there is something else going on. The 'third' greeting item stands as a way to
recognize who's done the second item which then serves as a first to the third;
the first item simply being the formal thing that a telephone answerer does.)
The fact that greetings are paired has implications with regard to what we
can then do by looking to the ways in which the class of adjacency pair objects
work. That is to say, we can then cull out features of adjacency pairs and see
whether such features, considered programmatically, hold for greetings. If
they don't hold for greetings we might, e.g. , consider that greetings are not
precisely adjacency pairs. But, roughly, among the features of adjacency pairs
are that they are organized in such a way that the first item of the pair selects
a class of return items to it, from which some return can be selected. It does
not necessarily select only a single class of return items; rather, given a first pair
member, a second pair member should be selected from the class of
alternative second pair members. And a party who speaks second to a first pair
part, by doing an appropriate second pair part, exhibits, among other things,
that they see that a first pair part was done.
An interesting part of the work of greetings, then, is that there are a series
of different types of organization involved. Adjacency pair organization
partially handles some of the things that greetings do, and we can say things
about adjacency pairs and locate such objects. Then there's this other thing
about greetings, having to do with their placing, i.e. , that greetings go at the
beginning of the beginning section, which is altogether independent of
adjacency pair organization and has to do with a different type of organization
for conversation, i.e. , the overall structural organization. And in those terms
there is no information in adjacency pair organization about where the first
part of the pair should go in a conversation.
Now there may be, as another thing, the organization of the beginning
section of a conversation. For this, the issue is where, relative to the various
parts that can be put into that beginning section, should various parts go. And
given the possible relationship between the beginning section and what can
follow from the beginning section, it may be that the greeting sequence is not
determinative of how you get into other than the beginning section, where
what can follow from the beginning section turns on the sorts of things that
are done after a greeting sequence. That is to say, a greeting sequence may be
fixed and irrelevant - or it may not be. It's plain that other things are quite
relevant to moving from a beginning section, e.g . , the use or non-use of a
how-are-you can be enormously relevant. Obviously a how-are-you can elicit
a piece of news, e.g . , "Fine! I'm getting married" which moves one into
topical talk right then and there. And, e.g. , I've heard conversations which
start out "Hi how are you?" "Oh, not so good" "Why?" then a 2 0-minute
discussion, the parties part, and the other as he's walking away, says "Hey! By
the way how are you. " So that how-are-yous are massively separable, and a
 Lecture 4 191
second how-are-you may not come in the beginning section at all, whereas I
don't think you get hellos separated in that way, with a second hello placed
somewhere other than the beginning section.
So we have these series of different types of organization for conversation
that greetings are objects in, and they're all involved in bringing off the
greeting section of a conversation. Now we said that the greeting pair is fixed
in its placement and also is fixed as an adjacency pair, i.e. , that the second
should go right after the first. That turns, for its working, on a series of other
inspectional properties of greetings. For one that in a strong way an initial
greeting - and a second greeting also - can be produced and treated as an
adequate complete utterance such that the utterance can be treated as complete
when the greeting has occurred. " Hi Joe" is treatable as a complete utterance
right then and there such that the other party should start talking. So if
somebody produces what could be a complete greeting, like " Hi Joe," and,
e.g. , starts to say as well, "how are you?" then you can get an overlapping
return greeting. Like, in the GTS data we have " Hi Jim, II come on in, "
where "come on in" is overlapped by Jim's return greeting. One relevance of
that is that for considerations of the occurrence of 'interruptions, ' one wants
to know, about as many sorts of interruptions that you can find, do they have
some orderly base? Can you say how it happens that the other party starts up
where they do start up? And in the case of, e.g . , "Hi Jim I I come on in"
there is an orderly basis for the occurrence of the interruption.
Now we have this rule that says given a first, a second should be done, and
given that they're pairs, what should be done on the finding of completion is
specified by the pair organization, i.e. , some second member should be done.
Recognizable completeness matters, then, by virtue of the rule that says
completion is transitionally adequate, because on the completion a second
should be done, such that if it's not done it can be seen to be absent. So, for
example, if somebody says "Hello" and there is no return on its completion,
a repeat can be done quite directly. And returning a hello to a repeated hello
is a different thing than returning to an initial hello and can involve, e.g. ,
offering some excuse as to how come you didn't answer the first. Now that
completeness feature for an utterance is, for other things than greetings,
massively problematic. For all sorts of utterances it's a complex question as to
how its completion for transition purposes is to be achieved, and how it's to
be responded to. But for adjacency pairs in general, given a first pair member,
on the recognition of a possible completion a second pair member should be
done. And that an utterance containing a greeting is recognizably complete
when the greeting is done, has various importances. Greetings are routinely
done by people who are otherwise unacquainted, and are done before any
monitoring can be done of what, for this person, constitutes a complete
utterance.
Added to these features is that greetings are specifically heard as directed to
somebody, and they select the somebody they're directed to, to speak. So it's
not just that somebody should talk and should do a return greeting when a
first greeting has been done, but the greeting selects the somebody to whom
192 Part Ill
it's directed as its recipient and as the next speaker, i.e. , the speaker of the
return greeting. And plainly it can be a technical problem as to who's been
selected, and you routinely get reports like, "I was walking along and this
gorgeous girl is coming towards me and she says 'Hi!' with a big smile, and
I looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to, and then I realized
it was me. "
Now completion and directedness have to do with what can be called the
sequential implicativeness of an initial greeting. To say, for example, that a
greeting puts one into a state of talk or begins a conversation, could be heard
as saying that a greeting puts one into a state of talk because it's an instance
of a state of talk. The matter is much more pointed than that, by virtue of the
fact that a greeting not only involves talk in itself, but it gets more talk - at
least another greeting. And if one is doing a beginning section of a
conversation, then the second greeting should get something further, but not
another greeting.
Earlier I mentioned the issue of greetings having highest priority. A second
place where greetings go is on the entry of some party into a conversation
that's already ongoing. And to see the sort of priority status greetings have in
such a scene, one might look at materials like the following:

Tony : The head of these United States' gotta be a dynamic person.

Forthright. Very forthright person. Can' be- can' be a meek
person. Gotta put his cards on the table. See, the guy that puts his
cards on the table is- Russia an' all these other countries, Russia
an' all these- uh, Hi Matt!
Matt : Hi.
Tony : Russia an' all these other countries . . .

That is to say, a party will do a thing like interrupt their own utterance - aside
from that parties will interrupt others' utterances - to do a greeting. And note
that the insertion is of a greeting sequence, not just that the speaker says "Hi
Matt" and continues. And we could ask for what sorts of things can an
utterance that one is engaged in have something inserted into it that is
otherwise adequate. Greetings may be among a small class of such things.
And that would be a way to see the kind of priority it has for conversation.
(It's interesting that this entry-of-a-new-participant thing is kind of parallel
for the ringing of a telephone, i.e. , if two or more people are sitting and
having a conversation and the phone rings, then routinely someone will stop
in the middle of their utterance and go answer the phone.)
Returning to the fact that greetings go at the start of the beginning section,
a question is, do greetings invariably begin a conversation or are there some
conversations in which greetings don't go at the beginning? Also, do greetings
mean the beginning of a conversation, definitively? The answer to the second
is obviously 'no. ' It's obvious that people do simply exchange greetings and
don't have more interaction than that, so the fact that greetings have been
done doesn't mean that a conversation will take place. One kind of interesting
 Lecture 4 193
feature o f the accomplishing o f greetings-only interactions, where parties are
approaching each other on a street, in a hallway, etc. , is the way in which
parties are able to withhold doing greetings until they reach some space
relative to each other such that they can do greetings and have passed on its
completion. Now if one party starts a greeting at such a distance from the
other as to involve that the other returns the greeting while they are still
approaching each other, then more than greetings will perhaps have to be
done. And there is more-than-a-greeting which can be done, i.e. , an exchange
of how-are-yous, but apparently you can screw up on that by starting
greetings at such a distance that the how-are-yous are finished and you're still
approaching. But for the most part, people do it very well, engineering that
thing so that they do not pass each other face to face having ended the
interaction, but the interaction is over when they pass.
With regard to the issue of do greetings invariably begin a conversation, I
used to have a rule that said 'greetings are ahistorically relevant, ' i.e. , that no
parties' history of interaction removes the relevance of greetings. I was
thinking about that in comparison to, e.g., things like introductions where,
having been introduced to somebody once or twice, introductions are no
longer appropriate, whereas greetings remain usable between parties as a way
to begin their conversation though they've seen each other every day for 30
years. And while some such thing as that may be so, there are specific
historicalizing techniques which permit the beginning of conversation to take
place, as a specifically historicalized conversation, without greetings. That is,
a way to say, e.g. , we are now doing the second conversation this afternoon,
or we are now doing a continuation of a conversation that had closed, is not
just to begin without a greeting but to specifically connect this conversation
with the last, e.g. , " Oh you've put up your hair" as an entering remark on
returning to somebody's house having been there earlier, or other such
noticings. Or things like "He said no, " "She can't go, " "She already did
it, ' ' etc. Such beginnings specifically connect a possibly-newly-begun conver­
sation with a last. And that stands as a particular technique for doing a sort
of thing that is done - if not in the beginning section then early on in
conversations - which is, bringing this conversation into relationship with
past conversations.
I talked about the business of 'turning your mind to us' as a thing one does
at the beginning of a conversation (and that's not merely turning your mind
to the other, but to 'us'). Now, among the ways you go about doing the job
of 'turning your mind to us' in the beginning of a conversation is focussing on
its distance from the last, or some business by reference to the last, e.g. ,
"Where've you been, I haven't seen you for three weeks!, " "You're looking
a lot better, " "How's your mother?, " "I want to thank you for the lovely
dinner, " and a whole range of such techniques. (Some of those things should
be done specifically in the beginning section of a conversation, e.g. , an inquiry
about the health of somebody who in the last interaction was reported to be
ill.) So, early into a conversation you use some way of showing that you've
found at least that part of 'us' that is involved in our last interaction. And it's
194 Part III
always a last. If you deal with interactions prior to the last one you work your
way through the last one to the others. That sort of technique is a way to
connect up two interactions such that the second is done without a greeting
sequence, i.e. , it can just begin off with those items I've mentioned, "She
wouldn't go, " etc. , those sorts of things that have to be understood by
reference to whatever we were talking about when we last ended.
At this point there's a whole thing that fits in; a type of conversation that
begins without greetings, indeed without a begining section. There is a
phenomenon that's been widely observed: In times of public disaster and
tragedy people in large cities who otherwise do not talk to each other, develop
'comeraderie, ' talk to each other. That will turn out to be involved in this
issue that we've just gotten to. We have to try to develop some sorts of
explanations, characterizations, of why that happens.
In order to arrive at such a characterization a lot of clearing up has to be
done. For example, it's reported that strangers now talk to each other, where
strangers don't talk to each other in cities. Now there's a way in which that
is plainly nonsense. People who are strangers to each other talk to each other
all the time. Not, however, as 'strangers. ' That is to say, 'cab drivers and fares'
talk to each other; people talk to cops, to salesladies, to all sorts of people, and
they don't encounter that they're 'talking to a stranger' as a problem they
have to overcome, nor one that the respondent treats them as dealing with.
So, the characterization of 'stranger-stranger' interaction in a city is equivocal
and turns on, for its relevance, that the parties who are now interacting in a
time of disaster are specifically interacting as 'strangers' and not as 'cabbie and
fare, ' 'saleslady and client, ' etc.
We'll just play around a little bit with the problems involved. In the first
instance, one needn't treat the matter as ' how do people overcome their
(acquired) natural unwillingness to talk to strangers, ' but one wants to know
why they would feel that they want to talk to strangers, such that they have
to overcome that they shouldn't or don't. That is, one doesn't want to
suppose that people are dying to talk to strangers all along and now they have
an occasion to do it, you have to find out why, for this situation they want to
talk to strangers; and also, why do those who are approached as 'strangers'
allow themselves to be talked to. Initially, then, the problem isn't as simple
as 'how do people now get a chance to talk to strangers. '
Let's consider some things about the situation of 'strangers' in the streets of
the cities. In lecture 1 I mentioned the status of the crowd outside of Bullocks,
and said that a thing about the occurrence of a crowd around, say, a possible
crime, is that somebody who sees the crowd and the crime, sees what the
crowd is looking at, whereas otherwise what anybody is looking at in the
streets is not available. With that, we can achieve a small part of the sense of
what is called the 'integrative function of crime, ' i.e. , in such a situation you
know what's on all these people's minds.
We can in similar fashion get at the integrative function of disaster and
tragedy. That is, it is otherwise routinely nobody's business on the one hand,
and perhaps unsolvable on the other, what's on the mind of the person who's
 Lecture 4 195
passing you. Furthermore, it's your business to not make it their business as
to what's on your mind by doing something which would cause them to
wonder what's on that person's mind, e.g. , by crying in the streets. Crying in
the streets is not a thing that somebody encountering somebody doing it can
solve - except classificatorily, e.g . , they can say it's some private problem -
and it's something you shouldn't cause them to try to solve. But at least one
facet of the integrative status of public tragedy is that somebody standing on
the street can cry, and the set of persons who pass him, who don't know him,
can know what he's crying about, i.e. , he's crying about that public event.
Your mind is, then, made available to the anonymous persons who encounter
you, who otherwise have it as not their business to figure it out, and who
otherwise can't.
So, a sort of thing that happens in public disasters is that persons can
express emotions in public places, and those emotions are available to others,
who need not avoid looking at the person who's sad, and also can figure that
they know why he's sad. And the major thing is that this is for people who
are unacquainted, i.e. , 'strangers. ' Now that operates in a rather pure fashion
as compared to crying in front of your friends about, e.g., the death of Bobbie
Kennedy, where, in interactions with your friends you find that the account is
not sufficiently ' 'I'm crying because Bobbie Kennedy died" but, that, plus
'how come I in particular care. ' When people talk among their friends about
how they were affected by a death like Bobbie Kennedy's, or Jack Kennedy's,
or Martin Luther King's, etc. , then they give not just the fact of the death as
their account, but their involvement in the life - however small that
involvement may be. Whereas for strangers, the fact of the death is all you
need display and it's sufficient. You are crying as a member of the public, with
public motives and explanations as sufficient. And no one is interested in
inspecting, say, the irony of your crying; that you of all people should be
crying, after all you hated the guy. Public tragedies, then, make persons'
emotions publicly available and publicly explainable to anonymous parties.
Also, persons can express emotions in public without having that they are
doing that treated as something embarrassing, something they shouldn't do,
etc.
Another sort of thing is somewhat off the topic but may be relevant to it:
A feature of 'stranger-stranger' interaction in the city apparently serves as a
way to show that the initiator is specifically, while talking to the person he's
talking to, not 'beginning a conversation' with him. And that is that
techniques other than greetings are used to begin the thing. Those techniques
consist of such a first utterance as solves the question of how come I'm talking
to you; things like "Excuse me, could you tell me where the subway entrance
is?," "Pardon me but do you have the time?" etc. Such a 'ticketed' first
utterance is plainly a 'beginning, ' but is such a thing as when it has been
returned to the interaction will be, if not complete, completable with a 'thank
you-you're welcome' exchange. As compared to starting with a "Hello"
where, for conversations that begin that way the ending is not foregiven, these
sorts of things, when they are done as a beginning, announce also what it will
196 Part lli
take to bring that interaction to a dose. So that people who, if you say
" Hello" to them will ignore you, will answer, I take it, if you say "Pardon me
could you tell me where the subway is. "
So, 'stranger-stranger' interaction can be done in such a way as to indicate
that I'm not starting a conversation with you. It will turn out to be a relevant
sort of fact because at least one reported way that 'stranger-stranger'
interaction in disasters takes place is the following, from the New York Times.

Yesterday they kept asking for news; any news of Kennedy's condition.
"How is he?" people would ask a taxi driver, soda jerk, or policeman
and they didn't even think of saying who "he" was.

What you get, then, as a conversation beginning is "How is he?" It's a

conversation beginning that could perfectly well be done where you're doing
the historicalized beginnings, i.e. , that sort of thing as connects two
conversations. But in this case it has a series of ideal properties to it. It says as
between us, interacting as 'strangers, ' my business with you is that public
matter that you and I ought to have on our minds and nothing else, such that
what I come to be doing with it can be brought under control. It also says that
it's a matter solvable by an 'anybody. '
Now, the character of 'intimacy' in any event - leaving aside intimacy
between strangers - is that one can do firsts like this which are not tied to
prior matters. That is, if one can say to somebody "How is he?" without a 'he'
having been talked of, then that's a way of doing 'being intimate. ' And a way
of doing 'being intimate' with strangers turns on that we have an item that
we can do it for with strangers, i.e. , something like a public disaster. And it
may be that the intimacy, the friendliness that exists in the cities during such
a disaster does not more readily permit a conversation that begins with
"Hello" "Hello. ' ' That is to say, the non-use of a beginning section may be
a specific part of this kind of interaction. And that then assimilates it to
standard 'stranger-stranger' interaction and distinguishes it from 'ordinary'
conversation. So, when you have an item like " How is he? , ' ' "Isn't it awful?,"
"Will they ever go on again?, " etc. , as first items usable for anybody in the
city, you now have ways of beginning a conversation with a stranger, which
announce to the stranger the terms of interaction. And any sort of public event
that can be assumed to be on the mind of any other party you happen to
encounter can be used that way. But perhaps only such public events as can
be assumed to be on the mind of the person you interact with can be used that
way.
The question of why people will respond to it deserves altogether separate
treatment. Of course on the one hand they know the terms that they're being
invited into, and they can know what it will take to bring the thing to a close;
that they're being addressed as a member of the public and not as some
exploitable object (or they can suppose that until they find out otherwise). But
also, if they are correctly found, what happens is that they have an answer
occur to the them - as compared to this being a puzzle - and they can offer
 Lecture 4 197
the answer, and in offering it they do thereby show their membership; that
they are indeed reasonable citizens.
You could figure it might not matter very much. Why in the world does
somebody care that a stranger thinks well of him, or thinks that he's a
reasonable person. Why should he care that a stranger not think "this guy
doesn't give a damn" about something that this guy in fact doesn't give a
damn about. Why should he care that somebody think he does give a damn
when he doesn't. And yet there are enormous masses of material that tell us
perfectly well that people are subject to that sort of embarrassment, i.e. , that
people care enormously - or enough - what anonymous people think of
them. Consider the difficulties of, e.g. , having a fight in a public place,
deciding that you're going to refuse to stand up for the Star Spangled Banner
at a football game (where you might be afraid of being beaten up, I suppose)
but there's plainly no issue in principle about people's concern to have the
anonymous public think well of them in the terms that the anonymous public
has available to use for them, on them, about them. So, without regard to
whether you think it's a good thing, a bad thing, or nothing, if indeed you
have an answer to "How is he?" you can find yourself offering it.
In any event, my main point is that the reported type of beginning such as
"How is he?" with its structural character of requiring some other, in
particular a stranger, to know what in the hell you're talking about, and with
its feature of not making them have to figure out what kind of interaction
they're getting into - as with the "Hello" beginning - is not an incidental
sort of way to begin such conversations, and that how these conversations
begin is part of the solution to the problem of how it is that comeraderie
develops in the cities during disasters. So the lesson is, if we want an answer
to the question 'How does comeraderie develop in the cities during times of
disaster?' then the organization of conversation is relevant to an answer.
To return to our initial focus, the fixed placing and adacency pair status of
greetings at the beginnings of conversation. Plainly enough a problem about
them that what we've so far said does not deal with is, how is who goes first
determined? It turns out that that sort of a problem has a bunch of diagnostic
interests, turning on that lots of cultures find that sort of problem a thing to
play around with. And where you have a situation where there is some thing
that involves an order as between the parties, and involves that they go one
at a time or two at a time but behind each other, etc. , you have that situation
mobilized for other sorts of structural uses. You will widely find, cross­
culturally, solutions that do not just somehow or another solve the one-at-a­
time, who-goes-first problem, but solutions which allow other sorts of
organizations to operate.
I refer to things like, in jungle tribes a characteristic sort of problem is that
a trail narrows so that only one person can walk at a time after, say, having
been able to walk in a group of five, and now they have to arrange themselves
to manage it. Also, trails involving one person at a time where two people are
approaching from opposite directions. Those sorts of problems, like the
problem of getting into a greeting sequence, are mobilized for other uses.
198 Part III
They are characteristically solved by a rule that says 'high ranking person goes
first' or '-last. ' It doesn't matter which, since there's a theory for each way,
such that going first shows high status or going last shows high status.
And that's a thing that's done for conversation beginnings, i.e., to some
extent this formal problem is mobilized for such considerations as, e.g. , in the
pre-Civil War South a slave should always greet a white person, or a slave
should never do an initial greeting but only a return greeting, etc. Children
should always give a first greeting to adults. Now the telephone poses some
sorts of problems, since answerer goes first and then caller. But caller can be
talking not to called but to somebody other than called, so you end up with
situation of caller talking before called, and then such things as caller waiting
for called, i.e. , "Hello," " Is this X?, " "No, hold on a minute. ' ' And for some
parties, waiting for another party is a status problem. There's a set of people
who have developed procedures for managing that so, e.g. , when I get a call
from the Vice-Chancellor I never get a call from the Vice-Chancellor, I get a
call from the Vice-Chancellor's secretary, and the Vice-Chancellor doesn't
come on the line until I'm on the line. So if my wife answers the phone she's
got to bring me to the phone before the Vice-Chancellor's secretary will put
him on the line. And it's now being reported that really elaborately delicate
battles go on in the upper levels of organizations, in businesses and
bureaucracies, when both parties to a conversation are parties who do not get
on the line until the other party is on the line. But I assume that the same sort
of thing takes place upon entering the magical hut in a tribe, crossing trails,
etc. Indeed, pick up any ethnography and you'll find that who goes first gets
routinely assimilated to status hierarchies.
So the fact of a fixed problem of this sort is of interest for the ways in which
people go about devising solutions which allow it to be used for some other
set of purposes. The point is that somehow it's been found out. It's not just
a fact in the world that researchers discover and it happens that conversation
has this character or that trails have this character, etc., but it's been diagnosed
and a solution has been achieved which allows it to be used for various other
purposes.
It's of interest of course that in some cultures, e.g . , the Burundi, the whole
organization of conversation can be put at the mercy of other interests. And,
for example, in the pre-Civil War South, there was a rather total organization
of white-slave conversation in which what the slave did and what the white
did was fixed for utterance after utterance after utterance to some very
considerable extent. Here is a fragment:

Negroes, for example, usually agreed with any statement made by a

white person, so that in many instances they were accused of evasion if
not deceit. "Tom, " said his master pointing to Y, "This is my brother. ' '
"Ah master and very like you . " "You did not know that I had a
brother, did you Tom?" "No master, him very good brother. ' ' "And
Tom, " pointing to us, "These are my cousins. " "All your family,
master. " "Yes Tom. " "All very like you master, what a family you have
 Lecture 4 1 99
master. " I need hardly remark that four persons more unlike could
hardly have been brought together.

So, for example, saying "Master" at the completion of every utterance was a
required thing. Agreeing with any utterance that could be made was a
required thing such that that set up games of trying to get a slave to be found
to disagree - where disagreeing essentially could be treated as a capital
offense, i.e. , because it could be seen to be accusing the other of being
incorrect, lying, etc. So the conversation system was massively put at the
service of the slave system. There were some negative consequences for the
masters, in that they could never find out what they wanted to know.
One other aspect of the kind of fixed status of greetings is that it's available
for use as a specific pair of items within a conversation that can be occupied
emotionally. Imagine there's a place that you can put something into, and you
have this item to put into it, where it's also an item that you can fully use for
some other job. And while you can put emotions into lots of places in
conversation, you can specifically do an emotional beginning for the range of
emotions. You can say " Hello" such that somebody will say, e.g. , "What's
the matter?" That is, you can show with "Hello" that you are high or low,
where " Hello" is a specific place to do that. As compared to the fact that you
can, I suppose, ask a question glumly, " Hello" is a place for somebody to
listen to see that you're doing some mood with it.
 Lecture 5
Foreshortened} normal} and expanded
beginning sequences; joking
relationships; First topics}· Close
offerings
We've been talking about 'greetings' and arguing that they are the beginnings
of beginning sections, not the whole beginning section. Before going on to
consider some aspects of the further organization of beginning sections I want
to amend some of the remarks I made last time. For one, I said that the first
place where 'called' has an opportunity to move for first topic control is in the
third utterance, and therefore 'caller' has a prior opportunity because caller
can do it in the second utterance, e.g. , to "Hello" they can say "Jeanette"
which can get "Yeah" and provide for movement into first topic control by
caller. There are perhaps ways in which called can make a topical control
move before that. It turns on bringing together that issue with something else
I said last time, that "Hello" is 'emotionally occupiable, ' i.e. , one can present
an emotion in it and parties are prepared to listen to " Hello" for its joy or its
misery, etc. Now considering that sort of possibility it's easy enough to see
that called can do their first "Hello" in such a way as to have it elicit "What's
the matter?' ' or such a thing, which would then put called into a position to,
e.g. , offer their troubles. Or they can do a big happy " Hi!" which could elicit
"My, you're sounding chipper this morning, what's up?"
In fact, that discussion can be made rather more general than just for
"Hello"s, and here I'm referring to work that Schegloff has done on greeting
sequences in, I think it's the October American Anthropologist. Borrowing on
his work I just want to note that it's routinely technically done that first
utterances of calls are topically controlling of a conversation, presumptively.
That is, the presumptive topic-type that the first utterance sets up can work
itself out via the control provided by the first utterance called makes. It can
also be altered by other techniques. We might think, then, of uses of first
utterances which we can say give a candidate typing or a candidate signature
to the conversation. Such things as "Morgan, Paint Department, ' ' "Police
Desk, Haynes speaking, " etc. , which say ' T m going to listen for your
business relevant to the identification I make of myself ' such that it's your
business now to state your business. And if a call is going to be otherwise, then
that will have to be achieved. And Schegloff has found that it can be rather
2 00
 Lecture 5 20 1
an elaborate task to transform a called-defined business call. He has material
which goes something like:

A: Police Desk,
B: Who's this.
A: Sergeant Brown.
B: Do you know Sergeant Smith?
A: Yes,
B: Well I'm a friend of his, I think we met once. I'm Bill Jones.
A: Yeah, I think so,
B: Well look, can you give me some information about . . .

where the caller takes it that he couldn't get the information that he wants if
he just started out with " Could you tell me . . . " And they happen to be
correct routinely, i.e. , when people call to a police desk and just say "Hello
I'm calling to find out about . . . " then they don't get it. And they know that
the way to get it is to transform it into some sort of private interaction.
So the sheer use of "Hello, " or some identification can initially, candidat­
edly, signature the type of conversation that's taking place, such that given
"Police Desk" a person begins by stating their police-relevant business. If they
don't, they try to get the identity transformed so that it's now 'one friend to
another, ' or that they have special rights, or they're not calling the police desk
but somebody who happens to be there who is obliged to answer that
way - either the one who has answered the phone or someone who now has
to be found by the one who answered.
Those calls have very thin beginnings. There are interactions that have
much more elaborate beginnings.

A: Hello,
B: Vera?
A: Ye:s.
B: Well you know, I had a little difficulty getting you.
( 1 .0)
B: First I got the wrong number, and then I got Operator,
A: Well.
B: And uhm
( 1 . 0)
B: I wonder why.
A: Well, I wonder too.
A: It uh just rung now about uh three ti/jmes.
B: Yeah, well Operator got it for me.
A: She did.
B: Uh huh,
B: So jj uh
A: Well.
B: When I- after I got her twice, why she --
202 Part Ill
A: -(telephoned)-
B: -tried it for me
B: Isn't that funny?
A: Well it certainly �-
B: Must be some little cross of lines someplace hh
A: Guess so.
B: Uh huh,
B: Uh,
---+ B : Am I taking you away from yer dinner?
A: No: : .
A: No, I haven't even started tuh get i t yet.
B: Oh, you (h)avelln't.
A: hhheh heh
B: Well I- I never am certain, I didn't know whether I'd be too early
or too late II or ri-
A: No: : .
A: No, well I guess uh with us uhm there isn't any - -
B: Yeah.
A: -p'gcular time.
B: Uh huh,
---+ B : Well I- I wannid to say I enjoyed your class so this morning, and
too,
A: Wei Ill, thank you.
B: Uhm
B: Will one of - - where- are those records going to be uh available.
A: I don't - -
( 1 . 0)
A: I don't know yet . . .

If we're able to say what sorts of things are still part of the beginning
section of, e.g. , a telephone conversation, then, if we take it that "Are you
busy?" is a candidate part of the beginning of a telephone conversation - and
there's lots of information usable to argue that - we can note that in a call like
this one, a version of "Are you busy?" i.e. , "Am I taking you away from your
dinner?' ' comes some 2 5 lines into the transcript, and another 'beginning
item' occurs some 1 3 lines after that, "Well I- I wanted to say I enjoyed your
class. ' ' Among the things I alluded to earlier was the relative placing of these
sorts of 'beginning items' ("Well you know, I had a little difficulty getting
you," "Am I taking you away from your dinner?, " "I wanted to say I enjoyed
your class").
I want now to go through some of the types of ways that beginning sections
run off, and I'll initially consider three sorts of things: Foreshortening
techniques - ways of shortening a normal beginning sequence, the use of a
normal beginning sequence (and I'll say what I mean by that), and
lengthening techniques. And we're talking about them as techniques relative
 Lecture 5 203
to some first-topic or non-first-topic topic (and I've talked about what I mean
by 'first topic').
I already discussed a foreshortening technique in the first lecture when I
went through the "Hello," "Jeanette, " "Yeah" series, where use of called's
name by caller set up that caller would like to move directly, with a minimal
beginning sequence, into first topic, and that she would begin first topic, and
where called can accept that being done by, e.g. , saying "Yeah! " or reject it
by saying "Yeah?" which will involve an extension of the beginning sequence,
at least such that the caller will now offer their name and called will recognize
that person and perhaps do, e.g . , "Oh hi! How are you?" requiring, then,
further extension, after which they can move to the 'body' of the conversation.
I also discussed foreshortening involved in the called's strategy of, after, e.g. ,
"Hello" "Hello, " doing "Where've you been!" where that involves called
attempting to deal with the caller-called relationship and things like that.
And now we can add the possibility of called doing one of these 'emotional
hellos' which generate caller responding with an offer to called to say what's
up, good or bad. And that's leaving aside the signatured business conversa­
tion.
Treating as a normal sequence one which involves an exchange of hellos
plus an exchange of how-are-yous, one thing is that the how-are-you sequence
can specifically provide a first topic by reference to the sorts of responses that
come, e.g . , "How are you?" " Fine! I got a raise, " where that announcement
is turned into first topic. And that possibility turns, for one, on the fact that
how-are-you exchanges don't have to be placed adjunctly, and are not
infrequently rather widely separated. Where "How are you" has among its
businesses that it says "Give me such information as will involve me in asking
you what it is that's of some substantial news as between us. " That is, you
don't have to say "Fine, I got a raise, " you can say "Wonderful! " and it's now
the business of the recipient of that to say "What happened?" and you can say
"I got a raise, " they can say "That's wonderful, how much?" etc. Obviously
you can have news to deliver which you don't want to deliver as something
attached to "How are you?" and you can just say "Okay" and not get the
asker saying "Gee, how come?' ' People don't say " How come?" for any
reported state, but, e.g . , perhaps just when you report something as an
'exceptional' state. This is all in that 'Everyone has to lie' paper.
Now, given that in the first instance one doesn't have to use "How are
you?" but can do one of those foreshortening techniques, the sheer use of
"How are you?" is a way of saying "I have no immediate business that I want
to offer before giving you the chance to offer something. " A way to think
about the how-are-you exchange turns on considering who does "How are
you?" first. You might think of some of the problems involved in that as
something like being an invited guest for dinner in a restaurant. The issue
there is that you will definitively order before your host, but in picking out
what to order you want to find out what they think is a reasonable item, so
you want to find out, e.g . , what they're going to have. You get, then, this
elaborate negotiational thing when people take other people to dinner, in
204 Part Ill
which they all discuss "What are you going to have?" which has nothing to
do with the sequence in which people will make their orders. That is to say,
the waiter can partially decide who's going to order first; in some restaurants
women go first, children next, and male adults third. But women may well
be in a position of not wanting to announce what they're going to order until
they find out what the host figures is a reasonable thing, and if the host
doesn't do that, e.g . , if they don't give a hint like "The steak is great
here," then there are a series of procedures available with respect to a
menu, e.g. , you can pick some medium item on the list and say "I wonder
how X is, ' ' hoping to get some suggestion as to whether that's too much or
too little from the host.
From the discussions about "How are you?" in the ' . . . lie' paper which I
mentioned briefly in an earlier lecture, we can see that there are problems
involved in being the first to answer a "How are you? " That is, assuming you
have no business, it may be better to try to be the first to ask "How are
you?" - assuming also that you don't know something that you want to tell
the other which would affect their answer if they knew it. Clearly it would be
the business of somebody with awful or great news to not put the other in a
position of having to answer first, and one way to do that is to indicate 'I want
to talk first, ' which can be done by caller with " Hello" "Jeanette" or by called
with, e.g. , a woebegone "Hello: : " "What's the matter. " And then, e.g., they
need not be in the position of saying something that would mutually
embarrass you in that their fortunes are up while yours are down or vice versa.
Later on you can say "Things always get better, look at me. Yesterday
nothing, and today I'm on the top of the world. " And that would be a way
to ease their troubles. But otherwise it's better to give them the obligation to
answer first so you can then produce your answer to fit theirs. Like, are you
going to be intimate this time or distant this time? You may have sometimes
had intimate conversations, but this time you know something's been going
on with them and you also know that they might just say, to your "How are
you?" "Okay, " where, then, you don't want to start off telling them about
what's intimately going on with you. And of course there's a use of "How are
you?" on the stray chance that some topic will be found by reference to it. I
show that I have nothing much to say and might try to latch on to
anything you'll give me and make talk out of it. So the negotiations about
who does "How are you?" are to be watched with care, and also the series
of alternatives to its use which we perfectly well might think of as obliged.
That is, we want to think of a package of alternatives; not just that there's
a possibility of you doing "How are you?" first or they doing it first, but
there's a possibility of no one doing " How are you?" And these kinds of
considerations might give you an idea that you can look at these incredibly
nothing-happening beginnings of conversation and see really interesting
mechanisms going on.
Now there are a collection of lengthening techniques, i.e. , ways to extend
the conversation past an unsuccessful " How are you?" , i.e. , one that goes
" How are you?" "Okay how are you?" "Okay. " At that point we're still
 Lecture 5 205
nowhere, and neither wants to take this chance to produce a first topic - and
I've talked about reasons for not wanting to do a first topic, e.g. , you have
some news but it's not first-topic status news, and you don't want them to
think that's what you think is first-topic news. There is a topic that can go
after, say, an unsuccessful how-are-you sequence, that is a non-first-topic first
topic, and that has very similar features to "How are you?" in that it may
produce another topic - and that's in the first place the interest in producing
this one - and also it can be used for any conversation in which "How are
you? " can be used. It has separate features in that it is 'transitional' in the
specific sense that at pretty much any point into it, it can be dropped in favor
of something that happens to come up, whereas topics don't ordinarily have
that kind of character. The topic is the weather. I'm proposing that the
weather is a 'false first topic, ' and specifically a 'transitional' first topic. And
it is used in just the way "How are you?" is used, e.g . , if you say "What a
miserable day," that can do the same thing as answering "Lousy" to "How
are you?" And people can pick up on that, e.g. , "Yeah isn't it. Makes you feel
really crappy. " Yeah it does. I do. " "Oh, what's the matter?" Or, "Isn't it
glorious out! Just the day to go shopping. " "Yeah, let's do that. " I'm not
going to go on with further points about weather talk; I only want to notice
about the use of weather that its placing after a how-are-you sequence is
only after certain sorts of how-are-you sequences, and that its ends can be
very similar to the ends for how-are-you sequences, and that with the
weather we find something that we can really call a 'transitional topic, ' a
topic that is uninformative about what's on your mind and has 'exchange'
features, in that even people in fairly local juxtaposition can exchange
weather reports.
Let me tum to a topic of interest about the beginnings of begining
sequences, and that is that insofar as it seems plain that some signaturing or
typing of either a relationship or an interaction or both can be done
there - and not only such things as "Police Desk" or "Morgan, Paint
Division, " but also things like "Hello" "Jeanette" do some typing of the
relationship and perhaps the conversation they're going to have - one can ask
what sorts of relationships can be - perhaps should be - signatured right at
the beginning of a conversation; what sorts of relationships are interactionally
relevant in some way, over the course of the interaction. And that leads you
to look for things that are called 'types of relationships' to see whether they
can be made operative from the beginning of a conversation. Here is a
fragment which is of interest in that way. Jay enters a lunchroom where Sy
and George are eating:

-+jay : Alright s:Sy why d'nche [stop-

George : ( , �right.)
Sy : Where'v yuh been Jay, I haven' [seen y'fuh three, weeks.
Jay : -y'know, making,
-+jay : -making love tuh that chair over-over there,
206 Part III
-+-George : There 'e is, with iz psychedelic tie.
(pause)
Sy : Yeh(hh)hehh hh ((clears throat))
Jay : Yuh: : : , - - my good I- ((attempted Irish accent)) MY
GOOD IRriSH TAH YIHKNEOW,
(pause)
jay : So: : .
(pause)
Sy : All yih need now's a tietack tuh hold ih down when yuh,
have a date .
(pause)
Jay : Mm hm,

Jay's remark to Sy and George's remark to Jay constitute that they are
doing, that they have and are now engaged in, from the beginning, a
'joking relationship. ' That's not one of my made up terms, there's an
enormous anthropological literature on 'joking relationships. ' Considering
the productional aspects of it makes the thing kind of interesting. Jay is
arriving on the scene, and bringing off, on his part, that the joking
relationship can be used to start off, involves him in inspecting the scene to
find the sorts of materials he can employ to bring off a crack - as George is
in return doing the same sort of thing, inspecting Jay for what kind of
crack he can make. The gross point is that joking relationships may be such
a thing as not only involve an exchange of cracks between parties here and
there in the conversation, but involve people in bringing an orientation to it
to an interaction, such that they're starting off with that as a specific way of
getting into the conversation. We can then look for whatever types we
figure might exist and might be interactionally relevant, and see whether
there are some ways that those things are brought to bear at the beginning
of an interaction.
It ought to be noted about the above conversation that it takes place in the
cafeteria of a place of business, and that may be relevant to the doing of a
joking relationship. That is, if any of the parties were to approach each other
in the office, at their desks, with some business, they might not do this sort
of interchange. Now, there are no 'kin' relationship issues here, or anything
like that, and I'm not prepared to develop what about these people provides
for them finding themselves in a joking relationship, but I want to note that
there are some sorts of possible characterizations of a social-structural sort that
might be involved in that these people have a joking relationship, other than
that they happen to joke with each other.
I've made some suggestions about why someone might want to do a ' first
topic' and said that there are ways to classify some item as a 'real' first topic,
and I've mentioned such issues as the saying of some item before someone
gets a chance to say something else which might be troublesome for that item,
and things like that. I want to introduce another sort of consideration that is
involved. Here's the data:
 Lecture 5 207
Margy : Hello: : ,
Agnes : Hello Margy?
Margy : Ye: l s,
Agnes : 'hhh We do pai: :nting, a:ntiquing,
Margy : I(hh)s that ti;_ght.
Agnes : Eh!hh [ hhh: : : : :
Margy : hnh hnh hnh
Agnes : nhh hnh hnh! 'hh
Margy : 'hh
Agnes : -keep people's pa'r too: :ls,
Margy : Y(hhh)! hnh hnh
Agnes : I'm sorry about that that [I din' see t�·tat;- .
Margy : Oh: : : he d1dn t need 1t,

What's involved is something like this: Agnes' (the caller's) husband

borrowed a power tool from Margy's (the called's) husband, said he would
bring it back in a couple of days, and Margy's husband said not to worry
about it he wouldn't need it. And then he turned out to need it, called up to
get it back, and it was brought back. But having to make a request for a
return is altogether different than having the thing returned without a request.
There is in general a difference between requests and offers, a preference for
offers over requests, and people will go out of their way to get the other to
make an offer. And Agnes is plainly embarrassed that a request had to be
made, and wants to do an apology. The question is, how is she going to bring
that apology off?
If she can do it in such a way as to have the other committed to the
lightness of the issue before the other knows what the issue is, then she has a
way of bringing off the apology with a minimum of embarrassment for both.
If Agnes can get Margy into this topic in a giggly mood before Margy knows
that they're into this topic, then, e.g. , Margy won't prevent Agnes from
making the apology, and will be in a position of being committed to accept
the apology without making anything of it. And that's what she does here.
She gets Margy to be 'laughing along' before she knows that the list will be
extended to include reference to the power tool that Agnes will be apologizing
about.
Making it a first topic is not so much a matter of, say, getting it over with
then and there, but if it's a first topic then Agnes can control how it comes up;
she's able to design its presentation, whereas in the ordinary course of
conversation she may have to deal with it, without having control over how
it came up. It's not that she might not get a chance somewhere in the
conversation to bring it up just the way she wanted to, but that perhaps before
that point, a spot that stands as a 'natural' place for it to occur will have
occurred, and she won't get a chance to do it the way she wanted it. E.g. , the
conversation might be going along and Margy might mention people
borrowing things and never returning them, which gets said lots of times,
especially when such an issue is on someone's mind, and Agnes might be
208 Part III
saying "By the way I'm really sorry about that." (And if we find it hard to
empathize with the particulars of this conversation, we might imagine other
sorts of things that one can be embarrassed about, need to apologize about,
and that you would like the other to be in a good mood about before they
knew what you were doing, e.g. , " . . . and dent other people's fenders, "
" . . . and bring undercover agents to other people's parties, " etc.) So that's
another kind of basis for doing something as a first topic, i.e. , the one who
introduces it can control how it gets developed, whereas for topics routinely,
they are not 'introduced' but, e.g., affiliated to last topics.
Here's another issue. A way to see that you're doing 'content' kinds of
considerations, a conventional sort of semantics, would be to focus on a thing
like "Well I wanted to say I enjoyed your class so much," "I wanted to thank
you for inviting me to the party, it was lovely, " etc. , and give a discussion
involving that what that does is a piece of etiquette; specifically, that what
that does is to say something about the other event, etc. , rather than that what
such a remark does, and how come it's routinely placed at the beginning of
a conversation, is that it says 'whereas in our last interaction you were the party
who did the thankable thing, in this one I am. ' And indeed it's responded to
with "Well thank you. " So when people put in thank-yous at the beginning
of a conversation for events in a last interaction, they're bringing to the other's
attention specifically that last interaction and its relation to this, with this
interaction specifically as something they are doing. What you want to be
asking, then, is what are they doing in this interaction, rather than what are
they doing relevant to some other interaction. It's a parallel problem to that
when somebody says the sky is blue, saying they're making a remark about
the sky, rather than that they're doing something in this particular conver­
sation.
And these kinds of arguments partially would be used in making a case for
things like "Well I wanted to say I enjoyed your class this morning" as part
of the 'beginning section. ' That is, insofar as they, e.g . , involve part of the
procedure whereby who we are relative to each other is established, which
then sets up the talk that we can do. We are then in a position to see that this
is 'yet the beginning' although it's the 2 5th utterance. And then of course we
can get at the relative placings of these beginning-section items, where some
of them are movable down into the conversation and some are not, such that
if they're not done right there then they can't be done later. "Hello" is not
movable. And "I had difficulty getting you on the phone" goes at the start
and nowhere else. I haven't encountered a call where that gets put in later into
the call. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, but that has to do with the
fact that I don't know what it's doing. But whereas I used to figure that for
"Are you busy?" and "How are you?, " since both have to go immediately
after the greetings you could only do one of them, it turns out that each of
those items can be placed later on into the conversation; indeed, later on into
the conversation but still in its beginning. We want to see which, of a series
of items, are movable. And the issue of their relative placement is a real
research issue, e.g . , we see that greetings have high priority such that a person
 Lecture 5 209
will interrupt himself to do greetings, but it may be that that doesn't extend
to how-are-yous.
Now there's a bunch of things of which "Are you busy?" is the most
characteristic, which are beginning items, which announce that their user has
something to talk about. Routinely the caller does them, though occasionally
I've seen them done by the called in circumstances where caller calls with
specifically a one-topic conversation and called may then say "Are you busy?"
indicating that they have something to talk about as well. It need not be done
right at the beginning of the conversation, where you might well figure that
if you're going to use ' 'Are you busy?' ' you'd better use it right up front. And
it's not even guaranteeably part of the beginning sequence but can occur well
into a conversation, since it can say "There's something more I want to say. "
Indeed, it also has a status as a close offering in the sense that if it's answered
in the affirmative, then perhaps getting into a closing is obliged. And as a
'close offering' and a 'beginning' it serves to collect the following sort of
materials: "Are you cooking your dinner dear?" "I had just gone into the
kitchen to start it. ' ' Then the conversation can go on, and the one who asked
it in the first instance can then close by saying "Well I'll let you get back to
your cooking . " So they can save the answer that allows them to continue, for
use in closing later on.
And there's a neat difference between "Are you busy?" and "Am I taking
you away from your dinner?" apart from transparent sorts of things that the
latter can involve, e.g. , that I'm attending your schedule, etc. It has to do with
that if you say "Are you busy?" and the other says "No" then the formal use
of the item as a preface to something or as a close offerer is all that it can bear.
If, however, you say "Am I taking you away from your dinner?" and they say
"No, " you can treat the item as topically generative. You can, e.g. , go on to
talk about your dinner. So, we get a thing like the following, after an
exchange of greetings:

B: (This is Rhoda Blair.)

A: Well, howareyuh.
B: Fine, how are you.
A: Well just fine.
B: Were you eating?
( 1 . 0)
A: Some grapes, ehh [hheh heh!
B: heh!
B: I was just lookin' at mine,
A: ehh heh heh heh heh
B: It's so hot.

And here's another, at two and a half minutes into the call:

B: Are you cooking your dinner dear?

A: I had just gone into the kitchen to start it.
2 10 Part III
B: Uh huh. Well, I was hungry when I got home, an' I just finished
I mean my main - -
A: [[Yeah.
B: Uh - ­
B: -entree.
A: Mm hm,
B: And I'll have a little ice cream la[ter.
A: Yeh.
Now my feeling is that these sorts of things are used not merely when you
are signalling that you have something more to say, but to indicate that the
thing you have to say is something you planned to say, as compared to things
that happen to come up in the conversation. It may be that in such a way you
mark that an item is something you had as, say, a reason for calling, if not the
'reason for the call. ' This distinction between something that somebody had
in mind before they began a conversation and something that came up in the
course of it is a muddy one in lots of places. But forgetting about the perfectly
obvious instances where somebody says, right after "Hello," "Look, I called
to tell you something, " a way to see that there is a difference and that the
difference is attended turns on such materials as the offering of invitations in
conversation. Apparently people have ways of detecting that an invitation
that somebody offers, they decided to offer in the course of the conversation.
And a way that they can indicate that they see that is, not that they turn it
down, but, e.g. , as in the following fragment, they make a counter offer. This
call was only partially recorded, so we don't know how far into the
conversation they are:

B: . . . Monday?
A: Ye[ah
B: Yeah he usually comes home but that doesn't matter,
-A : Well you wanna come out and have lunch with me?
-B : No, let me take you to lunch, some [time.
A: OOOHHH! No. No
Come on. Come out uh uhh say you get out here 'bout uh
twelve thirty.
B: Twelve thirty. Don't fix very much though, I just 1- uh I eat
very light anymore, I'm tryina get slim.
A: Yea:h?
B: [[ hehh heh hh hh hh
A: You get slim, my heavens. You don't need to get any slimmah,

And another option, which we also see here, if the first one says "No, you
come here" one can say "Alright but don't fix much. " Whereas for
invitations that are heard to be planned before this conversation, you
absolutely wouldn't do that. If someone invites you for Christmas Eve dinner
you don't say "Don't fix much. " So they're plainly attending to 'interaction-
 Lecture 5 211
ally generated invitations' and 'invitations that generate an interaction' as
markedly different things which get different responses. Where, then, even
though the matter could be awfully muddy about some items, we can say that
a difference is attended, though it may not be attended everywhere.
 Part IV
Spring 1970

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 1 Lecture
Doing 'being ordinary'

Usually I start the course by doing what I do in the course, without any
programmatic statements, without any indication of why it should be of any
interest to anybody. But - and this may be unfair - the course will tum out
to be much more severely technical than most people could possibly be
interested in, and some good percentage will drop out, and usually that has
the consequence that they get nothing out of the class if they last one time. So
I decided to spend the first time telling people something that I take it could
hardly not be of interest to them. Then, when they drop out, they'd at least
have gotten what I figure would be worth the price of the course. And I guess
I should say if this isn't absorbing, you could hardly imagine how unabsorb­
ing the rest will be.
Now, this is in many ways nothing like the way I'll proceed throughout the
rest of the course. In the course I will be taking stories offered in conversation
and subjecting them to a type of analysis which is concerned roughly to see
whether it's possible to subject the details of actual events to formal
investigation, informatively. The loosest message is that the world you live in
is much more finely organized than you'd imagine. As well as that loose
message, there are some really specific things about how stories work and why
they work the way they do. I'll do that from next time on. But in this lecture
I won't be studying the organization of telling stories in conversation, and I
won't be attempting to prove anything. I'll be saying some things about why
the study of storytelling should be of interest to anybody. But people don't
have to stay around after that to have caught that message, and to have been
armed with some materials that would permit them to wander around
noticing things that they might not have noticed, and find them ghastly.
I've been studying the organization of stories, how they work, for some
time. And one sort of issue is, what do people make stories out of? In
particular, given what they might make stories out of, what do they make
stories out of? It wasn't of particular interest to me why anybody else should
be interested in such an issue, but the question arose and now will constitute
the business of this lecture: What sort of large-scale interest does what people
make stories of or what they don't make stories of, have? A good deal of what
I'll say has its obscure intellectual source (I say 'obscure' because if anyone
were to read the book it's not likely that they'd find that it says what I say,
but with some consideration they might see how it is that I owe what I'm
saying to this source) in a novel called Between Life and Death by a French
novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. The book is absolutely not assigned; I'm just
citing a debt.
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 215
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
2 16 Part IV
A kind of remarkable thing is how, in ordinary conversation, in reporting
some event, people report what we might see to be not what happened, but
the ordinariness of what happened. For whole ranges of things that you
might figure to be kind of exciting, something like this will be offered (the
following sorts of things are not made up but are actual) : Somebody
talking about a man they met the night before might say "He's very nice.
He's very very nice. " Or if they saw a movie they might say "It was really
good . " If they went away for a weekend, they say something like "We
went to Palm Springs. Bud played golf with the guys and I sat around the
pool with the girls. ' ' The reports do not so much give attributes of the
scene, activity, participants but announce the event's ordinariness, its
usualness. We might figure that lots of these things could be stories, but
they're not made into stories. And if you think of literature or poetry you
can perfectly well know that out of any such event as is passed off as "It was
a nice evening. We sat around and talked, " really elaborated characterizations
are often presented. So I've been wondering about the non-production of
stories.
Now I come to the central sorts of assertions I want to make. Whatever we
may think about what it is to be an ordinary person in the world, an initial
shift is not to think of an 'ordinary person' as some person, but as somebody
having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing 'being ordinary. '
It's not that somebody is ordinary, it's perhaps that that's what their business
is. And it takes work, as any other business does. And if you just extend the
analogy of what you obviously think of as work - as whatever it is that takes
analytic, intellectual, emotional energy - then you can come to see that all
sorts of nominalized things - personal characteristics and the like - are jobs
which are done, which took some kind of effort, training, etc. So I'm not
going to be talking about an 'ordinary person' as this or that person, or as
some average, i.e. , a non-exceptional person on some statistical basis, but as
something that is the way somebody constitutes themselves, and, in effect, a
job that they do on themselves. They and the people around them may be
coordinatively engaged in assuring that each of them are ordinary persons,
and that can then be a job that they undertake together, to achieve that each
of them, together, are ordinary persons.
The core question is, how do people go about doing 'being an ordinary
person'? In the first instance there's an easy answer: Among the ways you go
about doing 'being an ordinary person' is spending your time in usual ways,
having usual thoughts, having usual interests, etc.; so that all you have to do,
to be 'an ordinary person' in the evening, is turn on the TV set. It's not that
it happens that you're doing what lots of ordinary people are doing, but that
you know that the way to do 'having a usual evening' is to do that. It's not
just that you're selecting, "Gee I'll watch TV tonight, " but you're making a
job of, and finding an answer to, how to do 'being ordinary tonight. ' Some
people, as a matter of kicks, could say "Let's do being ordinary tonight. We'll
go watch TV, eat popcorn, ' ' etc. - something they know is being done at the
same time by millions of others around.
 Lecture 1 217
We can see, then, that it's a job. You have to know what anybody/
everybody is doing; doing ordinarily. And you have to have that available to
do. There are people who don't have that available to do, and who specifically
can't be ordinary. If, for example, you're in prison, in a room with no facilities
at all - say, it has a bench and a hole in the floor and a spigot - then you find
yourself doing things like systematically exploring the cracks in the wall from
floor to ceiling over the years, and you come to have information about the
wall in that room which ordinary people don't have about their bedroom
wall. It's not a usual thing to do, to say "Well this evening I'm going to
examine that corner of the ceiling. " Of course it may be that prison walls are
more interesting than other walls, since among the other things prisoners are
occupied with is leaving information on the wall that they've been there, so
there's things to read on the walls. But it's perfectly available to anybody to
spend an afternoon looking at a wall. You could choose to do that. If you take
drugs you're permitted to do that. But unless you take drugs you would not
find yourself allowed to do it, though nobody's around. That is to say, in
being an 'ordinary person, ' that's not a thing you could allow yourself to
spend the day doing. And there is an infinite collection of possibilities, of
things that you couldn't bring yourself to do; not out of boredom, though
that's one way you could formulate it, but in the midst of the most utterly
boring afternoon you nonetheless would rather live through the boredom in
the usual way - whatever that way is - than see whether it would be less or
more boring to examine the wall or to look in some detail at the tree outside
the window.
There's a place in Freud where he says, "with regard to matters of
chemistry or physics or things like that, laymen would not venture an opinion.
With regard to psychology it's quite different; anybody feels free to make
psychological remarks. ' ' And part of the business he thought he was engaged
in was changing that around, i.e. , to both develop psychology and educate
laymen, co-jointly. So that the laymen would know that they don't know
anything about it and that there are people who do, so that they would
eventually stop making psychological remarks as they stopped making
chemical and physical remarks.
I raise this because while we all can see that that's quite so, there's a related
and in a way much more interesting thing that I doubt we've noticed. If one
were to pick up the notebooks of writers, poets, novelists, you're likely to find
elaborated studies of small real objects. Like in the notebooks of the poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins there are extended naturalistic observations of a very
detailed sort, of, e.g . , cloud formations or what a leaf looks like, looking up
at it under varying types of light. And for some novelists what you have is
extended character observations. Now, my notion is that as it is for chemistry
and physics, so it is for making distinctive observations about the world and
its persons. That is to say, that's the job of novelists and poets and not an
ordinary person. It's just a thing that, in being ordinary, you don't do. For
example, considering the situation of the Palm Springs weekend described as
"I sat around the pool with the girls, " you don't get, from somebody doing
2 18 Part IV
'being ordinary, ' a report of what the wind did to the water in the pool, or
some character observations other than "She was nice, " "She was not so
nice, " "She's getting older, ' ' of the people with whom the afternoon was
spent.
And I think it's not only that one doesn't make the story but does perhaps
make the observations, it's that the cast of mind of doing 'being ordinary' is
essentially this: Your business in life is only to see and report the usual aspects
of any possibly usual scene. That is to say, what you look for is to see how any
scene you're in can be made an ordinary scene, a usual scene, and that's what
it is.
Now plainly that could be a job; it could be work. The scene doesn't in the
first instance simply present itself, define itself, as insufferably usual, nothing
to be said about it; it's a matter of how you're going to attack it, what you
are going to see in it, what you are going to see in it that you can say about
it. Plainly, people are monitoring scenes for this storyable possibility. I'll give
a gruesome instance of it, from a book called An Ordinary Camp by Micheline
Maurel. She reports the first day in a concentration camp. The first hours are
terribly horrifying, and then there's a lapse.

Little by little conversation sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors

were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We'll be
home soon. We'll have an unusual experience to talk about.

A way in which this event was dealt with while it was taking place - and
which, for an experience which might leave one utterly without hope, we can
see as wonderfully relevant for being able to survive it - was that in the end
it will tum out to have been a good story. And we've all experienced being
in scenes the virtue of which was that as we were in them we could see what
it was we could later tell people had transpired. And there are presumably lots
of things which, at least at some points in people's lives, are done just for that,
i.e. , it seems fair to suppose that there's a time when kids do 'kissing and
telling, ' that they're doing the kissing in order to have something to tell, and
not that they happen to do kissing and happen to do telling, or that they want
to do kissing and happen to do telling, etc., but that a way to get them to like
the kissing is via the fact that they like the telling.
It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they're in for their
storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome, overwhelming fact is that they
come away with no storyable characteristics, where presumably any of us with
any wit could make of this half hour, or of the next, a rather large array of
things to say. But that would take a kind of effort that could make one feel
awfully uncomfortable.
So, there's a business of being an 'ordinary person, ' and that business
includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects, so as to see how it is
that it's a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in
its usual 'nothing much' fashion, with whatever variants of banal character­
izations you might happen to use, i.e. , there's no particular difference between
 Lecture 1 2 19
saying "It was nothing much" and "It was outta sight. " That is to say, we've
all heard the usual characterizations of 'our Protestant society' or 'our Puritan
background, ' which involve that ordinary people/ Americans/Europeans are
built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences
that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of
repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i.e. , the Puritan
ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc. ,
which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in
Western civilization. Though that's manifestly important, it misses an
essential part of the thing, which is: Were you to have illegitimate experiences,
the characteristic of being an 'ordinary person' is that, having the illegitimate
experiences that you shouldn't have, they come off in just the usual way that
they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you
have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc. , you find that it's been the
usual experience that others who've done it have had. Reports of the most
seemingly outrageous experiences, for which you'd figure you'd be at a loss
for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened,
turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly
unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints - as
people report they're being removed - and our utter usualness, the ordinary
cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about
doing 'being ordinary. '
My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching
ourselves live in the world - or watching somebody else if that's more pleasant
- we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And
presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g. , the
ease with which - after practice - you see only the most usual characteristics
of the people passing (that's a married couple and that's a black guy and
that's an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your
girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there's
some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your
perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful
things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of thing would not explain
how it is that, e.g. , you can come home day after day and, asked what
happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you
concealing something, if it were reported it would turn out to be nothing
much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And
further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and
unknown costs, i.e. , if you come home and report what the grass looked like
along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of
which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be
some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it
routinely, then people might figure that there's something odd about you;
that you're pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose
friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have
checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.
220 Part IV
Now it's also the case that there are people who are entitled to have their
lives be an epic. We have assigned a series of storyable people, places, and
objects, and they stand as something different from us. It may be that in
pretty much every circle there's a somebody who's the source andj or the
subject of all neat observations, as there are for the society in general a
collection of people about whom detailed reports are made; reports that
would never, not merely be ventured about others, they'd never be thought of
about others. The way in which Elizabeth Taylor turned around is something
noticeable, reportable. The way in which your mother turned around is
something unseeable, much less nonreportable.
The question is, why in the world should it be that it's almost everybody's
business to be occupationally ordinary? Why do they take on the job - it's not
that others do it for them - of keeping everything utterly mundane? I'm not
going to answer that question, but I guess it has some diagnostic interest, i.e. ,
there are presumably a really large collection of what seem to be serious
changes in the world - changes in governments, economies, religions - that
would not change the business of being ordinary. Across such changes it is
enforced on pretty much everybody that they stay, finding only how it is that
what's going on is usual, with all their effort possible.
And it's really remarkable to see people's efforts to achieve the 'nothing
happened' sense of really catastrophic events. I've been collecting fragments
out of newspapers, about hijackings and what the airplane passengers think
when a hijacking takes place. The latest one I happened to find goes
something like this: "I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and
by the cabin I saw the stewardess standing, facing the cabin, and a fellow
standing with a gun in her back. And my first thought was he's showing her
the gun, and then I realized that couldn't be, and then it turned out he was
hijacking the plane . " And another; a Polish plane is in the midst of being
hijacked, and the guy reports, "I thought to myself we just had a Polish
hijacking a month ago and they're already making a movie of it. " And a
classically dramatic instance is that almost universally the initial report of the
Kennedy assassination (the first one), was of firecrackers.
Just imagine rewriting the Old Testament in its monumental events, with
ordinary people having gone through it. What would they have heard and
seen, e.g. , when voices called out to them, when it started to rain, etc. There's
at least one place in the Old Testament where that happens. Lot was warned
of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and given permission to bring his
daughters and sons-in-law out. ' 'And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons
in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place;
for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his
sons in law . " And they stayed behind.
Here I'm only giving specifically dramatic sorts of things, as compared to
seeing the interesting possibilities in an event that can also be seen to be
ordinary - which is really a much more fundamental kind of thing. And when
we start considering stories, at least one tack we can take is to treat the
overwhelming banality of the stories we encounter - in my data, in our own
 Lecture 1 22 1
experiences - as not so much something that, e.g. , allows for statistical
analysis of variation, or that makes them therefore uninteresting to study, but
as a specific feature which turns on a kind of attitude; say, an attitude of
working at being usual, which is perhaps central to the way our world is
organized.
Now there are enormous virtues to seeing the usual in a scene. It perrnits
all kinds of routine ways of dealing with it. Also, if you're dealing with an
utter stranger, e.g. , somebody in an approaching car when you're about to
cross a street, it seems to be awfully useful to know that what he sees, looking
at you, is the usual thing anyone would see, with its usual relevancies, and not
God only knows what. You do not, then, have to make an each-and-every­
time decision whether or not you'll be allowed the right of way. So, then, I'm
not saying let's do away with the ways in which we go about being ordinary.
Rather, if being ordinary is the sort of thing I'm suggesting it is, then we want
to know what importances it has.
 2 Lecture
Stories take more than one utterance;
Story prefaces
I'll be working with this utterly bland fact: Stories routinely take more than
one utterance to do. It's conceivable that one could come away from this
discussion thinking that that's what I'm asserting as the interesting thing. The
whole interest of what I say has to do with what's done with such a fact as that
a story takes more than an utterance to do. There is also the obscure issue of
how you come to find such a bland fact as can be made something of, where
there are lots of bland facts, bunches of which it might be difficult to make
things of. So it's not quite as bland as it may appear in the first instance.
Nonetheless the interest is in what's done with it, not its assertion.
The subject matter of the course is storytelling in conversation. A question
that one eventually comes to raise is: Although something may be callable a
'story,' is it recognizable as a story? Is it produced as a story? Specifically as a
story? And is there some relationship between its production as a story and its
recognition as a story? And why should it be produced and recognized as a
story?
For pretty much any object it turns out there are various things we could
call it. We want to know, not so much is some name correct, as how is it that
that name is relevant. And we know that the names that are assigned to
particular objects, or on particular cases, can matter for all sorts of treatments
of them. Now if, forgetting about conversation, I asked what is referred to
with the name 'story, ' what one would think of is some achieved historical
thing: ' 'An instance of a story is . . . ' ' and one might name a story or give a
story. And, for example, with that kind of attention what might then be
partially relevant to calling the thing a story is the way it ended, and one
might not at all focus on the kinds of problems that occur in conversation
when someone specifically tells a story. If, e.g. , some hearer didn't hear that
a story was being told he might cut it off before it came to an end, and then,
had you the intention of looking at the whole thing to decide whether it was
a story, and to use the end as one partial criterion, you might not have such
an end so as to decide it was a story.
The issue of the production of a story might involve that anybody's
determining that it is a story is relevant to its coming off as a story. If assigning
the name 'story' to some production is an issue, then it may be an issue not
just after the thing is done, but perhaps to the teller before he starts and
perhaps to the hearer somewhere early on into it. So we don't want to in the
first instance suppose that we can examine historical instances of stories to see
222
 Lecture 2 223
what the productionally or recognitionally relevant features o f it are. We also
want to know if it is relevant for a story's occurrence that, that it might be a
story is something that a teller projected. After all, a teller could tell what
might tum out to be a story without any specific attention to that he was telling
a story, and a hearer might perfectly well hear what's being presented without
hearing that it's a 'story. ' Is the fact that it might be a story something that
matters? I want to insist on that as a criterion of using the name 'story,' and if
it just otherwise happens to be that you could call it a story then it's of no
particular interest. We want to see: Is the fact that someone is telling a story
something that matters to the teller and the hearer? How can it matter, and
why does it matter, and of course when does it matter? We're assigning the
candidate name 'story' to something for which that name is provably war­
ranted, provably relevant to the thing coming off as a story. If it isn't provably
relevant then it's of no particular interest that it's a story or not.
So we have at hand the question: Does it matter that a story is produced
to be recognized and that it is recognized by its production? With that, we are
in a position to examine - not stories but candidate stories, to see whether it
appears that that matters. And we look for some way to find that it might
matter. What sorts of facts about candidate stories can be found, in terms of
which a demonstration of the relevance of that the thing is a story can be
done? And what I'm offering as such a fact is that bland fact that stories take
more than an utterance to produce. I want to devote some time to seeing what
that fact means. Why do they take more than an utterance to produce? And
why is it that if they take more than an utterance to produce, it's relevant that
somebody finds out that a story is being told?
In order to make something of the fact, some rules about conversation in
the first place are required. I'll deliver these in an informal fashion, and a lot
of what I say will be relatively obvious once it's been said. The question is,
why do stories take more than an utterance to produce - where the word
'utterance' is equivalent to a tum at talk. We want to look at some rules
having to do with turns at talk, and I'm going to give a general character­
ization of the rules regulating people's turns at talk in American conversation.
First of all, the rules regulating turns at talk are occupied with, have as their
business, preserving certain features for conversations that conversations have.
A central such feature is that exactly one person - at least one and no more
than one person - talks at a time. Now the rules regulating turns are a way
that that is brought off. And some of those rules are concerned with achieving
such a thing as: At the end of someone's tum, where, say, three or four people
are present, that somebody starts talking and not more than one person starts
talking, i.e. , the rules are, among other things, concerned with getting next
speaker selected.
And, again very grossly, there are two general sorts of rules which stand in
an orderly relationship to each other, i.e. , where the first is preferred over the
second in the first instance - though they have a more complicated relation­
ship. The first rule is that current speaker can select next speaker. And a routine
way that when some party stops another starts is accomplished, is that the patty
224 Part IV
who is stopping has selected a next from among the set of possible nexts. There
is a very large collection of particular techniques whereby one currently speak­
ing selects another - while one might think right off of using their name,
addressing them, that's hardly anything like a small part of the story.
The second general sort of rule for next-speaker selection is that a next
speaker self-selects himself. And the rule for that is essentially that the first
starter has rights to speak. Now obviously those rules have to be in some
orderly relation, i.e. , 'current speaker selects next' and 'next speaker self­
selects' are not equivalent options, or else the first would be systematically
undercut by the second. The second operates when the first hasn't been used.
And that poses a problem: When can it be determined that the first hasn't
been used? Can a party just keep talking indefinitely and as long as they
haven't selected somebody they keep going? Plainly that's not so, and the
question is, what sort of a 'when' is it that governs when somebody can decide
that they're going to start talking, no one having been selected?
Essentially the situation is that the completion of an utterance for transition
purposes, i.e. , for the possibility of a next starting, is available on what we
could call its 'next possible completion. ' And what I mean by 'next possible
completion' is that if you considered, say, roughly, an utterance as composed
of sentences, then if somebody has produced a sentence and has now gotten
into the second sentence, then, though you might have been in a position to
treat the completion of the first sentence as a first possible completion from the
beginning, if you hadn't done that and started talking there, you wait until
the next occurrence of a sentence end.
So the possibilities run in terms of sentences as the building blocks of
utterances, with the points of possible transition being at any next sentence
end. If you miss one and the speaker continues, then it's not free room to
interrupt him anywhere in that next sentence, but as that next sentence comes
to completion you get a next possible place to start - if he hasn't selected
anybody. If he has selected somebody, then the business of the selected party
is not to talk up as soon as he discovers he's been selected, but upon first
possible completion after the selection, i.e. , the next sentence ending after the
selection. The way that works to handle the two rules ('current speaker selects
next' or 'next speaker self-selects') is that if current speaker intends to select
a next then he's got to do it within the current sentence he's producing, or, not
having done it, he can be treated as not having selected, and somebody can
start up upon his completion. That is to say, he can't figure that he's going
to get a series of sentences to speak since he hasn't selected anybody. So you
have that second rule operating to constrain the length of utterances that can
be produced if only the first rule were considered. Current speakers don't and
can't go on talking indefinitely via not having selected a next speaker, and that
turns on that the second rule operates at any point of possible completion of
an utterance, which is, roughly, at sentence ends.
That is then to say that if you are planning to produce an utterance about
which you know that it's not going to take a sentence, it's going to take more
than a sentence, and you don't know how many sentences it's going to take,
 Lecture 2 225
then you face a problem. You can clearly, if you get the floor, produce a
sentence-length utterance. But at the first possible completion somebody can
start up talking, and if you haven't selected someone, then whoever wants to
can start up. And they then don't, say, at the end of their sentence-length
utterance, have to give the floor back to you; they can, e.g., select somebody
else to speak. You might find, then, that intending to tell in an utterance,
some bit of talk that lasts longer than a sentence, you can't do it, but that
others start up and they give the floor to others, and it takes a while before
you get a chance again. We could then imagine a situation in which, intending
to tell a story of, say, some n length, you would be dropping fragments of that
story into some conversation in which people are talking around, across,
through, your story. But storytelling doesn't work that way.
So the situation is, then: If, for conversation, the circumstance is that what
you can be assured of if you get the floor is that you can talk in everybody
else's silence for a sentence-length utterance, then how do you deal with a
situation where you want to talk for more than a sentence-length utterance?
How do you do that methodically? That is, you could obviously always get a
chance to produce utterances of indefinite lengths as long as nobody happened
to start up, and routinely, of course, people happen to talk for more than a
sentence in an utterance where it's not just that they didn't plan to, it's often
that they didn't want to. That is, they produce what they figure is a perfectly
good sentence-utterance, and, nobody having started talking, then they find
themselves 'continuing' so as, in part, to deal with the fact that a silence had
emerged - where, under the more general rule of the turn-taking techniques
we're dealing with, silence is a terrible thing. The turn-taking rules say that
somebody should be talking all the time; not more than one person, but
somebody. So a currently-completing speaker, finding no one's starting, may
make it his business to keep off silence by going on, and then may turn out
to produce much more than a sentence in his utterance though he did not
have that as a project.
Our problem is, how does one produce more than a sentence-length utter­
ance, as a project? An obvious kind of methodical solution would be if speakers
had some way, within the first sentence of some projected coherent piece of
multi-sentence talk, to say that they wanted to talk for more than a sentence.
And of course the kinds of solutions there are, are not the kinds of things that
anybody goes about inventing, but there are ways of doing it. I suppose the
simplest thing that would come to mind is that they say ' 'I'm going to talk for
more than a sentence" and then continue. That isn't the way things get done,
and there are lots of reasons why, but it is the case that when more than a
sentence is specifically projected, one does in some fashion signal that right off.
One doesn't exactly say that one is going to talk for more than a sentence, one
asks for the right to produce a more-than-a-sentence-long coherent bit of talk.
Now, involved in how you go about making the request is something like
this: Insofar as talk is going along in terms of planned one-sentence utterances
(which allows of course for more than one sentence utterances or less than one
sentence utterances) then, built into that system is a requirement - not as a
226 Part IV
matter of a rule that is enforced on you from the outside, but a rule that is
internal to the system - that everybody more or less must listen. Among the
reasons for that are, e.g . , on the one hand, any current sentence-utterance
might select you to speak next, and you have to listen to find out whether
you've been selected. Alternatively, you might find that, no one having been
selected, you're going to get a chance to self-select yourself, and to know when
you could start up if you're self-selecting, you have to listen. So, listening is
built into the willingness of parties to talk if selected, and to their interest in
choosing to talk if no one else has been selected. But that only holds when they
know that at any given sentence completion it might be their turn. If you lift
the requirement that it's possible that on the next sentence completion they'll
have to talk, then you're also lifting a basis for their listening. So if what a party
wants to do in producing a more-than-one-sentence coherent bit of talk is not
just to have a chance to produce it, but also to keep the others listening, he may
have to do more than announce that he wants to talk for a while; he may have
to have some way, in that first sentence that engages in saying ' 'I'm going to
talk for more than one sentence" to also say "and what I'm going to say may
oblige you, if you're going to talk after me, to have listened. " That is to say,
there may be ways of nonetheless building in a requirement to listen, for
somebody who is going to talk, not immediately but eventually. There may
also be ways of saying that what's going to be said will be interesting.
The two jobs I've introduced - saying ' 'I'm going to talk for more than a
sentence" and keeping people listening, where listening is otherwise only built
for one-sentence utterances - are both jobs that should be done in the first
sentence. If the first job fails, you may not get the chance to produce the
multi-sentence utterance; if the second fails, you may get the chance but lose
your audience. Now, how do you go about finding that you have a right to
talk and an audience? A way is to build such a first sentence-utterance that
will on the one hand arouse them and inform them that that's what you're
intending and that it may be interesting, and also will tell you at some point
that indeed it's okay and they're interested. The consequence of that is that
one produces, for what turn out to be stories, what I'll call a story preface. It
is an utterance that asks for the right to produce extended talk, and says that
the talk will be interesting, as well as doing other things.
At the completion of that 'interest arouser' if you like, one stops, and it's the
business of others to indicate that it's okay, and maybe also that they're
interested, or it's not okay, or they're not interested. If one looks at stories one
finds that prefaces of this sort are present. For example, there are sequences
with an initial utterance such as "I have something terrible to tell you"
followed by some other party saying 'say some more' via such specific obvious
technical things that can be done as "What?" which returns the floor to the
last speaker with an instruction to say some more. That is, a promise of
interestingness is made in this sort of thing, which doesn't tell it, and one
can, if one buys the sort of discussion I've offered, see, e.g . , why people
produce such things in the first instance rather than starting the story that
will turn out to have been "something terrible" and, e.g. , hoping to force
 Lecture 2 227
their way through over people's taking chances to talk - or taking it as a time
to rest.
So, two features of stories as extended coherent bits of talk are that they're
begun with a story preface by the teller, and on the completion of the story
preface a recipient of it indicates that he sees that a story is being ventured.
They do, e.g . , "What?" as compared to, e.g. , saying whatever they wanted
to say before the storyteller got a chance to start, where they might well have
had something they wanted to say before that, e.g., continuous with what was
going on before. But they either tell the storyteller to go ahead or tell the
storyteller that they're not interested ("Something awful happened to me
today," "Big deal"). This place is for acceptance or rejection of the request to
tell a story. And there are of course specific utterance types which simply
announce stories, e.g. , "You want to hear a story?" "You want to hear a
joke? ' ' etc. Others are designed with more or less the particular story in mind,
i.e. , "I have something terrible to tell you" is, while widely done, done only
for stories that it can preface.
Earlier we asked a set of questions: How is it that telling a story is relevant
to the talk one does? How is recognition that a story is being produced relevant
to the hearers? Why does the possible fact that a story is being told matter for
the telling of it? I think we developed kind of an answer to that set of questions,
which involves that if the talk you're going to do might take more than a
sentence to produce, then you need some way to get the floor for more than a
sentence, and story-preface building is one class of ways that you can accom­
plish that. And what that involves is that in order to get the floor for that
extended bit of talk, you take the floor and do something that involves giving
it away to get it back to tell the story. The fact that stories take more than an
utterance to produce involves that tellers should in the first instance see that
they're intending to tell a story, and that it might take more than a sentence to
produce, and, seeing that, they turn it into at least a two-utterance thing in
which they first say they're going to tell a story, get permission to do that, and
then tell the story. So it's a systematic occurring fact that stories, taking more
than a sentence to produce, turn out to take more than an utterance to produce.
And it's not that it just happens that they're taking more than an utterance to
produce by virtue of people's happening to talk in their course. If you look at
a story, it isn't just that somebody happens to talk up at some point in the
telling of a story; they are specifically invited to talk up, where plainly that
could be a problem in that having given the floor to others you might not get
it back. In storytelling you give them the floor to give it back to you. A sort
of orderliness, then, is not just that it takes more than an utterance to do,
i.e. , more than two people talk in its course, but that's specifically intended
by the teller and collaborated in by the recipient. Which is to say that the
recipient's talk at various places in the story is talk that deals with the
recognition that a story is being told.
We've talked about some coherent bit of talk, some number of sentences.
The question now is, how does it happen that the teller is able to show that
the story is over, and hearers are able to see that the story is over and can show
228 Part IV
that they see that the story is over? The usual constraint - next possible
sentence completion - doesn't hold. Everyone knows it's not going to be any
next possible sentence completion, it's going to be something else that tells
you that the story is over. How do tellers inform hearers what it will take for
the story to be complete? Again, you could imagine that they'd say "Now it's
over. " Among the things that wouldn't give a chance for is that the teller
could see that the hearer sees that it's over. If, among the things that a teller
could do is make it the business of the hearers to show the teller that they see
it's over, then they're building in motivation for hearers to listen.
It turns out that among the jobs of the story preface is that of giving
information about what it will take for the story to be over. And there's an
obvious rationality to putting information about what it will take for it to be
over, right at the beginning so that people can watch from there on in to see
when it will be over. Just taking the type of preface I've given you, "I have
something terrible to tell you," then in stories that have characterizing
adjectives like "terrible, " the business of such a term is not just to arouse
interest but to instruct hearers to use that term to monitor the story - when
they've heard something that it could name, the story will be over.
Apparently that is not only used to monitor the story, but to indicate that the
hearer sees that the story is over, i.e. , "I have something terrible to tell you,"
a bunch of talk, and then at some point, " Oh how terrible, " i.e. , some
utterance by a recipient that has something synonymous with the character­
izing adjective used, to say 'I see the story is over. ' And there are problematic
sequences which involve, e.g. , "Something really wonderful happened
today, " "No kidding, " Story. The recipient at various points in the story
goes, e.g. , "Uh huh, " "Uh huh," and after some "Uh huh" the teller says
"Isn't that wonderful?, " i.e. , you missed that the story was over. And a story
preface can be more specific than that something was terrible or wonderful,
e.g . , next time I will consider a fragment in which a story preface directs
the recipient to listen for something that could be 'news' on the radio or the
local newspaper. You can look at the parts of the preface, then, and
decompose it into a series of jobs that it has for the story as a sequenced
object. Of course this set of jobs of storytelling are specifically jobs of
storytelling in conversation, with no particular place in writing, radio, etc. ,
except for such issues as, e.g . , arousing interest. 1
1 Attached to this lecture is the following note:

The materials in this lecture were presented with an interest in accessability for the
hearerjreader, and are therefore in a crude form which does not reflect the state of
research on these issues. For more detailed consideration, see Pre-draft, chapters l
through 4, of Aspects of Sequential Organizati on in Conversati on.

The projected book did not materialize. The first chapter became obsolete as Sacks'
considerations of its materials and issues developed. Sacks distilled the remaining chapters into
a 1 2 -page draft entitled ' An initial characterization of the organization of speaker turn-taking
in conversation, ' which was later augmented and became 'A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking in conversation. '
 Lecture 3
Story organization; Tel/ability;
Coincidence, etc.

I ' m going to discuss in some detail a particular story. 1 The business of the
lecture will be to give some idea about what is involved in seeing how a story
works. I'll be talking about some types of organization and how they are
achieved in the story. Here is how the thing begins:

A: Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on
the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura
yesterday,
B: Mm hm
A: And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck.
B: Oh: : : :

An initial type of organization is that the story is fitted into what I'll call a
'request format, ' i.e. , the teller of the story tells it by virtue of using it as a way
to get some information which she asks of the other. She's requesting
information, and to get that information she has to tell the story. The story
will provide some information to the other on the basis of which the other can
satisfy the request or announce that she can't satisfy the request.
Fitting the story into a request format, telling it by virtue of the request for
information that the telling permits the resolution of, does some sorts of jobs
for the teller and imposes some sorts of jobs on the recipient. One transparent
job that it does for the teller is to provide an occasion for telling the story, i.e. ,
the story has to be told to give the recipient that information whereby the
recipient can satisfy the request. It's not just being told as 'here's an interesting
story do with it what you like,' but 'here is a story I'm telling you so that you
can then tell me something. '
Now one thing involved in the use of the request format for this story is
that the teller, in using it, will have indicated that she's done some
determination of who it is she's talking to, which determination allows her to
figure that the other might have the information she wants. Now I have to
give some information that's not in the story itself. The teller and recipient
live in Santa Barbara, and it's from there that the teller went to Ventura and
to there that the teller was returning when the accident took place. The

1 Attached at end of this lecture.

2 29
2 30 Part IV
reClptent, living in Santa Barbara is, then, local to that area in which the
accident took place and might have been reported, such that if this thing were
in the newspaper or on the radio she would have been able to have heard it.
And it's by reference to that that the recipient has been selected to hear the
story via a request about an instance of 'possible local news. '
It's perfectly imaginable that the story itself, of the seen accident, could be
told to somebody who was not local to Santa Barbara, but if it were told to
such a one, then the use of such a request would be senseless, or just not occur.
The request for information is designed for somebody who's been identified
by the teller as somebody local to where the event took place, and in that way
it can be seen to have been designed for the recipient, for some identification of
the recipient. And the use of the request tells the recipient that in some way
the storytelling has been designed for them, for an identification of them that
the teller knows. We will see that it is utterly routine for stories, that tellers
have ways of showing their recipients that the telling of the story is done with
an orientation to who it is being told to. In this case, at least the request is used
to do that.
Producing the story within the request format has other interests, some of
which were partially developed last time: In producing the story via a request,
a basis is given for the recipient to listen to the story. That is, it's now the
recipient's business to follow the story so as to be able, on recognition of its
completion, to satisfy the request; to say "Yes I heard about it" or "No I
didn't hear about it. " And also, as I mentioned last time, it provides that the
recipient is able to listen so as to know when enough has been presented to
decide that they can or cannot satisfy the request, i.e. , to decide when
something that could conceivably have been 'local news' has been told. It's of
interest that the information presented in the story is usable by the recipient
even though the recipient didn't hear the story on the radio or read it in the
news. It might be one sort of a problem for the recipient if what they had to
do was simply to see if they'd heard the story, then when they recognize it
they can say "Yeah I heard it" as compared to if they haven't heard it, how
do they know when it's been told? But the recipient here is able to say at some
point "No I haven't heard that, " i.e., to at least indicate that they recognize
that the candidate news event has been adequately presented, which is in part,
then, to recognize that what was proposed to be a possible news event was a
possible news event, since it could be recognized independently of having
found it in the news.
Now that request format is an altogether independent rype of organization
from the organization of the story itself. The request could be used to do other
things than telling a story, and, as well, other ways of getting to tell a story
could be used. One could then collect various other ways that things like
indicating that I designed this story's presentation for you, why you should
listen, what you should do when the story is over, etc. , are done. Some of
them, like the request, congeal those jobs in a specific technique, as compared
to those things being separately dealt with. But we can say about this request
format as it's used here, that it specifically is designed for interactional aspects
 Lecture 3 23 1
of the storytelling, i.e. , as between the parties the jobs they should do, etc . , for
each other.
Now to say that it's independent is not to say that it has no relationship to
the story that's being told. There are ways in which the sort of request made
may effect the way that a story is told, or what's told in the story. The sort of
thing that I mean is, if the request is with regard to a 'possible news story, '
that sets some restraints on how the story is to be reported so as to be
recognizable as a story that might have been reported on the radio. She might
tell the story about the wreck she witnessed in such a way, say by reference to
the kind of experience it was for her, as to not permit the one who heard about
it on the radio to see that this was the story they heard on the radio. But she
also might, as she does here, locate such things as approximately where it took
place, that there were some deaths, etc. , which can be used by the hearer to
compare to some story she might have heard. Doing it as a request by
reference to its possible news status can, then, effect the story that's being told.
Told in some other format, the story might be presented in quite a different
way, e.g., without the somewhat objective information being included within
it. She might well tell the story of the wreck in terms of the way in which the
glass was patterned on the freeway macadam and what that did to her, which
wouldn't particularly give a hearer such information as would allow them to
say "Yeah I heard about that on the radio , " by virtue of the fact that they
don't report stories on the radio that way. And it needn't be as far out as
that - if that's far out.
A second type of organization that the storytelling contains is that the story
materials, i.e. , the wreck, are fitted into some course-of-action report of the
teller's circumstances. What we have is that the story events are fitted into talk
which deals with a course of action that could be reported independently of
telling this story or any story. The course-of-action parts of it are: "Ruth
Henderson and I drove to Ventura" . . . "on the way home" (we saw a
wreck) . . . "We were parked there for quite a while . . . "I was going to listen
to the local news and haven't done it" . . . "I was listening to the blast off, you
know, the astronauts. " That is to say, there's a series of teller actions which
are in some ways a sequence, which bounds the story.
Obviously the wreck could be reported apart from the presentation of this
course-of-action sequence the teller employs, and that course of action could
have other features to it than the ones reported. That is, it begins with ' 'Ruth
Henderson and I drove down to Ventura" but it could presumably begin
somewhere else in some course of action that the teller was engaged in. She
could make a long story of it, e.g . , that a week ago we decided to go to
Ventura and we were going to go Thursday morning but it turned out we
couldn't because Ruth had another appointment come up that morning and
instead I did this and that . . . and then finally get around to "so we drove to
Ventura yesterday, " and then what we did in Ventura, etc. Or it could begin
with "we were driving up the freeway and saw the most goshawful wreck. "
And it could end in various sorts of places, assuming that a teller-course-of­
action is being employed to give that sort of organization to it.
232 Part IV
But the course-of-action organization has a great deal to do with the kind
of coherence the story has, i.e. , that we're still within a course of action at
various places, such that, e.g. , saying "on the way home" is a way for the
teller to require of the hearer that they've kept in mind that she had gone to
Ventura. That is, the course-of-action organization involves employing a
technique which makes it obligatory on the hearer, if they're going to
understand the story, that at each point that a new feature in the course of
action is introduced, they organize that new feature by reference to what
they've already been told about where she is, what she's doing, etc., because
the later parts in the course of action are not done in such a way as to bring
one up to date with the earlier parts. It's not said, "Ruth Henderson and I
drove down to Ventura yesterday and on the way home from Ventura
yesterday we saw this wreck. . . etc. . . . and when I got home from going to
Ventura with Ruth Henderson yesterday and having seen the wreck . . . etc. "
But those sorts of things are done in such a way as to make it the business of
the hearer to keep in mind the sequential status of what's being said. The
hearer's business, then, is not to be listening to a series of independent
sentences, but to a series of connected sentences that have that connectedness
built in such that it is required for the understanding of any one of them.
And a course-of-action telling is a perfectly routine way to do such a job of
requiring that if you're going to understand it at the end you've got to keep
in mind what's been told earlier. The story is thereby built in such a way that
it is coherent if you do that and isn't coherent if you don't.
Let me just note a sort of thing that might be so, and is checkable out. A
course-of-action report will not involve that at any point in the course of
action the story is likely to come up, but at some point in the course of action
the story is likely to come up. What I'm saying is that the phrase ' 'and on the
way home" says 'right now the story is about to come, ' i.e. , that sort of a
phrase will not be used in a story unless the story is going to come then. And
you will routinely find that in the most abbreviated form of a course-of-action
report, it will go "On the way home from work this afternoon . . . " And if
there is some rather long presentation before the story, then 'on the way
home" is one way of saying 'listen now, the story is about to come. ' That has
to do perhaps not only with a convention that "on the way home" is the way
you do it, but in part by virtue of the fact that "on the way home" is
otherwise nothing to report. "On the way home nothing happened. " I don't
know if that's so. It seems to be so, but it may not be.
I'm going to say more about this course-of-action organization, particularly
with respect to its relationship to the story of the wreck. But first I'd like to
tum to the story of the wreck itself, then we'll come back. I want to argue that
the story that's told is found, and that an appropriate story has been found to
tell, of the possible stories that could be told. Also, that regardless of the fact
that she tells the story as something witnessed, one doesn't want to think that
it's told by virtue of its being witnessed, and that what she witnessed is what
she told, and what she told is what she witnessed. It turns out that that sort
of argument, which needs to be made in general, can be made rather nicely
 Lecture 3 233
for this story. I t has importances which involve that if what happened was
that from the things she could have made a story of, she found what she
should have made a story out of, then we can see that of the possible events
there are specific 'storyables' which will rum out to matter for, e.g. , how the
story events are then characterized.
My argument is briefly this. If we read the thing over we can see that she
in fact encountered a wreck aftermath, i.e. , she came upon an occurred auto
wreck. She didn't see an accident, she saw an accident aftermath. She doesn't
tell the story of an accident aftermath. She tells the story of an accident.
Indeed, she has to do a bunch of work to make the story a story of an accident;
work involving, e.g. , that she constructs how the accident could have
happened - that one car hit a car and then another car hit that one. Now she
could perfectly well, if she were telling what she witnessed, tell a story about
a wreck aftermath. But on the one hand, wreck aftermaths are not particularly
news stories - maybe in the human interest section of a newspaper you'd have
stories about the aftermaths of wrecks - and on the other hand she doesn't
particularly seem to notice that what she told is a wreck-aftermath-used-to­
find-the wreck story. Seeing the wreck aftermath she looks for the story of the
wreck. Encountering the scene of the smashed car and the bodies, she's not
looking for what is it that, coming on this thing now, is of interest with regard
to its state now. Her mind is so organized that she knows that what's to be
found is the story of a wreck, even though she didn't see the wreck happen.
And she looks at the scene in front of her to find how it took place, and tells
that.
It can then be seriously said that she finds the story. And that she needs to
do some work to find the story. That is, coming on some scene which was a
story a moment ago, you may be told "you missed all the excitement" and
walk away with really nothing to see and tell about it, though having come
a moment earlier you would have had a story to be told. But what she's able
to do is to tum the coming-a-moment-afterwards into a chance to nonetheless
have a story to tell; that story being the story of the wreck itself. So when we
want to move to suggest that the story is put together by her, we have this
kind of initial information: That she had to find it, and that she found, not
what was available then and there in terms of what's happening now, but
what, from what's available now, can be gleaned about what happened. And
that plainly should be a natural sense of 'working to make the story. '
We could then ask, is it perhaps the case that in finding the story of the
wreck from the scene of the wreck aftermath, she's finding what is tellable in
what she saw. There may then be some collection of findable stories such that
one exhibits, e.g. , some sorts of competence at observing the world when one
correctly finds one of such stories, even if one has to find it as compared to
saying "I saw this great wreck aftermath, it was among the more interesting
wreck aftermaths I've ever seen. " Where, though people collect wrecks, it
doesn't strike us that people collect types of wreck aftermaths. And we can
start, now, to see that reliability is restricted such that there are reliable parts
of events. And we can begin to get an idea, then, about how it is that not
234 Part IV
anything is a story, and that people don't figure anything is a story, and see
that even in a scene where there is a story, it's not just any story that could be
made out of it. In some ways, then, we get to the theme of the first lecture;
at least in terms of the restricted storyability of the world under a competent
viewing of it. Plainly enough somebody could tell an interesting story about
a wreck aftermath. Plainly enough it's not much done. And whereas it takes
seemingly no work to have seen the wreck in the wreck aftermath, it would
take special work to see the wreck aftermath in the wreck aftermath.
Let me make a passing remark having to do with just the course of making
findings about such sorts of things. I'd been working on this story for a year
and a half before I happened to notice that in fact she didn't see the wreck,
and to see that she had found the wreck story in the wreck aftermath. I'd been
focussing on the story as a witnessed story - which indeed it is, but it's
witnessed in a different way - and the obviousness of the wreck story is such
that even with rather extended, careful observation it just wasn't noticed, at
least by me.
Now I want to say some things about the way the story works. There are
several sorts of problems I want to deal with. One of them concerns the
descriptors in the story, i.e. , the talk about the bodies "laid out and covered
over on the pavement, " and of "the worst wreck I ever saw," "I never saw
a car smashed into such a small space, " etc. What sort of work would they
pose for the recipient in dealing with them, and correlatively, how does the
sort of work they pose for the recipient pose work for the teller?
It might at least be a kind of mildly interesting fact to consider that
recipients can apparently decide that a story was correctly told without having
to go out to reobserve something the story reports, to see that that was the
way to have observed it so as to tell the story that it contains. We might at
least imagine that a recipient is given some description of what happened, and
in order to know whether that's what happened they would have to see if they
could themselves see what happened, and that what they themselves saw was
what it proposes. But we know that no such thing needs be done; that instead,
a recipient hearing some description can see that 'it must have been like that,'
and given some other description can figure, and sometimes assert, 'that isn't
the story. ' I have materials where, in the first minute of conversation between
strangers, some report being presented, the recipient will say "You're lying,"
where all they've been given is that report. That is to say, recipients do not feel
at the mercy of the teller for what the world is about. And apparently tellers
need to employ ways to produce a story that is recognizably correct, or at least
possible.
Again we are returning in a way to the observable story, the possible story
in the event. Now, instead of thinking of the descriptors in a story as things
that simply happen to be so, that the teller saw and that the recipient has to
deal with by deciding that it's logically so or not, or by reserving judgement
in that they weren't there, we might think of them in another way. And that
is, that what a teller presents as a descriptor, a recipient can use as an
assessable criterion for deciding whether any such thing happened. We can
 Lecture 3 235
then begin perhaps to get at the kinds of ways that descriptions might be put
together, and that recipients make determinations. So, a presented description
is dealt with by its recipient as something to use to decide whether a correct
story is being told. It may contain information about the competence of the
teller to say what he says, e.g. , by being utterly conventionalized in the sense
that he says such a thing as anyone knows happens - whether it happened or
not is another question - or by some other sorts of means.
And I'll talk a bit about some other sorts of means that are used in stories,
and in this story, for the teller's bringing off a competence to have observed
a wreck that is a tellable. There are a series of measures used in the story, e.g. ,
the size of the car in the wreck ("I've never seen a car smashed into such a
small space") and, e.g., some way of referring to the duration of the traffic
jam that ensued ("We were parked there for quite a while"). Now what I will
suggest is that what those things are, are terms from types of measures that
people employ, in the employing of which they can exhibit their competence
at observing scenes . They are types of usualness or normalness measures. Each
such term comes from a package of terms which are specifically used to
characterize a scene so as to say that the scene was as it usually in, or that it
wasn't what it usually is but some variant of what it usually is. And what
the terms report are large variances and small variances, where the specific
thing that constitutes what it 'usually' is, is something that is presumably
known by the recipient, so that they can see that a usualness measure is
being employed.
That is to say, there can be various ways to characterize how long you were
stopped in a traffic jam - "just for a second, " "seemed like hours," "quite a
while, " and various things like that. When you pick one of those instead of
saying, e.g. , "We were stopped there for 2 5 minutes," then what you're
doing is involving the other in appreciating that the how long you were
stopped there was known by reference to how long people are stopped at
various sorts of traffic jams. And when you say the car was "smashed into such
a small space" what you've done is to pick a way of characterizing the impact
of the accident in terms of observations people have presumably made about
how accidents affect cars. So by virtue of the fact that you employ these
usualness measures, you're asserting that you know how to watch wrecks.
And by virtue of the fact that the other is figuring out what you're telling
them, they will have been required to also employ such sorts of information
such that they can see that you're possibly competent at observing wrecks. It's
not like you're telling the story of the first wreck you've ever seen, and are
now seeking out ways to characterize it. That you know how to characterize
a wreck is something you can show from the way you describe one, and if you
show that you know how to describe one, then the recipient can take it that
you've possibly correctly characterized this wreck.
That is to say, it' s perhaps not incidental that one doesn't get a 'more
precise' characterization of how small a space the car was smashed into, or
how long we were parked there. It is, in a fashion, better to not use those
'more precise' characterizations, which can be equivocal in the sense of is that
236 Part IV
a long time for a wreck or is that a small space for a car? Instead what one does
is offer the product of what can be seen to have been specifically done as an
educated analysis, and thereby be seen to have been done by someone who
knows how to look - if it's told to someone who knows how to hear. So that
this possible 'vagueness' of the report - "quite a while," well how long was
it? - is not a defective kind of vagueness but is the way to show that you
measured the thing in an appropriate way to measure, e.g . , being caught in
a traffic jam.
I want now to start to focus on some ways that various parts of a
storytelling other than the reported storyable itself, e.g . , the course of action
parts of it, are designed for the story that is put into them. What I'll
particularly focus on is "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura
yesterday. " Now that needs to be seen as at least possibly something put into
the report by virtue of the story it begins, as compared to how what Ruth
Henderson and she were doing would be conceived of for some other story,
or for no story, but, say, the event projectively. That is, two sorts of things are
involved. One is that when she and Ruth Henderson were deciding what they
were going to do, then it may be that 'driving down to Ventura' was not the
way they formed up the project of the day. What they figured they were
doing might have been something altogether different. They might have been
'going shopping, ' incidentally to Ventura; 'going to visit' someone who
happened to live in Ventura; 'spending a day together' and ending up in
Ventura; 'going to Los Angeles' but the weather got lousy so they stopped in
Ventura, etc. And, however they projected what they were going to do, when
they did it or until the story came up it need not have been that what we did
was to 'drive' down to Ventura, i.e. , they might not have particularly focussed
on that they were 'driving. ' Of course they were driving, but that wasn't part
of the way that they conceived the event they were doing.
The other sort of thing is, it's equally well relevant that however they did
project the day, however they did describe the day until they came upon the
accident, it's a way to have projected a day or to describe a day, independent
of the accident, i.e. , "Well let's drive down to Ventura" or "We drove down
to Ventura. ' ' And it's terribly useful in the telling of the story that "drove
down to Ventura" gets said - both that we went down to Ventura and that
we drove down, because while a course of action is being delivered that comes
off as kind of independent of the story that then happens, it sets up where the
event took place, i.e. , on the freeway or something like the freeway between
Ventura and Santa Barbara - which never has to be said in the storytelling.
Saying "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura, and on the way home
. . . " locates where the thing took place.
Now there are ways in which both those sorts of facts matter. For one, we
will find in due course that a massive economy is achieved in stories. What this
involves is that parts are put in for use with regard to the particular story,
where, then, some of them may be characterized in one way in one story and
in another way in another story. And what one absolutely doesn't have is that
if a story contains a sequence, then if you were to have stopped events at any
 Lecture 3 237
point in the actual sequence, the reports of the events to that point would be
as they are in the story. Instead, you can see in stories that while a sequence
is employed, that sequence sometimes could not have been known by the
teller in the way they report it, and other times they could have known it but
then again they might not at all have thought of it that way.
A sort of thing I mean is that you often get things like the following. In
telling the story of a missing car a fellow reports, "I came outside and my car
was gone. At first I thought somebody must have stolen it. But then I realized
that it was towed away. " Now I want to suggest that at least two aspects of
that, "at first I thought" and "then I realized, " are not sorts of things as
report how it is that the person understood the events taking place when they
were taking place. Instead, when somebody says "at first I thought" or even
just "I thought, " then that's routinely used to say 'it turned out I was wrong. '
And on the other hand, when they say "I realized, " it isn't as though, upon it
occurring to them, they knew they were right. What they're saying is 'I
thought this next, and then found out I was right, ' i.e. , they called up the
police, asked Did you people take away my car, the police said Yes, and they
went down and there it was. So that the terminology is terminology for the
story in which the events have already happened. The terminology is set up for
the way in which it turned out to happen. And you can specifically tell crazy
stories by making rather small modifications, like by saying "at first I thought
X and I was right, ' ' or "I realized X and turned out to be wrong. " And in this
story we have something like that, when she says "I was going to listen to the
local news and haven't done it. ' ' When she says "I was going to listen" you can
be sure that she'll say that she didn't. You don't get reports, unless they're
slightly odd, which say "I was going to listen to the radio and I did . "
Sq there are lots o f parts o f stories which, while they're placed in a
sequence, bear a needing-to-be-determined relationship to what anybody
would have or might have reported as events were occurring. They're not a
narrative characterization of reality, the narrator telling the story, e.g . , into a
tape recorder on a day as he's going along, and now simply replaying it in,
say, a capsulized version. And plainly "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to
Ventura" is a lot of use in the story. It tells you where and when the accident
took place, at least in a somewhat sufficient way.
Now the following may or may not come off right. I give it in part for
methodological purposes, and it has a kind of weird status to it. There's a
phenomenon that's utterly familiar to us that the foregoing materials bear on.
The phenomenon is that for some stories that happen to a person, in thinking
about it, telling about it, etc. , they come to see and say such things as "Gee
isn't that a coincidence that that happened. " Things like "I hardly ever go to
Ventura, isn't it coincidental that the day I went there, there was a hurricane! "
or "I hardly ever go to Ventura, you hardly ever g o to Ventura, isn't it
coincidental that on the day I went, you went, and we met." We know of all
kinds of stories in which, what it turns out is that participants to it see a
striking coincidence. I want to see if we can get at the beginning of an answer
to how we come to see these coincidences. The interest in the beginning of an
238 Part IV
answer is not so much in whether it's an answer - I don't have any idea
whether it's an answer - but in some way that the answer is built.
A reason for bringing this thing up now is that it's at least my suspicion
that a possible such 'remarkable coincidence' is in the offing in this story
though it doesn't come out in this conversation, where that possible
'remarkable coincidence' underlies the search that's going on, perhaps, on the
part of the teller. And that is, to find out who died in the accident. The reasons
have roughly to do with 'local news, ' and the way in which people see
freeways. That is, the accident having happened near Santa Barbara, it can be
imagined by her that, as she was "on the way home" to Santa Barbara, so,
too, were the people in the accident. Now, even though people on the freeway
could be going anywhere, there are places where one figures that people on the
way to some particular place are. That's specifically observable. Simple
enough evidence for that is, e.g . , on a Saturday afternoon if you're on the
Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, you can look into the next car and
say, "Looks like everybody's going to the ballgame. " People you don't know,
in another car, are seen to be going to some specifiable place by reference to
things like where they are on the freeway, and other things like their age, etc.
But people attend freeways in part by reference to where people are going on
them, and they can make guesses about it.
So if the accident happened near Santa Barbara, then it's possible to her
that it happened to somebody who lives in Santa Barbara, and that then sets
up this great possible coincidence, i.e. , that she was a witness to the wreck in
which somebody she knows died. And that's perhaps the thing to tell and
think about, ' 'Oh my God, there I was at the wreck in which so-and-so died. ' '
So the discussion about coincidence, while it doesn't wholely turn on what we
absolutely know happened here, bears on what might be going on here.
I want now to suggest a series of possibilities, and again, the texture of the
argument is of neat possibilities, not of anything sure. We've at least asserted
that things like "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura" are
characterizations built for this story in some independence of whether they
were projected - i.e. , what they, beforehand, thought they were going to do
- or what they conceived they were doing while they were doing it. A
possibility is - and this, I think, is something we could work out rather
sharply - that although people design large parts of stories for the story they
know to have happened, independently of the way they'd conceived any part
of it on its partial occurrence, they don't know that they do that designing.
They're not aware of designing the parts for the story.
So, for example, they design it in an extremely economical way, i.e. , the
story is extremely spare. Any parts put in can be used by a listener to find
what further is going to happen. Nothing is just mentioned.
Let me say something about spareness. In a beautiful discussion of it
having nothing to do with storytelling in actual conversation but having to do
with conventions in fiction, particularly in theater, in a book on Gogol by
Nabokov, he's talking about one of the things that Gogol did to Western
literature. And that thing is that before Gogol, if, when the curtain rises,
 Lecture 3 239
there's a gun o n the mantelpiece, you can be sure the gun will g o o ff before
the end of the play. Or if one of the characters says at the beginning of the
play, "I wonder what happened to Uncle Harry, he's been in Africa all these
years, " you can be sure that Uncle Harry will turn up. That is to say, that's
an aspect of the spareness of the theater. Now what Gogol did was to
introduce characters into his fiction who were mentioned in a paragraph and
never appeared again. And if we think of the development of the literature of
the absurd, then part of it is that sort of de-economizing, where events occur
that have nothing to do with anything except that they occur, and you can't,
then, latch onto anything to know if you take good account of this - e.g . ,
taking a detective story as an idea - then i t will matter. And i f you watch
stories in conversation, at least for the people whose stories I study, then that
economy phenomenon remains and has enormous usage in the telling of
stories.
So we have this designed economy which is, however, unknown to the
teller who does not see that he's constructing the parts by reference to the story
he's telling. What happens is perhaps something like this: Consider, e.g. , the
people who meet in Ventura, where "I never go to Ventura and you never go
to Ventura, and here we are in the same place, isn't that amazing. " Again, for
each of them, until they meet in Ventura, neither of them particularly
conceive that they were 'going to Ventura; ' one was going one place, one was
going someplace else. When they meet what happens is that the strangeness
that they find turns on the formulation of their mutual projects as 'alike'
although they didn't figure that they had such alike mutual projects. And
again, they don't even see that what they did was to formulate them so as to
have them alike.
So there's this organized economy without any specific knowledge that
that's what's being done. Such that when a story comes off, and it has an
observably marked organization and economy, the very teller can be struck by
that. What the teller sees is " My God look how elaborately elegantly
organized this is" - but not how 'this story' is, but how its events are. Seeing
that, he can be struck by "Isn't that oddr ' that it all came out so neatly. And
that will have turned on that the organization is achieved by him without his
seeing that that's what he was doing. Seeing the product of the organization,
what he notes is that gee, it's extraordinarily organized; by virtue of the fact
that he had no idea that he organized it. And then he can be struck by the
coincidentality of the fact that its parts fit together so nicely.
So the argument is something like that the observed coincidentality of
stories turn on that they're designed for an organized economy for some
purposes; that that design is unseen by the designer; that the designer however
can perfectly well encounter its organized economy and be struck with it; and
that that's what they're then puzzled by. Now I said that the form of the
argument is interesting. What I mean by that is that if you took the initial fact
that people are sometimes struck by the coincidentality of stories, of the stories
they are participants in, and asked how does that happen, then you would be
led to think, I think, about why people are interested in coincidences, see
240 Part IV
coincidences etc., rather than to, as I did, not be focussing at all on that, but
to be engaged in the construction of something altogether different, i.e. , the
design of story parts to do a range of jobs which ends up providing that
they have a striking economy, an economy that the doer doesn't see that
he's done.
To put it another way, one of the things that Irvine people spend a lot of
time doing in social science is building models. Among the ways that people
go about building models is to start with a product and then try to find how
that product was achieved, where it's the achieving of that product that the
machine is designed for. And there are those who do it rationally or
irrationally, but the basic focus is that starting with the product you go
backwards and try to build a machine that does that. As a kind of a counter
strategy, suppose something like this: Most of the things that we treat as
products, i.e. , the achieved orderliness in the world of some sort, are
by-products. That is, there is machinery that produces orderly events, but most
of the events that we come across that are orderly are not specifically the
product of a machine designed to produce them, but are offshoots of a
machine designed to do something else or nothing in particular. And it stands
to reason in a way, that if there are some number of machines and some
number of products, then by and large we're not going to find things that are
indeed products, but things that are probably something else.
It's a much weaker kind of assumption, to suppose that most of the
orderliness we ever encounter is by-product orderliness rather than product
orderliness. Then let's see if we can build by-product machines, i.e. , machines
that explain something but had no particular interest in explaining it. As, for
example, when I set about to explain why stories take more than one
utterance to produce, perhaps I could have built a model that had as the
specific project of the machinery, getting more than one utterance in a story.
Instead, the model that was built had no particular interest in that; it had an
interest in preserving something else, and as an offshoot of that, it achieved
this. And the same thing goes for coincidentality - and here what's happened
is that the coincidentality is coincidental in, now, a double sense, i.e. , a
machine is designed to do a bunch of other things which happen, as a
by-product, to yield this observable coincidentality.
Now, without regard to whether my explanation of coincidentality is
correct, or whether my explanation of why stories take more than one
utterance to produce is correct, the endeavor of some extended interest is to
see how you would go about building much more conservative types of
explanations, i.e. , those that explain events without having been built to
manifestly explain just that event. The issue is: You have the orderliness to start
out with, and it's easy enough to build some sort of model that, having that
orderliness to start out with achieves it. It's much more interesting to have the
product and then to build a model which seems to do a lot of other jobs, which
we know works to do those other jobs, and happens to do this one as well. Then
you can see at least a sort of thing that's going on, where you can be fairly weak
in your conception of what it is that the world is trying to do.
 Lecture 3 24 1
Following is the relevant segment of the 'auto wreck' fragment. A fuller
version is attached to Fall 1 968, lecture 1 .

A: Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything
on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura
yesterday,
B: Mm hm
A: And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck.
B: Oh: : : :
A: - we have ev - I've ever seen. I've never seen a car smashed into
sm - such small space.
B: Oh: : : :
A: It was smashed from the front and the back both it must've been
in - caught in between two cars.
B: [[ Mm hm uh huh
A: Must've run into a car and then another car smashed into it and
there were people laid out and covered over on the pavement.
B: Mh
A: We were s-parked there for quite a while but I was going to listen
to the local r-news and haven't done it.
B: No, I haven't had my radio on either.
A: Well I had my television on, but I was listening to uh the blast off,
you know.
B: Mm hm.
A: [ The uh ah - I I astronauts.
B: Yeah
B: Yeah
A: And I - I didn't ever get any local news.
B: Uh huh
A: And I wondered.
B: Uh huh,
B: No, I haven't had it on, and I don't uh get the paper, and uhm
A: It wasn't in the paper last night, I looked.
B: Uh huh.
 Lecture 4
Storyteller as •witness;' Entitlement
to experience
This time I have two sorts of things tQ say, that bear obscurely on the story.
'Obscurely' doesn't so much mean that it takes effort to relate them, but that
it takes effort to see that they bear on it. I'll start off kind of simply, talking
to the teller's status as a 'witness. ' I'm going to talk about this 'witness' status
insofar as I can with the use of this story, and over the rest of the course I'll
occasionally say things about the status 'witness. ' That is, it will come up as
materials seem to require or allow it as a topic. It's kind of a terribly
important topic, independently of any interest in the technical considerations
in the course.
The initial point I want to make is that in using the fact that she was a
witness, for the telling of the story, she employs a way of identifying herself
which articulates two types of organization involved in the story: the
course-of-action organization that bounds the story, and the story of the
wreck. That is to say, the 'witness' identity relates those two things. It's by
virtue of that, that the course of action gets into the story, and that the story
is tellable as something seen. Notice that 'witness' could be contrasted with,
say, 'reporter,' where the reporter of a proposed news story would present it
without the use of a course-of-action characterization as to how he comes to
tell it. And there could be course-of-action characterizations which generate
the story within them that didn't use 'witness' as the way to get at the story.
As I suggested last time, it is of particular interest to see how the separable
types of organization get meshed, and at least one way that those two things
get meshed is via the use of this 'witness' status.
A way we presumably think about being a witness is, having been a witness
you can report what happened as what you saw or what you inferred from
what you saw. And it turns out that people sharply differentiate how they
come to know things, and they make a point of making it known how they
come to know something, where that distinction - what you saw and what
you inferred from what you saw - is a used distinction, one that is used in this
story. The teller makes a difference between what she reports as what she saw
and what she didn't see. The way she does it is to say about some of the
events, that they "must have been" - "must have run into a car and then
another car smashed into it" - where the meaning of 'must have been' is
'what I'm saying, I didn't see. ' And that connects, in part, to what you
saw.
So, we think of the 'witness' position as allowing you to tell what you saw,
etc. But another way to think of presenting something via being a witness is,
242
 Lecture 4 243
using the wimess position to treat that of what happened that is storyable as
that which was wimessed, where perhaps not any possible thing one could
have seen just-as-one-sees-it would be storyable. Rather, as in this case, she
found the storyable thing in what she wimessed, where the storyable thing is
something storyable independently of that she happened to wimess it this
time, i.e. , it's a known story, 'a wreck, ' which is delivered as 'another wreck
story. ' What I want to be noticing here is that one could present a story, the
events of which one in some way wimessed, without having what one
wimessed be what one told. Instead, one could, e.g. , report what one felt on
some event's having happened.
And I want to shift a little, to talk about having experiences; entitlement
to have experiences, where, now, I'll be continuing some of the things I said
in the first lecture, about doing 'being ordinary. ' I want to suggest that in
having witnessed this event, and particularly in having wimessed it and
suffered it as well in some way, like having had to stop on the freeway in a
traffic jam by virtue of it, she has become entitled to an experience. And that
she is entitled to an experience is something different from what, e.g. , her
recipient is entitled to, or what, e.g. , someone who otherwise comes across this
story is entitled to. Now one may think of 'entitlement' as a matter of
having or not having rights to it, but that's only part of it. It's also not
coming to feel it at all, as compared to feeling it and feeling that you don't
have rights to it.
In part I'm saying that it's a fact that entitlement to experiences are
differentially available. The idea being that encountering an event like a
possible · news story, and encountering it as a wimess or someone who in part
suffered by it, one is entitled to an experience; whereas the sheer fact of seeing
things in the world, like getting the story from another is quite a different
thing. A way to see the matter is to ask the question, what happens to stories
like this once they're told? Do stories like this become the property of the
recipient as they are the property of the teller? That is, the teller owns rights
to tell this story, and they give their credentials for their rights to tell the story
by offering such things as that they saw it, and that they suffered by it. And
now the question is, does a recipient of a story come to own it in the way that
the teller has owned it, that is, e.g. , to tell it to another? Plainly enough, the
recipient doesn't then have the story to tell in the way that the teller has it to
tell, and in that way it either just dies or is preserved by the teller for future
occasions. And there are materials for that in this story sequence, where the
recipient of the first story offers an experience of the sort that the teller of the
first story had, that the second storyteller had independently, and that she
already told the teller of the first story.
Or, for example, a question is, does the recipient of story come to own it
in the way the teller has owned it, e.g., to feel for it as the teller can feel for
what the events were? For example, you might, on seeing an automobile
accident and people lying there, feel awful, cry, have the rest of your day
ruined. The question is, is the recipient of this story entitled to feel as you do?
I think the facts are plainly, no. That is to say, if you call up a friend of yours
244 Part IV
who is unaffiliated with the event you're reporting, i.e. , someone who doesn't
turn out to be the cousin of, the aunt of, the person who was killed in the
accident, but just a somebody you call up and tell about an awful experience,
then if they become as disturbed as you, or more, something peculiar is going
on, and you might even feel wronged - though that might seem to be an odd
thing to feel. And we can notice in this story sequence that what the recipient
of the firstj teller of the second does is to indicate that she had similar
experiences by telling a story in which she was involved as the teller of the first
was involved in this one; she doesn't just latch onto the experience of the first
and borrow it for her own emotions.
Now one reason I raise this whole business, and a way that it's important,
is that we could at least imagine a society in which somebody having
experienced something, having seen it and felt for it, could preserve not
merely the knowledge of it but the feeling for it by telling others. Instead of
a feeling happening to some random X, if this person X driving along a
freeway encounters an accident and feels for it, then anybody they could tell
it to could feel for it. Then plainly that stock of experiences that anybody
happened to have wouldn't turn on the events that they happened to have
encountered, but could turn on the events that anybody who ever talked to
them happened to encounter - as we think of a stock of knowledge that we
have. That is to say, if I tell you something that you come to think is so,
you're entitled to have it. And you take it that the stock of knowledge that
you have is something that you can get wherever you get it, and it's yours to
keep, but the stock of experiences is an altogether differently constructed
thing. In order to see that that's so we can just, e.g., compare how we deal
with a piece of knowledge and how we deal with someone else's experience,
and then come to see that experiences get isolated rather than are themselves
anything like as productive as are pieces of knowledge.
And of course there's no reason to restrict the matter to misery; plainly it
holds for joy as well. And plainly it's specifically an attendable problem that
joy is not productive. Somebody having such an experience as entitled them
to be high, telling it to another they can feel "good for you" but there are
rather sharp limits on how good they can feel for themselves about it, and also
even sharper limits on the good feeling that they can give to a third with the
story. That is to say, if A calls B to tell her a wonderful thing that happened
to her, B could feel good for A, but B is not in a position to call C, where, e.g. ,
C doesn't know A, and have C feel as joyous as B felt hearing a story about
A. C might feel mildly good that B had a mildly good experience, a lot less
good than B felt, and nothing like as good as A felt. And again, if we think
about it we can perhaps just see that that's not intrinsic to the organization of
the world, but is a way we somehow come to perceive and feel about
experience - or the way we're taught to do that - which is altogether different
than the ways we think about knowledge. And I presume if one wanted, one
could develop some historical discussion in which somehow knowledge was
able to achieve a status for itself that is different than experience. And one
could presumably find bases for attempts to do that for experience, which
 Lecture 4 245
have failed. Obvious instances are attempts at universal religion, for example,
which are attempts to preserve a kind of feeling that somebody once had
encountering something or somebody, and where the whole history that we
have is that it hasn't worked. It's extremely difficult to spread joy. It's
extremely easy to spread information.
Now that obviously matters a good deal in all sorts of ways. One of the
ways it obviously matters is that if having an experience is a basis for being
aroused to do something about the sorts of things it's an instance of, e.g . , the
state of the freeways, the state of automobiles, the state of whatever else, then
plainly the basis for getting things done is radically weakened where those
who receive your story cannot feel as you are entitled to feel. And there are
obvious virtues to that sort of situation. Here I'm thinking of the following
sort of thing. If a trouble occurs in the world somewhere, then a characteristic
way it's dealt with is to, e.g . , find which family's trouble it is, and, it being
some family's trouble it's nobody else's trouble. Sometimes it turns out not to
be satisfactorily formulatable as a family's trouble in that it might turn out to
be a neighborhood's trouble. But if it's a neighborhood's trouble then it's
nobody else's neighborhood's trouble. So, e.g. , crimes are by and large
historically treated that way. A gets robbed or injured and that's a problem for
B and C, but is nobody else's. And thereby, of course, one is not then
constantly swamped with the troubles of the world. Instead, it turns out that
people can be thankful that the troubles occur elsewhere.
Occasionally a situation is given a kind of abstraa status. Occasionally,
e.g. , when someone gets raped, instead of the rape being seen as the rape of
so-and-so's daughter and thereby nothing for anybody else to worry about, it
gets formulated as the rape of somebody's daughter, and perhaps it can bode
for other people's daughters and maybe my daughter, and then from a rape
it turns into a national arousal at rapings. This isn't all that current right now,
but the story of a famous rape case years ago, that of Caryl Chessman,
essentially involved that the way in which Chessman was gotten to be
electrocuted eventually was that people across the state were able to be turned
to seeing that rape as the rape of anybody's daughter, and to feel that
something had to be done to this guy. That is to say, it was successfully
transformed into a general thing while preserving the power of its feeling in
each family. What was able to be done was to have the kind of anger, etc . ,
that can be felt in each family for an occurred rape, felt for somebody else's
occurred rape - as compared to it's just being a matter of general public
concern - "Isn't it awful" - or only a matter of some private concern. That's
rare, and enormously powerful when it works.
The only parallel that I can readily bring home this issue with is that an
attempt is being made with the Vietnam war, to turn the deaths of soldiers
into a something that would give it such a status. It turns out that a major
way that a war comes to hurt the government doing the war, is by it
happening that people from small places die. Not only does it, as we say,
'bring home the war' for the people in that place, it does much more than
that. It's about the only way that they can come to seriously feel about it. For
246 Part IV
one, if everybody knows the parents of the person who died, then everybody
has occasion to be told about it, to talk about it, and in talking about it come
to talk about the war.
It happens that our military is organized in such a way that even the
relatively small groups that go into battle have a good chance of having a
series of people from a fairly local place on a same team. And a consequence
of that is that now and again, say in an ambush, four guys from the same
town get killed. And when those towns get small enough, then what happens
is that half a high school class has been wiped out. And suddenly, then, 'what
the world is doing to us' becomes a thing that people get enormously aroused
about. And over time, that happens to a lot of villages, where, then, a lot of
villages which were otherwise completely inaccessible to, say, anti-war
movements, are found to be writing letters to the President saying "our kids
shouldn't be in this war" - our kids, not so much American kids - "you
should stop sending our high school kids to this war. " And all over the place,
then, people who had no particular interest in the war, the theory of the war,
etc. , come to be involved by these local deaths. They are then available to
seeing that the local deaths in their town are something like the local deaths
that are occurring elsewhere, and, in that they have their own, they could also
feel for the others. Without having their own, their feeling for the others is not
anything like what it could be.
There are ways, then, whereby the isolating character of experiences can
nonetheless get undercut - if what one is dealing with is that there are others
who have the same experience. Then, you can have more extended experience
than you would have had if only you had had it, or you can see a pattern to
experience other than the one you would see if only you had had it. So, if
we're talking about the ways in which the feelings that experiences generate
can get amalgamated, then, on the one hand if you haven't had an experience
you're not entitled to feelings, and on the other, if somebody tells you an
experience you're not entitled to feel as they have, but on the third hand, if
you've had an experience and now you're told a similar experience by another,
then you can make very big generalizations from it and feel more than you
would have felt in either of the prior two cases.
Now that's one order of thing, i.e. , introducing aspects of the distributional
character of experience, and just raising what the import of its distributional
character is for troubles and joys in the world, in sharp contrast to knowledge
and its distributional character. You might figure it would be a severe enough
kind of fact with regard to people's rights, abilities to have experiences, that
they were restricted to those experiences that they had some such connection
to as that they witnessed them. But that's not yet the full story of the kinds
of constraints that are set on the possibility of having an experience.
The second sort of constraint, that deeply relates to this story, is that if
you're going to have an entitled experience, then you'll have to have the
experience you're entitled to, i.e. , that ordinary story which can be seen to
have taken place, which can be, e.g. , presented as a piece of news. That is to
say, you could figure that having severe restrictions on your chances to have
 Lecture 4 247
experiences, which turn on, e.g. , that some important thing, even if only in a
mild way important, e.g. , just an accident, happens to cross your path or you
happen to cross its path, well then you're home free. Once you got it you
could do with it as you please. No. You have to form it up as a thing that it
ordinarily is, and then mesh your experience with that. The rights to have an
experience by virtue of encountering something like an accident are only the
rights to have seen 'another accident' and perhaps to have felt for it, but you
can't turn out to have a nervous breakdown because you happened to see an
automobile accident, unless it turned out that, e.g. , the accident involved
people who, though you didn't know it at the time, matter to you. Or unless
you can somehow form it up as there but for the grace of God go I - "If I
hadn't been in this lane it would have been me that it happened to. " That is,
you can't make much more of it then what anybody would make of it. We
can, then, think of the way that you're entitled to an experience as that you
borrow for a while that experience that's available, as compared to that you
now invent the experience that you might be entitled to.
But in that you are so sharply restricted with regard to the occasions of
having an experience, then presumably people are happy enough to take them
as they come. You're not going to get very much surprizing new feelings or
whatever out of this experience, but it's the only experience which you have
any chance to legitimately have, so you might as well have it. You might as
well form up this wreck story as an ordinary wreck story rather than attempt
to make it into something that would occasion such comments as that you're
really reaching for experiences. And of course people are readily seen to be
reaching for experience with something that anybody knows is 'just a wreck, '
'just an X' and they make it into a life's work.
In that regard, there are a whole bunch of ways that the teller of this story
tells us how she went about bounding this experience. What she made of it
is not just told in the story, but it's told in other ways in the telling of the
story. Among the ways that she goes about locating the kind of experience this
story was, is that she doesn't tell it right off in the conversation, but she tells
it somewhere in the conversation. And you'll find that stories are specifically
differentiated in terms of their importance to the teller by reference to where
the teller places them in a conversation. So, for example, among the ways that
a teller can make out a story as really important is to tell it right off. And a
way to make it even more important than that is to call to tell it when you
figure the other isn't available to hear it, i.e. , to call them up in the middle
of the night and say "I know you were sleeping but . . . " where it's not that
they happen to be sleeping but you call them when they're sleeping, in that
if you don't call them then, if you call them when they get up, you've already
told them something about the story, i.e. , it's not as important as you might
otherwise want to make it out.
So, stories are ranked in terms of, and express their status by, the placing
of the story in the conversation, and the placing of the conversation in people's
lives. Clearly if this teller had been injured in the story's event, she wouldn't
have told the story well into the conversation; indeed, it would have served as
248 Part IV
grounds for making the call; indeed, for making the call despite whatever the
other person might have been supposed to have been doing when the call had
to be made.
Then of course in the story itself, aspeas of its importance are told. For
example, while it was an important enough experience for the teller to say to
herself I'm going to listen to the radio, other things got in the way of that.
She isn't embarrassed to say that instead of that she watched the astronauts ­
which obviously for some other story would be altogether perverse. But for
this story it's perfectly okay, and is a way to locate how the events matter, i.e. ,
to produce the story while indicating that if it came down to trying to find out
more or watching the astronauts, I watched the astronauts. Aside from that,
we are told that she could go home and go about her business, as compared
to, e.g. , "I went home and went to bed," or "I had nightmares all night, " or
that it in other ways interfered with the life that she was engaged in when this
happened. "I was coming home, there was the accident, we were stopped for
a while, and then I went home and watched the astronauts. " That's plainly
a way to locate how the story matters, and is plainly an appropriate way for
this story. Had she said it ruined the rest of her day, she was shaking, she went
to the doctor, she had nightmares, then her friend could say "Well, you're just
oversensitive.
At least the initially blandest kind of formulation we might make, then, is
that while lots of people figure that experience is a great thing, and apparently
at least some people are eager to have experiences, they are extraordinarily
carefully regulated sorts of things. The occasions of entitlement to have them
are carefully regulated, and then the experience you're entitled to have on an
occasion you're entitled to have one is further carefully regulated. And, insofar
as part of the experience involves telling about it, then that's one of the ways
in which you lay yourself open to having, e.g. , made too much of it,
experienced it wrongly, not seen the thing you should have seen, etc. The
telling of it then constitutes one way in which what you might privately make
of it is subject to the control of an open presentation, even to what you
thought was a friend. That is to say, your friends are not going to help you
out, by and large, when you tell them some story, unless you tell them a story
in the way anybody should tell it to anybody. Then they'll be appropriately
amused or sorrowed. Otherwise you'll find that they're watching you to see
that you're, e.g. , making something big out of something you're not entitled
to make big, or something small out of something that should have been
bigger, etc. , or missed seeing something you should have seen, which could be
deduced by virtue of the way you requiredly formed the thing up. What we
come back to is that of all the things that could have happened on the day
that this event took place, this was what she was entitled to bring away, and
she did.
 Lecture 5
'First' and 'second' stories; Topical
coherence; Storing and recalling
experiences
Basically I'll be continuing talking off the materials we've been working with,
the sequence involving the automobile wreck. There are two initial, unrefined,
altogether unsettled observations that I'll take off on. They obviously hold for
this conversational fragment. First, that stories come in clumps, and second,
clumped stories have an apparent similarity between them. In the case at
hand, it's apparent that the similarities involve such sorts of things as that the
second story or story fragment or referred-to story involves, as the first does,
an accident, and involves also as the first does, some supposition, assertion,
about the expected news status of it.

A: Boy it was a bad one though.

B: Well that's too bad.
A: Kinda I I (freak)-
B: You know, I looked and looked in the paper- I think I told you f­
for that uh f-fall over at the Bowl that night. And I never saw a thing
about it, and I I I looked in the next couple of evenings.
A: Mm hm
( 1 . 0)
B: Never saw a th- a mention of it.
A: I didn't see that either.

So that we have a slight refinement on the second observation, i.e. , there are
not just some apparent similarities, but some apparent similarities of the sort
that grossly can be said to be topical. Both stories have similar topics.
What I want to do first is to use these initial observations to get some
problems, and then to develop a solution to the problem. If clumped stories
have a characterizable sort of similarity, then perhaps it's the case that the
similarities are projected, i.e. , that the teller of the second is in some way
concerned to produce a recognizably similar story to the first. We'll try to
develop what might be bases for that interest although our main concern is if
we can suppose that the teller of the second has such an interest, how does he
go about satisfying it? Are there some procedures which the teller of the
second uses in order to get such a second story as has for him, and perhaps
recognizably for the teller of the first, a similarity? That's a central problem
that we want to solve.

24 9
2 50 Part IV
Let me just note that I've already been talking about a ' first' story and a
'second' story, and that raises the possibility that for clumped stories there's
some organization as between them so that we can say that one is specifically
a 'first story,' that being now a class as compared to it just happening to be
a story that came before the other. So that there is a specifically produced 'first
story' and a specifically produced 'second story, ' where, then, if you look at
a sample of clumped stories, we'd find that we could use the classes 'first' and
'second' stories across the sample, i.e. , there would be features of 'first stories'
and features of 'second stories' that turned out to be somewhat systematically
present.
At least two interests of that possibility are: First, harking back to the
lecture on stories taking more than an utterance to produce, it's kind of plain
that that assertion, though it has some gross obviousness to it, doesn't in fact
characterize all stories. Not all stories take more than an utterance to produce;
indeed, there's a bunch of stories that take only an utterance to produce. And
a problem which carries over from that discussion is, then, are there ways that
we can cut into the group of stories left over, so as to find that they're not
stories that simply happen not to have the feature we considered, but that
there's a class of stories which may not take more than an utterance to
produce, and in not taking more than an utterance to produce nonetheless
don't raise trouble with the argument we offered about why stories take more
than an utterance to produce. Where one sort of interest we have is that
perhaps these second stories don't have the sort of basis for taking more than
an utterance to produce that obtains for first stories.
Our second interest in the differentiation has to do with that while we
propose that first and second stories within a clump have similarities that may
be projected, if we say that there's a class, ' first stories' and a class, ' second
stories, ' then we may be in a position to begin to deal with some aspect of
another correlative obvious fact. And that is that within a clump of stories,
first and second stories also have dissimilarities. Now, we're asserting and
being concerned with the similarities between the stories. But the similar
stories are also different. That could either mean we'll focus on the similarities
and forget about the dissimilarities, or we can perhaps also begin to look at
some differences they have. And at least one possible source of some
dissimilarity, which doesn't conflict with our argument that they have
similarities, is that some of the dissimilarities perhaps turn on that the clumps
are ordered into 'first' and 'second' stories; 'first' being a type, having some
features and 'second' being a type, having some features, and thereby at least
some of the dissimilarities will have been handled.
Returning to the problem of how it is that a second teller might go about
getting a second story to tell which shows a similarity to the first, let me kind
of say why I'm interested in solving it. The problem was gotten in something
like the following fashion: There are striking similarities between first and
second stories. Are those similarities due to chance, or is it not a matter of
chance that with regard to within-dump stories, across clumps - across, that
is, a variety of topics, tellers, etc. - one finds that second stories are similar to
 Lecture 5 251
whatever first stories? If that's not a matter of chance, then perhaps it's
something that is achieved, projected by a second teller. Now that would lead
us to ask whyjhow they do it. But just because we can ask whyjhow they do
it doesn't mean that we're going to ask it, i.e. , to put any effort into trying to
solve it. There are lots of questions we might ask where we don't figure there's
any particular interest in solving it, i.e. , as a matter of where I'm going to
devote my work. Now there are reasons for choosing to work here. And the
reasons exist before it's known that there is a solution. One reason is
something like this: It obviously would take some sort of work on the part of
the second teller to achieve a similar second story. That work would obviously
involve such things as some sort of attention to the first story, some sort of
analysis of the first story, some sort of use of the analysis of the first story in
building a second. And the variety of types of work that would seem
obviously to be involved - before you know indeed what work is involved -
would seem to have interactional aspects to it. That is, a second may, in telling
a similar story, be doing something to the first, telling the first something.
And in the first place, in listening to the first to get a second, he may be doing
some sort of interactional attention. So there's a kind of direction to what the
solution would look like - if there is a solution - that would involve some
sort of interactional technology. And that possibility of work of an interac­
tional sort, which may be also rather generalized work, is what provides the
attraction of the problem. What I want to be constructing descriptions of, are
procedures of an interactional sort. When I can see such a possibility from
some posed problem, then that's the place where I'm going to work. So that's
one sort of basis for the interest in this problem.
A second and related source is this: Among the plainest kinds of problems
there are in dealing with people talking together, engaging in conversation, is
coming to be able to say what somebody heard. There are lots of supposables
about what they might have heard, but one specific interest is in coming to say
what they heard. And if a second story exhibits some similarities to a first,
then in examining how the similarity is achieved we may be in a position to
say something about how the first was heard - perhaps indeed, something
about how the second was heard; something about how people listen to each
other.
A third sort of interest is rather more elaborately technical. I'm interested
in doing provings. For example, provings of what somebody heard, or
provings of that a story is similar. In consequence of that, I'm looking for
problems that can have provable solutions. Now let me amend that in a way
I intend as altogether general to whatever I say over the course. I don't ever
intend to prove that so-and-so heard such-and-such, or that so-and-so
produced a similar story. What I intend to prove is that it's possible that that's
so. I won't always say that, but for me 'possibility' is an extremely strong kind
of relationship, and it's the strongest relationship I will ever be intendedly
proposing. I want to prove possibilities, and I take it that proving a possibility
is other than asserting "Well it's possible that, " i.e. , I don't intend to be using
"It's possible that" as a way to say anything I please. I intend the proofs to
252 Part IV
be weak in the sense that they only prove possibilities, but where that takes
some sort of proof.
The interest being in proofs, in looking for things that look like I can prove
possibilities with them, let's suppose that while some stories had some sort of
similarity to them, we couldn't develop that the similarity was, e.g. , projected
by the second speaker, but, so far as we can tell, they just happened to have
some similarities. In contrast to that, consider the possibility that there's some
assertable interest of a second teller in, e.g. , showing that he understood the
first story - to put it even more strongly, proving that he understood the first
story. If the job of the second teller, as he takes it, is to prove that he
understood the first story, and he has ways of proving that, then perhaps while
he doesn't offer his proof procedures but instead offers some product of a
way to show he understood, i.e. , exhibits something which proves the
understanding, we might be in a position to examine how he does the
understanding, as something provable. So, insofar as it looks like what
the second teller is interested in is proving something, then perhaps how he
does it can be characterized, and that could then, say, be a proof of how he
proves.
And in the instant type of case there are assertable interests of a second
teller in proved relationships between his story and the first story. Proved
relationships are attended by parties as systematically different than other sorts
of relationships, e.g. , claimed relationships. Things like, e.g. , at the end of
some first story a recipient says "I know just what you mean . " Period. We can
say that that's a claimed understanding as compared to having some way to
produce some materials that exhibit an understanding. And there are other
sorts of things that have a similar sort of attended differentiation. For
example, if someone tells a story that has a point, or states a certain opinion,
then a routine thing that somebody who receives that story or opinion does,
is to say "I agree. " Again, we could say that that's a 'claimed' agreement.
And people are perfectly well aware that though he said that, he might not
mean it, and in any event so far as they know, he's just saying it. That might
be contrasted with some procedure whereby a party does what can be said to
be 'achieving' or 'proving' an agreement. And there are, say, a variety of
things that parties can do that are manifestly stronger than claimed
agreements. For example, they might say, after some opinion, "I was just
telling so-and-so that, myself. " Or, stronger yet, "I told you that a week
ago. " Or, e.g., in the course of a developing opinion, a second chimes in and
finishes it off. And insofar as claiming and achieving are different, we can at
least propose that there may be an interest of parties in proving some
relationship between what they say and what another says; relationships like
'proving that I understand' or 'proving that I agree. '
With regard to 'understanding, ' which seems transparently involved in
these story dumps, I fix on that as a possibility because I already know from
other work that there are nice sorts of means for proving understanding, and
that some seemingly obvious sorts of means are not treated as good means. So
that, e.g. , repeating what a person says is sometimes treated as not a good
 Lecture 5 253
indication of understanding. It's known that one can repeat without under­
standing. I have no idea whether that's true or not, and we're not interested
in that, but to give you an instance of its being known, in a conversation a
fellow tells a dirty joke that his 1 2-year old sister told him. Talk then gets
around to 'did she know what she was saying, ' and it's proposed that the fact
that she told it doesn't show that she knew what it meant; she may just be
repeating it. Alternatively, simple ways of showing understanding in some
senses are exhibited in such a sequence as:

A: How long are you going to be here?

B: Til Monday.
A: Oh. Just a week.

Here, A took the announced day, and maybe the current day, and performed
some operation on it which yielded an utterance that has done a transforma­
tion on "Til Monday. " Whatever else they're doing, it shows that they've
caught that. That is to say, they do some sort of analysis of it and use that
analysis in producing a next utterance.
A fourth reason that I'm interested in achieved similar relationships
between stories has, like the third, some elaborated technical interest to it. In
other work it seemed obvious that sorts of organizations that were very fine
and transparently methodic - or if not transparently methodic then showably
methodic - could be established for small sequences. Two-utterance
sequences, for example. Like you can build more or less elaborate method­
ologies which describe how it is that there is some organization between the
two utterances "Hello, ' ' "Hello" or the two utterances "Goodbye, ' ' "Good­
bye" or between "What are you doing?" "Nothing, " and various types like
that. One specific interest that I have in dealing with stories is to see whether
there can be an order of expansion in the length of sequences that can be
subject to methodical characterization. And an initial thing I presented about
stories was that they take more than an utterance to produce. They take at
least three to produce. And there was an attempt to characterize, say, a
specifically three-utterance unit. Then we tried to extend things to types of
organizations that stories have, which didn't specify how many utterances
were involved but only involved that they weren't a particularly small
number and might be a very large number, and the number might be
irrelevant. Now when we come to deal with dumped stories we're further yet
expanding the size of utterance sequence that we can hope to give systematic
characterization to. And that plainly is an obvious aim that one would
undertake in attempting to characterize the organization of conversation. So
there's a bunch of reasons why the problem of achieved similarities between
the members of a clumped story group was attacked.
Now we'll proceed to consider the problem. We already know from earlier
discussions that the recipient of a first story listens in a variety of ways to it,
and can use the listening they do to come up with utterances. For example,
2 54 Part IV
they can use the listening to see a 'preface' and produce an 'acceptor' that says
'go ahead and tell the story. ' For example, they can use the initial request to
listen to the story to be able, then, to satisfy the request. Now does that
delimit the kind of listening they do, or do they do other kinds of listening as
well, other kinds of listening that we can prove is possible by reference to
things that they say?
Let's begin to do a partially suppositional, partially hypothetical consider­
ation of sorts of similarities so as to find such sorts of similarities as would be
involved in a hearerjsecond teller's procedures for constructing a similar
story. There is, e.g., the fact that second stories are topically similar to firsts.
Does that mean that, e.g . , what we want to do is construct a rule that says
'Listen to the first story in order to find the topic and then use the topic to
locate a second story'? And if we constructed a rule like that, what sorts of
stories would it yield, and what relationships would the stories it would
yield have to the sorts of stories that tum up in second stories? I want to
propose that while topical similarity is present, on the one hand it's an
overly weak feature and on the other hand its overly weak status has to do
with the way topical organization operates independent of stories, but also
for stories.
'Topical similarity' is overly weak although the following sorts of attention
to topic do hold: It appears that people make it their business to attend the
topical coherence of a next thing they say to some prior thing someone else said.
The evidence for their attention to that is extremely extensive, turning not
merely on the fact that they often obviously produce same-topic talk, but that
they have a variety of ways of indicating that they're going to produce
same-topic talk and that they are now producing same-topic talk, and they
use them. For example, there are ' topic markers' which say 'what I'm saying
now is on topic with what somebody just said. ' And by 'topic marker' I mean
something that is a kind of formal object that simply says 'same topic' or may
say 'different topic. ' An obvious complex of topic markers is, e.g. , a beginning
like "I still say though, " where that involves, particularly focussing on 'still'
and 'though,' that current speaker is saying: ' It's relevant to what I now say
that I am speaking at least third in a sequence on some topic, where I spoke
before on that topic and took a position, and somebody spoke after I spoke,
and I know they disagreed with me, and nonetheless I am now reasserting
what I asserted before. ' Where the business of those particular topic markers,
aside from signalling 'still on topic, ' is to say 'I know I'm being stubborn. '
That is to say, the particular action is 'intendedly being stubborn' and its
mechanism involves using topic markers to do that by locating where in a
sequence one is producing it. Another sort of instance of a 'topic marker' is
when, for example, you begin an utterance with an appositional 'anyway. ' It
can be engaged in saying: 'Without regard to the topicality of the last
utterance, returning to the topic talked about before that, I have this to say. '
If one wanted to think of it in logical terms, 'anyway' can be conceived as a
right-hand parentheses, i.e. , it proposes that there was a topic, it was moved
off of, it's being returned to.
 Lecture 5 255
There is, then, a bunch of business around topical coherence, and people of
course note about an utterance that it's 'not on topic, ' that it's 'off the subject, '
etc. And o f course while I ' m saying that topic similarity doesn't work, an
initially noted similarity was topic similarity. We started with an observation
about similarity and refined it into partially topical similarities. Now we're
engaged in an attempt to further refine it, and here topic similarity becomes
overly weak. The reasons for its over-weakness are that the question of
whether there is topic similarity can't proceed by listing the set of topics that
the first story had and then seeing, 'does the second have one of those?' Topic
similarity is something that the second story can exhibit, though you wouldn't
have thought from the first that such a second would be a coherent topic with
the first. That is to say, the relationship 'topic similarity' is one in which the
second is crucial. Given the second you can see that they're topically similar.
And an enormous range of produced utterances can turn out to have some
sort of topical similarity with the first.
In this case, for example, the first story's topic can be conceived to be ' an
auto accident' as compared to just 'an accident. ' But the second story leads us
to see that the first is about 'an accident' in that we thereby see that the first
and second are 'similar' as compared to seeing them as topically dissimilar by
virtue of the first being about an auto accident and the second being about a
fall. We could, in fact, be in as much a position to say about these two that
they're topically dissimilar as that they're topically similar. It's obviously,
then, our decision to focus on how to make them topically similar that leads
us to say that they're similar, when under topical considerations we could say
that they're dissimilar, where, then, we couldn't figure that the producer of
the second intended topical similarity with the story of the fall. So we'd
already had to suppose similarity.
And that aspect of the procedure for attending stories - that you try to find
similarity - is terribly relevant to the way a second teller can proceed. Second
teller has as a resource that he knows that a hearer of a second story will be
looking for similarity, so that extends the range of things he can do to get it.
Now, what other features of stories can be used to construct a procedure
that will yield observable similarity? One sort of thing that lots of stories have
is some bunch of characters. That a first has some bunch of characters could
be used by a listener who operates under a maxim that says: ' Examine a story
for its characters and use them to get you another story - where you can get
another story that's similar if you find one that has the same characters in it. '
For example, for the stories we have, the first involving, say, a witness and
victims, then one might collect its characters and produce - if you could find
one - a second story that also involves a witness and victims. You'd have,
then, a way of looking at a first to know what to pull out of it which you
could use to find another. Where that other would have such features as
would permit it to be seen that you had used the first to get a second, and that
the second was 'similar. '
A next sort of feature, sticking within 'character similarity' shifts our
ground slightly and shifts it in a way that I would obviously find attractive.
256 Part IV
And that is that a notable thing about some first stories - and reasons for its
being in lots of first stories can be thought up by reference to, e.g., the last
lecture - is that the teller appears as a character in the story. It's a routine
feature, particularly of first stories, that the teller appears as a character in the
story. Possibility: If the teller is a character, find a story in which such a
character appears and also in which the teller of the second is a character. Finer
relationship: If teller is a character, then look for such a story as has that
character, and in which you play the same character. The business of the
hearer of a first story might then be: Examine the first for whether the teller
is a character. If he's a character look for a second story in which you appear
as the same character.
Now that could be a procedure; one that has an extraordinary generality of
use. That doesn't mean that it will always succeed, but it has an obvious
formality to it, such that anyone could try it. They might fail, but they could
try it. It tells them how to examine a story to get another. And one fascination
with it is its generality and its simplicity - as compared to, e.g., having to do
some job of collecting and organizing a set of characters, since often the teller
character's features will yield some other characters as affiliated with it, as a
witness will be a character for stories involving some determinate kinds of
other characters. But not merely that. We've now shifted from story features
to story-telling features. That is to say, it's an analysis in which the hearer of
the first figures he's attending the telling of the first and not just the first story.
And there is, then, at least that kind of obvious interactional character to the
production of the two stories, i.e. , that the second party feels with the told
character of the first, in producing the second that he tells.
When we get there, we can examine some permutations on it to notice how
much they matter. Consider an initial story like this auto accident story, and
consider the slightly weaker version of our rule that involved teller appearing
in the story, but as any character in it, not necessarily the same character as the
teller of the first. Then you could get sequences like this first story in which
A was a witness to an auto accident, and some second story in which a witness
and victims also appear, but where the teller of the second is a victim. And
now the second story might run, "I was in an auto accident, I was lying on
the pavement, and here were all these people standing and gawking at us. "
That is to say, the comment the second story might be making about the first
would be something about, e.g . , the immorality of the kind of thing the first
reported he had done. By shifting the characters that the two tellers take, one
can systematically get that the first and second are not merely similar or
dissimilar, but that the second agrees or disagrees with the first, and a variety
of such sorts of interactional features. If, then, a second teller is not so much
interested in achieving 'similarity, ' but in achieving some feature that
similarity can let him get, like 'agreement, ' then the relationship between the
characters and the tellers can be quite crucial. If, e.g. , it were the business of
a second story to deal with the uniqueness of the experience of the first, then
again that the tellers stood in similar or different character statuses in the two
stories would be relevant to, e.g., the non-uniqueness of ca first's experience
 Lecture 5 257
being exhibited. And again, in the story we start with, the issue of whether it
appeared in the news and perhaps why it didn't is something that the teller
of the second can deal with. 1
Now the procedure we've offered involves the hearer of the first monitoring
it in terms of the teller being a character in it, and using that to find a story
in which they also appear and are the same character. In order to use that
procedure to produce an observably similar story, it's not enough to use it and
get a story that can be told sometime. Part of the way of achieving a similar
story turns on discovering a candidate within a rather sharply delimited
conversation time. That is, the second stories that are observably 'similar
second stories' go right after the first story. And that has a kind of a large
import to it. Finding a story to place right after a first involves remembering
a story, where the story that is remembered may tum out to be something
remembered from an extraordinarily divergent sort of past. People will
routinely tum up with stories, delivered precisely on the completion of a first,
which involve them in remembering events from ten, rwenty years before.
What that tells us is that it's not just that people can put their memories to
the service of a conversation, but they can put their memories to that service
and get results within this remarkably short time period.
And with regard to showing that you're attentive to the other party, which
is a general matter relating to the sorts of things we've been talking about, it
may be that there isn't a better way to do it than to show that the things they
say have a full control over your memory. That is to say, you put your
memory utterly at their service and it yields results of this speed. Not, e.g. ,
' 'I'll think about it and come up with a story and next week I'll tell you what
it reminded me of, " but within the constraints of close to next utterance, a
story is produced. That's a kind of way of saying ' my mind is with you,'
where it's also known that the mind that I'm saying is with you doesn't
produce its remembrances at will, but just produces them. It isn't a
self-conscious search for stories, you're not looking to be accommodating,
they simply pop into your head. And if one wants to know what the ways are
that a conversation can be shown to be ' absorbing, ' plainly it would be hard
to find better ways of showing that than that one is able to dredge up stories
that you figure you haven't thought of in some indefinitely long period, at the
spur of this sort of moment. And that we do it is at least one sort of evidence
for the fact that one is engaged in these kinds of analyses, using them to find
things to say.
Let me make a side comment that I figure is sort of important. Suppose we
were going about designing the way minds should store experience. And
suppose the experiences we're thinking of are those in which people appear.
Now we can think of kinds of rules we might impose for the ways that minds
should store those experiences. Obvious possibilities would involve, e.g. : Store
the information in terms of what anybody would say was the most important

1 There follows "an excursus on the import of reliability" consisting of matters dealt with
in Winter 1 9 7 0 , lecture 1 , pp. 1 63-4 and 1 69-7 1 . It has been omitted here.
258 Part IV
aspect of it or the most important figure in it. Then you'd have a situation
where, say, the experience would be stored in terms of collections of different
characters selected in terms of interest, importance, whatever else. Now one
neat and possibly general way to have experiences stored, though it's one that
could create lots of difficulties, is to say: Whatever experiences you have, store
them in terms of your place in them, without regard to whether you had an
utterly trivial or secondary or central place in them. And that might have the
virtue of providing a generalized motivation for storing experiences. If it's
your part in it that you use to preserve it by, then it might lead you to preserve
lots of them, simply in terms of the idea of experiences being treatable as your
private property. People can then collect a mass of private experiences that
they then, by virtue of their generalized orientation to 'what's mine,' have an
interest in keeping. You might, then, design a collection of minds, each one
storing experience which is to be used for each others' benefit, though you
couldn't necessarily say "Remember all these things so that you might tell
them to somebody else. " You have to have some basis for each person storing
some collection of stuff via some interest like 'their own' interest. Where,
then, you get them to store experiences in terms of their involvement, but
have them be available to anybody who taps them right. Anybody can get
the story if they ask in the right way. And the right way is to tell one just
like it.
You have, then, a bunch of stuff stored, that persons have an interest in
storing, that's nonetheless available to anybody else who, e.g., has such a
problem as wanting to know, "Has anybody ever suffered from this trouble
that I suffer from?" In that I organize my experience in terms of my position
in it, and don't know that that's an organization I do, I may only find that
I suffer from it and don't know that obviously lots of people suffer from it.
That is, though I could have formed it up in some other way, I organize it in
terms of 'my experience' and that can lead me to wonder whether anybody
else has it. If I tell it to somebody else, they having organized experiences in
the same way, I produce a response in them which yields that they now will
pop up with such a story if they have one. That is, I simply find that there are
such, each one having been stored in terms of a 'my experience' focus, but
being available to any analytically similar situation. So that though I start
with a possible sense of uniqueness I can solve that uniqueness problem by
just telling somebody else the story - not even specifically asking them for
another - and they will simply come up with one if they have one. And not
only will they come up with one if they have one, they will often know one
that somebody else has come up with. The consequence of that is the familiar
phenomenon of "Until I had this trouble I didn't think anybody had it.
When I had it it turned out that lots of people have it. " One finds, when
something happens to one, that whole ranges of things you never knew
existed exist, and that lots of people tum out to be in exactly the same
situation. Which is to say that something happens to you, you tell somebody
about it, and it turns out that that's an occasion for them to tell you that
 Lecture 5 259
they're in the same situation - though all you know in the first instance is that
it's your situation.
So again, the kind of simplicity in the organization of experiences for the
remembering that's involved in focus on 'your position' can be accommo­
dated to a general availability of those experiences to anybody who knows
how to get them. And knowing how to get them involves that people store
them in the same way and tell them in the same way, such that if someone
produces one, you will come up with another and tell it - or feel awfully
frustrated if it turns out that you had it and didn't know it, and remember
it the next day. And it's kind of interesting that the commitment to the proper
operation of your memory in conversation time is sufficient to make you feel
miserable about yourself when you remember a story ten minutes later. It's a
way to see that your mind is treated by you as properly at the service of others,
such that it's mis-serving you when you have a story to tell and you don't
remember it fast enough.
If something like the procedure I've suggested is in fairly general use and
is fairly general with regard to the way it exhibits understanding, then we
might look to whether there are special places where it doesn't hold, and
whether those special places have special problems. That is to say, what we
don't want to do is to just ask if there are any counter-examples to this. We
want also to ask if there are any systematic non-operations of this, and if those
systematic non-operations yield expectable problems. Obviously I have
something to say on this.
An obvious place in which the procedure is specifically not used - obvious
once you think of it - is in places like psychoanalysis and other sorts of
psychiatry. That is, it is absolutely not the business of a psychiatrist, having
had some experience reported to him, to say " My mother was just like that,
too. " Now, while that's kind of obvious, if the procedure we suggested is
kind of generally used in an automatic way, then it presumably takes specific
training for it not to happen that a psychoanalyst has occurring to him as he
hears some story, how the same thing happened to him. Some systematic
revision of how his mind operates has to be done. Now, to not be reminded
is an offered rule. I can give a direct quote from a book called Principles of
Intensive Psychotherapy by Frieda Fromm-Reichman, used to train therapists:
What then are the basic requirements of the personality and professional
abilities of the psychiatrist? If I were to answer this question in one
sentence I would reply, the psychotherapist must be able to listen. This
does not appear to be a startling statement, but it is intended to be just
that. To be able to listen and to gather information from another person,
in this other person's own right, without reacting along the lines of one's
own problems or experience, of which one may be reminded, perhaps in
a disturbing way, is an art of interpersonal exchange which few people
are able to practice without special training. To be in command of this
art is by no means tantamount to actually being a good psychiatrist, but
is the prerequisite of all intensive psychotherapy.
260 Part IV
And maybe at this point we can have some idea of why what she says might
well be so. That is, at least why it is that it would take a considerable amount
of training to be able to do not listening in the ways that I characterized as the
ways we listen, which specifically involve finding one's own experiences. It's
not just that it happens that people find their own experiences, it's their
business conversationally, to do that. It's not that they're lost in their own
fantasies, but that they're absolutely at the service of the person they're
talking with when they are lost in their own fantasies, i.e. , their own
remembrances of rather particular sorts, i.e . , of just the son of thing that the
other person just told them.
It's perfectly possible that if this is the son of thing that psychiatrists have
to acquire, its acquiring could have consequences. Like, that being prevented
from coming up with the sorts of things one might come up with and say, one
finds what other people say boring, for example. Now a classical problem that
psychiatry had systematically to deal with was that of psychiatrists falling
asleep during sessions. And I wonder whether that they fall asleep has to do
with that they know they can't say any of the things that are interesting, that
they might think of when somebody might tell them something, and
therefore they have no good way to listen to find anything interesting.
A correlate is the problem psychiatrists have of showing people who have
told them their problems that they understand the problem they've been told,
where one best way of saying "I understand what you've told" is to say ' 'I've
been through it myself. " And patients have it as their business to say "Well
I know you're healthy now, but when you were younger didn't you have the
son of problem that I have?" Patients also routinely complain about the way
that psychiatrists might attempt to show that they understand, e.g. , where
somebody would tell a story in response to the story, a psychiatrist might say
"Ah hah. " And patients specifically attend the miserableness of "Ah hah" as
an attempted indication of understanding. And of course precisely the son of
help that can work for some people who find difficulty in things like
psychotherapy is that son of help which involves exactly that a collection of
people get together and tell a series of stories, one alike to the next, i.e. , places
like AA involve a series of stories where we come to see that we're all in the
same boat, and people figure that they're understood and that they're not
alone - where among the problems present in therapy is that for all you
know, given that the therapist doesn't respond with telling you he had the
same experience, nobody had the same experience as you. And in that nobody
may have had such an experience, maybe you damn well are crazy. That is to
say, the way you find out you're not crazy is that people who you figure aren't
crazy tell you that they've had exactly the same experience you had. Now they
may say "lots of people had it, " but that's quite different than saying " I had
it and here's the�way it went. " That's the difference between claiming it and
showing it.
 Lecture 6
Hypothetical second stories and
explanations for first stories;
Sound-related terms (Poetics); uwhat
I didn't do"
I'll continue talking about second stories. We talked about the relationship
between first and second stories and went through some discussion of how it
is that a person finds, i.e. , remembers, such a second story as they might tell.
Now, that procedure might order a considerable amount of the clumped
stories one can encounter - as I find in my materials, as I hear in the streets
- and I want at this point to introduce another type of evidence for the second
story phenomenon, and also for one facet of its interest, i.e. , the kinds of
attention that hearers give to first stories. I'll be turning to a slightly variant
use of the attention they give to first stories, having to do with the following:
A thing that people do besides telling remembered second stories is, roughly,
producing hypothetical second stories. And by that I mean materials of the
following sort:

J: Wuhdidju think of, when Romney, came out with his statement
thet he w'ss urn -- thet 'e wz brainwash/ jed
G: I think he wa:s
-- --

( 5 . 0)
J: In in uhm what sense.
(2 .0)
G: I don'know, b't if he says he wz brainwashed,
(7.0)
S: He's one a' these Romjjoey c'd do no wrong types. hh
G: He's an honest man.
G: This much I do know.
G: En whether' r not he was brain-brainwashed, he believed 'e was,
so - - that's why he said it.
( 1 4. 0)

The term 'poetics' doesn't occur in the leaures; it is used in this and several subsequent
lecture-heads to capture such phenomena as 'sound-related' terms, puns, etc.

261
262 Part IV
- G: It's like the uh - - woman who wen' to the doctor 'n - - she wz
having marital problems. She said uh "My husband always tells
me that I henpeck 'im b'd I don't henpeck 'im. " And the doctor
says "Now waida minute" 'e said "let's call yer husband in" So
'e calls the husband in, an' says uh "Y'wife tells me yer
henpecked are yuh?" He says "Yes" En so he turned t'the lady en
says "He's henpecked. " - - Cuz if he believes it then he is. So
evidently he got the wrong impression of something. If he
believes 'e wz brainwashed - - then he was. Ez far as he was
concerned.
]: B'd you're thinking that perhaps uh -- hh in effect he wuss not.
Exllcept thet he believes it.
G: No.
G: I'm not saying one way or another. I don't know the facts.

And the following.

K: I had a very intellectual talk with my father.

R: Ah how pleasant.
K: Yes. And it turned out very good.
R: (From) the old man's viewpoint?
K: No! In my viewpoint. He- agreed. For once in his life.
R: He agreed with what?
K: Oh, I don't know I just­
R: heh (He II agreed) hehh
K: He-he grounded me 'cause of my grades, see. I-I know, I
deserved to be grounded, so­
R: No you I I don't!
K: I-
K: I did though. With two fails? You- you're bound to be averaging
to be- you-
R: But chu don't wanna be grounded.
K: I sure do, because -- uh well w-we starting talkin' II (an' he
said-)
R: Oh you want him to control.
K: No. No. He-he says uh are you mad at me because I groundedju?
an' I said no, he said uh are you sure? s'd yeah,
R: ehheh heh
K: He sez uh --( 1 . 0)-- Well then what are you so hap- or w- uh
unhappy about?
R: heh I I You know what he reminds me of ?
K: I go Oh, no good reason, II y'know, I-
-R : Y'know what he reminds me of, when the warden takes the guy
to the gas chamber he sez yer not mad at me personally hehh
j : Hell no!
R: hehhh
 Lecture 6 263
K: hhhhh
R: It's the same type of da(h)mn situation hehh I mean it's not my
fault that the society couldn't - -
I want also to consider the constructing of explanations for a first story, where
producing a hypothetical second story and building a constructed explanation
for a first story have some closely similar aspects. The construction operates
under very similar constraints in some ways, to the telling of a second story.
Basically, that it has to be done within conversation time, i.e. , done right then
and there. And that it's done right then and there may tell us things about
how it could be done; what kinds of attentions to a first are used. I'll be
focussing on the following fragment.
B: ! hev a gurripe. hhhnh!
A: What's the grllipe dear.
B: And oh boy hhhnhh heh heh heh hhh!
B: Well, eh-eh The trai::ns, Yuh know Theh-the-the people.hh
Uh-why: : : , eh dizzat- do not. They. hh respec' . The so called
white ca:ne (bohk). In other words, if they see me wih the ca:ne,
trav'ling the city essetta, hh why do they not give me, the so
called right of way. Etcetra.
A: Well they probably II do, once they see it.
B: Wah dintenehh
A: Uh, The I I trouble is­
B: No they don't Brad.
A: Ha' d'yih know.
B: Becuz I've been on th' trai:n before en they don't care whether
I live 'r die hh hh
A: Well,
B: [[ Uh­
A: May-
B: [[ Yihknow­
A: Maybe-
A: [[ Dear wait wait wait, wait?
B: ( )
A: [[ Wait.
B: Go 'head.
A: No:w. N: d-d-
B: [[ Okay.
A: Don' ask a question 'n then answer it.
B: Go 'head.
-+- A : Uh: : , You see what happens, with- specially with New
Yorkers, i:s? thet they get a: :ll preoccupie: :d with their own
problum: :s
B: [[ Yes.
A: -with the::- fallout an' the pollution, en the II b-en the
landlord,
264 Part IV
B: Yeah mm hm,
B: Yeah.
A: [[ And they don't-
B: ( ) -

A: Nuh waitaminnit, Lemme finish,

B: Guh 'head
A: And they don't notice.
(pause)

This is from a radio call-in program in New York called the Brad Crandall
Show. B is a lady caller and A is Brad Crandall, the guy who takes the calls.
Now supposing that Crandall comes up with his explanation right then and
there, one wants to see what kinds of attention he has given to the story to
come up with the explanation. We note that what he has to do is to solve the
problem posed, 'Why don't people give a blind lady with a white cane the
kind of treatment they're supposed to?' And you could give all kinds of
explanations. Or you could give no explanation, i.e. , he could commiserate
with her: "People in New York are miserable, thanks for letting us know, I
hope they do better. " He comes up with an explanation and I want to focus
on the magnificent delicacy of the relationship between the story-problem she
poses and the explanation he offers. A virtue of that relationship is that we can
see some of the ways in which the second-story phenomenon operates - here
in a particularly eerie way.
What I mean to point to is, first of all, the way in which vision conceptions
or terms kind of pervade his explanation. For example, in the sequence just
following her presentation of the problem: "Why do they not give me the so
called right of way, " he says "Well they probably do, once they SEE it. " Then
her denial, and then his question, " How do you know?" which is after all
directed to someone who is supposed to be blind, and isn't then 'how do you
know' in the sense of 'go ahead and tell me how you know, ' but 'how do you
know, in that you couldn't see whetherjwhat they see. ' Again, let me note
that, that "they probably do, once they see it" is constructed by him, i.e. , he
is making this up now. And were she to have said to it, "How do you know?"
she would be in just as good a position as he is. But he's using some of the
information she's given him to start out to construct an explanation, and he's
already so satisfied with it that he can use a ' 'How do you know?' ' in that
strong position, i.e. , 'if you can't see, how do you know?, ' where, as I say, how
does he know is something that is just as well askable.
Then I guess he gets a little bit of time to begin to play around with
producing an explanation, and he produces one that has, as I hope you'll see,
this kind of real eeriness to it. He constructs some New Yorkers in the train.
Now that's kind of interesting because though indeed it takes place in New
York, and the people on the train could be conceived of as 'New Yorkers, '
plainly enough, for lots of them, at any given time that they're on the train
going somewhere, their identities as they're travelling may only incidentally
be 'New Yorkers' - aside from the fact that a lot of them aren't New Yorkers
 Lecture 6 265
in any event. But 'the city' and 'the trains' are among the data that he was
given, and so now he constructs ' New Yorkers. ' Not only does he use the data
to find a population, ' New Yorkers, ' but he also uses it to locate some class
of problems that tum on their identification being 'New Yorkers, ' i.e. ,
specifically ' New York's problems. ' Whether anybody has such a problem,
has such a problem when they're on the train, is another question altogether.
But, having located this type from the materials given - and it's a talked-of
type - he's able to turn that into 'a New Yorker with New Yorkers'
problems. '
Now what he does is not just to find New Yorkers with some New
Yorker's problems, but to give them the character of these-problems­
preoccupied. The character of 'preoccupied' here is more delicate than I think
I can confidently say, so I'll just notice it. The term 'preoccupied' bears some
kind of sound relationship to something like 'having something in the way of
your eyes, ' i.e. , there's a thing like 'ocular' that seems somehow to be involved
here in the picking of 'preoccupied' - given, in any event, the way in which
he's using visional conceptions here. That is to say, people could perfectly well
be 'preoccupied' with a problem without it affecting what they see;
particularly they can be 'preoccupied' with problems without it affecting that
they see somebody is blind.
But there's a wonderful argumentative relationship here. Talking to
someone who's blind, ttying to bring them to appreciate the problems of
others, a best way to bring them to that appreciation is presumably to find
some such problem of others as does to them what yours does to you, i.e. , that
others face problems which lead them not to see, as you face a problem which
leads you not to see. He could, after all, have come up with any number of
reasons why they don't happen to give her the right of way, but what he does
is to find a parallel problem to hers; some matters which, as a sheer abstract
argument, have this parallel to her situation: 'You have some problem that
leads you to not be able to see. And now you're complaining about others.
Well why don't you then be a little bit more thoughtful and realize that they
also have problems which prevent them noticing. It happens that what their
problems prevent them from noticing is people who can't see. '
Though again, when we take it apart it's not clear that there is any such
person, 'the New Yorker; ' that if there are 'New Yorkers' that whatever
they're occupied with when they travel the trains are specifically ' New
Yorkers' problems' , as pollution is a 'New York problem. ' A given person
travelling on a train may have some problem in mind, but for this package
to be brought off it turns out that they have 'New Yorker's problems. ' And
of course furthermore, while they could have all sorts of problems on their
minds, that their problems would lead them not to notice something is
another question. And in any event, if they have those problems that lead
them not to notice something, that their problems lead them not to notice a
blind person is an altogether different thing.
Now the eeriness of the thing is the way in which the explanation is built
on the spur of the moment. And perhaps that's the only way this explanation
266 Part IV
could have come to be built. That is, doing it on the spur of the moment
provides for the kind of examination he makes of what she's done. And that
then leads him to produce, using what she's done as his data, an explanation
that should satisfy her by virtue of the kind of complaint she has. 'Why don't
people notice somebody's seeing problem?' 'They have them of their own ­
as you should know better than anybody. ' 1 So in a way, not being really
prepared to have an answer, you might be in a perfectly good position to build
a convincing - and perhaps altogether too elegant - answer, given some
problem. One kind of question is, after all, how do people go about coming
up with answers to the questions they get, right off, just like that? People are
asking people all kinds of questions, posing problems of this sort. And they
have answers. Do they have answers or can they just use the problem to get
themselves answers? Having more time, he might well not have come up with
so elegant an answer. But being strapped for time, it's not that he can't find
a solution, it's maybe that the solution he finds will be radically parasitic on
the problem, as this one is.
Of course it may well be that there's some kind of filtering that has
somebody who can operate on what people give him, with this kind of
rapidity, being specifically virtuoso for this job or jobs like it. But one wants
to think, then, about what kind of virtuosity it is, and whether having rapid
answers of this sort is a virtue that would yield good solutions. And I have no
idea whether people who heard it, or whether he or she, felt any of its eeriness.
I wonder, because I guess at least on some occasions one feels that the
conversation was kind of eerie, and if things are going on like those that are
going on here, then you might have some way of seeing that there's some
kind of systematic basis for the feeling of it being eerie.
The gross point, then, is if people don't have a second story they can make
one, in just the way they come to find one, i.e. , by using a careful
consideration of the first story to construct it. A constructed second may work
better than an actual second, an actual second, being perhaps somewhat more
constrained by what you remember, being, then, less free to being fitted to just
what you've got. And I doubt that it would be good theater - it's not too
believable.
I'm going to talk now to the following fragment.

Louise : I've got a back house a guest house in the back a' my house?
Ken : Mm hm,
Louise : It's uh you can't hear anything it locks it has a bedroom a kitchen
and a bathroom. It's a real nice place also a TV.
Ken : Mm [hm
Louise : And a radio.
(2 .0)

1 In an earlier consideration of this phenomenon , not included in this edition (omitted from
Winter 1 969, lecture 8), a student comments, " Something like she's blind to their problems. "
Sacks responds, "Right. It's at the edge o f overt punning, i n his usage of her materials. "
 Lecture 6 267
Louise : Jo and I go out there some- you know, ( 1 .0) and I've- ( 1 .0) One
night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An' uh
(3 . 0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the ( 1 .0)
Ash Grove for a while, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't stand
a car. 'n he [has a small car.
Ken : Mm hm,
Louise : So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house
an' we stayed there half the night.
( 1 .0)
Louise : We didn't to to bed to- t'each other, but- it was so comfortable
an' so [nice.
Ken : Mm hm,
Ken : Mm.
Louise : Y'know? There's everything perfect.

The way I go about getting myself a problem is to see, e.g. , what sorts of
orderlinesses, similarities, are noticeable in some fragment. Having noticed
them, then I can try to see whether there's something about them that could
be explained. And when I say some sorts of orderlinesses or similarities, that's
kind of different than some of the things one might initially ask, proceeding
in the ways one proceeds in the first instance, e.g. , to say "Why did he do
that?" for something you see him doing: "Why did they pause there?" "Why
did they put this word in?" Now at least a reason for starting with some
observations, and some observations which at least tentatively locate some
sorts of orderliness, is that if you have some observations in the first instance,
then it may be that even though your initial formulation of a problem needs
to get rejected, doesn't turn out to be solvable, etc. , you have nonetheless seen
something going on in the fragment that you might be able to find in
something else, or you might at least have an observation which needs to be
turned into a problem.
There are some instances of that here. As a lay matter, it's initially
noticeable about Louise's story that she seems sort of defensive about what she
did. And in noticing her defensiveness I'm noticing things like: In the first
instance, she says 'what we didn't do, ' "We didn't go to bed . " And I have
at least an initial interest in a report in a story, of something one didn't do.
Why does she say 'what we didn't do'? And for that interest I have a kind of
generalized analytic basis which is: Unless there's some discriminativeness
with regard to things you didn't do, then, if you're allowed in stories to say
things you didn't do, you could put in zillions of things. And I guess we kind
of have this feeling that lots of things that you surely didn't do, that you could
propose for some stories that you didn't do, would make the reporting of
them an absurdity.
Now I'm trying to construct a technology for building stories. So I'm
looking for any part of a story that I can pull out and say this part has a
technology for getting done, for unspecified people telling unspecified stories.
268 Part IV
What I want are the most limited sorts of constraints on an item that would
nonetheless preserve its observable features. Like, that in a story that says in
an obvious way that it's about 'something I did once, ' there is sometimes
something in it that says 'what I didn't do. ' If I can isolate that facet of it, then
I may be able to see how that thing is built into stories as a technical part of
them, without regard to which stories or which 'what I didn't do. ' If so, then
we have a gross orderliness, and we can then begin to picture a kind of answer
to the question, how do people go about picking some 'what they didn't do'
to put into a story - leaving aside the issue of why they put it in, which I
initially focussed on in part by reference to the sense that the story is a bit
defensive.
So I focus on 'what I didn't do' in order to see, when something is reported
as not having been done, whether there's some systematic relationship to the
story that's told. If there's any discriminativeness for what you formulate as
what wasn't being done, then one could initially suppose that an orderliness
I'm going to find in stories is that if there is a 'what I didn't do' part, it will
bear closely on what was reported in the story, such that if I took a set of
stories each one of which had a 'what I didn't do, ' I couldn't exchange them
sensibly. And that is to say, there would perhaps be a way of specifying what
the story is about, to tell you what sorts of things would go in a 'what I didn't
do' part. So, e.g. , when you think about it, you kind of immediately figure,
well, in a story about sex, that they didn't go to bed with each other is a
wasn't-done thing specifically reportable for that story. In a story about
something else, something that stood in a similar relationship to 'we didn't go
to bed with each other' for a story about sex would be used as a 'what I didn't
do. '
You could see, then, that this was a technically picked thing, for which,
e.g. , you didn't have to specify very much. That is, you wouldn't have to
know who these people are in very much of a way.
[Here the tape runs out.]
 Lecture 7
•what's going on' in a lay sense;
Tracking co-participants; Context
information; Pre-positioned laughter;
Interpreting utterances not
directed to one
One of the ways one can attempt to deal with conversational materials is to
engage in figuring our what's going on in a kind of lay sense. Obviously
'what's going on' can be dealt with in various sorts of detail, with various sorts
of information that you might happen to have about the people involved, or
about what they're doing in their talk - in this case, in the following story. I
think it pays to try to see what the events might have been in the reported
story, and thereby to get some idea about what the various people were doing
withjto each other. Indeed, it might have been a good idea to spend some
time with the materials I've given out, before I started talking about them;
thinking about such matters so as to not have what I say about them be either
'obviously correct' or 'Well, it might as well be that as anything else.'
Let m e give a litde background on the data. Agnes and Portia are sisters,
middle-aged ladies. Portia is more or less long-time separated from her
husband, and she went away for a couple of days to visit Kate, a friend of
hers. Kate is kind of recendy remarried to Carl, a very rich man. Portia has
just come back, and she and Agnes are talking on the phone about, among
other things, the trip. Now, the facts I give to context the fragment, I
obviously picked as relevant to what's going on, and I suppose were
something else going on, I might have offered some others. So, which facts,
that I have from other conversations or from other parts of this conversation,
tum out to be relevant, tum in part on getting some idea about what's going
on.

Agnes : Where'djuh have dinner: : with them.

Portia : 'hh Oh, we went down tuh, Ravina.
Agnes : Oh . . .jj.
. .

Portia : Et the El Grande, en this Frank thet ownsa place, course

Carl's built all these placiz y'jjknow 'n God 'e knows
everybojjdy.

269
270 Part IV
Agnes : Mm: :hm,
Agnes : Mm hm,
Portia : He- Oh: : God whatta guy, that guy is absolutely
go(hh)rgeous 'hh en so last night, - they were, feelin' pretty
goodj jje know,
Agnes : Mm hm,
Portia : They had quite a few drinks et home en then when we went
down there tuh eat they ad jj quite a few drinks 'n this
fella, Frank thet ownsa place, he goes tuh, downa Rancho
Cordova, so we adda lot in cojj mmon yih know,
Agnes : Mm-hm,
Agnes : Mm: :hm,
Portia : 'hhhh So he w'z kinda feedin'm drinks en so finally (hh)he­
'hh his uh, wife thet died's name's Ellen (hh)yih(h)know'hh
(h)en hheh 'hh so 'e sez "Well now Ellen? uh you jus' (hh)be
quiet" en s(h)he s(h)iz Kate (h)yihknow en she's so funny
'hhh jj she siz "Okay Ted, " hhhj jhah ha:h!
Agnes : ( ),
Agnes : She- Oh did she,
Portia : 'hhh en Carl is a �nn'lmun yihknow =
Agnes : ( )
Portia : - [ oh he doesn't like anything like that =
Agnes :
= [ n::No.
Portia : course Kate, she- she watches 'er Ps 'n' Qs jj you know,
Agnes : Mm hm,
(0.9)
Agnes : He's crazy about 'er,
(0.6)
Agnes : 'hh/jhh
Portia : Oh: : God, en I told im, eh so when she wen't' the restroom
I sez "Boy there goes a great gal" 'n 'e s'z "Boy I sure l:love
'er 'n I hope I c' n make 'er �py' ' so, when, 'hh we came
home why he wen'tuh bed 'nen we went swimming again
'fore w'w(hh)en'tuh/jbed-'hh
Agnes : Oh: : God, isn'at fu: :jjn?
Portia : Ahheh! Yeh. So, 'hh I told Kate 'e said 'at 'e sez y- "Oh yer
a liar" I s'z "Well no: : at's he said the: : : they- he said that
to me" he s'z "Well 'e never tells' me" en I sez " 'e said that­
tub/jme"
Agnes : Mm hm,

Put kind of straightforwardly, what I figure is going on is that as Portia sees

it, an event took place on this evening which she, at that time, saw as being
possibly dangerous for Kate's relationship to Carl. And at that time she took
steps, both to check out whether indeed a dangerous thing had happened and
whether she might do something to help Kate's position in the situation. That
 Lecture 7 27 1
is, she thought then and there that Kate might have done something that
embarrassed, maybe angered, annoyed, Carl. She then proceeded to tell Carl
how good a person Kate was, in some aid of Kate.
Now that's an altogether informal, unproved, perhaps unprovable, per­
haps irrelevant to prove it, characterization of what took place. And it's just
the sort of observing that, when it appears in a student's paper, we thoroughly
discourage. However, it is one legitimate and fruitful way to approach
materials, for the initial observations themselves, and in that that sort of
sophisticated lay observation of a scene is one way that you come to find items
that can be extracted and developed quite independently of the observations
one initially made, where the initial observations need not, then, be presented.
One needs to see if those sorts of observations, that sort of a discussion, can
lead to something that could perhaps transcend it and tum into some sort of
serious statement, other than the statement I offered, which perhaps Portia
herself could offer.
So, for example, a kind of thing that one could notice in stories is that at
least some of the time a teller will keep track of the co-participants to the
conversation at various points in it. It is done several times in this story, i.e. ,
when Portia reporrs ' 'and I told him, eh so when she went to the restroom I
says . . . " she provides for the absence of Kate. Then, when she reports that she
told Kate about what Carl told her, she provides for the absence of Carl:
"when we came home, why he went to bed and then we went swimming
again . . . so I told Kate . . . ' ' What she told Carl, then, she told him in the absence
of Kate, and vice versa. Moreover, she tells Agnes that she told each one in
the absence of the other. And in that regard, we can note a kind of routine
thing: When she reports to Kate in Carl's absence what Carl said, she doesn't
tell Kate what she had said that got Carl to say what he said. She says "I told
Kate he said . . . " and not "I told Kate that when I said X, he said Y. " So,
Portia having done a compliment about Kate, Carl returns a compliment
about Kate, but when she reports to Kate, she can report just what Carl said
and not what she said that got him to say it - or for that matter, why she said
what she said that got him to say what he said.
Having noticed that tracking of who is present in reported talk in this story,
we can find that it is a kind of recurrent feature in stories. Here's another
instance.

Kim : What's even funnier is, his father said, "Well, after 2 5 years, I
don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just ridicu­
lous!
Bob : It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so, he
uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that
really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to
Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. So jeez!
they were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being
very rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got
much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it,
272 Part IV
you know. " So, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were
over there, and, Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim
came out to me and said that my mother had gotten my father
just scads and scads of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim
said that my mother was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her
anything. So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father to
see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs)

So here's a situation where it's reported. " Kim was in talking to mother. And
then Kim came out to me . . . So I was supposed to go out and feel out my
father. " It's not just that a series of exchanges are reported, but who was
present for each exchange is reported. And it's plain that each of the
exchanges reported were two-party matters for what is being done with them.
It may then be that stories serve us as a resource to see ways in which people
take it that, e.g., who is present, or the number of persons present, matter for
what's being done with some piece of talk. And these may overlap, i.e. , at
some places it might be who's present and for some things it might matter not
merely who's present, but that only two people are present or that more than
two people are present. At least the initial materials from stories that are
relevant to such considerations are that people keep track, for single utterances
or utterance exchanges, of who was present. And the question could then be
raised as to why they do that in stories, and whether that tells us about ways
- not in stories but in the events the stories report - that they attend such
matters.
Let me focus on some other facets of the materials; that remark of Portia's,
"I told him, eh so when she went to the restroom I says 'Boy there goes a great
gal' . ' ' An initial question is, can we come up with some consideration of a
then-and-there which will be relevant to why she said that, or to what she's
doing with what she said? Not knowing any of the the context, not knowing
much about it at all but what one can glean from the fragment, she seems to
be offering a compliment. And if we know that she's offering a compliment
to the husband of the person referred to, then that's a reasonable recipient of
such a compliment. And plainly, to offer the compliment in the presence of
the one being complimented can be doing something a bit different than
offering it on their absence. That is, to have produced some such compliment
in Kate's presence, then at least one kind of difference involved would be the
way in which it could affect what Carl could say in return - not that Carl
couldn't say what he says here, but perhaps he couldn't say negative things.
And, e.g. , though it was addressed to Carl, it might well require that Kate
say something also. In any event, the presence of Kate would plainly shift
the sort of thing that Portia is doing. And the compliment is plainly
designed for the fact that Kate is leaving for the moment, i.e. , it picks up
on that 'going.' Presumably she's walking off when " Boy there goes a great
gal" is done.
Now, forgetting about what's happened so far, and at this point not
knowing whether Frank, the guy that owns the place, is still around, the
 Lecture 7 273
situation i s now perhaps one o f Portia and Carl and Frank, or o f Portia and
Carl sitting there by themselves. And if it is Portia and Carl there is now an
issue of what are they going to say to each other, or what are they going to
do with each other in the time that they are by themselves. For one, Portia
could have some interest in, say, making her position plain that all she's going
to do is get into such a conversation as involves Kate and Carl and not Portia
and Carl. And also of course, if she figures that Carl might have been
embarrassed by or annoyed with Kate, then she now has an occasion to check
that out. Indeed, if she doesn't say something about it right off, then he
might. That is, he might, finding this an occasion when Kate's not there
closely after the scene that's taken place, find it necessary to apologize to
Portia for the way Kate behaved. It's possible, then, that Portia is not only
intending to pick the topic that they'll talk about while Kate is gone, but to
take a position on that topic, and perhaps, then, to indicate that she wasn't
bothered by what happened and that she hopes he wasn't bothered, and in
any event he shouldn't be bothered by reference to her being bothered. That
is to say, what took place, took place in her presence, and in that she is
something of an outsider to that couple, then a routine kind of thing is that
a party of the couple can feel that the person present was put in an
embarrassing situation and feel the need to apologize, which he could have
done right then and there. So there may well be bases for Portia waiting for
Kate to leave and then offering her compliment so as to, e.g. , check out
things with Carl and to state what she made of it to Carl - and also to
bring that up as soon as Kate leaves, if what she's doing is connected to
what's transpired.
Now whereas if we only had a transcript of what took place we might only
figure that that might be so, the way the story is told makes it rather more
plausible. That is to say, these are the events presented in the story. And that's
important in this sort of way: The usual sorts of connectednesses we can set
up in dealing with a transcript of something like the events that this story
talks of, are most easily done when the talk that's being examined is very
closely adjacent talk, i.e. , when one utterance follows another directly or
connectedly. It's very difficult to establish conneaednesses between utterances
that are fairly distant from each other. And that kind of problem is
particularly touchy. As a technical problem, it will weaken analysis by virtue
of the fact that there are some utterances which are intendedly connected,
which cannot be done directly upon what they're connected to without losing
their effect. If the exchange between Kate and Frank took place: "Well now
Ellen? uh you just be quiet," " Okay Ted, " and then directly thereupon Portia
were to offer to Carl some such compliment as she offers here, then plainly she
would be doing a connected remark which would have to be seen as
attempting to do something to a scene that's emerged. The fact of the
connectedness would be transparent, and would then locate the sorts of things
that Portia could be doing. Her offering a compliment about Kate right then
and there would indicate that she figures Kate has either done something bad
or will be seen to have done something bad. That is, although she does it
274 Part IV
because of what she saw Kate do, or what she thought Carl might think of
what Kate did, she can't have it be seen by Carl as being done by reference to
what happened, or being done just by reference to what happened, if it's to be
at all effective. And if she can wait to do the compliment, then that occasioning
of the compliment can be lost. But that of course will pose problems for us
when we pick this utterance up two or five minutes later into the talk.
It's precisely a kind of burying job that she's trying to do. And stories can
give us access to the fact that such things are done. Not that we don't know
it in some way, but perhaps in stories we can isolate types of things that get
done at a distance and see whether they can be connected as, say, instances of
A in the presence of B and C, doing something that embarrasses B, and at
some specifiable point thereafter but not directly thereafter, C doing some­
thing which is directed to raising or lowering the status of the embarrassing
person. Obviously it doesn't have to be a compliment, it could perfectly well
be a dig. And, as well, the effectiveness of a dig would be different depending
upon its placement. There is, then, a kind of large gain that the organiza­
tion a story has gives us for problems that are otherwise difficult to get at.
Here, a connectedness between utterances that may be minutes, perhaps
much longer, apart, but which are specifically intended to be connected in
some way, while also having their connectedness not directly available in
other ways.
We're lucky for other things that the story has, that we don't have in a
transcript of the story's events. These turn on the ways in which stories may
be designed for their listener, now not simply in the sense of what their listener
knows and doesn't know in general, but what their listener might or might
not have in mind at the moment, over the course of the story. One of the
things that Portia is doing throughout the story is, in various ways, dealing
with relevancies that she knows of that turn out to be important for the last
thing or the next thing said. It's not just that sometimes a fact might be
asserted which the other party doesn't know, but that whether the other party
knows it or not, the issue is would they use it now. So what we have is a sense
of context being employed by the teller, which involves fitting to the story, in
carefully located places, information that will permit the appreciation of what
was transpiring, information which involves events that are not in the story
sequence at that point. An obvious sort of thing is, e.g., the pre-assertion of
who Ellen is, before any Ellen gets mentioned. It's a thing that, having been
said by Portia she can apparently figure that Agnes will hold it for the
moment, assume it to be relevant, but not worry right then and there "Well
why mention Ellen?' ' Sometimes such bits are stuck in in advance, and
sometimes, like the remarks about Carl's being a gentleman, they're stuck in
afterwards.
I think there are some reasons why these kinds of context information
designed for the listener are used, and that is, to keep them attentive to how
to read what they're being told. And there is reason for those things to be put
directly before or after. In considering the matter, I think I've come up with
a partial answer to a question that was asked last time: Why do people do
 Lecture 7 275
these "hehh"s. 1 I think an answer is something like this. Let me give another
instance from the same conversation. Agnes is asking about the house.

Agnes : I bet it's a dream, with the swimming pool enclosed huh?
Portia : Oh God, we hehh! we swam in the nude Sunday night until
about two o'clock.
Now what I take it that "hehh!" is doing, and what I take it a bunch of
"hehh"s are doing is something like this: Something is about to be reported
which the teller takes it that the hearer should know what the teller's attitude
towards it is. The kind of event being reported could be specifically equivocal
as to whether it is something awful, embarrassing, serious, non-serious, etc.
And there are ways for the teller to let the recipient know which the teller
thinks it is, so as to guide the recipient in figuring out what's happening, and
also in figuring out things about the teller's participation. So, for example, in
the report about swimming in the nude, by using "hehh! " before reporting it
she's saying "I took it lightly. " Where it could be read as a kind of obscene
event, it is rather to be treated as something light-hearted. It was funny.
Where it perhaps could be important for the teller to have the recipient know
or believe that the teller thought it was that sort of thing.
And it's important to put the "hehh! " beforehand so as to not have to
await the recipient's response to it. That is, the recipient could, if you didn't
put the "hehh" in there, laugh themselves and then you might laugh, and
then the recipient might figure that although you laughed when they
proposed it was funny, you may not have thought it was funny. That is to say,
you awaited my response to do your own appreciation of it, and had I given
another response to it you might have gone along with that, too. Or, if you
don't give the information, then the recipient might well figure that it was
something else that happened, and that you're not such a good person as they
thought, or whatever.
We can notice that in this story Portia is rather elaborate in doing these
sorts of things. She knows damn well that it's equivocally a chuckleable
sequence, she thinks it's a kind of dangerous sequence, with her remark about
Carl's being a gentleman who doesn't like anything like that. But she starts
chuckling right off, and before offering Kate's remark she specifically says
"and she's so funny, " which is to say ' hear this as funny as compared to hear
it as something a vulgar person does. ' She can do that here, as part of her
argument about what took place, and presumably she could have done it on
the occasion of its happening, i.e. , laughing in the hope of bringing Carl to see
that it was funny, or at least to see that she thought it was funny and not
something that engendered simply her silence. And in the telling of the story,
she doesn't put Agnes into quite the same situation as she was in, where the
funniness of it was something that she could try to achieve after it, but which
was specifically an issue - for Portia, anyway, i.e. , she has no idea about what
Carl indeed felt.
1 Not in the unedited ttanscript of lecture 6.
276 Part I V
S o the "hehh"s i n stories may have some bunch o f jobs that they
specifically do, and one of them can be of the same sort as asserting things like
"she's so funny" and " Carl's a gendeman, " i.e. , directing the recipient's
hearing of some next or prior story item. And then presumably tellers could
offer other classifications of something they report than that it was funny, e.g . ,
b y sighing or other sorts o f sounds, o r b y asserting it.
Let me now address the particular question of why Portia sees what
happened as something that would embarrass Carl. An exchange takes place
between Frank and Kate. Neither Carl nor Portia are recipients of either of its
utterances. The remark is directed to Kate and the return is directed to Frank.
The question, then, in some generality is: In various conversations there are
more than the people who are direct recipients of an utterance present, and
they are engaged in making out what's happened. Do they use some
procedure?
What we see here is that for Portia it's not simply a situation in which Kate
and Frank are talking and she and Carl are listening and each of them is freely
entided to just see what happened and make of it whatever they want as an
audience to it, i.e. , they could see themselves as an undifferentiated audience,
each one hearing the thing as an independent party listening to what has
happened. Instead, in this case Portia seems to take it that in order to see
what's happened, her business - whether obligatory or optional - is to see
what Carl made of the event. And she figures what Carl made of the event
is not only relevant, but is something that, e.g . , he would do in a different way
than she would That is to say, at least it wasn't in the first instance Carl's
problem to figure out what she might make of it. But her view is that Carl
would make something of the event, and that she would make something of
the event by reference to what Carl made of it. And while it may be a problem
to figure out what Carl made of it, that she should figure out what Carl made
of it is something she accepts.
Of cause that's a fairly simple possibility, that of the two listeners who are
legitimate listeners in that they're parties to the conversation, one of them
makes it their business to figure out what's happened by reference to an
attempt to figure out what the other made of it. And the more general
question is, again, are there procedures whereby, for any size conversation, the
various parties in it go about deciding - not only what's happened, but what's
happened that's relevant for them. That is to say, Portia isn't just abstracdy
examining the thing as "Well, what did Carl make of it?" she's using what
she thinks Carl made of it in order to herself do something in the
conversation.
Now let me try to begin to propose that there is a format for parties
interpreting utterances not directed to them. Thereafter I'll go on to what
some consequences of that format are. In this case it's kind of simple. You
have Frank, the owner of the place, and Kate and Carl, husband and wife,
and Portia, a friend, present. Frank is 'feeding drinks to them. ' Kate is
presumably getting very loose. Frank then rebukes her, maybe jokingly
maybe not. The rebuke doesn't quite come off, but it is something that, while
 Lecture 7 277
it elicits a return from Kate, could perfectly well have elicited a return from
Carl, i.e. , his wife being rebuked, though the utterance was directed to her,
he perfectly well could come back with something to Frank. It plainly is an
occasion for a non-recipient to talk up, when someone has insulted his wife.
A presumable attention of the parties to the interaction could then be to
whether Carl is going to have a chance or be given a place to respond to what
Frank said, i.e. , to tell Frank to lay off his wife. So that while Portia can see
that what Frank said is not anything that will occasion her saying anything
then and there, she could be attentive to a way that Carl will hear it as an
insult to his wife, or a rebuke or a rebuke-insult to his wife, that he might
respond to it, and that in any event his way of hearing it can be presumed to
be by reference to what's been done to his wife by somebody. Alternatively
but relatedly, it can also be that with Frank being perhaps a friend of Carl's
and Kate being a new wife of Carl's, Portia could imagine that what Carl sees
is that Kate is being embarrassing to him by having to be rebuked. He might
then have something to say to Kate.
In any event, right upon the first utterance Carl becomes a possible talker.
And Portia isn't. And it might be her business to be attentive to possible
talkers since she has to know, e.g. , if she herself has something to say, is now
a time to say it? That is, attending the organization of talk in which turns are
assigned so as to see whether, e.g. , there's a free space to talk, any party to a
conversation can and should analyze an utterance in order to find out who
should speak next. And a way to do that is to find out if anything has been
done to somebody that would involve them in speaking next. One 'anybody'
who would be looking for such things is Portia. Simply out of an interest to
see whether she can or should talk, she would then see what's been done
and to whom and thereby can see that a rebuke was done, was done to
Kate, so that in the first instance it's at least Kate's business to talk and not
Portia's.
Now I want to suggest that if we can suppose that one kind of question
that any parties to a conversation can have for any utterance in that
conversation is "What's been done with that utterance to me?" then there
need be some systematic ways that anybody can solve that question. And that
doesn't involve simply a matter of looking at a rebuke and saying "There's
a rebuke in the room, ' ' but using to whom a rebuke was done as a first step
to then finding out "What's been done to me?" That is to say, the first step
to finding out what's been done to you is to find out what's been done to
whomever something's been done to - i.e. , that person who is a recipient in
the first place - and then applying, say, relationships that one has to the
recipient, to find what's been done to you.
That sort of sequence will account for one class of things that happens in
conversation: Some party is the recipient of an utterance that does something
to them, and somebody else talks up, where among the things that that
somebody does is to deal with "What's been done to me" via what's been
done to the person who's been talked to. Transparent instances involve series
just like this one where somebody insults a wife and a husband talks up to the
278 Part IV
insulter, or where a little brother is threatened by somebody and a big brother
talks up to indicate "If you want to fight with him you've got to fight with
me. ' ' So that a secondary parry hears an insult to somebody they stand in
some relationship to and uses their relationship to find themselves speaking
up and, say, defending the spoken-to party. In an instance that occurs in one
of the group therapy sessions the therapist rebukes one of the fellows, who has
gotten into a brief conversation with another about some outside business. So
we get "Ken, why don't you make these arrangements out of here" at which
point one of the others, not in the outside conversation, says "Yes teacher. "
I take it that he is, for one, seeing that the sort of thing that was done, was
done in such a way as to pull rank not merely on the fellow on whom rank
was pulled, but on any of such people of which he, himself, is one. So that this
kind of sequence in which any party tries to find who's been addressed and
what's been done to the addressed party, and uses that to then see 'what's
been done to me, ' tells us something about when some people come to say
something though they haven't been addressed - specifically, to say some­
thing which deals with what's happened. And if there is some kind of
formality to the way in which relationships are used to find 'what's been done
to me' for secondary non-recipient parties, then, e.g . , it's no particular
surprise that Portia could do that, without regard to whether she should do
that.
Now let's shift the consideration around somewhat. Just as it's the business
of secondary parties to use what's happened to recipients to find what's
happened to themselves in some chain that can get variously elaborated, so it
turns out to be the business of speakers in producing an utterance, to attend
not merely its consequences in terms of how it affects the person they're
addressing it to, but also to attend how it affects others. In that there are these
non-recipient parties, and in that they have the business of analyzing an
utterance to see what's been done to them, it is, then, the business of a speaker
in producing it to know not merely what it's doing to the one it's addressed
to, but what it will do to others who will analyze it by reference to what's been
done to them through the party to whom it's been done. And that is plainly
done in conversation, i.e. , it's plain that parties design their utterances not
merely by reference to who is receiving something they're doing, but what it's
doing to third parties.
A favorite sort of thing I have for this is a phenomenon I call 'safe
compliments. ' By that I mean that if you're engaged in building a
compliment to some party present, in the presence of others, then a problem
you face is how to build a compliment to that one without thereby doing
something like a denegration to the others. If, e.g . , you say to one person out
of four or five who are present, "You're the smartest person I know," then
you're saying to the others that they're not as smart. There are ways of
designing 'safe compliments' which involve, e.g. , finding a characteristic that
no one else present has, so that in seeing what's been done to them they don't
find that they've been put down by the compliment to another. So,
compliments and other sorts of things can be designed to handle just that sort
 Lecture 7 2 79
of issue. To take another simple, obvious sort of thing, if three parties are
present and A flirts with B, then A can be flirting with B in order to tease C.
Though not interested in flirting with B, A has a possibility of doing ' flirting'
in order to be 'teasing,' by virtue of the way in which C is going to be seeing
what's been done to B in order to see what's been done to himself. And
plainly parties will attend how they do their flirting by reference to who else
is present in the conversation. And, for that matter, possible conversationalists
will attend features of the conversation to decide whether they should become
a party to it, by seeing what would happen if they did. That is to say, if, e.g. ,
at a party, people are more or less paired off, then you can figure that any pair
you happen to latch onto is going to spend some amount of time doing things
that you will find unpleasant for you, or that you're going to be engaged in
pushing someone else out.
Now if it can be supposed that a speaker will have attended what he's
doing to third parties who will find out what's been done to them by reference
to what's been done to a second, then you could begin to have rather
complicated tasks, mutually involved, as the size of a conversation goes up.
That is to say, the sheer fact of number could begin to impose rather
elaborated tasks on any given speaker, who could be held responsible not
merely for what he's doing to B, but what he's doing to C through B, or to
D through C through B, or to E through B, etc. And that procedure we've
been considering, which may work in three-party conversations, and might
work in four-party conversations, could work for any-sized conversations. It
may be a procedure in which any party feels entitled to figure out what's been
done to a recipient and then use that to find out what's been done 'to me, ' and
then hold it against the speaker as someone who should have known what he
was doing ' to me. ' And it may further be required that one consider not
merely what they're doing to the one they're talking to, or to some particular
other, but to any of the others that happen to be present.
To that sort of fact some other sorts of facts need to be added, e.g. , that the
relationships that are used to find these sorts of things out can change in the
course of a conversation. (Not that, e.g. , Carl and Kate will get divorced in
the course of the conversation, but that some utterance will make it not
relevant that Carl and Kate are husband and wife, but relevant that they're
rich or that Carl's rich, or that they're guests, or that Portia is a guest, or that
Portia is unattached, etc.) When that is added we begin to have rather
technically awesome problems involved in a situation of, say, an ordinary
five-party conversation. Further, add this sort of fact: When a conversation
reaches a size of four it can split into twos, i.e. , as the number of parties
increases, the number of possibilities for split-off conversations increases.
There is then a chance for the fifth, sixth, and seventh person in a conversation
to move out of it - where they also have to be held into it by having things
happening to them, and unless you're talking to things that they could be
kept interested in, i.e. , things that they can figure that something's been done
to them, they're liable to move out of it. One begins to see, then, that for the
mechanisms that work in two- or three-party conversations, it may well
280 Part IV
become altogether inconceivable that they could be in operation as soon as the
conversation gets slightly larger. It may be unreasonable, may be known to be
impossible except under special circumstances, for parties to do what they do
and hold others to do what they ought to do in two- and three-party
conversations, in much larger conversations.
What you might then get is a kind of transformation of the structure of the
conversation. It may no longer be a matter of each person standing in their
complex relations to anybody else, i.e. , it may be that parties no longer can or
do attend what happens as happening 'to me, ' and speakers do not have to
worry about what they've done to some such parties. Rather, some much
simpler splitting now takes place, in which you have current speaker(s) being
engaged in some sort of performance for others who simply treat themselves
as an audience, and who appropriately so treat themselves, even though they
may come up for talk. Then you could get a kind of talk taking place between
the two parties in which neither figures that the people are talking to each
other, and they can do things to each other that could otherwise be delicate,
since not only is it that the rest of the group is an audience, but they are
audience to each other as well. That is to say, in a seven-party conversation it
might perfectly well be that this kind of exchange could take place without
it ever passing through Carl's mind that his wife had been insulted. Rather,
the two of them, Frank and Kate, were staging something - though that, too,
could bother Carl. I'm suggesting that you cannot simply expand the kinds
of considerations that operate in two- and three-parry conversation and
suppose that they hold in five-party conversation. It may not be the way in
which conversations operate, simply by virtue of such a fact as that the
mechanisms requiredly operating in two- or three-party conversations, while
they could conceivably be managed in larger conversations, couldn't in
principle be imposed on people's minds. Now that may be a kind of
theoretical argument, but there are some sorts of evidence that they do
proceed differently. Then of course, among the ways that we conventionally
run conversations, the numbers don't increase relevantly when the numbers
increase, i.e. , three couples could still be something like a three-party
conversation if, e.g. , a rule which assigns women the job of laughing and not
talking were preserved.
So the idea was roughly something like: There's a legitimate and required
sequence of interpretation that parties engage in. If, e.g . , Carl didn't do it then
he could be taken aside afterwards by Kate and complained to about how
come he didn't defend her, and if he says he didn't hear what was happening,
that's no excuse, it's his business to be attentive to what's happening to her.
But that business plainly becomes an extraordinarily complicated thing when
the size of the conversation becomes large. And that's not merely in the sense
that Carl couldn't do it, but supposing that Carl could do it, do we have
grounds to assume that Frank should have done that sort of consideration?
That is to say, the rules of conversation are designed for anonymous parties,
i.e. , people can perfectly well conduct a conversation who have never met
before. Then, the kinds of general tasks that can be built into it may well rum,
 Lecture 7 28 1
not merely on what somebody could do, but on what anybody could
reasonably be expected to do.
This sort of line has a variety of interests to it. One is that one might
suppose, having found what seem to be central mechanisms for conversation,
that those mechanisms would of course hold over various numbers of parties
involved. And that may simply not be so. The number may well be a specific
consideration. There is, e.g . , that number from which conversations can split
off. Three people are locked in together - one can leave to be sure, and the
conversation continue, but that one can't get into another conversation off of
this one. So the problem of speakers to keep a third party in is less then that
of a four-party conversations which, if it turns into a two-party conversation,
permits the others to drop out; where, then, some amount of talk is designed
to keep people who are not talking, in.
So, taking as an initial tack trying to find out what someone like Portia
is doing, can pay off if you extract and construct the procedures whereby
they come to do what they're doing and attempt to give those procedures a
general characterization. Then you can arrive at the general conditions under
which everybody and anybody in such positions could do that job and under
which anybody could find what's being done to them. That is, you will be
finding and characterizing general organizational, relational, etc., features of
interaction.
 Lecture 8
Asking questions; Heckling
The bulk of this class was given to back and forth discussion. Eventually one of
the students complains about a lack of honesty and responsibility in the
question-asking of other students. That generates the following.

You seem to have the view that question-asking as a students' skill is

something that they could perfectly well do, just by trying. And I might
behave that way. But some people figure that you perfectly well could make
it your business to do one of two things: spend a lot of your time showing
people what might be questions they could ask, or finding how the question
they ask is a question to ask.
Now, I don't see the sharp break between questions and other things said,
in which, say, you're educated about one thing but the other is natural. And
I think that you may not make the effort to find what sorts of ways people
might be trying to find out how to do whatever they're trying to do, like
treating a question they have as, 'Is this an instance of a question? Let me hear
what I say in order to find out whether it's something somebody would say. '
And I think that that's utterly a reasonable thing. You could always figure if
it's on your mind it's on other people's minds. It's like a fly that's moving
around the room and now it's on your shoulder; it just happened to settle
there, and nobody's going to say it unless you say it, so go ahead and say it
and then we'll see whether that's something to have said. And unless we see
whether it's something to have said, nobody's going to know it isn't, because
they will have thought it and then not said it.
There's a real virtue to asking anything while you're around, just as there
is to thinking anything at some point simply in order to know what people
are thinking. And that could be as much a responsibility as the other, because
I'm sure that everybody has had the experience of saying something and
thereafter finding that it was a weird thing to say, but you wouldn't have that
experience had you not said it and heard somebody say it. So I think that a
plenty good case could be made for being responsibly irresponsible. And it
would take as much inner strength if you like, to ask an absurd question
which pops into your mind, which you might know is absurd but which you
know a lot of people think, yet you know you might get laughed at even
though everybody feels that way. And some people are able to do that.
Aside from which, for an expert answerer there's a range of ways to deal
with questions, in which an answer shifts the question so that nobody knows
but that the answer was the answer to the question. And indeed the person
who asked it could feel that. There's a nice instance in a conversation between
four or five guys who work at an insurance company. One of them, George,
282
 Lecture 8 283
in response to a crack about what's he trying to look like, has said "I try to
look like what I am. A liberal. ' ' And the others are saying things like ' 'You're
going to have to work a little harder to make it, " "I think you're trying to
look like a hippie, " "Not with the crew cut. Now if you had long hair, " and
he says:

George : Didju hear that fella on Les Crane show las' night I only saw the
very beginning. -- But 'e innerduced some uh, -- producers? of
TV s-shows, -- en one of 'em was a h!ppie.
jay : Uh huh,
George : Can' remember his name. The others weren't. But uh there were
four producers. -- An:d, he quoted this h!ppie ez s-saying when
'e wz, when the hippie w'z asked a question by the, by the,
news media, if it came to: : , whether, he c'd keep his jo:b, as a
producer,
(Sy) : Yeah.
George : in television, -- or, -- or keep his, bea:rd. In other words would
'e shave off his beard tuh keep his job.
(Sy) : Yeh.
George : And he said I would shave off my beard, my eyebrows, my
head, -- and my arms. tuh keep my job.
(pause)
jay : Mm hm, mm-hm,
George : How 'bout that.

Now the hippie producer is asked an extremely conventional question,

where the news media is doing their job of having integrity in a kind of
peculiar way, i.e. , it's a question that everybody wants to know the answer to,
in the sense that after all it's because he's a TV producer that he can afford to
be a hippie. And when such people claim that in that they're hippies they're
free, and show the world that they're free of kinds of constraints, they're only
free of the constraints because of other circumstances, and therefore to flaunt
that on the rest of the world is unfair, since if they were in other circumstances
they wouldn't be free to be free in that way. So it was really an elegant
question, which is why not only did the news media ask it, but it was quoted
by Les Crane and then quoted by George to his friends. That is to say, it was
really fitted nicely to what people wanted to hear, and George uses it to say
that that's why he keeps his hair cut short. Because he has a job in an
insurance company and would get fired if he wore it long. Now this is without
regard to whether that's the reason he doesn't wear long hair; it's also that,
that he's embarrassed into a position of feeling that he ought to wear long hair
in order to be a free person, he needs a reason not to wear long hair though
he'd just as soon not.
So it's a very neat question, though it's in a way also a very nasty question.
And its focus is on the beard. The answer, however, works over the question,
and answers a rather different one. What it answers is something like: 'If a job
284 Part IV
required it, would I not merely give up my hippie-like beard, but would we
not do utterly unreasonable things, like shave our eyebrows and all the hair
off our head, as you, too, could be asked to do. If they required that of me,
might not they require that of you . ' So he focusses off of the particular
hippie-attribute aspect of it to the more general facet of it - that things like
jobs set constraints on how you can appear. And it may well be that people
hearing that answer now see the question for the way in which it's partial or
unreasonable. Where, in the first instance when you're asked a question like
that, you can't say it's an unfair question. You can try to say it's an unfair
question, but that does other sorts of things. The question is, how can you, by
an answer, make it an unfair question, or teach people that the question is one
which, while it doesn't seem to implicate them, does so. The answer can do
that, and thereby affect the question. And that's a used procedure; one that
can change the question that had been in the asker's mind, and change the
question that had been in the audience's mind.
I'm going to talk now about a thing I haven't talked about this quarter,
and that I'm not going to say very much about here, but I've been giving a
very partial account of storytelling in that I've been mostly focussing on tellers
and not other parties' activities during stories. And that involves as a
consequence that I haven't focussed on the really obvious fact that often in
stories the listeners talk up, apart from things like "Mm Hm" and
responding to a preface and appropriately responding upon the story's
conclusion. Where it will radically misformulate what happens in stories to
not appreciate the fact that listeners may and do talk up in stories, with regard
to the way that, that they may talk up in stories affects the way stories are
told.
One thing to focus on then, is the phenomenon of 'heckling' stories, which
is kind of common. We can take as a characteristic kind of thing, the
following, from a group therapy session. They're talking about self-concepts
and plans.

Ken : I mean I'm thinking about what someday I'm going to be, and
stuff like 11 that
Roger : heh Wh(hh)en I grow up! heh hhh hheh hhh hh

That "heh When I grow up heh" stuck into some ongoing talk is the kind
of thing I'm talking about. It's enormously common that people do such sorts
of things, not at the end, but in the course of a story. And without giving even
the beginning of an extended consideration of what heckling can do, I just
want to say some things about it.
Recall that the chance to tell a story is a chance to do a rather more
elaborate package of things than one otherwise gets a chance to do. Now that
fact can get employed in a specific way, to get a chance to do what you
couldn't otherwise do. An instance of that occurs immediately following the
hippie-producer story.
 Lecture 8 285
George : How 'bout that.
(pause)
Sy : Very honest ma:n,
jay : Well, uh, I c'd see that if he really, wanted that job, 'n' if he
felt he c'd do much more goo:d er -- y-y 'know fer 'imse:lf,
er d'world, uh, doing that. I w'z having this kinda discussion
with, this, friend of mine. -whose, so:n, recently turned, in,
his, draft card.

Jay : A:nd uhm, -- oh he turned it in s:sorne, some weeks ago, -­

a:n', he hadda deferment. He 'adda Two S k- uh, classification
'e w'z a studen' in Pennsylvania. -- A:nd uh, -- en she w'z in
conflict yuh know, -- uh, aboud it, -- y'know at, one point
y'know she, she realized thet he 'ad certain principles thet,
y'know he felt he had to uphold, -- en the other s- h-uh, on
the Qther s- hand, y'know, she w'z, concerned. about y'know
the trouble she would- she would get into. -he would get
into.
(pause)
jay : So: : , uh: : :m, -- in any case it turned out that the uh Selective
Service, returned, uh, the draft card. Now what he expected
was thet they were g'nna return the draf 'card, but take away
his deferment. Give 'im One A staytus.
George : Yah but they, they only threaten that, they never do II it.
jay : They-
Jay : Well they didn't, in this p'ticular case �nyway.
(pause)
�jay : And uh: : : , -- any case that got us intuh conversation about -­
uh: : : many of the young people. Against the war, -- uh: : : , -­
uh, -- going tuh� On-on that account or, for the­
n-o-demonstrations or for, turning the draft card or burning
the draft card'n so on 'n so forth. Uh, on- on that principled
basis. A:n' I was saying, y'know, it would be a pity, y'know
fer this guy. -- -tO,Spend, uh, a half a year, a year, what have
you in jail. -for something like that. When 'e c'd be so- much
more productive. -for his principles.

For a bit of context, the guy who tells the story is among those guys in the
business of getting into conversations about the war. And the others don't
particularly want to talk about it. Now what he does is, the hippie story
having come up, involving perhaps something about people and their
principles, he then tells a story in which he can offer what he had as his
opinions - not as his opinions now, but as opinions that he can put into the
story as opinions he told somebody. So that the story gives him an occasion
286 Part IV
to tell his opinions in a way that preserves them from immediate criticism.
They can be told by reference to 'what she said, what I said, ' etc. , without
having to deliver them in such a way that at each sentence-end in an opinion
he could be quarreled with. So what he can do is have one occasioned
conversation about the war, and thereafter deliver his views about the war as
a story of something that happened, which then allows him to tell his views
without interruption.
Now that's the kind of thing you can get to do with the story form. Plainly
that's a considerable amount of power for storytellers, since at the end of the
story no one is in a position to counter the opinions offered in it, in the way
that those opinions were delivered. Somebody could try to argue, if they
happen to get first chance to talk, but their argument is subject to different
treatment, i.e. , at every utterance-end they could be argued with. They don't
get two minutes when he had two minutes. They get an utterance, then they
can be argued with, etc. And of course by delivering the other person's
opinions, he can already have shown story recipients that some of the opinions
they might offer are not too good, etc. Not only do stories allow for this kind
of packaging of opinions, but they allow for packaging of events in terms of,
e.g. , a view of what happened which, if offered otherwise, could be put into
various sorts of doubt. The sheer organization of descriptions in stories is
another kind of packaging that the storytelling possibility provides. So there's
an enormous amount of power in the packaging that a story has. The question
is, then, is it the case that recipients are in no position to do anything about
the kind of packaging power that the story form has? In which case, of course,
storytellers would expectably employ such kinds of techniques for all sorts of
purposes, unrestrictedly. So it's important to see what kind of constraints
there are on storytellers putting whatever they might please into a story. And
it's in that interest that the 'heckling' phenomenon should be looked at.
Because, for one, perhaps the possibility that heckling can be done can serve
as a constraint on the story that will be told.
A key sort of thing is that plainly a listener is in a different position with
respect to the other parties if he is constrained to offer his view of what's been
said after the story is over, than if he can, not simply offer his view of what's
been said while the story is going on, but talk in such a way as to show the
other listeners how to listen to the story. If a listener can, by inserting cracks
into a story, not simply have made a joke, but have pointed up how to listen
to what's being said in a way other than the teller intends, then a kind of
power is given to listeners that a storyteller would have to take account of.
Now one kind of thing that heckling specifically deals with is pointing up
ways that things have been said, which focus on them differently than teller
intends. The gross break is that whereas the teller has said something
intending it to be utterly serious, a listener can by his remark show other
listeners that the teller said something funny. Not that the listener who
interrupted has said something funny, but that the listener has pointed out
that something the teller said was funny. In the case at hand, "I mean I'm
thinking about someday what I'm going to be and stuff like that" is intended
 Lecture 8 287
as a perfectly serious remark, where "When I grow up points out a
conventional and funny-in-that-way aspect of what was said. And that
that's done in the course of the story provides that with it the heckler can
affect the other listeners. Now, things like a listener laughing might not
sufficiently do that, since people might not know what he's laughing at. But
by finding a thing to say that points up that something was funny, he can
bring other listeners to find what else is funny, and thereby begin to weaken
the kinds of power the teller has. And thereby, in that that's then a known
capacity that listeners have, tellers have got to be aware and perhaps design
their stories so as to not invite heckling, or to be in some way invulnerable to
heckling as a possibility. And they thereby may do, e.g. , less controversial or
less conventional stories.
So a kind of central thing about the heckling possibility is what it can focus
on. You could imagine that if it were perfectly well agreed upon by
everybody, overtly or not, that what the teller was talking about was serious,
the teller would be in an invulnerable position. That is to say, if he were
talking seriously on a serious subject, then he couldn't be heckled. It turns out
that a marked separation is attended between a serious subject and the way a
thing is being told, where you can heckle the way it's being told without
affecting the seriousness of the subject. You can heckle that it's being told too
seriously for the subject, or that it's being told in an utterly conventional
fashion, so that you're heckling the how-it's-being-told, and not implicating
the what's-being-talked-of. So one use of heckling serves as a kind of check
on the sort of seriousness that a story gets delivered with, such that any
disproportionate seriousness put into a story can be heckled out of it, and it
can be brought back to some view of the appropriate way to tell that story.
So, e.g. , a teller does not have the power to deliver something serious as
though it were the end of the world. The heckling possibility which
monitors the how-it's-told can keep storytellers in line with anybody's view
of the subject they're telling the story about. And I think one can find that
when tellers try to build it up more, that's a thing they get heckled down
about.
Now one wants first of all to treat the fact of heckling as something that
is to be seen not only for its actual occurrence but for its possible occurrence,
where stories can perhaps be designed so as to avoid heckling, and being
designed to avoid heckling they might be different than were they built
without fear of heckling. At least one way to see that would be to imagine,
say, some possibly controversal story being told to audiences of different
characteristics. When, say, some political figure is telling a story to an
audience that he knows is altogether with him, he may tell it in an utterly
more extravagant way than when he tells it to an audience he figures may be
hostile. The sheer design of it may be affected by such a possibility as that he
could be heckled down to a reasonable position. So you don't want to treat
heckling sheerly for its occurrence.
I'm suggesting that people heckle in the course of a story as compared to
making remarks at the end of it so as to affect other listeners' hearing of the
288 Part IV
story, and in doing that, affect the teller; to indicate to the teller that he
doesn't have the kind of control of the way the audience hears things that he
can suppose he has if he has no hecklers. In that way, the heckling job can be
an utterly serious kind of job, in which the storyteller's view of his story, e.g. ,
that it's serious, that it's this serious, is something that he wins or doesn't win.
It isn't that a story told as serious is serious, but that if it comes off as serious
it's a matter of the others acknowledging that, or not arguing it.
 Part V
Winter 1971

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 February 1 9
Poetics; Tracking co-participants;
Touched-off topics; Stepwise topical
movement
Portia : But we wen' in, uh the Billy Michaels place on the way back,
en uh, had- uh, they had en after dinner drink God there
wasn't a soul in we were the only ones et the bar en there w'z
about two parties in the II dining room-
Agnes : Yeah
Portia : En I didn' wanna say- eh: : Kate said she always wanduh see it
so, "I never said anything but- uh Carl said t'day he sez
"Wasn' that the dirtiest place?"
Agnes : [[Yeh.
Portia : En I said "Yihknow? I felt the same thing? But I didn' wanna
say anything to yuh, but I jis' fllelt-
Agnes : Yah.
Portia : -dirty when I walked on the �et.

Portia has just come back from a vacation and is talking to her sister. She
has been visiting a friend of hers, Kate, and Kate's new husband, Carl. Let me
just point out a few things.
We can notice the "they" in "But we went in uh the Billy Michaels place
on the way back, and uh, had- uh THEY had an after-dinner drink" as a
curious sort of thing, where a specific point is being made. If she were to say
"We went in on the way back and had an after-dinner drink" she would not
be necessarily making any statement about herself drinking. To say "We went
in . . . and they had a drink" is to specifically mark that she didn't.
Another thing. Looking at the occurrence of " . . . God . . . soul . . . only
ones . . . " in " . . . God there wasn't a soul in we were the only ones at the
bar . . . " one might say - after having it pointed out - Well, we're just
playing with something that really has no orderliness to it, it just happened
that "God" and "soul" are closely juxtaposed here. There's no import to it.
There's no real relationship in terms of how the talk was produced, i.e. ,
there's nothing that would have involved "soul" being produced by reference
to the fact that "God" was said. Not to mention the utterly absurd
relationship between "soul" and "only", in the s-o-1-e sense of the word. But
all I'd like to get at is this: When you have such an investigative aim as mine,
which is to try to discover sorts of detailed relationships that might tum out
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 29 1
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
292 Part V
to exist, then, when you notice these sorts of juxtapositions of things that are
otherwise known to have semantic relationships, the question is then to be
asked, Well, is there anything to it? Does "soul" get used somehow by
reference to the fact that "God" was used? And does "only" get used by
reference to the fact that there is this ambiguity between s-o-u-1 and s-o-1-e?
Then you can just pull it out, and say, Well, who knows? Noticing it, you get
the possibility of investigating it. Laughing it off in the first instance, or not
even allowing yourself to notice it, of course it becomes impossible to find out
whether there is anything to it.
In particular, we're trying to find out things we don't know about how
delicately people use their language. Then, any possible extended delicacy is
something to look into. And I certainly can say at this point that I find an
awful lot of such things. And usually, once I find an awful lot of something
I wonder if there isn't something to it, and begin to develop an account of
how it would happen. Finding one, you could just say, Well, I'm just being
artful in finding it, there's no reason for it to be. Now there is a tremendous
temptation on the part of people doing social science in general, to not notice
a possible fact unless they already have an explanation for it. And in a way,
of course, that's awfully silly, and it's plainly of rather more interest to get in
a position to be able to notice possible facts for which the question is, then,
what in the world could explain that? Where you don't know why it's there,
but you can see if there were a recurrence of that sort of a thing, then you
would be able to describe it as a fact of some sort.
So we can point this one out just to see whether, having noticed one, others
can be noticed. And what can happen is, you might, for example, find that
there is some kind of not universal but common recurrence of a relationship
between, not the use of ' ' God' ' and ' ' soul, ' ' but between the use of something
that "God" is and some other word that occurs. What I mean is, "God" is
used as a kind of an expletive. And there are a lot of other expletives, of which
some are related semantically, like "God! " "Jesus! " "Heavens! " and others of
which are not, e.g . , "Shit! " "Wow! " "Gee! " and lots of others. And you
might then say, Let me look at the environment of expletives and see if there
aren't, within that enviroment, words that stand in some interesting relation­
ship to a particular expletive's use. It might tum out that the relationship isn't
always semantic; you might begin to find out that there were other ways in
which expletives were related to later words - and not merely somewhere later,
but within a rather close environment. They might be related in such a way as:
Bob : Oh, GOD! Christmas has GOTten so damn painful!
Where, for "God" and "gotten" there might be some kind of sound-sequence
relationship, and you might begin to be able to see that perhaps there's
something to that. You might begin to notice that there are often sound
relationships between expletives and words around them. If you collect your
' ']esus"s and your "God"s and your "damn"s and your "gee"s, then you
might be able to put together a package of relationships between them and
some rather closely placed other words. So that expletives, which are after all
 February 1 9 293
selected, might have some relationship to other things in the talk that can be
gotten to. There might be a family of relationships; sometimes semantic,
other times sound. And you could begin to see a kind of loose but not
ineffable not-to-be-explained thing happening with the use of expletives,
which says that they may have some position in an utterance in relation to
other parts of an utterance, other than that this is the particular expletive
someone happened to use.
And in that regard, picking out an expletive is not just picking a word, but
is picking a word that has free occurrence. Expletives can occur in lots of places,
independent of the syntax of the utterance they're in. So that in terms of
which one can occur, they're not constrained by the talk around them. We can
then begin to notice that sort of fact: There's a special freedom. Now, in that
they have a special kind of freedom, and in that there are a bunch of them,
are there any principles to their selection? Where we can observe that there are
other words or word-groups that you couldn't subject to that sort of
treatment.
But in the first place all we did was start out by saying "God . . . soul" -
is there anything to it? Then the question was how to find if there's anything
to it, where the key thing is there's no particular reason for these things being
related. That makes it of interest to ask if there is some possible relationship.
And you can look at a whole range of them and find that more than you
might expect, it turns out that there are connections between words like
"God! " - now call them 'expletives' - and words around them that have no
reason to be related. Again, sometimes it's a semantic relation, other times it's
a sound relation. And then you could ask if there is anything about this kind
of a word which suggests that it could take such a relationship. You get, then,
to this 'freedom of occurrence' where, of a list of alternative expletives one or
another of which could get used and it wouldn't matter particularly for the
course of the talk which of them were used, "God" or "Hell" or "Boy" or
whatever else, it just happens to be that one of them was used. So the task is
to find bits of orderliness where isn't any reason to expect it here. And that's
also what puts one off about it. There not being any reason to expect it, you
might find yourself embarrassed to have noticed it or congratulating yourself
on your artfulness, but not convinced that it could be a matter of some real
event that you are in a position to be noticing.
Turning now to another sort of thing, I want to notice the word "parties"
in " . . . we were the only ones at the bar and there was about two parties in
the dining-room. " It's rather special, and there's an instance of it in the
materials called Trio that have been handed out. 1 It could be seen as giving
away a piece of information, or as a way in which an identity of a person
overcomes the topic of the talk. Portia talks about two "parties" in the
dining-room. She happens to be a waitress. The usage "parties' for the people
in a restaurant is something that a waitress or somebody like a waitress will
do but other people don't particularly do. And in Trio, in the first
1 See Winter 1 9 7 0 , lecrure 2, p. 1 8 1 .
294 Part V
conversation the caller, who doesn't work at the department store, says
' ' . . . and a colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the
silver is and all the gifts and things. " In the second conversation, the two
women talking both work at the department store, and talk about it as
" . . . where the giftware is. " " Giftware" being a term that people who work
in the place will use to refer to it, and not a word that the purchasers would
use. So, terms like "parties" and "giftware" are technical terms, and it could
turn out that, having an habitual way of referring to something, people might
use it in other environments.
Another point of interest is the following. Portia says "Kate said she always
wanted to see it so I never said anything, " Kate being Carl's wife. Then she
goes through an exchange she had with Carl the next day:

. . . but Carl said today he says "Wasn't that the dirtiest place? And I
said "You know? I felt the same thing? But I didn't want to say
anything to you, but I just felt dirty when I walked on the catpet.

Now, you have a sequence reported: Carl comments on the dirtiness and she
agrees. Okay, there are many such sequences: A does something - a question,
a greeting, whatever - and B does something. But here you also have some
other sorts of things. One is that she reports "Kate said she always wanted to
see it so I never said anything, " and the other is she quotes herself as saying
to Carl, "I didn't want to say anything to you. " What I want to deal with is
why when this sequence occurs, it occurs in the way it does as compared to,
e.g. , Portia coming out on that evening and saying "God this place is dirty"
and Carl then saying "Yeah, isn't it?" In either case we have some remark and
an agreement, and yet there are bases for the sequence occuring in just this
way and not the reverse way.
One of the issues I have in mind for this conversation is related to a sort of
thing going on in a conversation we will be looking at next time:

Bob : . . . so, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there,
and, Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me
and said that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads
of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother
was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was
supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten her
anything.
Where you have a report of a sequence of conversations, each one accompa­
nied by some indication of who was there, i.e. , Kim had a conversation with
mother, Bob wasn't there and father wasn't there. Kim came out and told
Bob, in the absence of mother. Bob was to go out, in the absence of Kim and
mother to talk to father, and then Bob and Kim and mother would get back
together again. This is not simply a report of who happened to be there; it's
that who happened to be there was relevant to what was happening. And
 February 1 9 29 5
when reports like that occur they signal specifically that something delicate
interactionally is taking place.
There is a similar sort of tracking at another point in the Portia
conversation. One evening Kate had said something which might be an
embarrassment. Then we get:

Portia : . . . en I told him, eh so when she want to the restroom I sez

"Boy there goes a great gal" 'n he says "Boy I sure love her 'n
I hope I can make her happy' so, when we came home why he
went to bed 'nen we went swimming again before we went to
bed . . . So I told Kate he said that, she sez "Oh yer a liar" I says
"Well no: : that's- he said that to me" she says "Well he never
tells me" en I says "He said that tuh me. "

Again, what Portia says to Carl, she says in the absence of Kate, and what she
says to Kate she says in the absence of Carl - and these details are selectively
reported.
And we have a conversation where a woman is describing meeting a man
at a gathering. There is a rather elaborate accounting of who was where at any
given time, ending in a situation where the two of them are together outside.
And in that case what you have is a way in which things get managed so as
to have some particular grouping. It goes roughly like this: 2 A recently
divorced lady is invited over to an older friend's house because the friend's
husband hasn't been well and he's grumpy and doesn't want to talk, so the
friend feels lonely. When she gets there she finds that another older woman
is coming over to get some business matters taken care of, and her nephew is
driving her. The recently divorced lady says something like "Why didn't you
tell me, I wouldn't have come" and her friend says "I wanted you to come
anyway. " And it turns out that the nephew is, say, an eligible male for the
recently divorced lady. Okay, everybody's there. At some point the nephew,
Rick, says "That's a real cute car you've got" and asks if he can go out and
take a look at it. She very naively tells him to go ahead and look at it, which
he does. And she stays inside. After being out there "quite a while" he comes
back in. But about an hour later she gets into an argument with her
friend's husband Kevin, about a 6,000-mile service requirement on her car.
And she's insisting that it says such-and-such "right in my owner's
manual. ' ' Then:

Nancy : So finally I said to Kevin well dammit I'm gonna get up en

I'm gonna go out' n get that manual, out of my glove
compartment 'n I'll sh- tell you. what it sa:ys yihknow or you
c'n read it. 'hhhh So I went out 'n GQd the first thing I knew
there's Rick. right ahh huh huh 'hhh right behind me

2 The following description is taken from Spring 1 9 70, lecture 8 , (D) pp. 1 5- 1 6; a
back-and-forth discussion not included in this edition.
296 Part V
And he asks her for a date - where, as she says, after all he couldn't do it in
front of God and everybody.
And in the fragment we started off with, there may be something like that
going on. It may be that Kate was not present when Carl said to Portia, today,
"Wasn't that the dirtiest place?' ' And on the other hand, there could be a
connection between Portia reporting "I didn't say anything, " and that Kate
may have been present when Portia could otherwise have said it, i.e. , at the
restaurant. Where what we have is, Carl is the "host," Kate is his new wife,
and Portia is a 'guest. '
Now it's a curious feature of the adequacy of local collections of people ­
and that means whoever just happens to be together on some occasion - that
even when one is doing things like talking about something else, an initial
issue is: What is it that's being done about the current collection of people?
So, to take an example I routinely use, it's an extra special person who, having
gone to a restaurant with some set of people, and having found that the meal
was wonderful, would make it his business to go tell the chef. Instead what
people do is tell whoever it is that brought them there that the meal was
wonderful. And that's not heard as something to be relayed to the chef, but
is heard as a compliment to the person who brought them there. So it's not
merely that you compliment or complain to the ones that you're with, but
that compliments or complaints about anything can find some co­
participant(s) as the correct and adequate recipient. And they are then in a
position to feel good, or whatever. You can perfectly well imagine that last
Tuesday morning there were lots of people who, having guests in their houses,
would have been apologizing for the earthquake. And on the other hand,
there were people who, being guests, found themselves saying, e.g. , "Oh
that's alright, I don't hold it against you" or whatever. That is to say, without
regard to the earthquake's just happening, nonetheless it happened while
people were in such a position that one was responsible for the other. And
there are a large number of events of that sort, where you can get the credit
for taking somebody to see something that somebody else did - an art show,
a restaurant, a movie, whatever else. And on the other hand, you feel a need
to apologize, and they know that you have to apologize and they hold you
responsible when it turns out that the earthquake, the lousy movie, the fire,
the rain, the automobile accident, whatever else, happened while you and
they were together and you were in the position of being 'host. '
And what's involved in this fragment is, perhaps, that while everyone
suffers the dirtiness - or it's perfectly possible that nobody suffers the dirtiness
- there's a complex relationship involved between the speaker, the host, and
the host's wife which is relevant to their treatment of the dirtiness. So, the host
see the dirtiness. Now to say that the host sees the dirtiness is not to make
it out that the host is somebody who is sensitive about dirt. If he went out
there by himself, maybe he wouldn't notice, or if he did, he couldn't care less.
But having guests in tow, he's now viewing the place by reference to how the
guests would make it out - and, making it out, how they would make him
out as a host. I also don't mean that while he isn't sensitive to dirt, he knows
 February 1 9 297
that the guests are sensitive to dirt. You could have a situation where the host
apologizes and the guests accept the apology, where neither of them care
about the dirt. It's just that the host has to look at the place now, to see it
by reference to that he's carrying somebody to whom he's responsible. And
the guests on the other hand, are involved in acknowledging the attention
that the host is giving them. A way, then, that the host looks at the carpet
- not even in his own home - is a function of that he's bringing somebody
there. The carpet is now a something that, it somehow happening that we
got to this place, a restaurant I've never been in before, somebody told me
about it, nevertheless I could blush as though it were my own home. So,
e.g. , it could happen that in the course of some meal at a place they've
never been, a person will start apologizing for the food - that indeed they
like.
So there's that. But there's also that the host is bringing this guest to this
place at the suggestion of his wife. It's not, then, merely that he's bringing the
guest here, but that if she says anything to anybody about the place she's
commenting about Kate. So that she can choose not to mention the dirtiness
by virtue of the fact that if she did she would be embarrassing Kate in Carl's
eyes. And now, though she doesn't care about the dirt, she could come away
feeling terribly good-natured about not having said anything about it, by
virtue of the fact that not having said anything about it, she's done a good
deed to Kate. So here's a way in which, nothing having occurred, nonetheless
someone can feel generous about not having made something of a thing that
is structurally available to be made something of. But, then, it is the very fact
that she withholds her activity of mentioning it that leads Carl to have to
make the remark. That is, if Portia could have noticed and been bothered by
the dirt on the carpet but isn't mentioning it, then it's Carl's business to
mention that dirt and apologize for it, lacking which he is seen to be some sort
of clod. And at least a facet of Portia's agreement is that it's a way for her to
tell Carl that it wasn't a mistake of his to have made the apology, i.e. , that
inded an apology was appropriate.
Again, then: We have a sequence here where there's a complaint about a
place and an agreement. And you could have the same sequence with the
parties turned around. But for Portia to have done the first part of the
sequence, the complaint, would be an altogether different event than it was
with Carl having done it. In doing a complaint about the place, Carl is
apologizing to her. If she did the complaint, she would be complaining to him
about him or about Kate. So her agreement to his complaint is a rather
different thing than her doing the complaint in the first place. And in that
regard, then, which sequence they do it in matters. What we're talking about
a good deal of the time is, does the sequence that people do things in matter?
My position here is that the same sequence, i.e. , 'complaint-agreement, ' is
altogether different and has altogether different bases for occurring, if Portia
does the complaint and Carl does the agreement. And, again, what her views
are and what his views are about, e.g. , the dirt, can be altogether independent
of what they happen to say.
298 Part V
Now here's a major problem for working out any research. If all you had
was, e.g. , Carl saying "Wasn't that the dirtiest place?" and Portia saying
"Yeah," you could mark it down as a sequence of 'complaint'-'agreement. '
But materials like ours give you some way to get a rather more elaborate
charaaerization of what is involved in some particular sequence, among those
which are all similar in the sense of having a first part which is a 'complaint'
and a second part which is an 'agreement. ' And you can begin to have
concepts about which such particular sequences can occur or do occur. But
you have to rum the relationship of such things as "I didn't want to say
anything, " "Kate said she always wanted to see it, " "The next day Carl said
to me . . . ' ' to use, to see how those things permit you to elaborate on the
transparent complaint-agreement sequence. We can also pull out a more
general thing, which is to get an idea of how it is that for the different
collections of people walking into a room, the inspectable features of that
room are a function of who happens to be with you.
Let me shift now to some other materials. We have a conversation
involving a young couple being visited by their parents. They talk about food
for a good deal of the conversation. At some point we get the following.

Bill : The other day we were goin t'the library en we just happen'ruh
get there- just et the r- time thet the DAR wzserving lunch
t' everybody-
.-
Lori : Yeh I I we-
Ethel : OHH khhHAHI IHAH! hnh!
Lori : En' we-
Lori : Then so we hadda frI I ee,
Bill : We hadda free lunch.
Ben : Yuh did?

Bill : They had some nice things they even had like chicken liver.
Y'know chopped chicken liver . . . I tasted it, it wz really horrible
'n Lori said I better not eat it becuz,
Lori : I didn't I I trust them II ( )
Bill : -they proballbly ( )-
Ethel : Lori en Bill I have something ruh tell you you probably heard
about it already but just in case you haven't, you must not use
any'v the pottery you picked up fer any- tuh cook in. Or fer
anything edible, -- haven'tchu heard the news?
Bill : -from Mexico I I ( )
Ethel : Becuz uh they have discovered, thet the coating, the glaze is so
thin . . .

She goes on to describe the possibility of lead poisoning. Now, the

juxtaposition of the talk about the DAR's chopped chicken liver and the
 February 1 9 299
Mexican pottery have a kind of interest to them. It is not at just any point in
the conversation that food is being talked about, that the Mexican pottery
comes up, but where food going bad is being discussed. Now this raises an
elaborately interesting issue which has to do with the general topic of the way
that people can rely on the natural course of conversation to bring them to
remember things they wanted to say. Here is an item that Ethel, the
motherjmother-in-law, has wanted to warn them about - leaving aside that
she didn't immediately call them up and tell when she happened to find out
about it - i.e. , they have the stuff and they shouldn't be using it. It was able
to be kept in mind in such a way as to have it placed when the conversation
kind of brought it around. And people can apparently allow items that they
ought to say, want to say, etc. , to be kept in that kind of storage that will be
elicited by the conversation rather than, e.g. , going to it with a list of things
that need to be said, and saying them right off. This is a way in which, on the
one hand memory can be trusted, and also that the natural course of
conversation can be employed to tum up occasions to say certain things that
you had wanted to say. That's kind of an interesting thing about the uses of
conversation.
Anyway, they get to talking about this Mexican pottery. In the course of
that, Ben, the fatherjfather-in-law begins to talk while Ethel is still talking,
which for a while involves two separate conversations, Bill and Ben, and Lori
and Ethel. Ben says "I was gonna make some chile sauce but I didn't have
time . . . I worked last night . . . I was up all night fighting fires so I went to
sleep when I got home. " (Ben is a fireman.) Bill says "You had a fire last
night?" Ben says "Yeah" and they talk about it a bit. Okay, so in the course
of the talk about Mexican pottery, Ben announces "I was going to make chile
but I didn 't have time. " Hold onto that for a moment and consider the
following, from a point later in the same conversation. Lori and Bill have had
some trouble with vandalism.

Ethel : Have the kids harrassed you er anything lately?

Bill : No,
Ethel : That's good.
Sam : Didju put a sign out 'don't touch'?
Bill : [ [ Mmheh
Lori : Nehhj jno.
Ethel : So you put up yer timer you said en it worked?
Bill : Yeh but the, the photo cell is on that light, an' the timer is on the
outside light. -
Ethel : Oh.
Bill : Then we have the - burglar system too,
Lori : [[ Muhhh!
Ben : hhh!
Bill : En the alarms en the uh, 'hh
Sam : I bet if you put a sign out ' 'beware of dog, ' '
Bill : We had one,
300 Part V
Ben : That doesn' I I (do anything)
Bill : But they, look et he:r

They have a tiny dog

Bill : But they, look et he:r and y' (h) know

Bill : We aftuh get one a' those phony signs 'hh I I uh,
Ben : "This place is protected by photo scan"
Bill : Yeah, or I1 uh
Lori : Really? What is II that. Some new kinda thing?
Sam : They'll tear the wires out.
Ethel : Yeah, thaiIt's a,
Ben : Surveillance by photo scan which is y'know a television camera =

Ethel : = Whatchu sh'd get is jus' d- a li'l baby ti:ger hhmh! hmh! 'n
t(hh)ie it oul l(h)t there,
Bill : hnhh
( 1 . 0)
Ethel : Don't ferget tuh watch Born Free tuhnight.

In both cases you have a situation in which the way topic moves, which is
stepwise, is used to make a jump. That is to say, in the first case, the party
who mentions the chile is engaged in getting the conversation around to talk
about his fire-fighting. And in the second case, perhaps, the talk about getting
a baby tiger is engaged in bringing up the reminder to watch Born Free.
Now, the character of the stepwise movement for topics is that if you have
some topic which you can see is not connected to what is now being talked
about, then you can find something that is connected to both, and use that
first. So that the chile is in some way on topic with talk about the Mexican
pottery and food, and can be used in an utterance that it becomes a first part
of - in this case, via a structure 'I was going to do X but I couldn't for reason
Y. ' And utterances can be built in such formats, starting with something
connected to the prior topic, with, then, the second part using something else
which is connected to the first part of the utterance, not to the prior topic. So
there is a routine stepwise movement, which is to say that any next utterance
is built in such way as to be on topic with a last. That then becomes a thing
which can also be used to make jumps. But to notice that a way of making
jumps is via using the steps, is one way to see how the stepwise movement
operates in general, and also provides for tasks which are in some way
charaaerizable.
In that conversation where Nancy talks about meeting a man, the first talk
is about her friend Agnes' toe operation. As the toe-talk comes to a dose,
we get:
 February 1 9 301
Agnes : Ah: : , it's not worth it tuh be on my feet.
Nancy : [ [Yeah.
Agnes : Yihknow.
Nancy : Right. Uh huh? "hhhhhhh Wul ! wz just out washing
windows, uh-a:nd uh, my mother called, so I came in I
thought "Well while I'm in here," I looked et the clock 'n
eleven thirty en I thought "Wul, they're-" "hhhhh "they're
un-" "surely they're up" yihknow, I knew it I I w'z kind of
a, 11 sleep in day,
Agnes : Yeh.
Agnes : Uh huh,
Nancy : But uh I didn't get home til, "hhh two las' night I met a very,
very, nice guy.

What she does there is to start in a way which is not connected with what
went before. But she gets to her topic via setting up a chain that, when the
topic is arrived at, it is arrived at in ways that connect it to earlier parts of her
own utterance. So she can build something at the end of which she is where
she wants to be, and which by its elaborateness has made up such a kind of
stepwise movement.
Now the stepwise kind of movement is the most routine thing, and
ordinarily involves nothing particularly noticeable. But the way you build a
jump is to produce elaborations which often have to do with the standard
construction techniques for utterances. For example in the above case there are
the standard components "I was just out washing windows and my mother
called, " where a routine sort of thing for telephone conversations is that a
party - characteristically the called, not the caller - can volunteer or be asked
what they were doing before the call. In this case caller does it, but notice that
the way caller does it is to turn herself into a called. In any event, 'what I was
doing' is a sayable. And, roughly, she is involved in the following: She is
offering something now which might well have been a first topic but which
she passed on, and something else became first topic. By that I mean that at
the start of the call, asked how she is by called, she doesn't say, e.g. , "Great!
I met a very, very, nice guy. " What we get is:

Agnes : HI: HONEY HOW �RE yIluh.

Nancy : Fine hQw'r you.
Agnes : "hhhhhhhhh OH: I'm -
pretty goo::d I h�dda Iiddle operation on
my toe this week

They then come to making arrangements for getting to maybe go shop­

ping. And arrangement-making is a way that you end conversations, and of
course the topic which has been involved in that conversation. So, via
making arrangements it is at least available that the toe topic is coming to
an end:
302 Part V
Agnes : W'l l!sten I'll �ll yih what I could do: dear, uh: if G.!!)' goes to
the boat h� c' d drop me off et th' tr!!!ler.
Nancy : "hhhhhh Hey now th!!t's en idea?
Agnes : "hhh A:nd uh I j!!_st'm not gonna walk around a lot bejjcuz
uh
Nancy : No: : : : .
Nancy : No: : . H!!h/ juh.
Agnes : Ah: : , it's not worth it tuh be on my feet.

Now there is an issue about how does she go about introducing the date. She
could just say "By the way, I met a man. " Or she could make a new topic of
it. And what it looks like she does is, again, to treat it as though it were in
first-topic status. She goes through a 'how I came to call, ' which then gets to
her topic: "I was out washing windows, my mother called, I looked at the
clock . . . ' ' which brings us in a sense back to the point where the conversation
began. So it looks like she's redoing this thing as first topic. And in order to
get it into this first-topic status, she has to get back to the making of the call.
Now, in part, you have got to get at the detailed workings of this utterance
in some independence of the question of why in the world would she do it that
way. And although it might look over-elaborate, it may turn out that it is no
more complicated than other things she or anybody else might do.
 March 4
Produced similarities in first and
second stories; Poetics; �Fragile
storiesJ ' etc.
Bob : Oh, god! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know
there's always this great no one likes what they're getting. You
know what I mean? So you say, "thank you," and like my mom,
"shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric
skillet, I wanna coat, or I wanna sweater, " and uh-
Ted : Well, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint, or even-
Kim : What's even funnier is, his father said, " Well, after 2 5 years, I
don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just ridiculous!
Bob : It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so, he uh
she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really
cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida
twice and my father had to go to New York. So Jeez! They were
pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very rational
about it. 'Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get
things for the kids and you and I'll forget it, you know . ' So, the
day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there, and, Kim
was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me and said
that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of
presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother
was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was
supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten
her anything. (laughs)
Kim : We should've just left everything alone!
Bob : No. I'm glad we didn't. But, my father'd gotten her a lighter.
(laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs)
Ted : At least it was for her use.
Bob : Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure.
Kim : [ So we went out-
Bob : So we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had this
tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my mother to
know that we did this, but how are we gonna give it to my father
without hurting his feelings? Oh, shit! And we finally got it to
him. I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to
figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this thing?"
I don't know how we did, but-
3 03
304 Part V
Jan : He probably knew.
Ted : I know just what you mean. We go through this thing every year.
My father said, "No gifts. " And we tried to analyze what­
Bob : Does "no gifts" mean no gifts, or does it mean more gifts?
Ted : No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts. " And I was
questioning the reason. I didn't think it was his a legitimate
reason. I don't think it was his real reason. He said, "Well you
know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such a big
killing over Christmas, killing, and Christmas is becoming
commercialized, and therefore I don't wanna be sucked into this
thing. I'm not giving gifts this year. "
jan : "You spend your money and buy something you really want.
And I'll spend my money and buy something I really want. "
Ted : But we figured there must be somethin' deeper, because if a guy
is aware of, that Christmas is becoming very commercialized. Uh
must he submit to this idea and reject it entirely and end up
giving no gifts, or is it because he really, doesn't, he's not a person
that likes to give anyway?
Bob : Yeah.
Ted : And this is just a phony excuse for not giving. And finally, I think
we figured out it must be some kind of a, a combination, and he
really isn't that stingy.

Last time we dealt with some of the things involved in these data. This time
I'll deal with a different range of problems. Let me just first note that aside
from what's kind of obvious, that the two stories or reported conversations,
one told by Bob and the second by Ted, have as similarities that they are
about Christmas presents and problems in the family, there are a variety of
other possible relationships or similarities between the two stories that are
much finer than that. For example, you might note that the quotes of father
in each story have him saying "Well you know: "

Bob : So jeez! They were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was
being very rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got
much . . . "

and

Ted : No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts" . . . He said, "Well
you know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such a
big killing over Christmas . . . "

And the two stories kind of come to a conclusion in both cases with something
having to do with "finally figured out . . . : "
 March 4 3 05
Bob : And we finally got it to him. I don't know, we spent about an hour
and a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna
manage this thing?"
and

Ted : And finally, I think we figured out it must be some kind of a, a

combination, and he really isn't that stingy.

In both stories the father is, on some occasion at least, referred to as a "guy: "

Bob : And like my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't
want an electric skillet . . . "

and

Ted : But we figured there must be somethin' deeper, because if a guy is

aware of, that Christmas is becoming very commercialized. Uh
must he submit to this idea and reject it entirely and end up giving
no gifts, or is it because he really doesn't, he's not a person that
likes to give anyway?

That's leaving aside a collection of other sorts of things, having to do with

Christmas presents, etc. So there's a beginning of a possible surplus, if you
like, of detailed relationships, beyond what might be expectable in telling
similar stories. We'll see what such finenesses can add up to - if they are
indeed to be given any attention as possibly produced similarities. If there was
one, then you could say, "Well, that could just be a coincidence. " When you
start to add them up, then perhaps its's not that, e.g. , "Gee they've had
remarkably similar experiences, ' ' but that the second one is heavily sensitive
to the way the first was told, just in terms of the words it uses.
And that raises a kind of question that has been alluded to, anyway: In
what way does the occurrence of some word, at some point in talk, set up
possible future uses of it. I've pointed out that there are these short, local
sound sequences in which it looked like, if they were to be found with any
reasonable regularity, perhaps the selection of words was history-sensitive for
a conversation. Not simply in terms of things like, that a word previously
occurred, but that the sound of some word could be used to find words later
which had similarities in sound to it. That's one thing. Then there is the
contrast-pair phenomenon, where one could begin to make some kind of
prediction of the sort that if a term from a marked pair of contrasts occurred,
then, forgetting even about semantic considerations, it becomes at least
weakly expectable that its contrast term or one of its contrast terms would
occur close by. And when I say forget about semantic considerations, what I
mean is that when somebody says "I got up this morning and went down to
the market, " then 'up' and 'down' are contrast-pair terms, but not semanti-
306 Part V
cally. It's not the same as "I got up this morning and lay down again, " which
would be a semantic contrast usage. But the sheer use of 'up,' a term which
has a marked contrast term, sets up a use of its contrast member where that
member can be used, though other ways can be perfectly well found for
saying "I went to the market" .
Now obviously ways of checking such things out need to be discovered.
And a preferred procedure for me is too see if things found in the materials
can then be extracted and used as possible rules. For example, here you
have:

' 'Oh, God! Christmas has gotten so damn painful . . . no one likes what
they're getting. "

And when you get the sound-row "God . . . gotten . . . getting, " you wonder
is there anything to the use of, say, "gotten" in terms of the prior use of
"God," or for that matter the reverse, i.e. , it's known that the story is going
to be about "gotten" and "getting" and things like that, and maybe "God"
was used by virtue of its being found as an expletive via the tale that was
about to unfold.
A neat kind of relevant material might be the differences and similarities
between that fragment and one that occurs later:

"all the stores, uh well, make such a big killing over Christmas . . . and
Christmas is becoming commercialized"

In the first place, "is becoming" is as perfectly well usable in the first instance
as "has gotten" is usable in the second. So, you could perfectly well say
"Christmas is getting commercialized, " bur between "big killing," "becom­
ing" and "commercialized" there is again a kind of relationship that's similar
to that of "God" and "gotten" and "getting. "
Another environment for developing a consideration of such things which
has a systematic basis for exploring it, can be found in the sequence that goes:

"She was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut
into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida twice. "

You might notice that there's this "really" and "resources. " Well, so what.
Then there's also, now that you look at it, "cut" and "cuz . " Then there is
"really cut" and "resources cuz. " I want to focus on "cuz. " There's a term
that, forgetting for the moment about alternate words, has specifically
alternate pronunciations; say, "becuz" and "cuz . " Now, a way of seeing if
sound considerations are relevant to selection would be to see whether "cuz"
is used in an environment in which it stands in, e.g. , some historically sensitive
relationship to a prior 'k', and "becuz" is used when there isn't such a thing,
or when there's some historically sensitive relationship to a prior 'b. ' Then you
could take the range of things that are like "cuz" and "becuz, " of which there
 March 4 307
are lots, and see whether the way they're done has some variability that stands
in a relationship that looks like, e.g. , a developing sound-row. And it isn't a
matter of that "cuz" is used in 'informal' speech and "becuz" is used in
'formal' speech, which is a way that people might be led to talk about it. But
"cuz" and "becuz" both occur in this fragment:

"It's just that BECUZ presents are so important to her, and so, he uh
she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into
their resources CUZ they'd also . . . ' '

And when you've got "God . . . gotten . . . getting" and "big killing . . . be­
coming . . . commercialized, " issues of whether some sounds have systematic
historical differences involved seem to be raised in this data, where pronun­
ciational differences have not to do with, e.g. , lapses, but tum on systematic
differences within the data.
Now plainly we're not only talking about sound relationships, and that
makes matters more and more complicated, as there is also the contrast
relationship and selections from among relatively synonomous words - as well
as the selection of variable pronunciations for a same word. And note that all
the stuff we're talking about now is extractable from this particular fragment,
where it's in part by adding up the pieces that we begin to get some kind of
feeling that some such thing is happening; that the stuff is woven together in
such ways.
Sometimes you can focus on a particular usage, and say about it that it
seems slightly off - or maybe altogether off. For example, the following piece
of data.

Ken : She came in there the other night with Scotch tape an'- every
inch of the room. You couldn't- the roof I think she's got done
in Beatie pictures.

Louise : Well they need some kinda idol you know, something to look up
to

Let me just mention the interesting relationship of having Beatie pictures on

the "roof " and having "something to look up to. " But now, notice that
"roof " is plainly a wrong word, 'ceiling' being the right word. And we can
see that, on sound-selectional considerations, we get something that's close,
i.e. , "room. " So that a way to account for the occurrence of "roof " as a
noticeable slight error is to say that searching for a word to refer to that thing,
sound-selectional considerations were involved in finding it. And not merely
sound-selectional where any relevant recent word might serve, but sound­
selection plus some obvious semantic constraints - here, e.g. , a collection of
architectural terms.
308 Part V
With that as a direction, I want to note that I was slightly puzzled by, or
came to focus on as possibly interesting:

"Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids
and you and I'll forget it, you know. "

Where "forget" is not quite the right word there, strictly speaking. Perhaps
it is a perfectly good idiom, and in that case we have another way to focus on
specific usages, i.e. , where idioms, like expletives, have a certain freedom of
occurrence and one might then be led to ask why this one now? At any rate,
I began to wonder if there was any good reason that ' ' forget' ' might have been
said - using my manifestly strange sense of 'reasons. ' Well, we've got things
like "haven't got much," "get things for the kids, " "you and I'll forget it. "
And immediately prior to "forget" there is a use o f "get . . . for. ' ' Now is
there any reason to attend as a way that things possibly work, that there is
some relationship that involves reversals? We can look a little further on in the
data. "And THAT'S JUST ridiculous" says one, and the next says "It's JUST
THAT because . . . ' ' And then someone is saying " . . . we had this tremen­
dous problem of HOW, NOW we don't want my mother to know . . . " and
then, "NOW, HOW the shit are we gonna manage this thing?" So it isn't
altogether an isolated object, even within, say, one minute of talk.
Now it's no issue that we can find such sorts of things. Sure we can find
them. But in making something of them, the possibility that we could find
another one somewhere is something other than can we get batches of them
- which of course is not to say that some things don't occur only rarely. And
again, all of these have to be kept in a candidate status because we don't know
that there is such a thing as a procedure of getting a particular word by
reference to various sorts of environmental considerations. But we are trying
to get at some collection of procedures whereby the words that people use
come to be selected; procedures which involve that things like them in sound,
or things that contrast with them in meaning, etc. , have been recently stuffed
into the person's head by something someone else, or they themself, just said.
And the general thing is, then, to begin to see if we can't specify some
procedures which have the same character. Where we now have a whole series
of possible procedures which operate within the argument that words are
selected in an historically sensitive way, and where we can maybe specify some
of the historically sensitive ways they are selected. That there are whole series
of such procedures would account for the fact that in short fragments one can
find materials like these. And I don't think that this is a particularly odd short
fragment, though that remains to be seen.
Another kind of thing, which now deals with both semantic and sound
properties but in a different way than we've seen so far, turns on one feature
of words, i.e. , that some words have multiple meanings. Now if sound is
relevant to selection, then a thing that you might be led to expect is that you'd
get small flurries of the use of a word, where what is involved is that a word,
getting used for some reason, fitting some place, now starts to occur, running
 March 4 3 09
through the range of meanings of that word. So, taking 'got' and 'get,' which
have rather variable meanings and for each of which you could use some other
word, e.g. , 'receive' and 'become, ' what you have apparently is a collection of
uses of 'got' and 'get. ' So, e.g., a kind of dramatic difference here is
"Christmas has GOTIEN so damn painful . . . no one likes what they're
GETIING, ' ' where the use in each case is semantically different. And you
find such small flurries of a word's use. It keeps popping up - and popping
up with specifically different senses of it involved, leaving aside it having
consequences in sound terms for the selection of other words, so that words
that sound like it also recur.
Let me turn to something quite different for a while. Let's look at Ted's
"He gave us one reason why no gifts" which is followed by "And I was
questioning the reason. " Now, that he was questioning the reason is
something he tells us not merely by saying ' 'And I was questioning the
reason, " but by his formulation " one reason. " The sheer counting of it does
as much as to say "I doubt it. " To say "he gave us eleven reasons" is to give
a plainly doubting position on the reasons, and "one reason" works the same
way. There are specific alternatives to "one reason" which have not to do with
numbers, but with other things that express a different view about the reason.
So, e.g., to say "he gave us one reason" is to say something altogether
different from "he gave us his reason. " And the talk is pervaded with things
like that. For example, a characteristic instance is "My mother went to Florida
twice and my father had to go to New York. " Where to say he "had to go"
is to say "whatever his reasons were, which I knew of, I'm telling you they
were okay reasons. " "All I'm telling you about the reason is that I accept it. "
And this is constrastive to "My father said he had to go to New York. " That
kind of distinction, between "he had to go" and "he said he had to go" does
a markedly different locating of the position of the speaker. And an import of
that is that the sheer fact of doing quoting can be the expressing of a position.
Q : What would be the distinction between the fact that the mother
"went" to Florida and the father "had to go" to New York?
HS : You got me! I don't know - now. Now, it's just, "there it is. " The task
of making a problem is such that I couldn't even say whether the dimensions
of this thing have to do with why does he say mother "went" and father "had
to go, " and then, what does that distinction do. I don't know. It's not as if there
is a list of problems and the data is approached with it. Even the question of
how a word is selected is something that began to be posed because it looked
like some answers could be found to it, by virtue of the things that were
emerging as little bits of "What's that?" "Is that something?"
Okay, I made a distinction between reports like "he had to go" and "he
said he had to go, " the latter being some sort of quotation. Quotations are
terribly interesting things, and if you start to ask why do people do
quotations, then it isn't at all an issue of, for example, they do quotations to
be more accurate. Because if he says "My father said he had to go to New
York" that's not more accurate than "He had to go to New York. " It
specifically differs in that it says "I doubt it" or "I don't know whether that's
3 10 Part V
so. " And quotations are an environment for doing a variety of things; for
example, mimicking. So that if you say "He said" and deliver what the
person said in some mimicked fashion, you can also express your position
vis-a-vis what they said.
Now in this fragment there seems to be a curious feature where Ted is
quoting his father:
' 'Well you know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such
a big killing over Christmas, killing, and Christmas is becoming
commercialized, and therefore I don't wanna be sucked into this thing.
I'm not giving gifts this year. "
Ted is arguing that he didn't believe that that was the real reason. And now
I'm wondering whether, in that it has a noticeable awkwardness of delivery ­
searching for a way to say it, not saying it right, stumbling over it, etc. -
whether that's to be heard as a feature of Ted's trying to remember what his
father said, or if it stands as a way - and I'm not saying that he's consciously
producing this - a way that Ted can exhibit the hard-to-believe character of
his father's talk. Now that may sound kind of dubious, except that now
having said it you could easily enough make one up and do it just that way.
So if you say "I asked him where he was and he said 'uh, well uh, I was- I
was n- uh- nowhere I was right here' , " then we could say it looks like you
can perfectly well exhibit the hard-to-believe character of a proposed account
with such things as the delay and awkwardness of its delivery. Now I don't
have a tape of these materials, I just have the transcripts, so I don't know how
Ted delivered this. In any event, whether or not he's designing his delivery to
exhibit the hard-to-believe character of his father's talk, we have stuff where
somebody quoting can be found to be doing a mimic of the quoted one's
voice without even knowing that they're mimicking. And that seems a
relatively routine sort of occurrence. Anyway, that's a possible intriguing
aspect of this quote, and perhaps of quotes in general.
What you could say then is that Ted would have a series of ways of
supporting his position in the argument with his father, other than that he
delivers stronger reasons than his father did. There are ways of telling a story
in which someone's chance to be given a hearing by the recipient of the story
isn't a matter of the recipient now having in their hands a correct or incorrect
version of what somebody said. That is, it's not that you have to worry only
about the fact that a person will bias what somebody said, merely sketch their
arguments etc. , but there are a serious of ways, besides that, of rather
unnoticeably conveying one's position on the other's position. And they are
ways that we would hardly think of as having anything to do with
'incorrectness, ' e.g. , there may indeed have been one reason, but to say "one
reason" is already to be doubting it.
Now that line, about the ways a story is cast, raises some rather
interesting considerations about this conversation. There are some facets of
these people's talking to each other, complaining in an accepted way about
their parents, that might be looked into a bit. The theme I want to develop
 March 4 311
is the relevance for these two tales of a 'good listener. ' And also, what a
good listener can get out of being a good listener. I'll start off with some
relatively rough remarks in order to give us some idea about possible other
hearings of either story.
Begin by noting that Bob is talking about being involved in some
interactional offshoots of a conflict between his parents in regard to giving or
not giving presents to each other, and what he should do about it. And that
is the proposed source of the painfulness. He isn't complaining about the fact
that he had to end up spending money buying his father a present for his
mother, he's complaining that he ended up spending an hour and a half
figuring out how to do it. And it could be wondered if what he's annoyed
about is that he ended up buying the present. And for Ted's story, it could be
wondered whether he is kind of annoyed about not getting any presents (and
in that regard it's rather neat that he says his father 'gave us one reason why
no gift's,' i.e. , what he 'gave us' was reasons, not gifts). But the thing he's
reportedly puzzled about is whether his father is stingy. That is, he rejeas his
father's reason for the decision, not the decision. So he's involved in calling his
father 'stingy' in this conversation, although plainly were he to raise that way
of talking about his father to his father, then his father might well counter
with "Well why do you care about my reasons?" That is to say, the freedom
to analyze his father's reasons is something that he can secure only with an
audience that will permit his father to be treated in a way that Ted will not
be treated. Where, should Ted get treated in the way that he treats his father,
if he's asked "Well why do you care?, " then as soon as he starts giving
reasons, the question is - as his question was - "Are those your real reasons?
After all, what he said is that you're not going to get any presents. Are you
bothered about that?" And that possibility has, in some way, to be potentially
felt by somebody like Ted. You could at least wonder: Should he not know
the formal character of what he's doing to his father as something that can
just as well be done to him, and if done to him have consequences for the
way he makes himself out here? That is to say, everybody present in this
conversation comes off awfully clean out of what are plainly a series of
messy situations.
Leaving that aside, a kind of neat facet to the whole business is that while
a key thing about the character of this conversation is that these people would
be said to be 'intimate' - revealing family problems and things like that - and
doing 'intimate complaining, ' yet they are intimate to a point that is still
altogether distant. That is, there are no conflicts raised about anybody present,
though the same problems could perfectly well accrue to persons present.
Like, how did Bob and Kim, between themselves, negotiate dealing with
Bob's parents? It comes off with only a hint of possible difference when Kim
says "We should have left everything alone" as though, say, she doesn't have
exactly the same attitude as Bob does.
So there are ways that these are ' fragile stories. ' They come off, however,
as in no way fragile, but as correctly experiencing the world in a way
warranted by their listeners. If that is the case, then the ways that they are
3 12 Part V
fragile may be related to who is selected to be told them. And who is selected
to be told them may be someone with an equally fragile story; someone in a
position, then, to be happy to accept the first in order to have the opportunity
to - in a safe way - tell a second. That is to say, when Ted says "I know just
what you mean" he could be seen to be accepting Bob's story. But in
accepting Bob's story he's also offering his own, where his story's acceptance
turns on its having as good a listener as he was for Bob's. That these are two
young couples complaining about their parents may then be not so unrelated
to the way in which Bob's story works, with Kim in talking to mother,
coming out and talking to Bob, Bob going out and talking to father, etc., in
the sense that now, the story having been put together out of all these partially
hidden conversations, it is to be told only to selected audiences.
Let me mention in passing that the mother's mobilization of Kim to tell
Bob to go and feel out the father is an altogether unspecial matter. You have
here a prototype of the sorts of phenomena that are talked about in the
psychiatric literature as 'the family as a spawning ground for paranoia. ' This
has to do with the notion of families as an environment for conspiracies. And
we have here such a conspiracy. The mother-in-law enlists her daughter-in­
law as an ally to deal with what she delivers as a thing she's afraid of - not
merely that she's afraid her husband hasn't gotten her anything, but she's
afraid to tell him that she's afraid he hasn't gotten her anything. Now, you
could read considerable psychiatric literature on paranoia as a natural outcome
of the way that families generate conspiracy, but it's preserved for us, in its
artifacts, in this kind of a conversation. And not simply in the conversation
reported, but in the ongoing conversation that the report is part of, i.e. , it is
also that sort of a thing. That is to say, for one, they apparently aren't in a
position to go talk to the parents about these reports and find out what indeed
happened with the parents. What they can do is find friends with whom such
information can be exchanged. Where, while it appears that they're doing
terribly intimate kinds of talk, revealing deep secrets, their fragile positions
can nevertheless be preserved.
Again, what I mean by the 'fragility' of the talk is simply, in the first
instance: What would happen if the way that speaker A characterized
non-present party B's doings were applied to speaker A by his listeners? So
that you could ask about Bob and Kim, "And you don't have any problems
of that sort - having to find somebody else to tell your spouse what's going
on?" Also, the marked difference that's proposed between what the parents
care about - giving or not giving presents, and what the kids care about - not
the giving or getting of presents but the problems involved in people's caring
about giving and getting. And what I'm intending to be saying about it is that
the way the talk comes off turns on their having found an audience who will
not subject their reports of the circumstances in the story they're telling, to the
ways that they've dealt with those involved in their stories. And at least an
interesting aspect of how that fragility doesn't get burst is that they're able to
find people who will have a same circumstance to present and who, in
accepting the one, set up a way of getting a second also passed. So that it
 March 4 3 13
seems that "we both suffer the same troubles," "we both understand our
circumstances, ' ' as compared to what might happen if someone were to
simply apply to them as a way of analyzing their circumstances, what they've
offered as their analysis of someone else's. Then you've got quite a different
scene. And of course that happens. But it's not like I'm offering a
recommendation or a criticism, because we can treat it as how in the world do
perspectives which are delicate and tender, like a seven-layer cake or a
flickering candle, get passed on for generations as a reasonable characterization
of the world, without getting smashed, burst, dropped, ruined. And that
makes the finding of someone to tell a distinctly relevant part of the enterprise
of getting to preserve a version of what happened.
Now, with regard to this complaining about parents, I just want to
mention another nice fragment. It occurs in one of these teenage group
therapy sessions, where Louise comes in late and one of the boys shows her a
plastic beer bottle that he brought from his new job at a liquor store:

Ken : See our added exposition this morning,

(/ )
Louise : In't that nice.
Ken : 'S to remindju of last night.
(/ )
Louise : Not me, I went to my sister's hhh hhh Junior High Show.
v I>
Louise : We wen' out fer ice cream.
v I>
Roger : That II sounds like a I I scream.
Louise : D'you-
Louise : You think it's fun, takin' : : , Two girls who are twelve years old?
-- With makeup on?
v I>
Louise : A brother, a liddle brother an' a liddle sister who's ten? -- Out
for ice cream?
(/ )
Ken : whhew
Louise : Cause my parents didn'wanna do it.

Again, that sounds like a viable complaint that she might have about her
parents. Let me give some material. She's one of four sisters. She's 1 7 , there's
one who's 20, one who's 1 5 , and the 1 2-year-old. Now it comes to Friday
night, and there are various things these girls could be doing Friday night.
Preferred number one choice would be having a date. And the 1 5 -year-old
does date. Now thinking it out, how does Louise get selected to be the one to
take the kid sister? Is it plausible that within the family scene where there are
three sisters eligible to take the little one, Louise is picked by virtue of the fact
that . . . what? They just pick on her? The parents don't want to go, so she of
course goes? Or is it that of the three sisters there is some way in which at least
3 14 Part V
one, maybe the two others, are so occupied that while Louise does not have
the excuse "I have a date, " maybe they do?
Now Louise says nothing about "and I had to cancel a date to do it, "
which would make her complaint rather more powerful than it was - though
that's not to say that her complaint wasn't powerful. But what you might
then see is a scene where older sister and maybe younger sister have dates,
Louise doesn't have a date and has nothing to do, the parents either have
something to do or they perfectly well could get up something to do. Then
Louise is arrived at as the one to take the kid sister. Now, to be put in that
position is to be given something to do Friday night, so that she indeed ended
up doing something as compared to staying home Friday night. But it's not
just that she's been given something to do Friday night; she's given something
to do which she can complain of in a quite different way than she might
complain of not having a date. So the parents' solution to getting someone to
take the kid sister to her Junior High Show provides a thing that Louise can
complain of to other people, though complaining about it in the family would
be a quite different complaint. But to other people she can focus off how she
came to be selected, onto what she ended up doing. So you want to watch the
relation between the way a complaint is put together and the non-presence of
the people complained of. And again, the interest of the audience one has in
the acceptance of complaints like that, by virtue of their then being told that
they can deliver such.
Let me pick away some more at our initial fragment. I talked a bit about
the ways that talk gets topically connected, and I want to point up another
facet of ways that talk gets connected which is present a good deal here, and
picture a way to think about it that might alert one to its occurrence.

Ted : Well, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint or even­
Kim : What's even funnier is . . .

and

Kim : And that's just ridiculous!

Bob : It's just that, becuz presents are so . . .

Not exactly the same, but in a fashion related:

Bob : . . . and see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs)

Kim : We should've just left everything alone!

and

Bob : . . . I don't know how we did, but-

jan : He probably knew.
Ted : I know just what you mean.
 March 4 315
The kind of thing I'm pointing to is a phenomenon where what tum out to
be the last words of a current utterance are picked up by a now-starting
speaker who uses them in starting his utterance. I talk of it as 'latching on. '
You might think of it as something like a relay race, where rwo runners come
together and the baton is exchanged and one runner continues and the other
one stops. Now it's not necessarily that a given speaker intends to stop, but
that the next speaker latches on and seems to be continuing, or might be
making a gesture of some sort towards continuing, picking up on, the current
state of the talk. Latching on is a common close connection berween adjacent
utterances, i.e. , the terms of the ending of one and the terms of the beginning
of another, independent of whether the last was looking to close or not, have
this relay feature.
Quite another thing: The father says "Well after 2 5 years, I don't think
we're gonna give presents. " I want to make an observation about things that
go 'After X years, ' because you can come up with kind of a neat rule for the
way in which those things are interpretable. Let me give some more of them
and we'll see what's involved in them. "After 2 5 years they got divorced. "
"After 2 5 years they moved to New York. " Now a question is, after 2 5 years
of what? One has the subject of the clause "after 2 5 years" being, as they say
in linguistics, 'deleted; ' it's not present. They say 'deleted' by virtue of the fact
that they suppose that in, say, the planning of the sentence the subject was
present, and in its delivery it was deleted. Maybe one oughtn't say it was
deleted or it is absent, but plainly there's a question in interpreting the
utterance, of "after 2 5 years of what?" And what seems to be involved is
something like, with "after 2 5 years" you're told by the speaker "hold off
trying to figure out the 'what' until the following clause, then suppose that its
subject will tell you by contrast the 'what' that 'after 2 5 years' is about. " You
can then get "after 2 5 years [of giving presents} he decided no presents. "
"After 2 5 years [of marriage} they got divorced. " The interesting thing about
it is the way that that phrase, and maybe other things, incorporates a
delay-interpretation rule for a hearer. So that a knowledgeable hearer doesn't,
e.g. , interrupt with "Of what?" or find himself trying to figure that out now,
but will treat that as announcing the delay rule.
And it's interesting that among the kinds of rules that people might
employ would be rules that said 'hold off trying to figure out X until Y,' so
that it wasn't an operation of interpreting the thing as the words come out,
but one in which there would be some storage. And furthermore, what was
to be stored for further work would be indicatable by the talk that was posing
the problem. Now I offer that in that it looks like a kind of simple,
straightforward thing, and it would be lovely indeed if any reasonable group
of problems could have what look like relatively easy solutions like that one.
Another interesting character to the solution is that it involves contrast. That's
nice, and we're interested in attention to contrast because if there is some kind
of formal attention to contrast then that's supporting to the notion that when
these contrast pairs occur in close connection they're occurring by reference to
an interest in contrasts. What a word means is then, in some reasonable way,
3 16 Part V
something that needs to be gotten in part via a picture that allows for its
contrasts as well as for its 'meaning . ' That is to say, its contrasts, its sound, and
a variety of other things are attended when it's done. And you could build rules
that relied on that possibility, i.e. , nature could build such rules.
Another thing: The mother is reported to say "I don't want an electric
skillet, I want a coat, or I want a sweater. " What's interesting is that she says,
not 'I don't want an X, I want a Y, ' but 'I don't want an X, I want a Y or
a Z. ' A first sort of interest to that sort of thing is if she said "I don't want
an electric skillet, I want a coat, ' ' then at least one thing that could be
involved is that picking a particular alternative might be seen as posing the
problem too sharply. Like, "I can see how you don't want an electric skillet,
but how can you expect somebody to know that you want a coat?" They
would be wrong not merely if they got you an electric skillet, but if they got
you a sweater. So in proposing what's wanted and what's not wanted, it's a
not-unreasonable strategy to do it in such a way as to give options to what's
wanted while rejecting a singular. The presence of options in 'what I want,'
where it's done complainingly about 'what I get' is, I think, expectably
regular, and is part of the way to do the complaint in such a way as to have
it come off as reasonable.
An interesting feature of having two options to the 'what I want' part of
it is that whereas having said "I want a coat" you may be heard as saying you
want a coat, if you say "I want a coat or I want a sweater" then you can be
heard as saying, not "I want as coat or a sweater, " but "I want a coat or a
sweater or a dress or a pair of slacks or something else. " So that the two can
be heard as not simply a different quantity than the one, but, whereas the one
can be heard as unique the two can be heard as instances. Giving options in
the 'what I want' is, then, to be giving more than you've given.
Finally, focussing on Bob's report: "And so my father, you know, was
being very rational about it. ' ' It doesn't sound like a thing that has any serious
import. It could be, e.g. , just a grant to the father, saying "I go along with
what he did, ' ' rather than that 'rational' is descriptive. Now, occasionally it
pays off to say, okay let's look at it. He says he was being rational. Is it
rational? How is it rational? And maybe you find that it's kind of rational, i.e. ,
you could build a decent model about how to make decisions. So perhaps
when he says "rational" here, there's something to it. Let's consider the
problem. The father says "We just haven't got much. Let's get things for the
kids and you and I'll forget it. ' ' (I kind of like the utterance because of other
aspects of what is said, having to do with "we" and "let's, ' ' and then "you
and 1 , ' ' where the "you and I" are markedly different than the "we" and
"let's. ") Now we could imagine an alternate scene where the parents, under
a condition of having minimal resources, are going to buy presents - for each
other, for the kids, for whomsoever. Then there's a problem of how to allocate
those resources. And neither can know, e.g. , whether what they bought for
the other would end up being anything like what the other bought for them.
That could be okay where there's not a specific attention to minimal resources
and their distribution. But plainly there can be a problem where, while you've
 March 4 3 17
spent as much as they've spent, you've spent markedly less on them than
they've spent on you, you having spent more than they have on somebody
else of the same group. A solution to that could be if they all agreed on the
sum and then just broke it into equal parts, but I can't imagine a family that
could assume that; they would have to tell each other.
The problem then is, how in the world are we to get into a situation where
we can discuss what we're going to do. And the way we can get there is to say
"Let's not buy presents for each other, whatever we have we'll spend on the
kids. " That ends up with no problem of a marked skewing relative to each
other, or relative to one of the kids, for that matter. So there is a way in which
the combination "we'll buy for the kids" and "neither of us will buy for each
other, " under a situation of specifically asserted minimal resources, is
'rational. ' It's at least culturally rational, in that he could conceivably propose
"We just haven't got much, you and I'll forget it and let's buy presents for
my girlfriend" or "let's give money to charity. "
I don't know how much it pays off, but it's payed off for me at least
occasionally to say: Somebody says 'he was being rational' or 'he was being
such-and-such, ' okay, let's suppose it's so. What might people be reporting
on? How would people go about doing 'being rational'? Can we find a
characterizable procedure that they go through, a problem that they solve? So
you take a characterization and imagine that at least for research puposes it's
not just a casual remark, but that he might have picked it with some care; that
it talks about something that has a describable character to it. Then you try
to construct that describable character. And you may find things out in doing
that. You may find out that there is a thing which has, independent of their
use of it, features that we could call 'rational. '
 March 1 1
Poetics; Requests} offers} and threats;
The *old man' as an evolved natural
object

The following sequence occurs in the course of a conversation between a

middle-aged couple, Ethel and Ben, their son Bill, at who's house this is
taking place, and Ethel and Ben's stepfather-in-law, Max.

Ben : You haf to uh, Uh,

( 1 .0)
Ben : Hey this is the best herring you ever tasted I'll tellyuh that right
now.
( 1 . 5)
Ethel : Bring some out II so thet m-Max c'd have some too. =
Ben : Oh boy.
Max : = I don'wan'ny
(0 . 5 )
Ben : They don' have this et Mayfair but dis is II delicious.
Ethel : What's the name of it.
( 1 .0)
Ben : It's the Lasko but it's uh, this Herring Snack Bits. En' there's
reasons why- the guy tol' me once before thet it uh wz the best.
(2 . 5)
Ben : 'Cause it's Nova Scotia herring.
( 1 . 0)
Bill : Why is it the be:st.
Ben : ((through a mouthful)) Cause it comes fr'm cold water.
( 1 . 5)
(Bill) : [[(Oh.)
Ben : S: :-col' water fish is always II better.
Max : ( ) when they uh, can it.
Ethel : [[ MMmm it's-
Ben : Cold water fish II is­
Ethel : Ouu Max have a piece.
Ben : This 11 is,
Ethel : Geschllmacht.
Ben : -the best you ever tasted.
3 18
 March 1 1 3 19
Ethel : MMmm.
(2 .0)
Ethel : Oh it's delicious Ben w'dyih hand me a napkin please,
Bill : Lemme cut up a' little pieces of bread.
(2 . 5)
Ben : I' n that good?
Ethel : It's duh::li_cious. It's geschmacht Max.
Max : What?
Ethel : Geschma:cht,
(0. 5)
Ethel : Max, one piece.
Max : I d'n want.
(4.0)
Ben : Yer gonna be- You better eat sumpn becuz yer g'be hungry
before we get there Max,
Max : So.
(0. 5)
Ben : C'mon now I don' wanche t'get sick.
Max : Get there I'll have sojjmething.
Ben : Huh?
Max : When I W there I'll eat.
Ben : Yeah butche better eat sumpn before. Y'wan'lay down'n take
a nap? =
Max : = No,
Ben : C'mon.
( 1 .0)
Ben : Y'wan' sit up'n take a nap? B'cuz // I'm g'n take one,
( ): ( )
( 1 . 5)
Ben : -inna minute,
( 1 .0)
Ben : Det's, good.
(2 .0)
Ben : Det is really good.
( 1 .0)
Ethel : Mmjjm.
Ben : Honestly.
(4. 5)
Ben : �·mon,
( 1 .0)
Max : ((very soft)) (I don't want.)
Ben : Max, please. I don' wanche t' get si:ck.
Max : I (won't) get sick,
(3 .0)
Ben : 00 that's // so­
Ethel : MMm. It just // sorta-
320 Part V
Ben : Isn'at- // Isn'at-
Ethel : -gckles the tongue doesn' !!:?
Ben : Mm hm?
(4. 5)
Ben : Mm ((through a mouthful)) Maybe we oughta take one take
one home with us.
Bill : Where'dejh � it.
Ethel : Alpha Be/ jta.
Ben : Alpha Beta (up here) .
Bill : ((through a mouthful)) Right here?
Ethel : Mm, hm?
Bill : Hm.
(2 . 5)
Bill : Hm.
Ethel : You better put s'm more in the dish Ben,
( 1 0 . 0)
Ethel : ((sigh)) W'l you, be g'd enough tuh empty this in the:re en'
then I'll fill it (h)up for you again.
((eight metallic bangs))
Ben : Yeah I // (know that whole --)
Ethel : Thankyou.
(3 .0)
Ethel : Max doesn't know what he's missin' .
Bill : He knows,
Ben : I don' wan' him tuh get sick I wannim tuh eat.
Max : ( )
(1 . 5)
Bill : Whadidjuh think a'this you wanna take this?

The sequence itself is really sharply bounded. Bill's utterance, "What did you
think of this you wanna take this?" has to do with another matter entirely,
and Ben's first utterance is a self-interruption of talk on another matter, which
is altogether a lawful thing: "You have to uh, Uh ( 1 .0) Hey this is the best
herring . . . " That is to say, for things like various sorts of noticings - noticing
the taste of food or noticing a plane passing, or a sound, or something falling,
or all sorts of things like that - one perfectly well can properly interrupt an
utterance that one is oneself making, or indeed that someone else is making.
There are sorts of noticings for which you want the timing to be such that it
indicates that they're not being placed in adjacency to some other utterance,
are not responsive to it, shouldn't be figured out by reference to what's been
said, but have to do with things that have been proceeding in some
independence of the sequence of talk. Self- or other-interruptions which
involve remarking about food belong, then, to a special class of interruptions
that are, in a way, properly done 'interruptively. '
Before getting into the sequence itself, let me suggest a way to approach a
piece of data. A kind of easy way to start out is to pick out various sorts of
 March 1 1 32 1
sound sequences, and just mark them out on the transcript. That might give
you some beginning feel for at least whether there's perhaps more sound
density than you'd expect. Having gotten some sound relationships, you
might look around to see if something can be done with them or with related
things. In this fragment we get a possible extension on a sort of thing I talked
about earlier, which involved a focus on words like 'because' which are
variously pronounced in conversation, e.g., "because" and " 'cause," where
one can look to see how that word is said, and see of it's at all, for example,
sound-coordinated with things in its environment. And we can find here a use
of " 'cause" which is affiliated with closely occurring 'k'-beginning words:
" 'Cause it comes from cold water, " and a use of "because" in an environment
of beginning 'b's: "You're gonna be- You better eat something because
you're gonna be hungry before we get there. " There are also a couple of other
instances of that sort of thing present; relevant then to the issue of is that sort
of thing a 'sort of thing'? And can we take it that the whole variety of such
words are adapted to their local scene? For example, just as a way to extend
things, the word 'this' gets, in one particular utterance, a "this" and a "dis"
pronunciation: "They don't have this at Mayfair, but dis is delicious. " We can
begin to suppose that a class could be marked out which is sound-adapted to
its environment, and that some sorts of organization can be found to the
relative distribution of "this" and "dis " , " 'cause" and "because, " etc., where
at least perhaps partially there are matters of sound considerations and not,
e.g . , considerations of formal-informal speech. So from this transcript we get
'some more of the same thing, ' that 'more' helping to put together a possible
class, and some aspects of the way that class may operate.
At one point in working with this, I started to look at the use of
"Honestly" here. I began to wonder about what was involved in its use, in the
light of what had been taking place in this sequence where Ben was trying to
convince Max to have some herring, hadn't been successful, said "That's
good. That is really good, ' ' and then says "Honestly, ' ' And one might readily
propose something like: It might be that Ben figures that Max's not having
eaten any herring is due to Ben's failure as a salesman, and he is now trying
to deal with some possible failing of his sales job. However, at that point I was
in a position to play around with some stuff on the sound locus of
"Honestly. " Ben has begun a series of prior utterances with sounds involving
" . . . ON . . . : " "Yer gONna be-, " "C'mON now, ' ' "Y'wAN'lay down, ' '
"C'mON , ' ' "Y'wAN' sit up, ' ' then the "hONestly, ' ' and then another
"C'mON. " We have a relatively extended, relatively unbroken string of
Ben's beginning sounds involving " . . . ON . . . " So there's a patterning of
those, independent of "honestly, ' ' within which "honestly" fits. And that
now adds to the kinds of sound-sequence patternings that we're accumulat­
ing. This one says there may be patterning which can be selectionally relevant,
which operates at particular junctions in utterances, for example, the initial
word of an utterance.
We haven't much looked at cross-utterance patterns. This particular kind of
cross-utterance pattern, i.e. , the string of "on"s, is of some interest because it
322 Part V
doesn't involve directly adjacent utterances, though it does involve adjacent­
to-same-speaker utterances. And that is not much of a movement from
adjacent utterances, particularly in a case like this, where the same speaker is
essentially speaking in every alternative utterance. Now, if such sorts of things
are operative, the relevance of that is that you then need partially to weaken
any argument you might make about what is somebody doing with, e.g. ,
some such words as they use which also have the feature of being consistent
with a sound pattern that is developing within the sequence. So you don't
want to make too much of what somebody is doing by saying "Honestly, "
where it is perhaps partially selected via the way he's going about building the
beginning of his utterances.
Looking at the relationship of "take one" and "tickles the tongue, " it
seemed that "take one" preserved some facets of "tickles the tongue. " I
puzzled about that for a while, as to whether anything could be said, until I
saw that one utterance says " . . . sorta tickles the tongue" and the other one
says " . . . oughta take one home, " i.e. , that "sorta" and "oughta" are kinds
of nice things for those particular adjacencies. And then up at the beginning
we get " . . . the guy told me once before that it was the best. " I was
semantically puzzled by the occurence of "once before, " which in this talk
seems unmotivated. Now this sequence begins with "Hey this is the best
herring you ever tasted I"ll tell you right now. " So now we have ' 'I'll tell you
that right now" and "the guy told me once before, " where there is an
exceedingly close parallel between those two things, where the "once before"
may be, for him, completing a thing he has been saying which starts with the
first utterance of this sequence.
Sticking with this words-as-objects kind of thing, later in the transcript Ethel
says "Will you be good enough to empty this in there, and then I"ll fill it (h)up
for you again. " She's talking, by the way, about an ashtray. Now, "Will you
be good enough" seemed in the first instance to be an awfully formal way, if
you thought of it in its semantic sense, to be saying to her husband "Will you
empty this?" so I was looking at it, and noticed something which I've been
intrigued with and which this seemed to be another instance of. The other
instances seemed to be partially conjectural also, until I had a bunch of them,
and then they looked like a possible way of connecting things which was not
made up but which was indeed operative. "Enough" is a member of the class,
'measure terms. ' I want to notice its membership in measure terms because
then I can notice things about measure terms, forgetting about "enough"
specifically, which are obvious for this utterance. For one, if we were marking
the local occurrences of contrast terms, then "empty" and "fill" would have
been isolated out as such an occurrence. And "empty" and "fill" contrast as
measure terms. Now there is a just prior use of a measure term when Ethel
says "You better put some more in the dish Ben," and there is a just
consequential use of a measure term, when Ben says "Max doesn't know what
he's missing. " So we have flurry of measure terms occurring.
Let me hold off the argument I want to make, and give another fragment,
from a different conversation.
 March 1 1 323
What's been happening is the past three times she's been over here,
she's been feeling us out by saying, oh, she'll say, like this morning "Oh
I'll come over and we'll all have supper together. " And then about ten
minutes later she said "Well, I'm not gonna come because you two
never get a chance to be alone and I feel that I'm intruding. ' ' And I said
"Well come on over Kit, we'll all eat supper here. " And uh she's been
doing that now for three or four days.

When I looked at that I was wondering why in the world would he say
"What's been happening is the past three times . . . " rather than, e.g. , "re­
cently" or something like that. It seemed to me that you could say "the past
two times, " but "the past three times" begins to get awfully precise, i.e. , you
don't indefinitely count events. Now "three times" might not seem all that
peculiar, but if you listen to number uses for counting events, then after "two"
you begin to get approximates, or something special is being said.
I began to wonder if an environment of number words made a place for
more number words; that is, if "the past three times" turned on that the
problem being talked about is that there is a couple, and two girls live next
door to them; one of those girls is very friendly with the couple, comes over
all the time, and is now embarrassed that those two never get a chance to be
alone, but are involved in this threesome. That is, her problem is focussed by
those numbers. And in telling this story about the "two" of us and the
"three" of us, that focus might provide some kind of source for an extension
of number uses around it; specifically, some surplus of number uses. The idea
roughly being that you might be able to look for flurries, for some class, of
its terms. When perhaps not all the terms of that class that are occurring in
some small fragment had equivalent sources, but that some are occurring by
reference to the fact that a bunch of the others had already occurred or were
going to occur in the already-planned talk. And in the data at hand we have,
not a flurry of number terms, but a flurry of measure terms ("more,"
"enough, " "fill," "empty, " "missing").
Here is a similar sort of thing, occurring later in the same conversation. The
topic is altogether changed. Ethel is telling a long story about some friends of
hers and Ben's who have a son around Bill's age. The story involves a
complaint by the friends about their son, which Ethel delivers very sympa­
thetically to the friends' complaint. At one point in the story the son is in Los
Angeles and has to go down to La Jolla, and Ethel is telling how her friends
came to go down to La Jolla with him.

Ethel : but tuh, he kept sayin' "Well how'm I gonna get down tuh La
Jolla. How'm I gonna get down tuh La Jolla. " A:nd uh,
Ben : W'theive �' II they, ha:ve two calj:rs.
Ethel : I guess they could-
Ethel : 1 guess they could have uh- uh given him a ca:r,lI y'kno: :w,
Ben : There's two cars. They're only drijlvin' one.
3 24 Part V
Ethel : But they were prou- This is the f-first time in many yea:rs thet
they've been alo:ne with him fer say two days. En I guess they
wanniduh be, with him. "hhhh So, you haftuh view it from both
si:des.
Now the "both sides" business might be kind of weird. It's not that she's
been viewing it from both sides. The qustion is, is the "both sides" some kind
of takeoff from this series of twos that they have just gone through?
The rough idea is that if you don't always read the transcript contentwise
- where if you were looking at "good enough" contentwise you wouldn't see
the "enough" particularly as a measure term - you might come to find small
flurries of some class of words. And if you find them, you can make kinds of
issues for how you would come to be explaining, e.g. , why she said "Will you
be good enough" or "You have to view it from both sides. " And my feeling
is that you ought to be allowing the possible development of a picture in
which at some point in utterence sequences people are partially assembling
their talk in a way similar to the way you do it in some kinds of board games
- out of what we've already built. They're doing some sorts of recombinations
and are exceedingly sensitive to historical developments and extensions on
what we've so far said. And this is not talking about it in terms of what they
topically say, but, for whatever they say, in terms at least of where they get
the words they're using.
Q: Are you saying that "Will you be good enough" is not selected out of
a bunch of things like "Would you be so kind," but is sound-selected?
HS: What I am wondering about is whether it's at all appropriate to say
that the alternative class members are to be derived from ' 'Will you be good
enough" by considering what sort of a polite object it is and saying "Would
you be so kind" is another, but that "Will you be good enough" is partially
selected, e.g., by reference to the massive ongoing occurrence of terms like
"best, " "better," "delicious, " "good," and by reference to the local flurry of
measure terms like "more," " fill," "empty. " It might not be anything like
that, but if someone were going to make something out of the measure terms
and the assessment terms that they've so far used, then they can do it in this
request form with "good enough, " and "Will you be good enough" pops
into her head independent of a search for something like "Would you be so
kind. " Now I don't really know if this is the case, but as a matter of aesthetics
I would prefer that it were. and I would be, e.g., stacking things in that
direction in my re-examination of it.
Q: Could you include the "wanna"s and "gonna"s and "inna"s that are
going on, aside from the beginning of utterances there?
HS: Yes, you could stick them in as another development. I wasn't tracking
the internal " . . . on . . . " sounds, I was looking at the track that ran for
beginnings of utterances. But sure, that's another. I used to figure that I ought
to put everything I could see onto the board. Then somebody remarked the
fact that people were finding things for themselves, and it became obvious
that if I didn't put up everything I saw, there would be room for people to
 March 1 1 325
find them themselves. They could say ' 'Oh look at that. There are things
happening here . " Where, if all that has been done is to assert what I see going
on here, it looks like maybe it's there, but you get more convinced if you see
that thing happening yourself than by my pointing them out. But in fact I
hadn't noticed those internal " . . . on . . . " sounds.
Q: Couldn't that be carried too far?
HS: The whole problem is that it's nowhere in the first instance. And the
issue is to pull it out and raise the possibility of its operation. It might be that
the only basis for doing that, which would get anybody to do it, would be
under the hope that it was really much more important than it would turn out
to be. So the fantasy that leads you to try to work on it is that it might turn
out to have some really outrageous operation. I guess I don't think so, but
while I'm working with it I'm going to propose that it could be. Otherwise
it's kind of boring. Now one virtue for going through this sort of thing is to
establish for yourself that there is a texture to what these people are doing,
that can be put on the transcript in just these sorts of ways, before you begin
to get much involved in what might be more difficult aspects of the thing.
You might otherwise find yourself looking at a transcript that you dido' t have
any way to begin working with.
Turning now to what's going on in this sequence, I eventually want to get
at why Ben and Ethel keep reasserting that Max should have some herring.
I want to deal with a variety of aspects of the sequence they employ,
beginning with Ethel's first utterance, "Bring some out so that Max could
have some too," to which he says "I don't want any. " So when it looks like
the herring will be made available for him to have some, he turns it down.
And, an offer being turned down, that can be that, routinely enough. Here we
don't have that kind of a development. It's turned down, it's nonetheless
brought out, and it's reoffered (it gets reoffered and reoffered, but at first
it's just reoffered). So the question is why, in that it's turned down, is it
brought out and reoffered? And there is a real point to taking the thing step
by step.
Let's focus on Ethel's "Bring some out so that Max could have some too,"
considering it first of all by reference to a possible dilemma of sorts that Ben
could be in, given that Ethel has told him to bring it out for Max and Max
has said no. The dilemma being should Ben bring it out or shouldn't he, i.e. ,
which one of them should he listen to. Now this is forgetting about whether
Ben would have wanted to bring it out in any event. That is to say, an
argument could readily be developed that Ben was perfectly well going to
bring the stuff out, he didn't need Ethel telling him to bring it out, and, that
Max said he didn't want any doesn't then make any puzzle for him about
whether he should bring it out. So I'm not going to make a case for Ben's
bringing out the herring because Ethel told him to, but let's initially consider
it that way, as though at least part of the basis for Ben bringing it out is
Ethel's telling him to, and the way she tells him to. Under that circumstance,
Max's "I don't want any" might be relevant to whether Ben should bring it
out or not. That is, if he brings it out he's listening to Ethel not to Max, and
326 Part V
if he doesn't, he's listening to Max not to Ethel - or so it might be said on
some literal interpretation of what Ethel and Max have said.
Now, that sort of dilemma doesn't occur for Ben, in part by virtue of a
consideration of what both Ethel and Max could be doing. Ethel could
perfectly well have said "Bring some out so that we can have some too," or
" Bring some out for me, " etc., i.e. , she could perfectly well be entitled to be
a recipient just as much as anybody else, or needn't locate some particular
recipient. And the relevance of that is that some people might choose to ask
for something to be brought out, intending to eat some, but ask for it on
behalf of someone else. So that Ethel could be heard by Ben as saying, in the
way that Ethel likes to say such things, that she wants some but she doesn't
want to ask for herself, and has here used a way of making a request which
involves attending to someone else - that one being the person present to
whom others owe most deference, i.e. , the oldest one there, which Max
happens to be. That is to say, in asking not for herself, there may be some
observable orderliness to whom she asks on behalf of. That some such person
as Max would get picked is, I think, an orderly aspect of the choice involved
in a request that is 'not for myself,' i.e. , someone to whom, in bringing things
out, one could be paying deference. In which case, not only the bringer, but
the asker can also be paying deference, aside from using Max as a vehicle for
getting the herring out.
Under that situation, Max's "I don't want any" can be an equally allusive
thing, in which he's saying, not "I won't eat any, " but "Don't bring it out
on my behalf. " That is to say, in the first instance saying "I don't want any"
when none is there is quite different from saying "I don't want any" when
something is there. And that is known, i.e. , a common, known, pattern is:
Being offered something that isn't present, people tum it down. They tum it
down under the auspices of "I don't want to be a bother, " "Don't go to any
trouble for me. ' ' And that difference can partially account for the reoffering
of the stuff when it's there. So, if someone says "Would you like some X?"
when the stuff isn't there, someone can say "No thanks. " If the stuff is then
brought out, that they said "No" doesn't provide that they're not asked
again. And when asked again, they may well say "Yes . " At least one
difference, then, between the scene of the first offer and the scene of later offers
is that the stuff is, on the occurrence of the first offer, not present. So in a way,
Ethel's request could be perfectly well to be recognized to be for something she
wants, and Max's turndown could be seen as something you shouldn't take
seriously.
So at least in part one can account for the occurrence of a reoffer by noticing
that in the first instance the stuff wasn't there and in the second instance it
was, where the initial rejection doesn't count for the reoffer. You can, then, do
a reoffer in the same terms as the offer, though there can be some change; e.g. ,
"Have some," "Have a piece," and as we get here, "One piece" - where the
" One piece" is now something that attends "I know you don't want any, but
you don't have to eat it, just try it. " Again, the reoffer can be done in more
or less the same terms as the offer, whereas, as occurs later on, when the
 March 1 1 3 27
second rejection "I don't want" is done - in more or less the same way as the
original rejection - then the offer-form changes. Later offer-forms take account
of the second rejection's being " I don't want any" and fit the issue posed by
it, i.e. , they no longer provide for it as a reasonable rejection, where the reoffer
has allowed for the reuse of "I don't want any" as a reasonable rejection. That
is to say, when the person has said, now in the food's presence, "I don't want
any," you don't repeat "Would you like . . . " or " Have some. " But that
doesn't mean you can't do another offer, because you can find another way of
doing an offer; one which doesn't provide for "I don't want any" as its
rejection. Such things as "You'd better have some because we're not going to
eat for a while, " for example, to which "I don't want any" is not an
appropriate return. Those sorts of shifts take place and, again, that they don't
take place right from the beginning has to do with the difference between the
stuff being there and not being there. So there is at least some orderliness to
why the offer-form can be preserved across its first two occurrences, and when
the offer-form gets changed.
Now I want to pick up on something relevant to how Ethel gets the stuff
out, and her " Oo Max have a piece, " because there are some nice similarities
between those two things. Ethel, having asked that the stuff be brought out
for Max, is now eating some. However, what she does in her appreciation of
the stuff is to turn herself into someone who's not 'eating' it, but 'tasting it for
Max. ' So she retains her position, first of having it brought out for Max, and
then eating it as a taster for Max. And that kind of a thing is not altogether
odd. There are people who can find a whole range of things to be doing not
on their own behalf but that others might enjoy. She could be in a position of,
having had this stuff brought out and now eating heartily, feeling for herself
that she's making sacrifices, i.e. , that she's done this thing not at all on her
own behalf. I don't say this terribly lightly, in that a great deal of what's
involved here has to do with how these people, Ben and Ethel, while eating
and enjoying this stuff, are finding themselves burdened by Max. And that's
part of what we want to be getting to when we ask the question, why do they
go on and on in their reoffering? So the " Oo Max have a piece" as Ethel's first
response on eating and liking the stuff, is in some possibly nice relationship to
the way she gets the stuff out, "Bring some out so that Max could have some
too. "
We get a movement from a variety of offers, to a request - not to eat but
to taste, " Max, one piece, " through the warning format, "You better eat
something because you're gonna be hungry before we get there, " to, finally,
some sort of quasi-threat, " I don't want you to get sick. " (In parallel to that,
the herring becomes transformed to "Eat something. ") I want to deal with
the relationship of the offer-transforms to some changes in identities of the
parties. And what I mean by changes in identity doesn't have to do with
changing from identities they had at the beginning to identities that they
didn't have at beginning, but it's a changing of operative identities, where the
identities they end up with are identities they have in the world, but that
they weren't employing earlier on. And we'll find that the sequence of
328 Part V
offer-transforms operates via a series of identity changes that progressively
provide further transforms. That is to say, at the various rejection points, in
order to proceed one has to find not simply another offer-form to proceed
with, but a form which is usable for and by the one to whom you are
offering.
Now if we go back to the beginning, then some initial bases for making
offers are at least and maybe nothing more than that the people who are
making the offers have eaten the stuff and liked it, and there is somebody else
present who hasn't. Somebody in a room with a bunch of people and stuff on
the table that isn't segregated onto various people's plates can, tasting
something, remark on it in such a way as to have it be heard not simply that
they're congratulating whoever bought it or made it, but that they're inviting
everybody else to eat it. And any person who thereafter eats it can comment
on it in just such a way, i.e. , appreciate it, and appreciate it in such a form as
to have whoever else has not yet eaten it hear themselves being invited to eat,
just by virtue of that the current eaters commend the thing. So, for the initial
series of offers, there need be no more between the people than that they are
gathered together and this eating has begun, and the food is available to all
of them. That situation doesn't require, e.g. , that one isolate people who
stand in a relationship to you of 'child, ' 'spouse,' etc., though those sorts of
things would be involved if, e.g . , the food were distributed on various
people's plates. In that case, though there perfectly well might be offerings,
they would be fairly restricted. But when things are not arranged that way,
any member of the group can say "Boy this is great, everybody ought to have
some, ' ' i.e. , not mobilizing any more particular relationships than that we're
all here together.
But there are some facets of this sequence which involve some sorts of
sharper things in it. For one, while Ben announces that the herring is
wonderful, Ethel takes over the job of having the stuff brought out, at least
in the management sense. Now Ethel is not the hostess here; she's mother of
the host and wife of the one who made the announcement. But the hostess,
her daughter-in-law, is not present and Ethel, the only currently present adult
female, takes over the business of having the snack brought out. She also has
it brought out in aid of Max, who is her stepfather-in-law and is now also a
widower. And not just anyone would choose to say "Bring some out" or
"Bring some out so that X can have it. " That is to say, these sorts of
statements occur with serious restrictions on them, having to do with whose
place it is, who this is relative to whose place this is, who it is that's being
referred to, who it is that's being ordered, and various things like that. Not
anybody in a room with persons gathered around on some social occasion says
something like "Bring out the drinks" or "Bring out the herring" or "Bring
out the herring so that X can have some. ' ' But that Ethel does it, she does by
virtue of a series of positions she has, relative to this place and to the absent
hostess.
Now some person having been offered and having turned it down, the
offer having been made by virtue of that the stuff is here and available, there
 March 1 1 329
are ways to reoffer. And you can try to play out, if you like, some of the ways
that reoffering can be done, under various relationships that parties might have
to each other. If the parties are unrelated, then it may be that once you get
beyond, e.g., pleading with them in a non-serious way, you're at the end of the
line. Even to take a step like "It's going to be a while before we get there" is to
invoke managerial work, and not just anyone will choose to do so. Nor, for that
matter, might there be any reason for them to do so, i.e. , they've offered, so
that's that. That is to say, one doesn't want to simply ask how could they go
about extending this sequence indefinitely, but one also wants to wonder at
least as much, why in the world would they? I want to be suggesting that as
between Ben and Ethel and Max there is a relationship which allows future
forms, like warnings and threats, to get done, and which can at the same time
provide part of the source for them to fail.
Max is recently a widower. A thing that Ben and Ethel - his kids, so to
speak - can be in a position to be now attending, is that they have become
responsible for him. It's not that he's old. That's not at all the issue. It's that
he's old and newly widowered. Because if he was old and his wife was there,
then she would be the one, if anyone, to be insistent that he eat. But in that
he's widowered, the question of who's responsible for him is one that Ethel
and Ben can come to figure they have. And it's on just such occasions as when
he does something like refuse an offer of food, that the phenomenon of their
possible responsibility for him can come into operation for them and lead
them to see that they ought to do something about it. That is to say, it's his
turning down what in the first place may be an offer to anybody that provides
for them focussing on his turning it down, and focussing on that by virtue of
its making for them a question of their satisfying of their responsibilities to
him - which is something that would otherwise never occur to them. If he
was offered some food and turned it down when his wife was sitting there, it
would never occur to them that he's going to get sick or any such thing, and
it would just pass by. Maybe the wife would say something, maybe she
wouldn't but if she didn't, that would be that. When he turns it down and
he's now a widower, they can see their relationship involved in it, and find
that they have to go on insisting.
Now this situation of being responsible, which can be actuated so to speak
by his turning food down - i.e. , they get reminded of it when he says "I don't
want any" - would not perhaps be the sort of thing that would have led them
in the first place to offer it. I'm trying to separate out what would lead
someone to offer something in the first place, and what might lead them to
reoffer it on its being turned down. You get, then, a picture, not of a sequence
that unfolds as though I planned it this way, i.e. , ' T il make an offer and if
you turn me down I'll do the following, " but one in which I make an offer
to somebody and when they turn it down I can look at the rejection to see
what to do; I can then notice who did the rejection and can then think about
the rejection and find that, e.g . , in that that one did a rejection I ought to do
another offer, and find a way to do another offer, maybe, or find that I ought
to change the offer in some particular way.
330 Part V
As they procee4 through the sequence and Max keeps doing the rejections,
that status of his ....: that he has no one to take care of him - can be made more
alive. Their reoffers can be specifically turning him into a 'stubborn old man . '
Seeing the stubborn old man, they can see that he's the stubborn old man that
they're responsible for, i.e. , that he doesn't take care of himself. In part, then,
the person he becomes in the sequence, the person they have got to take care
of, is an identity that the sequence brings into focus. It's just a person who's
sitting there. He is offered something, he says "No," it is offered again and
he says "No" again, and we can imagine him ageing in the reoffering, with
them saying "Oh my God it's that old man sitting there not eating anything,
he's going to get sick for sure. "
Now as it can happen that they see he's now the person they're responsible
for, we can have the reverse of it. He can be finding something happening as
well, which can be something like this: To use words that he more or less uses
on another occasion, for 3 5 years someone has been telling him what to eat
and when to eat, and now that he doesn't have a wife to tell him what to eat,
he'll damn well eat what he wants. But as soon as he happens to be in that
position, somebody else figures "He's all by himself, somebody has to watch
out for him. " That is to say, the battle can have in part to do with the fact
that what, for them, is that Max has no one to take care of him, is for Max
a situation of he can do what he wants. And to allow them to win in such a
scene is to acknowledge that they are the ones who are now responsible for
him, in the sense of, they can tell him what to do. So it's kind of an awfully
neat scene. Whereas they can figure that they're doing as they ought, and that
he's being obstinate for no good reason, he can indeed have a principled issue
on such occasions; that is, that he's damn well got to get them to recognize
that they can't force him to do things or he's going to be turned into their
little boy.
But in that battle, whatever its outcome, he will properly become the object
that he inevitably has to end up as, whatever he does, i.e. , a burden on them.
And if you know an old man in a family, then you know he's a burden. What
we want to do is think of 'the old man, burden in the family' as kind of a
naturally evolved object. We want to see how it is that the burden he ends up
being can be the product of some series of ways that he is pushed into doing
things like being obstinate, stubborn, laconically rejective, by virtue of the
way that things that are re-insisted for him extendedly, are not ever re-insisted
for anybody else. And that has its ultimate possible irony in that it's kind of
neat that they after all are the heirs, and to properly inherit his money they
should suffer and he should be a burden so that when he dies there's a kind
of relief involved. It's not like when he dies they will be in the sheerest misery.
Coming to inherit, they will have been relieved of the burden that he had
become when he was left alone, and they will also get something that's kind
of a payment for having taken care of him. Though in this case the story is
turning out quite differently; he isn't letting himself become that, he's
spending all his money.
Let's look at another sort of thing that's involved. We think of an 'offer'
 March 1 1 33 1
as something different than a 'request' or a 'warning' or a 'threat. ' But in
some situations the offer is simply the first version of getting the person to do
something. A person can say yes to an offer which is heard as the first version
of something, where they say yes in order to accept the nicest version of what's
being given. Alternatively, someone can use the offer-form when they and the
other know that if you don't 'accept the offer' you'll do it anyway. One wants
then to reconsider these objects - offer, request, warning, threat - not as
though they're a series of different things, but to see them as sequential
versions of a something. That they are sequential versions of a something can
operate to account for how come the sequence gets stopped at any stage, i.e. ,
at the initial stage, that of an 'offer, ' somebody who's good enough to do the
offer instead of right off doing an insistence, may well get an acceptance. You
can then have A saying "Would you like . . . ? " and B saying "Yes," where
A is saying "Would you like . . . ?" as their specifically first version of
something, and B is saying "Yes, ' ' not by virtue of "Yes I want" - you can't
read this to see that they desire this thing because they accept the offer - but
by virtue of the known sequence that will eventuate if they don't. That is,
they accept the courtesy, and the courtesy is what is offered in an 'offer. '
Perhaps it is sufficiently early on into Max's widowerhood so that they have
not yet run him through enough of these sequences so that he sees that when
he gets this offer he should accept it right off or else he's going to be run
through the rings until he does. And eventually, then, you have the ideal
socialized seventy-year-old who, whatever they're offered, very nicely accepts.
They don't see an offer as at all the same sort of thing that you might see if
you're a guest at a party: If somebody offers something, you think "Do I want
it or don't I want it?" But they know it as "That's the first step . " So the
sequential development here is not simply some possible natural sequence in
which one object is replaced with another, replaced with another, replaced
with another, but the initial one is treatable by parties as a version of the later
ones, and dealt with by reference to what it might become, where eventually
you don't get these elaborate sequences, but just "Have a piece" "Okay,
sure. "
 Part VI
Spring 1971

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 April
2
Introduction
Let me give some introductory remarks. The course is about conversation.
While for some people it could be a first course, for somebody else it could
be a fifth course or whatever it might be. I haven't made it a practice for about
the last three or four years to use this course to teach people how to
analyze conversation, for a variety of reasons, some of which I'll mention.
What I tend to do is to analyze conversation in the ways that I analyze
conversation, which involves that I come in each week and put a bunch of
stuff on the blackboard, or on brown wrapping paper, and consider it. And
if you wanted to learn how to analyze conversation, then it appears that if you
watch me do it enough and try the exercises that we give out, then over time
you develop some facility at that. What the virtues are of that facility, I really
couldn't say.
One reason why I don't have the course as one in which I teach you how
to analyze conversation is that courses in how to do things, academic things,
seem to me to have some massive institutional support for their getting done
the way they get done. That is to say, I could teach you calculus beause that's
something the university has decided you ought to know how to do. But
nobody has yet decided that you ought to know how to analyze conversation,
and certainly I wouldn't make that decision. And on the other hand, I'm
teaching in the university, and what I do is study conversation, and what I
teach is my work. All the stuff I present is my research. And I tend not to
present stuff that I presented last year. I tape record the lectures, and the past
courses are kind of available; anybody who wants to read some past course can
go up to the office and get a copy of one of them or four of them or whatever
they want. Now some of the courses are geared to an introduction; like I'd
wanted at that time to do an overview of where I was. But recently I haven't
tended to do that at all. Recently I've been tending to bring into the class
things that I'm pretty well currently working on. So I take a bunch of stuff
that I've been working at for the last three months or six months or whatever,
and organize it for the week before the class and then deliver an organization
of it in the class. And that tends to be about specific fragments of
conversation. And it tends to have, over three or four weeks, some thematic
connection; like there are some problems which I will be working on in the
class, though I won't much be developing a thing over the semester. You
could, I guess, come in any time and see an instance of the sorts of things I
do. And you could stay for three or four semesters, or one semester, and see
a lot of instances.
Now I feel kind of equivocal about doing it that way. That way I get what
I want out of the class, which is to organize my current work and get it down
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 335
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
336 Part VI
on paper and then let my friends see where I am. The lectures get taped, they
then get typed, and then they get sent around to whoever it is that writes me
letters saying they're interested in seeing what's happening right now. And
that's my audience. That is, the audience that I think of being directed to is
not here - or it's only incidentally here, if you choose to be one of them. It's
an audience of people some of whom I know and some of whom I don't
know, and it grows and changes. And I feel a bit equivocal about that; like
why don't I spend time trying to address the particular people who are
here?
And with regard to teaching you how to analyze conversation, I'm not
too clear on why people would want to learn to do that. I don't figure it's
all that useful - I mean useful for doing better conversation, or useful for
figuring out "what's wrong with my conversation?" or figuring out what
somebody was trying to do to you when they did something or other. Aside
from which I have deeper reasons, having to do with that I feel pretty
confident that whatever you would think is useful is probably not very useful.
And even though I guess I could show you things that you would think are
useful, I don't want to be doing that because I don't think they're useful, so
I'm not going to sell them as useful even though that could work out in its
fashion.
I guess I also figure that people just take a course for an hour, for whatever
reasons there may be. And the choice of how to spend an hour is made from
within some rather narrow constraints; it's not like some passerby picked up
the catalog of classes at a bus stop in Santa Ana and said "That's the way I'm
going to spend the next hour. " But it's among the set of courses that you
could take, given that you're a student spending your time now taking
courses, "which one should I take?" And then it gets chosen in a variety of
ways which involve eliminating various things, etc. , etc. It's not a matter of
someone waking up in the morning and deciding "what I want to know is
calculus" or conversation, and then going and finding out where to get it. But
that's my view of it. That's what I do. I wake up in the morning and want to
study conversation, so I get up and do it. And if I knew that there were such
people listening, then I would teach to them. Now there are such people
listening, but they're not here. So I teach to them. And anybody else can come
listen in. That's okay. I want you to know that I understand that you're
listening in. And you, if you're not kidding yourselves, know the same thing.
I don't have any feeling that the particular collection of people who come here
are 'coming here, ' i.e. , coming because they know what's going on and that's
what they want. And to treat them as though they are, is kind of a mutual
con game in which I pretend that you came to take this course, picking it out
of some collection of courses because that's what you wanted to learn, and
maybe you pretend that's so, also. And then we play along with each other
that here's this class and they're all interested in what's going on, when I don't
have any reason to believe that, and you certainly know that's not so. So it
would be kind of silly for us to go through a thing of "Okay, I'm going to
teach you how to analyze conversation and you're going to sit there and learn
 April 2 337
how to analyze conversation" when you couldn't care less about learning how
to analyze conversation - except if you cared to learn how to analyze
conversation you could probably learn by listening to enough of the work, and
also by coming around and letting us know that you're intrested in learning
how to analyze conversation. And we have people who will help you try
to do it.
So, since I don't really want to spend our time conning each other, I try to
find that sort of thing that I can do, and you know how to listen for an hour,
so you can spend your time listening for an hour, or any way you please. If
it turned out that some bunch of the class decided to spend the time learning
how to analyze conversation, it would be easy enough to get me to tty to teach
you how. Among the kinds of things you could do would be, when I run
through something you could ask me to go over it and develop it a bit more
closely, or you could ask me why were those decisions made about what's
happening rather than some others. And I'll do that. I mean, I'll do it if it
looks like it's not one person's aim that they want to learn a little more,
because if it's just one person or two people, then the class will let them know
that, and those two people and I can go off and have our party somewhere else
and some other time. And I really don't want to bother the bunch of people
who happen to be here, with what may or would or will seem to be dreary
details. So that's kind of the mess that I see us as being in; here together for
no good reason.
You have rights to ask for clarification, ask for better statements, ask me
why or how I did that, or is there more of that or is there a better way of doing
it, and I will try to help you out. At least one kind of rule that I would like
to have operating is, while you're free to argue and question and all that, I
would appreciate it if you don't do it in the course of the lecture but do it at
the end of the lecture. The reason for that is, if you do it in the middle of a
lecture then I get completely disoriented. Since I normally have a big package
of stuff I'm trying to keep in my mind to lay out, if you interrupt me then
I'm liable to pick up what you're saying and forget where I was, and not be
able to get back to it. And somebody will surely do it, and I will surely take
them up and I will surely get lost. I hope it's early in the course rather than
later so that we don't have to go through it too many times before we learn
it works that way. I'll give you as much tithe at the end as you need. Nobody
ever asks for such things anyway, but I'll give you as much time at the end
as you need, and occasionally I'll begin the class by asking if there are any
things that you've had in mind that have been bothering you, if so please tell
me what they are and I'll talk to them.
So it's not a terrible constraint. All I'm asking really is that if you have
something that bothers you, that you write it down while the class is going on
and ask me about it afterwards. That's not too much of a delay between when
you get a thought and when you express it. I take an awful long time between
when I get a thought and when I express it. The character of conversation is
that you'd better say whatever you have to say fast or you'll forget it, but I
would appreciate it if the class didn't run that way. It's a little bit of discipline,
3 38 Part VI
that you learn that when you have a thought, somebody who's been thinking
about that thing might have had that thought already and eventually they
will solve it (or get into worse trouble) . And if you wrote something down you
might think about it, wonder about it youself a little bit. So bring it up
afterwards. And everything is on tape: if I say "I didn't say anything like
that," you have a chance to say "It's right there in black and white. "
Is there any business that people have? Oh. There are things like what do
you have to do to get a grade. We hand out a bunch of assignments over the
course of the class. You're expected to do the assignments - and people can
do them - and there's a last assignment and your grade is some version of
your last assignment. There's no exams. Is there anything anybody wants to
know about?
Q : If we are incidental observers to what is your primary interest of
appealing to your principal audience, why bother spending time with the
class? Why bother stifling yourself with 40 people? Why can't you do what
you do?
HS : Well, there's a variety of reasons. I get paid. It turns out to have
worked kind of well for me, in that it's a good vehicle for me to organize my
work. And in some ways it's much more uplifting for the class. That is to say,
instead of being treated as the people you think you are, you might be being
treated as the people you might let yourselves be. I suppose that people are
more serious than they are, and I therefore don't spend much time talking
down to the class. That's justification, which only turns on that I heard an
aggressive sense to your question and didn't feel like being counter-aggressive
yet. But I've been saying what my experience in teaching, which is a long
time, has led me to feel. And I just don't choose to pretend otherwise.
But there are reasons which we could work out, which would make doing
it this way just the perfect way to do it. Some people consider it the perfect
way to do it. And I'm only saying that you're incidental for some unspecified
people who could choose otherwise. The class has plenty of power. They can
make me miserable, make me hate to come here, and on the other hand they
can make me feel kind of willing to come here, and also make me fly a little
better. If you're worried about my effort, it's harder to do it this way than to
talk to where you are, because then I could spend the whole semester doing
things I've already done in past courses, or introducing you to stuff that you
can have access to otherwise. And here I've got to work. That's why I do it,
in part. So I can force myself to work.
Now, when I take a fragment and put it on the board, it's gone through
a very elaborate filtering process and has ben isolated because I figure there's
something new in that fragment that I've learned. So it's not designed for
teaching you everything about conversation. It's put up because there are
some new things - typically altogether new things for me - that I've been able
to get my hands on from that fragment. So each one will be attacked in
different - sometimes drastically different - ways. I will also pick out and talk
to other things than the core thing I'm interested in a fragment for. There are
a series of topics that I'm kind of working on, that a fragment may more or
 April 2 339
less permit me to deal with, and I'll tell you about them in some sort o f way
when I'm telling you about that fragment.
The gross aim of the work I'm doing is to see how finely the details of
actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis which will
yield the technology of conversation. So the idea is to take singular sequences
of conversation and tear them apart in such a way as to find rules, techniques,
procedures, methods, maxims - that's a collection of terms that more or less
relate to each other and which I use somewhat interchangeably - which rules,
procedures, techniques, methods, etc. , can be used to generate the orderly
features we find in the conversations we examine. The idea being, then, to
come back to the singular things we observe in a singular sequence, with some
rules that handle those singular features, and also necessarily handle lots of
other events as well, other than this fragment. So what we're dealing with is
the technology of conversation, and we're trying to find that technology out
of actual fragments of conversation so that we can impose as a constraint on
some technology that it actually deals with singular events and singular
sequences of events - which is a reasonably strong constraint on some set of
rules.
And I'm not particularly going to contrast the way I operate on
conversation with the way other social scientists operate on anything else. If
you take other social science courses you may see similarities, differences;
that's your business.
 April 5
Poetics; Avoiding speaking first
The following minute or so of conversation happens to be from a group
therapy session for teenagers that was recorded in 1 9 64. There are three
teenaged males present, and a therapist. They've been talking for maybe an
hour and a half, and one of the fellows, Ken, has been starting to say
something about what he did "last night" - last night being Friday night, this
being Saturday morning. He's said something like "I went with four guys to
the Pike, " an amusement park in Long Beach. Okay, that's where we are.
The names we're using are not their real names. 1

Roger : (Isn't) the New Pike depressing?

-
Ken : hhh The Pike?
Roger : Yeah! Oh the place is disgusting. // Any day of the week.
jim : I think that Pop is // depressing, it's just-
Roger : But you go- you go- take.
jim : Those guys are losing money. hehh
Roger : But you go down-dow-down to th'New Pike there's a buncha
// people, oh: : an' they're old, an' they're pretending they're
having fun, but they're really not.
(jim) : ((cough))
Ken : How c'n you tell. Hm?
Roger : They're-they're tryina make a living, but the place is on the
decline, 's like a dejjgenerate place.
jim : So's Pop.
(Roger): (Y'know?)
jim : Pop is just - -
Roger : Yeah i-it // it's one of these pier joints, y'know?
jim : It's a flop heh
Roger : An' (there's) all these depressing people an'they're- an' they
getting worse an' worse y'know becomin' alcoholics an' all
kindsa- all kindsa things an' uh y'know they're tryina make a
living an' m-having-making people have fun an' pretending
they're having fun, an' they're really not. They get unhappy, an'
they- an' they're stuck in this small little circle this w- y'know
this little sea place, y'know, I mean-
jim : ((very softly) Have y'ever been down there?
1 In the original April 2 lecture, Sacks started to work with this data. The introduction to
the fragment and some of the subsequent discussion comes from that lecture, the unedited
pp. 7 and 1 2 - 1 4 .

340
 April 5 341
(/)
Roger : It-it's just wild. It's another way of I I life y'know?
jim : heh
(Dan): (No,)
Ken : I thought it was a ball. 1- I I (don't care if you-)
Roger : (Awright now an' look at the-) buh-an' I walked outta there
man, It's just uh- it wasn't like fun, (it) just ( ) II
( )-
jim : These old decrepit ladies in these litle pizza joints an' never
makin any II money, y'know
Roger : Yeah an' - an' you know they- eh people you know they c'm
fr'm these horrible pasts an' everything y'know w't I m'n?
They're walkin' around drunk wi' tattoos 'n all kinds 'n fun
houses y'know 'n this- this is where they live.

An object in this fragment which is partially responsible for the fragment's

being isolated is instanced by a series of words used in it that begin with 'de; '
not necessarilly spelled 'd-e': I'm talking about the spoken language:
"depressing," "disgusting," "decline, " "degenerate, " "decrepit. " And a
notable feature, besides that a run of them occur, is that they are all 'negative'
words in this instance, while of course it's not the case that all words that
begin in that way are 'negative, ' e.g. , 'delightful, ' 'divine, ' 'delicious. ' And
furthermore, it's not just that they have 'de' in the words, but the 'de' occurs
at a same place in each word in which it's used, while of course the sound can
occur at other places in a word: in the middle, e.g. , 'fundamental, ' at the end,
etc. Those words are said by at least two parties to the conversation. It's not,
in principle, that one guy happens to get on a thing where he starts using
words like that, but that two of the primarily three people who speak use one
or more of those words.
So there are, then, at least these features: There's a bunch of words that
begin with 'de,' and they are all 'negative. ' Now a question is, what's to be
done with those initial sorts of noticeable aspects of the fragment? Now,
characteristically what I'll be doing in the course is taking some observation
and posing a problem and then trying to find a technology for solving the
problem. And a kind of problem we can pose here is, how in the world do
people find the words that they use? Where it seems reasonable to suppose
that people are engaged in finding the words that they use in conversation, in
the course of the conversation in which they're using them. And by 'finding
them' I don't mean finding them anywhere, but using those they know. So
that there are questions of how, within conversation time, like within the course
of an utterance, do they get the words that they then say. Can we build any
kinds of rules that will tell us how they might do that?
Plainly we could build lots of rules that could tell us things about how
people get the words they then say. The most obvious and well-known class
are rules that have to do with syntax, which tell us, e.g . , that at a place after
'the' as an article, then only certain sorts of words will occur; nouns,
342 Part VI
adjectives, etc. So there are a variety of ways of imposing constraints on how
people go about selecting the words they use. Now those constraints don't get
all that fine in yielding what words people do use. And it's in that light that
we can focus in on what might be interesting about "depressing, " "disgust­
ing," "decline, " "degenerate, " "decrepit. " Like we can ask, is it possible that
in searching for words, people use a history-sensitive procedure? That is, do
they engage in employing recent words as a source for finding new words?
And if that's a possibility, how would they go about using the recent history
of their talk or somebody else's talk in order to find new words? Words have
lots of properties, and the idea is to see if we can't find some property that
words have, that could be fixed on by a speaker in using what's happened in
the past in order to get new words. For example, words have a bunch of
sounds, and they have an ordering of the sounds in them. Suppose people
used the sounds of words to find words. That's plausible. And there is a
procedure that we know that people use when they're looking for something
like a name that they know but they can't recall. That procedure is,
essentially, to take the alphabet and start to go through it: Does the name
begin with an A, does it begin with a B, etc. And that often works to find the
name you're looking for.
Now, if you used the alphabet in some fixed order at every point in which
you were searching for a word, then we could say that's not a history-sensitive
procedure. And it would plainly have a variety of consequences to it that
could be checked out. Like if the word that was found began with T, then we
might expect that there would be a longer delay between when it was uttered
relative to a last word, and when a word beginning with C was uttered. So we
could rule out this kind of a thing if there was no noticeable difference in delay
time relative to what a word began with. That is to say, we're not simply
making up possible procedures but we're making up ones that could be
checked out. One aspect, then, of the arguments one wants to develop about
the 'de' series has to do with how a word is found. What I would argue in
due course is not only that things like the 'de' series will emerge at a point in
a conversation, but that they will then stop. That is, you want as well to
account for why words like "depressing" don't end up occurring with the
same sort of regularity throughout the rest of the conversation once they get
started. And what one does indeed get is not that sort of continuity, but a kind
of disjunction between sorts of things that go on in small fragments of the
conversation.
Let me just for the moment point up some of the facets of sound and
suchlike relations involved in this fragment; for now, only as a texruring
device, and then I'll talk about what particularly interests me about this
fragment. (And in passing, a reason for collecting the series of sorts of things
I'm collecting and that I'm going to be just mentioning and dropping, has to
do with a kind of justification that might be seriously developed for asserting
that some sort of fragment has an elaborated organization which warrants
pulling it out and working it over.) A thing you can notice about this
fragment is that a bunch of the words that occur in it, that have marked
 Apri/ 5 343
contrast terms to them, have such contrast terms occurring within this same
fragment. So, for example, we find here: "these" and "those," "go to" and
"come from, " "in" and "out," "you" and "they, " "man" and "ladies,"
"new" and "old," "ever" and "never," "pretending" and "really, " "de­
pressing" and "fun . " That's another facet of a way in which things are
operating closely and with some sort of density here.
And the one sound thing I pulled out is by no means the exclusive sound
thing occurring here. There are other relationships, some of which, were they
to be asserted right now would seem implausible as produced phenomena -
whether artifactually produced by reference to some way in which words are
found, or intendedly produced doesn't matter - one just wouldn't figure that
to notice them is to notice something going on there. So, for example, there's
a possibly notable relationship between "degenerate" and "pier joint, " having
to do with r-j-n-t recurring in these. Admitting it for the moment just as,
"Well, that might be a possible thing" - certainly it's a thing in poetry - then
things like that happen to have more than a little occurrence within this
particular fragment. For example, a similar sort of thing is perhaps "walkin'
around drunk" and "all kindsa fun, " or "alcoholics" and "all kindsa
things. ' '
The idea of picking these things up is, as I say, that of getting a sense of
the textured character of a small fragment. By which I mean that the thing
is put together in some way that has its parts - hopefully obviously - more
closely connected to each other than you might suppose on participating in it,
reading it over, listening to it, etc.; a connection which a not too dose but not
altogether incidental attention would begin to give you. Don't forget, we're
talking about spontaneous conversation between three or four people. It's not
a script, and it's not that somebody says something and then there's some
marked pause and another person, looking to make a piece of poetic theatrical
return, does something. There's essentially no pauses going on - and we mark
them when they occur, say, at more than half a second between utterances. So
this is talk at its usual rate. And the idea for now is just to get some idea of
how closely attentive in some fashion people are to each other, where picking
up the sounds, doing simple contrasts, etc., are ways that they may be doing
being attentive to each other.
One also wants to get - not now but eventually - some idea of where these
compactions of local organization occur. They don't build up in a conversa­
tion to some kind of finale where, say, at some point all people are doing is
producing variants on what's so far been done. Though it can happen that
within, say, a topic in conversation, there are places where people are almost
exclusively employing the resources-so-far for the topic, to produce a next
utterance. As in the following utterance, where there's relatively little that
can't be locked back into what's already been said: "These old decrepit ladies
in these little pizza joints an' never makin any money. " For "pizza joints" we
have a prior occurrence of "pier joint" and the last part of "decrepit. "
"Decrepit" comes back to the 'de' series. "Old" and "these" contrast with
prior items, "new" and "those; " "ladies" contrasts with the just prior use of
344 Part VI
"man," "never" with "ever, " and "makin' . . . money" with the prior "losing
money. " But if conversation were proceeding simply in a step by step
historical development in which parts are being picked up and put into a
different organization, we might suppose that it would just continue that way,
additively, and it does not. So one wants to deal with the disjunctiveness as
well as the way things get put together within flurries or short sequences - or,
as I might eventually get to claim, within a kind of unit within conversation
that we otherwise talk about as 'topic,' but where we don't think of topics as
having this sort of intensity of organization. And when we begin to collect the
sorts of things that I'm noting here, we can feel that a serious attention to the
way the talk is put together might pay. These sorts of things at least suggest
some sort of close development.
Let me now begin to focus on what happens in this thing as a piece of
sequence, extracting from it some aspects of the way it works sequentially. A
kind of thing one can look at is Ken's question "The Pike?" At least a first
reason for giving it a bit of attention is that it's a question that follows a
question, where we have in mind that a usual sequence is not Q-Q, but Q-A.
And when you get Q-Q, that second Q will often be a thing like "The Pike?"
where some aspect of the prior question is isolated and returned as another
question. Where, then, you often get as a characteristic pattern, something
like Q-Q-A-A, in which you have an internal sequence. Something like this:

A: Did you tell Mary we moved to the beach?

B: Why, was she here?
A: Yes.
B: Yes.

As it happens, we don't have the pattern in this fragment, though we almost

could have it. If Roger had stopped after this "Yeah," then he would be
returning the floor to Ken to answer the original question: "Isn't the New
Pike depressing?" "The Pike?" "Yeah. " And then we might get Ken saying
"Yes," or "No, " or whatever. But that doesn't happen.
Now I want to do more than focus on a pattern that doesn't happen to be
fully used here; I want to focus on some other aspects of this thing. I started
off by saying that just before this question, "Isn't the New Pike depressing?"
Ken had said something like " Last night I went with four guys to the Pike. "
Now I will informally say that it appears that Ken was going to tell a story
about that last night's event. In due course, later on in the conversation he
does indeed tell that story. What happens here is that Roger picks up on the
mentioning of the place with a question of a sort. For sequential purposes it's
better to think of it not as what he does is ask a question, but one might say
he uses the form of a question to do some variety of things. We can then ask
what might he be using the question form to do, and there are a lot of things
we could say about it.
The thing I want to focus on is this: Roger is plainly indicating but not
asserting that he thinks the New Pike is depressing. To say " Isn't the New
 April 5 345
Pike depressing?" is sequentially altogether different than saying "God the
New Pike is depressing. " The way in which the two things are altogether
different has to do with something we can begin to think of as the issue of who
goes first and who goes second with respect to some possibly arguable matter.
And I want to assert that you can take it as a first policy for examining
conversation that people prefer to go second. And if you look at conversations
you can look for people's strategies for avoiding going first. There are
technical ways of developing that 'avoiding going first' is a thing, which I'm
not going into here because I want to be focussing on this particular fragment.
But to ask the question "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" has that character
by virtue of the way such a sequence can work. And that is that if Ken then
states a position about the New Pike - that it is depressing or that it isn't, and
maybe why - Roger is then in a position to take that apart, and Ken is
placed in a position of having to build a defense. That is to say, if you can
put off going first, it's not just a matter of your going second, it's that you
don't have to state your position or argument; instead, you can criticize the
prior party's.
Now, the question " Isn't the New Pike depressing?, " while it does not
assert Roger's position, plainly reveals it. And if Ken is going to answer the
question, he's got to answer it with knowledge that Roger is going to attack
him if he says, e.g., "I like the place. " That is information that Ken will
plainly have, given the question. Further, that the New Pike is depressing is
specifically a thing that Roger is raising knowing that Ken would, if he were
free to, say otherwise. There are a variety of reasons for my saying that; among
them, as a kind of intuitive point, that Ken has started to tell a story about
what he did last night, Friday night - where Friday night is not just any 'last
night. ' And Roger can know that one kind of common thing about people,
that happens to hold for Ken, is that unless he had a good time last night
he wouldn't have started to tell the story. So the fact that he started to tell
a story about what he did last night - involving going to an amusement
place - could inform Roger that Ken was going to say he had a great time.
Indeed, in this case he happens to say "I thought it was a ball," but I'm
suggesting that that eventuation is one that Roger already knew would be
developing.
In that regard let me sketch something out kind of briefly, just to give some
further backing to the sequential movement here. Ken went to this place and
had a good time. Roger has obviously been there and had a lousy time. Now,
Roger has never mentioned the place. He could have come in some time and
said he went to this place and had a lousy time. That could involve him in
reporting some kind of a failure of an evening, and it could lead to various
kinds of discussions of the ways in which he goes through the world. That is
to say, leaving aside that this is a therapy session, if you're reporting an event
and you're trying to make a case for both " I had a lousy time" and " the place
is lousy ' ' then you face certain obvious difficulties. On the other hand, Roger
can save up the failings he has at evenings, and employ them as ways of
debunking other persons' experiences. He doesn't have to tell us about an
34 6 Part VI
evening he had. What he does instead is to talk about this place and its
properties as negative in response to somebody else who proposes that they had
a good time there. If we were to ask what's to be gained by saving lousy times
that you've had, then a thing you can do with saved lousy times is to employ
them in dealing with other people's happy times. And that as compared to
feeling that if you don't tell the story it's not ever going to be usable.
Again, then, what Roger has done is to provide for Ken's having to defend
a position as compared to himself stating a position that he would then be the
one to defend. Now, that Roger does this doesn't mean that he's going to win
the strategy sequence. You can try, via some technique, to get to go second,
but it's by no means guaranteed that you will get to go second. There are
tactics that permit someone else to avoid that outcome. And such a question
as "The Pike?" can do that. It throws back to the other, who, should he then
go and develop what he indeed had to say, can then have his position
attacked. Though that can fail also, since it can be followed with "Yeah"
period, and then Ken is back where he was when he tried "The Pike?, " i.e. ,
back to now stating his position and having it attacked - though again, he
could move in other ways. But the idea is to take a question like "The Pike?"
which might be treated simply as 'he isn't sure he heard what was said, ' and
give it a position within some developing argument with respect to some
controversial matter - about which, if you watch conversation at all, you can
see maneuverings. Looking at it, then, in terms of a simple distinction
between going first and going second, we can begin to see that those are not
equivalent positions, and also begin to see why they're not equivalent
positions, i.e. , that it's quite a different thing to develop a critique of
someone's position than to develop a defense of your own.
Let me now pick up some further sorts of notably delicate aspects of the
way this fragment moves. I want to point up a relationship between two
utterances, "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" and "How can you tell?"
Looking first at Ken's "How can you tell?, ' ' I want to say that what he's done
is to focus on the more or less core possible weakness of Roger's argument.
Roger's argued so far that the people at this place are "pretending they're
having fun. " Now to argue that people are pretending is kind of a delicate
thing to argue, and the weakness that such an assertion can have is revealed
by such a question as 'How can you tell?" Ken's question here is not one that
says "I disagree, " but one wants to see that he has listened to Roger's
position, not so much for whether he agrees or disagrees, but for wherein does
its particular weakness lie, so that that weakness might be used by him
without ever getting into the question of whether he agrees or not. "How can
you tell?" is technically appropriate to the assertion "They're pretending, " as
Roger's "Isn't the place depressing?" turns out to be the appropriate way to
criticize the New Pike. That is, the specific character of the Pike is that it's a
"fun" place, and it's that specific character which is focussed on by calling it
"depressing. " So in these aspects of the way they deal with the place they're
talking about, and with each other's talk, there is an orientation towards each
other which is at least mildly going for the jugular. And again, this is taking
 Apri/ 5 347
place in 'no time' we might as well say. It's not that Roger spoke and Ken
sat down and tried to figure out what would be the best possible attack he
could make; it's the attack he makes on the completion of Roger's
utterance. And that paralleling of the attention to a distinctive weakness can
suggest that they are moving with a kind of close attention to each other in
a conflictive way.
 April 9
Technical competition
I want to talk about something I'm going to call 'technical competition in
conversation. ' I want that understood in a very special sense: It is technical
competition in conversation. Forget about the word 'competition' however
you might normally use it about people competing in conversation, e.g., that
in Roger and Ken's argument they are 'competing. ' I'm not thinking of
anything like that. I'm going to develop something called 'technical
competition in conversation,' and talk to how that works and what its
sources are.
Last time I mentioned that this fellow Ken had begun what we can think
of as a possible line of development, one that I suggested would have
eventuated in his telling a story about his trip to the New Pike, a story which
he does indeed tell later on, a story which involved him having a good time.
He doesn't get to tell it in this fragment. Roger, while taking him up on an
aspect of the line he might have been developing, shifts that line of
development slightly. And one wants to have in mind a conception of possible
lines of development that a conversation can take for now, as things that
speakers are attentive to in terms of whether they're going to go along with
such a possible line as they can see developing, or whether they're going to
change that possible line. 1 Now, I don't much want to focus on any possible
competition between Roger and Ken with respect to the line of development
that gets taken. Rather, I want to focus on the competition between Roger
and Jim in that respect. Early on in the fragment we get:

Roger : ((about the New Pike)) Oh the place is disgusting. // Any day
of the week.
jim : I think that Pop is // depressing, it's just­
Roger : But you go-you go- take-
jim : Those guys are losing money. hehh
Roger : But you go down-dow-down to th'New Pike there's a buncha
// people, oh: : an' they're old, an ' they're pretending they're
having fun, but they're really not.
(jim) : ((cough))
Ken : How c' n you tell: Hm?
Roger : They're- they're tryina make a living, but the place is on the
decline, 's like a dejjgenerate place.
jim : So's Pop.
1
Much of these introductory considerations comes from the April 5 lecture, original
pp. 1 2 - 1 3 .

348
 April 9 349
(Roger:) (Y'know?)
jim : Pop is just - -
Roger : Yeah i-it it's one of these pier joints, y'know?

If we just take the row of initials of the speakers, we get roughly, R, ] , R, ] ,

R, etc. I want to deal with a variety of facets of that, for which, for some
purposes, just this kind of line-up will do to isolate some aspects of what is
happening. As the series starts off, Roger's remarks are about the amusement
park called the Pike, and Jim's are about Pacific Ocean Park, another
amusement park that gets called "Pop. " We could diagram it as:

R: Pike
] : Pop
R: Pike
]: Pop
R: Pike

And the relationships that they have to each other are at least that both
speakers are talking about amusement parks, and both are talking negatively
about the places they're talking about.
Now, until Ken's utterance, they're both proceeding in a fashion that's
slightly noticeable, in that they are essentially doing something that we give
the name 'skip-connecting' to. What I mean to refer to with that is that a
speaker produces an utterance which is indeed related to some prior utterance,
but it's not related to the directly prior utterance, but some utterance prior to
the directly prior utterance. And if you look at skip-connecting utterances,
two prominent sorts of facts about them are: First, that when speakers
skip-connect they tend to skip-connect to themselves, i.e. , to an utterance of
theirs; characteristically to the last utterance of theirs. Second, they don't
much skip-connect unless their own utterance was last-but-one, i.e. , the one
that directly preceded whatever utterance preceded their current one. That is
to say, they don't skip-connect over long distances.
Now it's perfectly plain that speakers do things like reasserting a line that
they earlier started to take, that got nowhere. But if they do that over any
distance, then they tend to do it by reference to a re-beginning. So, a
characteristic sort of thing involves someone saying, very early in the
conversation, "I was at the police station this morning. " The talk that follows
does not take that up. No questions, no comments, no invitations to say
more. Instead, some sequence gets developed about something else. On the
completion of that sequence, say, six or seven utterances later, the speaker
reintroduces this thing, and reintroduces it in the same fashion he introduced
it in the first place, by saying "I was at the police station this morning. " And
then he gets an invitation to go on, and does develop whatever it is, or a
version of whatever it is, that he seemed to have planned to tell. But both
parties here are skip-connecting - and doing it mutually. That is to say, you
can perfectly well have one party skip-connecting to their own prior talk
350 Part VI
across the talk of a series of others who are alternating. But a facet of
competition in conversation is that parties do mutual skip-connecting. Two
people competing for the development of some line in a conversation can
proceed by alternating speakerships, each engaged in skipping the last and
tying to his prior - his prior being the last-but-one - to develop the line that
he began to take.
If this is at all approximate to how things proceed, then a thing that is
obviously set up in a circumstance of mutual skip-connecting is that other
participants to the conversation become distinctly crucial. If a party to the
skip-connecting is able to mobilize any third to talk, then the distance
between the last utterance of the one whom he's competing with, and that
one's possible next utterance, is increased. That is to say, if at some point in
a sequence of alternating skip-connecting, somebody other than one of those
who are doing it can be gotten to talk, and to talk to the business of one of
the skip-connectors, then if the other of those is to skip-connect again, he's
jumping a larger distance.
I leave aside for the moment questions of what kinds of complicatednesses
those sorts of things involve. But at least a possibility is that some third
speaker can intervene in a sequence of skip-connectings, and connect directly
to a last. And that he would connect directly to a last is not at all puzzling
since under the usual way topical talk proceeds parties do connect their
utterances to lasts, so the third party coming in is perhaps doing a perfectly
ordinary sort of thing. Now he can connect to a last in a variety of ways. One
way that's of distinct interest is that he does not simply produce an
utterance which connects to a last, but produces such an utterance that
connects to a last as on its completion provides for some further talk, directly,
by one of the competitors - ideally the last before him, thereby further
extending the distance between the other competitor's prior talk and next
chance to talk.
So, for example, what happens here is: R, J, R, J, R, and then K talks. At
this point if J were to try again to skip-connect - and he'd have to
skip-connect to continue his line since neither R nor K talk to it - then he's
got two utterances between. And if it happens, as it does here, that K does
something that provides for R to talk again, in this case a question to R, then
there's now at least three utterances between J s last and his possible next. Of
course K having asked a question of R, then, for example, R's answer can
provide for K to talk next, further extending the distance between J s last
utterance and any next possible utterance of this, making it that if he's going
to try to bring off taking up his line again he's got to move across a whole
series. So possibly any way that a third party can be led to select a prior-to-him
to talk, can be crucial for ending a possible competition sequence, i.e. , by
picking out one of the parties as the one whose line he's going to go along
with, and making that the group decision by virtue of the way in which it
complicates the problem of the other party to get his line reinstated. That then
turns K's question, which may perfectly well have been a hostile question to
R, into one that nonetheless gives R back the floor, permitting him to
 Apri/ 9 35 1
continue the line he was trying to take, and shutting J out for a time. So the
fact that it's hostile is secondary to that it nonetheless operates to preserve the
line R was trying to take.
Now let's look back at some of the details of the thing, from the vantage
we've so far gotten, rough as it may be, and notice that when ] comes in again
after R's answer to K's question, he's now talking differently than he was.
What he does now is to produce a connected piece of talk, no longer
skip-connected at all, but connected to R's last utterance, i.e. , " So's Pop. "
However, although connected to R's last utterance, it nonetheless keeps alive
his interest in Pop as a possible topic. In negotiational terms he's done
something that is in effect to say, "Okay I'll go along with Pike as the topic,
but I want to have Pop considered along with it"- but now 'along with it'
and not in alternative to it, which is what was happening at the start. And
with that, we get a possible resolution of a sort of competition; the resolution
being that the parties might find, and agree on, a way to assimilate the
competing lines and talk them together. And it appears that J having seen
that he's losing out, making a gesture of acquiescence while holding onto Pop,
gets from R an acquiescence in including Pop in the talk. That is, in R's next,
"Yeah it's one of these pier joints," he connects to )'s last. And J can then
produce one that's unlocated as to that it is or isn't competitive; it's now an
additive development.
That there should be a possibility of resolution turns on what the sources
are for competition in the first place. And here's why I'm emphasizing
technical competition. You might think of parties as competing in conversa­
tion when what they want to do is to talk about different things. You might
then imagine that they compete for the floor where what they're intending to
do is talk about altogether different things. It appears that when they do that
sort of competition which is characterizable in something like the sort of way
that I characterize it, the sources of competition are that the two parties are
intending to talk only about very slightly different things. And they get into
the competition in that each, in the first instance, has started to take the line
they do by reference to a line that's just been taken by somebody else. And
when I talk about 'taking a line, ' I don't mean what they say in this or that
utterance, but that they produce something that looks like it's something they
want others to talk to. At least one evidence for that being that when no other
talks to it directly, they themselves talk to it in a next utterance. And when
anyone does talk to it, they continue talking to it.
What we're saying then is that the sources of competition are, first, that
parties are intending to talk to only very slightly different lines, and second,
that the lines they intend to talk to take off on a line that someone else has just
begun. And they will fight over the floor by virtue of the fact that if what
occasions their talk is the talk of a just-preceding speaker, then, if they lose out
on their line now, there is no reasonable expectation that such a place will
occur again for the line they're starting to take. That is to say, the line they're
taking being specifically occasioned by the talk of another, the question is
which line will get going from that preceding utterance. The line that gets
352 Part VI
going will end up somewhere, a somewhere understandable as not likely to be
an adventitious spot for the line that lost out. Whereas, if parties were talking
about altogether different things, then one could perfectly well leave the floor
to the one who beat you out, who talked faster, who got his utterance on the
floor. Since you didn't in the first instance use the course-of-talk-so-far to
place your own utterance, you might as well save it to place it somewhere else
equally arbitrarily. But the thing is that by and large talk is very closely
placed, and persons are engaged in finding that line of development which
talks to whatever it is that's just been talked about, and not simply
introducing topics wherever they happen to choose to introduce them. If what
were being done were introduction of topics wherever one happened to intro­
duce them, then the source of competition for talking now would dissipate. So
it's a concern to place one's utterance in such a way as to have it take off on a
last, that provides for these sorts of technical competition in conversation.
We're dealing in a particular way here with one enormously general theme
about the organization of conversation, which can be said in a sentence as:
Speakers specifically place almost all of their utterances. Where, by 'place, ' I
mean they put them into such a position as has what's just been happening
provide an obvious explanation for why this was said now (where, when they
don't, a question could arise of why that now). They do use ways of indicating
that an utterance is off-topic, e.g., "by the way" or various other sorts of
things which say "don't attend the utterance I'm now producing by reference
to what's just been happening. " But lacking that, the effort is to find such talk
as provides for the slightest possible movement. Indeed, a rough observation
which goes along with the kind of line I'm taking now is: The relative
frequency of marked topic introduction is a measure of lousy conversations.
That is to say, when you're in a conversation which you find is dragging,
uninteresting, embarrassing, lousy in varieties of ways, then you might find
that one of the ways in which that's happening is that new topics need
specifically be introduced, and they get recurrently specifically 'introduced. '
Whereas in, quote, a high conversation, a good conversation, what you would
find is that new topics are never 'introduced,' they just happen along. Though
at any given point we're talking to something more or less markedly different
than what we were talking about a minute or five minutes ago, it didn't
happen by virtue of people saying, characteristically after a pause, "So what
have you been doing? " or varieties of things that say "Let's start a new
topic. " In a way, the measure of a good topic is a topic that not so much
gets talked of at length, but that provides for transitions to other topics
without specific markings of that a new topic is going to be done. The
richness of a topic is, then, not to be characterized by the fact that there's lots
to say about it, but that there are lots of ways to move from it unnoticeably.
Whereas a lousy one is one that, the end of it having come, we know we're
at the end of it, and if we're going to go anywhere else we've got to start up
again. And that's the character of, say, 'embarrassing' topics and 'controver­
sial' topics; that to get off of them one has to specifically do 'getting off of
them. '
 April 9 353
The upshot of this is in part that a consideration of some facets of the
detailed sequencing of the speakers is informing us about things like how they
do competition and why they do competition; things that tum out to be
characterizeable as due to the way in which conversations are sequentially
organized, moving utterance by utterance, in which, primarily, persons are
engaged in producing talk that connects to directly prior talk.
 April 1 2
Long sequences
Let me take some time now to say what I figure I was doing last time. One
kind of basic direction that the investigation of natural conversation properly
takes consists in attempts to extend the length of sequences one is able to
package. By that I mean in part, not simply the length of sequences one is able
to deal with in some way or another, but the length of sequences one is able
to put into an organization that deals with at least some parts of each, or
almost each, utterance in that sequence. There are plainly ways of dealing
with parts of the fragment we've been looking at, which do not contibute
directly to putting it into a package. If, for example, I were to develop a
characterization of that Q-Q-A thing, or some question-answer sequence as
just a question-answer sequence, then while I will have brought to attention
or remarked on or partially characterized some two- or three-utterance
sequence that is a sequence in this fragment, how the sequence is part of the
analytic package that's being developed is completely ignored by such a
consideration.
It turns out that one central problem in building big packages is that the
ways the utterances that tum out to compose the package get dealt with as
single utterances or pairs of utterances or triplets of utterances, etc. , may have
almost no bearing on how they're to be dealt with when an attempt is made
to build a larger package. That is to say, the operation is not at all additive.
It's not an operation in which one develops adequate characterizations,
interesting characterizations, of some utterance or some small sequence and
then assembles them into a package. It doesn't work that way at all. So, e.g. ,
information about utterances and their organization for smaller units might
be developed which would yield a discussion of all the utterances in this
fragment and not tell us anything about some such larger package as I've been
trying to get at. Certain aspects of the work you might do on a small sequence
won't do you any good in trying to package longer sequences. Indeed, they
might be misguiding in that you would figure that you've dealt with some
pair in some fashion, and even in a sequential fashion, and thereby not see the
potentiality for building a larger package for which the way you had studied
the smaller sequence didn't have much bearing, or had only some relatively
intricate bearing.
So work on small sequences and work on large sequences can go on kind
of independently. Packaging larger sequences is a different and in some ways
rather more difficult task because one thing you're engaged in doing is finding
what sorts of large packages there are, where analyzing the workings of, e.g. ,
question-answer is something that at least begins with a relatively firm,
common, intuitive knowledge that there are such things and this is the way
3 54
 April 12 355
they work, and you can look to the materials in order to see whether this thing
works the way we think or not. Again, then, a basic sort of investigation is
that of long sequences as a coherent matter as compared to simply studying,
utterance by utterance, a long sequence which you then have as an
in-some-way connected series of small fragments. And such investigation is,
if it's going to develop at all, at a rather primitive stage - leaving aside
obvious sorts of things where you're dealing with relatively gamelike
situations or other sorts of known, pre-organized matters. The sequences
we're dealing with are not pre-organized sequences.
To say such investigation is at a relatively primitive state is to say
something like: This sequence here may be the longest coherent package
that's ever been investigated in terms of its relative coherences, and for which
we have mechanisms of some sort for putting the whole thing together. A
sequence of that length has never been given anything like a characterization
which says it all works, and where one starts at the beginning parts of it and
characterizes them in ways that organize the beginnings by reference to
possible developments that take off on them. And the term 'possible' is
altogether crucial because in talking about, for example, lines of development,
they are possible lines of development. I am not at all arguing that the
collection of linked mechanisms that I roughly described run off automati­
cally given the initial one. At each point things could go specifically
differently - and one can characterize some of the ways they could go
differently.
But what happens is that bits and pieces get characterized in one or another
ways; like we began with some allusion to an utterance just preceding "Isn't
the New Pike depressing?" which is done by this guy Ken, something like
"Last night I went with four guys to the new-to the Pike. " From that we
went on and didn't give much consideration to it in its own right. All that I
wanted out of it was that it was an utterance that laid out a possible line of
development. Now, it happened to do it in a characteristic, describable way,
which is roughly that it was a specifically transitional utterance. There was
another topic altogether being discussed, sex. At some point there's a long
pause, then Roger says:

-Roger : Awright. Tell us about your sexual problems.

Ken : Me?
Roger : Yeah, you // c'n cry on our shoulder.
Ken : I had a-
jim : She-
Ken : I had a nun to/jday,
jim : He's mad because she wouldn't do it last night.
Ken : I didn't go out with anybo(h)dy last night. I went with four
guys last night, we went to new-to the Pike.
jim : You're mad cause he didn't do it last nigh(hh)t hehh heh heh
Ken : hhunhhh hhunhhh hhh
-Roger : (Isn't) the New Pike depressing?
356 Part VI
The transitional character of Ken's "I went with four guys to the Pike" has
to do with the connection between what was going on before, i.e. , "Tell us
about your sexual problems" and what follows, i.e. , "Isn't the New Pike
depressing? " Where, for one, if it works it closes whatever has led to it while
also opening up another direction. That is, he's setting up a story about what
happened last night, using the chance to talk he was given, to talk in such a
way as to involve him in responding to where we are, but to end up in some
new place. And that's a way that topic change takes place. It's interesting
because it isn't the specific introduction of a new topic in such a way as to
involve no relation to what's just been happening, though it ends up with a
new topic emerging, one that's unconnected to where we've been. Now if
topics are gotten to this way, it might well be the source of a nice technical
problem about topical organization in conversation which is, why is there
some sort of extended relative amnesia for last topics? People can know what
they talked about earlier but they routinely have a relative amnesia for
specifically the last topic. And there may be ways that transitions between
them take place which serve to break the connection between last and next,
and perhaps these sorts of transitions are involved in doing that.
Anyway, Ken does this transition, and now Roger comes on in a perfectly
routine way to be dealing with an opened topic, which is to preserve that topic
while making a slight shift in its possible line of development. And Jim does
exactly the same sort of thing, i.e. , he talks to the topic being talked of while
making a slight shift in its possible line of development. Either line of
development might well emerge here and continue, or another party could
perfectly well take up talk, doing precisely what these guys have done, and
get another connected but slight shift. But all that we want out of it is that
what would be minimally involved in getting into a possible competition
sequence is that two slightly different possible lines of development have been
mutually generated from a prior sequence. That then sets up a situation where
some attempt might be made to preserve one or another of those lines of
development.
And for that attempt, we have the skip-connecting technique used. Now,
you could perfectly well have a competition sequence emerge and skip­
connecting not be employed but some other device, and it's not the case that
skip-connecting is specifically a mechanism for doing competition; it is used
widely and for lots of other things. As it happens here, it is a part of the
mechanism for doing competition and as such happens to be preserved in a
way we would otherwise talk about it for consideration of a competition
sequence. In any event, we have the skip-connecting device used here. Just
how long such a thing could go on, I can't say. But for the skip-connecting
to have its character as a mechanism in a competition sequence given two
alternative lines having been offered, it would seem that at least a pair of
skip-connectings would have to be involved.
What we're getting now is a kind of a bare bones competition structure.
And once we're into a competition sequence we begin to have a real problem
of how such a competition can be won - it could just die out, it could move
 April 1 2 357
in other directions, but at least a possibility once you're into it is that it could
be won. And a way it could be won turns on somebody other than the two
who are doing the skip-connecting coming into the sequence in such a way as
to link to the last utterance of one of the competing persons, and to provide
that after they've completed there be more talk on the same matter by the
person they've linked to. Now, coming in with a question that is linked to the
last utterance is such a device, which is what we have with Ken's "How can
you tell. Hm?" Though again, such a question sequence has no particular
distinctive connection to a competition sequence. Asking a party a question
about something they just said, which involves them in answering when
you've finished, is a sort of phenomenon that is not at all distinctly located in
competition sequences. But it can be a mechanism for a competition sequence
by reference to the stuff I gave last time about the distance between the last
and possible next utterance of one of the competitors doing skip-connecting,
if the one who has now had that distance emerge between his utterances is to
try to preserve his possible line via skip-connecting.
Now there can be some other ways of preserving one's own possible line of
direction, and in a fashion we get Jim using some other way of doing it, which
is to link to the last utterance with "So's Pop . " That then allows Roger's line,
while hoping that something can be done with the line Jim wanted to take.
And we do then get Roger going along with it. In its fashion, then, that pair
of accommodations constitutes a way that, the competition having been
intervened in, it can get resolved. We then get the conversation running on
with the parties roughly alternating about their new mutual topic. And again,
for the purposes of the package the minimal components here would be that
they do things which attend each interest while making some talk to the
mutual line of development that's been gotten going.
The idea is that, characterizing these things in terms of the whole package,
we are able to say things that involve us in noticing facets of its utterances that
are not transparent. We come to see, e.g . , that Jim's "So's Pop" and Roger's
"Yeah it's one of those pier joints" are not just characterizable by reference to,
e.g. , "This is an agreement" and "This is an acknowledgement of the last,"
but that these things are productively done by reference to the whole package.
As we saw the relevance of Ken's "How can you tell. Hm?" in the way it links
up to Roger's prior and gives him the floor back, where it's otherwise just
some question to be dealt with in some fashion or another. But we saw that
the character of that question as linking is crucial. We might then come to see
that Roger could attempt to elicit such a sequence - not that he does it here,
but that could be a resource for somebody in a competition sequence, i.e. , to
attempt to get a question addressed to them on their intended line.
Having the package, we were also able to give it an examination which
would tell us something about the circumstances under which competition
emerged in the first place. And that had to do with the characteristics of
Roger's and Jim's first utterances as being placedly alike - each having as it
source a just-prior thing said - and only slightly different in line of direction.
And that, being technically altogether relevant to that a competition sequence
358 Part VI
emerged, was then of great interest in that it permitted us to consider the not
too obvious possibility that when competition would emerge in conversation,
it would emerge not about matters that involve people talking about totally
different things, but about only slightly different things, where the only
slightly different things that they wanted to talk about were each having as its
source a just-prior thing said.
And once we could begin to see that, we could begin to see why in the
world they would get into competition at that point, and that they would not
particularly need to have a competition where they were intending to talk
about totally different things or things that did not have a local source. That
is to say, the very phenomenon of their talking about things that took off on
a last and were only slightly different, would be what would provide that they
would fight for the position to talk about that line of development, given that
the way that talk procedes means that if they lost a chance to take the line of
development they were trying to take as a placed matter, such a line of
development is not expectably reocurrently placeable somewhere else. So that
we have, then, not simply a rough characterization of a sequence and its
mechanisms, but an explanation for how come that sequence got going,
though the explanation for how come the sequence got going wouldn't
particularly tell us where it would go once it got going.
I want to emphasize that this is by no means to say everything about the
package's components, and I've said hardly anything about a lot of its
utterances. Even the ones I talked about, e.g . , about the fineness of "How can
you tell. Hm?" or the fineness of "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" I was
dealing with in a rather different sort of way. There are, of course, a variety
of ways that any of these utterances can be dealt with; ways that can all live
together or separately. But a next order of aim would be to see how many of
the facets that one could isolate out of such a sequence can, if you could
develop a package for it, be put back into the package. That's another, yet
more elaborate kind of operation, which is also at a kind of primitive state,
and it's just absolutely unknown how much of what can be found out about
any utterance, any fragment, any sequence within a fragment, etc., can be
locked into some package, if some package can be found.
And after this there are a whole range of other directions one can take with
such an organization of findings. Only as an instance, one direction would be
that we can now see the specific relevance of more than two parties for the
ways in which a competition sequence could develop. That is, we can see a
business that the sheer status 'third party' would yield, and, say, an interest
that the two would have in mobilizing the third. And again, that could
perfectly well be a matter of three with a fourth, or three now attempting to
get one of those three to join with a second, etc. Those are now up for grabs
as possible ways things can operate, and they can be thought about. But
before we have this rough construction there's nothing to think about.
Now you want to watch when I say "Okay, now we can, from this, begin
to think about it. " Until then it's not that we're not thinking, but we're trying
to find how some things are happening in the world which permit us to, or
 April 1 2 359
stop us from, thinking about them in interesting ways. And when I say that
from now on we could think about something, that's an argument, and you
could begin to see if there is anything to reason about or not, and would it be
safe. It happens that the fundamental question in social science is when in the
world do you have things in such a status as to be able to think about them.
The difference between different sorts of model-makers is specifically when it
is that they start saying "Okay, now we can theorize; we have enough data so
that we can put our minds to work," and you can look at different areas just
to see what sorts of materials are treated as adequate for reasoning; at what
point people figure "From here on we can reason. "
 April 1 9
Caller-Called
This is a phone call. A and B are male, C is female.

A: Hello?
B: Yeah is Judy there?
A: Yeah just a second.
C: Hello
B: Judy?
C: Yeah.
B: Jack Green.
C: Hi Jack.
B: How ya doing? Say what are you doing?
C: Well we're going out, why?
B: Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk this
evening, but if you're going out II you can't very well do that.
C: "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you?
B: What?
C: It's Saturday.
B: What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday?
C: hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening.
B: That's why you look so bad on Monday morning.
C: hehhhh No not that long.
B: Hehhh No I just uh I didn't realize the library closed at five on
Saturday 'n-
C: Yeah, I got booted outta there too.
B: Today?
C: Yeah.
B: Uh were you there?
C: I was up in the grad reading room.
B: Oh. Oh I was in the bio med library and I had big intentions of
working all day and they flicked the lights and kicked me out.
Well that's just- I was just gonna call and see if you 'n yr husbn
would like to come over - -
C: Oh: : II Thanks Jack en we take a raincheck?
B: But uh g'wan out as long as your parents are footing the bill kid,
you just go right ahead
C: Yeah you're not kidding hehhh
B: Don't miss any of those opportunities. Get 'em while you can.
C: heh Yeah you know once a week we eat.

3 60
 April 1 9 361
B: hehh Why is it every Saturday night out there?
C: No
B: Well I wouldn't want you to do it every Saturday night, but once
in a while it's okay. Well lis-
C: We might get spoiled. yeah.
C: [[ Food's bad for you.
B: Yeah well get on your clothes and get out and collect some of that
free food and we'll make it some other time Judy then.
C: Okay then Jack
B: Bye bye
C: Bye bye
One kind of central purpose I have for bringing this in and talking about
it is as a differentiation from stuff I've been talking about so far, where a
package involved a sort of sequence which has essentially no breaks in it, for
its operation. That is to say, we haven't been moving from one place in the
conversation to quite another place and talking about sequential relationships
operating at a distance. And also, while there have been some sorts of
mentionings of who the people are, a consideration hasn't been offered of their
identities, and specifically of such of their identities as have the peculiar status
of being features of the conversation. One way I'll be proceeding will be to
focus on caller-called as identities for conversation, where, further, those are
such identities as operate over distances, i.e. , at places that are not directly
connected in the conversation, for example, at the beginning of the conver­
sation and at the end.
At least one relevance of talking about such identities as caller-called if one
can, is that perhaps we can say something about how a conversation operates,
with relatively minimal introduction of who the parties are. Obviously if one
can attribute something of what the parties do to each other in a conversation,
to no more than such a thing a caller-called, then one is in a position to say
that some part of a sequential organization of a conversation has to do with
identities that the conversation itself makes relevant, such that for at least those
facets of the conversation one needn't make reference to other sorts of
identities that parties have which are, so to speak, exterior to not simply the
conversation, but to its sequential organization. If, however, we found that
such other identities were central to almost anything one could say about a
conversation, then there would be a way in which conversation could not be
said to have an organization independent from such other aspects of the world
as yielded other identities, e.g. , the names, sexes, social statuses, etc. , of the
parties. You could imagine a world where some social status the parties had,
operated in such a way as to determine how they could talk to each other, and
in that world conversation would not be an independently organized
phenomenon.
Now, one question involved in the study of any possible domain of social
organization is, is there some extent to which it is independently organized?
And one way to determine that conversation is independently organized -
362 Part VI
from such other things as social class, etc. - is to find, e.g . , that it has a
sequential organization which employs identities that it determines, and that
it does proceed to some extent in terms of its identities. So that's a kind of
interest that could derive from an examination of how much it matters for the
way conversation proceeds, that a party to a telephone call is a caller and
another is a called. Where those identities might seem in the first instance ones
that wouldn't cut too much; it happens that so-and-so is a caller and it
happens that so-and-so is a called, but so what.
So we've tried to set up the import of there being some consequence to
these conversational identities caller-called, for the way conversation pro­
ceeds. Now a seemingly trivial facet of the caller-called identities, but one
that at least shows a way that such identities are usable in setting up aspects
of the organization of conversation, is that one can state a rule in terms of
those identities that tells you how telephone conversations begin. The facts are
not particularly newsy in the first place: If you're trying to say how telephone
conversations begin, then you can say the rule is 'called speaks first. ' So if you
took an indefinite set of telephone conversations, with, thereby, a possibly
immense set of possibly relevant identities that the parties might have, leaving
aside that for any conversation the parties might have more than a few
possibly relevant identities, a rule which ignores all such identities operates,
and operates to describe how conversations get started. All you need is
caller-called and 'called speaks first. '
The rule has a series of strategic consequences for persons in a variety of
other sorts of identities, having to do with, for example, how one can
introduce considerations of social status into the beginning of a telephone
conversation. And the fact that the rule 'called speaks first' operates generally,
is not undercut by the techniques that have been introduced to deal with it in
accord with other considerations, but the rule determines how it is that parties
go about dealing with it, given other considerations. So there have been a
series of institutions developed in an attempt to deal with the rule; things like
secretaries. Now one might think of the secretary simply as a device whereby
some people are prevented from getting through to some people. That's
plainly a thing it does, i.e. , the secretary serves as a filtering device, allowing
some calls through and not others, according to various considerations. But
another business of the secretary is to be someone who routinely answers the
phone but who isn't the person who is called. That is, a business of the
secretary answering the phone is to be not-the-person-who-is-called. Other
persons are the intended recipients, and those persons don't answer the phone.
That can set up a way whereby relative to the called, the caller speaks first,
though in actual conversation the secretary speaks first.
Then, a sort of thing that operates most nicely in some relatively rarified
statuses, is where two secretaries encounter each other. That sort of problem
emerges in high business and bureaucratic situations, i.e. , if you call the
President of the United States or of some business firm, you will never get
them directly on the line. That means that whoever you are as a caller, called
will never be first speaker, and you will then be selling yourself to whoever is
 April 1 9 363
the first speaker in order to get through. And a first step in dealing with that
problem is to have the intended caller never call. The caller's secretary calls the
intended called's secretary. At that point there is a problem which, so far as
I know, has never been given a systematic solution, i.e. , the people involved
in it have not found a way to deal with it except through more or less
elaborated negotiations as to who will be put on the line first - whether it will
be the intended caller or intended called who gets put on the line to talk to
the other's secretary. And at that point there can be an infusion of outside
considerations, i.e. , if your secretary gets a phone call from somebody who is
plainly superior to you, then it's her business to put you on the line to that
person's secretary, and you having been put on the line to her, she will put her
person on the line. The categories caller-called are then being dealt with via
the operation of outside considerations, such that if called comes on the line
first, that is incidental because the same parties involved but caller-called
reversed, then caller would come on the line first. That is, the secretaries are
operating in terms of their notions of the positions of their respective
people - sometimes clear, sometimes not clear. Sometimes one secretary will
concede to the other, sometimes apparently the battles go on for quite a while,
e.g . , the caller's secretary says "This is John Smith, president of X calling the
president of Y. Do you have your party?" "Yes I have my party, do you have
your party?" "Yes I have my party will you put your party on the line?" "Will
you put your party on the line?' ' etc.
Now the point of introducing all this is that this is about all you can
introduce in order to show the ways in which outside considerations can
operate to modify the 'called speaks first' rule. And this is plainly altogether
special, and plainly doesn't ignore the rule but is an attempt to find some way
of dealing with it. So even with this exception, this is about as far as we can
go in finding a way in which caller-called doesn't yield the consequence that
called speaks first. It then looks like caller-called is a relevant identity for
characterizing aspects of telephone conversation, and characterizing aspects of
tum-taking in a telephone conversation (first tum, second turn, etc.) inde­
pendent of any other considerations.
Once having gone through the sort of sequence that caller-called generates
directly - a greeting sequence and a variety of other things that I won't go
into right now - one can get to a place for which caller-called is quite
irrelevant. But, while there are identities that you might imagine can serve at
a place and then no longer be relevant as others come to the fore, caller-called
operates at the beginning and then may disappear from relevance, and then
operates elsewhere; in particular, at the dose.
Now, 'at the dose' is kind of a complex phenomenon because the way
conversation operates is that once having gotten going there are rules and
techniques which serve only to keep it going - things like, at the completion
of anybody's utterance someone else should start talking. That rule, which we
talk about as a 'transition-relevance rule' and which has all sorts of problems
and techniques involved concerning how completions are determined, etc. ,
simply serves to provide for more talk on the completion of anybody's talk.
3 64 Part VI
It provides no way for finding out when talk should end. For that, there has
to be a series of other techniques whereby a place can be arrived at, at which
the transition-relevance of a completion is lifted, i.e. , a place where, on
somebody's completion nobody talks and talk is not 'absent. ' There are plenty
of places where, on somebody's completion nobody talks, but what happens
there is that talk is missing. And that has to do with that while there is
nobody talking in the conversation, it is not over. For it to be over, it has to
be brought to a completion. Now the problem of bringing it to completion
in the sheer sense of getting to lift transition-relevance, is trivial. There are a
relatively universally used set of techniques for lifting transition-relevance,
and that involves using things like "Goodbye" "Goodbye. " What those do
is to say 'After we're finished with that, nobody needs to talk. ' But that
doesn't solve the central problem, which is how do you get to the place where
"Goodbye" "Goodbye" works? The question is, where do you put the first
"Goodbye"? Plainly the first "Goodbye" is not stuck just anywhere in a
conversation. But to say that it goes at the 'end' of a conversation is to say that
that matter is decidable, which it isn't. The question is, then, how is it that
where to put "Goodbye" "Goodbye" is dealt with. And at least for telephone
conversations, that problem is partially - though not minorly partially - a
business of caller.
It is caller's business to find a place to stick in possible endings. And by
possible endings I don 't mean a first "Goodbye," I mean things that go before
it, which serve in such a way as that at their end they can be followed by
"Goodbye. " We can talk of "Goodbye" as a terminator and then look at
things that are closings. Among the things in telephone conversations that
serve to close are making an arrangement or confirming an arrangement that's
been made. At some point in a conversation somebody can say "Okay so I'll
see you Tuesday, " or somebody can propose an arrangement; "Well then let's
get together, how about Tuesday. " And terminating items can occur directly
on the completion of an arrangement sequence. So then the question is, where
do you put the arrangements. And at least one thing that can be said is that
it may be caller's business to place them.
A characteristic sort of thing that's used in placing a closing is something
that can be elicited at the beginning of a conversation, where it has one sort
of job. When it is used, then, for placing a closing, the talk can be seen as
connected at sometimes very large distances. So, at the beginning of a
conversation - telephone or. face to face - having gone through greetings,
etc. , someone can say "So what are you doing?" to which varieties of answers
occur, e.g. , "Nothing much" or "Oh I was just about to make dinner" or
"Oh I'm going to the library. ' ' Now, if the respondant to such a question
gives such answers as the latter two, which we call 'tickets, ' then the other can
use those answers at some point in the conversation to say "Well, you'd better
go to the library" or ' 'I'd better let you fix your dinner. " They have then not
simply done the job of proposing to close, but have done it by reference to the
interest of the other. A specific routine technique which holds for both
telephone and face to face conversation is for the party who introduces close
 April 1 9 36 5
to do it by reference to interests of the other. And a way they can get those
interests is from something the other has said earlier in the conversation.
Those things are seemingly saved and used at some opportune time.
Now in a telephone call, if caller hasn't gotten such a ticket, he has things
like it available which he can introduce; things like "Well I'll let you off the
phone now," where the sheer fact that I brought you to the phone permits me
to now use that I'll let you off the phone as a caller-specific closing proposal.
And it may be caller's business to watch, or to appear to watch, for any move
on the part of called that seems to indicate that called is ready to close, in order
to introduce an offer to close. Though called can then reject the offer to close
by saying "No no I have nothing to do, " though rejecting a close in that way
can have the insensitivity of taking seriously something that caller did as a way
to get off the line themselves. But called is being shown that they're being
closed off by reference to their own interests, on their own behalf, without,
then, a basis for complaining by virtue of the fact that they figure that the
other party wants to get off.
In this conversation called has announced, to a question at the beginning,
that they're going out. Talk goes on, and at some place in it caller says
" . . . well get on your clothes and get out and collect some of that free
food . . . " Now that is not a proposal as to what called should do in the
future. It isn't that if called takes them up on the closing, then after the close
it's called's business to put down the phone and rush around getting dressed,
or any such sort of thing. It's the form of a closing that takes up the kind of
information that called has given caller, that caller can use now to do closing,
i.e. , a 'ticket. ' And in that same utterance there is a reference to future getting
together, " . . . and we'll make it some other time then. " We have then, both
a 'ticket' and an arrangements-making, and those can be packaged together,
separately, one can occur and not the other, etc.
Now a thing one wants to see with that close offering is, not "Isn't it
outrageous that this guy tells them what to do, " or cute of him or whatever,
but that what he's done is to indeed attend such materials as have been given,
and use them to bring off a close, where it's his business to propose a close,
and to propose it in terms of the other's interests if he can, and perhaps to do
it in such a way as to also involve some arrangements. And that's the business
of his utterance as compared to its being some sort of command. Where, then,
"Okay then Jack" is not an agreement to do what he 'commanded, ' but is a
way of agreeing to close. It's an acceptance of the close form and not an
acceptance of whatever has been proposed in that close form.
One wants to see a systematic differentiation here between a 'command'
where nobody ends up doing activities by virtue of what's proposed in it, and
things like "Is Judy there?" which is a 'question' to which you might imagine
an 'answer' would be done, "Yeah. " Where that is not just a question but a
'request,' and it's heard as a request, to be dealt with not as "Yeah she's here"
but "Yeah, just a second" and that party gets off the line and does an action
by reference to the request, i.e. , puts Judy on the line. What is involved is a
massive difference between what looks like a 'command' and what looks like
366 Part VI
a 'question, ' where the 'question' is a 'request' and the 'command' is a 'dose
offering. ' And it's the 'dose' character that counts for the latter, as it is the
'request' character that counts for the former. Neither have anything like the
way in which they would be grammatically characterized, as sufficient
information about how they're dealt with. The one could be characterized
as a 'question' and the other as a 'command, ' and that would be wrong for
both.
The point is, then, that there is a place to deciding what the language-form
import is of something, but plainly some facets of the language-form import
are not operative and others are, and you couldn't tell by looking at them
which facet was operative. That of course is not to say that "Is Judy there?"
is always a 'request. ' And the question, then, of how it's found to be a request
is seriously askable, in contrast to this other thing which nobody would ever
treat seriously as 'command' - nobody who knows English, anyway. You
could conceive of someone who knows the language but not how it works,
feeling obliged to do something, or feeling like being stubborn and saying
"No. ' ' It's these sorts of differences that make the problems of things like
Anthropological Linguistics serious, since if you're an outsider, for example,
studying a language, then the difficult thing is, even if you know something
is a 'question, ' to know what anybody does with it. Why doesn't he just give
a question-return, "Yeah. " And if that's a 'command, ' why does she accept
it? Where you could then imagine that a perfectly reasonable thing one would
be led to do, would be to try to find out who could give commands to who
in the culture, when no such things are involved.
But here it's caller's business that, with a series of constraints, caller should
offer dosing, caller should, if he can, use materials called has given him, etc.
It being, then, an altogether routine, produced, dose, which attends what's
happened in the conversation to get out of the conversation. In this case it all
takes place in less than a minute, but it can also operate at very long distances,
i.e. , the same sorts of materials can be used after a ten minute call or a half
hour call, etc. Now, called can hint at such things as involve caller in picking
up that dose can be made. And of course furthermore if it's caller's business
to do this, one has a kind of simple explanation of why callers feel lousy when
called does the dosing, or why calleds are hesitant to do dosing. And that is
to say, how it is that conversations should go on longer than any particular
party in them wants them to, can have to do with whose business it is to bring
them to a dose.
 April 2 3
Characterizing an Event
B: Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk
this evening, but if you're going out I I you can't very well do
that.
C: "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you?
B: What?
C: It's Saturday.
B: What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday?
C: hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening.

I want to talk a bit about the utterance "Talk, you mean get drunk don't
you?" How is it that his use of 'talk' is for her hearable as a possible allusion
to 'get drunk, ' or if not a possible allusion to it that he intended, then a
reading she would choose. That is to say, whereas 'in' and 'out' and things
like that have an obvious kind of contrast, 'talk' and 'get drunk,' while they
can contrast, might not look like precisely the same thing, and I'm not saying
that they're precisely the same thing.
We can begin by noting that 'talk' is a formulation he makes of the
business of the invitation, i.e. , "I was just going to say come out and come
over here and talk this evening. ' ' A first kind of thing that might be relevant
to the replacement operation, not 'talk' but 'get drunk, ' can be developed by
considering the status of formulations of invitational businesses. It's plain that
the terms used for invitations only partially formulate such businesses. If
somebody says "Come over for dinner this evening, " then that's one way they
might describe what we're going to do, but hardly does it constrain what we
will do. "Come over for dinner" doesn't mean that there will be no talk or
no anything else. So invitations partially formulate what the invitation is for.
That means that other formulations are available, so that something that
could be called "Come over for dinner" could be called something else as
well, and that, too, would be true. However, it's nonetheless not so that one
can choose any possible partial formulation of an evening and have that be an
acceptable invitation. One can readily come up with more or less silly versions
of a correct partial formulation of an evening which are not appropriately used
ones, e.g. , "Come over and have a drink of water, " "Come over and sit on
the living-room couch, " etc. But how they differ from 'talk' and 'have
dinner, ' which are appropriately used, is not by virtue of that the former are
partial and the latter are not. They are all partial.
Further, among partial ways to formulate evenings which are appropriately
used, there are preferred uses. That means that if one is inviting somebody for
an evening in which dinner will be served, then apparently that sort of

3 67
368 Part VI
information should be included in the invitation or they will have reason to
assume that dinner is not going to be served . On the other hand, if someone
is doing an invitation for an evening in which talk will occur, then one needn't
include that information. That is to say, if something other than dinner is
mentioned, say, 'talk,' then what's being said is that dinner will not be served,
whereas if something other than talk is mentioned, say, 'dinner, ' that's not to
say that talk will not be present. So what we get is that 'dinner' is a
'first-preference invitation' - not in the sense that one would prefer to be
invited to dinner, but if someone is inviting you for dinner they had better say
so - and 'talk' stands as an alternative to 'dinner' in the sense that 'talk' being
what one is invited for, one understands that dinner is not going to be served.
In neither case is it that the way to choose the terms of an invitation is to fully
describe what you're inviting the person for. Both formulations are partial,
but now we can see that although there are a series of partial formulations for
an invitational occasion, there can be another set of rules that tell you how to
choose the terms of an invitation, and how to interpret some actualized
invitation. Specifically, there is a way of selecting from among partial
formulations which says 'select first preference' such that if the partial
formulation you select is not a first preference, then you're indicating that a
first preference is not present. 'Talk' not being a first preference, a way of
hearing it is to hear that it's not an invitation for what it otherwise might be,
such that you find from 'talk' that dinner isn't being served. Whereas,
'dinner' being a first preference, hearing it, you are not to be engaged in
finding what you're not being invited for.
So then, the invitee here, hearing that she's been invited for 'talk,' it's her
business to see that the invitation 'lacks something; ' is to be read for what it
says she's not being invited for. Now, having made an investment in that
operation, it may be that that operation is now used to get a further piece of
talk on her part; one which finds not only an absence of dinner, but an absence
of something else. That is to say, 'talk' is in the first instance not alternative
to 'get drunk, ' but alternative to 'dinner. ' But having found that 'talk'
provides for an absence, she is then in a position to use that operation to get
some other item that is also a what-the-invitation-could-be-for that is absent.
How she gets the particular item she does get, turns, however on the use of
other information. What we have so far is a way she might attend being
invited for 'talk' as it involves a focus on 'something missing' in the
invitation. Now to get at what particular something is missing, we have as a
serious resource her use of "It's Saturday. "
We can notice that her assertion "It's Saturday" is a relatively peculiar one.
It states such a fact that she can assume he knows. And it's a general rule
about conversation that it's your business not to tell people what you can
suppose they know. If the rule were relaxed there would be no shortage of
things to say. You could read from a physics text to somebody; you could
announce the date, the weather, the time; you could say your name again and
again; you could point things out: "This is a chair, " "Today is Saturday,
tomorrow is Sunday, the next day is Monday. " The conditions under which
 Apri/ 23 369
some fact that is known is assertable, are then problematic. But at least a first
remark in that regard is that one asserts some fact one supposes a listener
knows, not when one is trying to tell them that fact, but where that fact has
some relevance which they seem not to have noticed, and one is pointing up
its relevance, not telling them the fact. And given that you wouldn't be
asserting that thing that you assume they know, they will then be inspecting
it for other than whether it's so, but for how does it bear on what we're
talking about. Which is why we can think of things like "It's Saturday, " " My
name is Joe," etc . , as 'reminding' somebody of something. So that announc­
ing "It's Saturday" she's engaged in saying "Look at this assertion to find out
what bearing it could have on what we're talking about. " So, for example, if
one begins a conversation with "It's Saturday, " then a hearer can suppose that
they ought to know what its relevance is for what we talked about some other
time, i.e. , they're liable to say "Oh yeah we were supposed to go somewhere,
I forgot. " 1

1 It is very likely that the bulk of this session was given to dealing with student questions,
and that the discussion of " 'Talk, ' you mean get drunk don ' t you?" started well into the hour
and was curtailed due to lack of time. The next session takes up this utterance again.
 April 2 6
An event as an institution
B: How ya doing? Say what are you doing?
C: Well we're going out, why?
B: Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk this
evening, but if you're going out I I you can't very well do that.
C: "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you?
B: What?
C: It's Saturday.
B: What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday?
C: hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening.
B: That's why you look so bad on Monday morning.

I want to give a bit of perspective on the discussion I began last time with
regard to "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" by asking why in the world
should people get into some sort of battle over a characterization of an evening
to come; indeed, more particularly, over an evening that's not to happen.
She's already turned down the invitation, and no matter what it would have
been, it's not going to happen. Nonetheless she initially quarrels with his
characterization, and subsequent talk is disputatious on his part; they are in
a sense having it out over what started as a questioning about how to
characterize this evening that's not going to happen.
We might try to consider that as a curious topic of dispute. I don't think,
were someone to have looked at the conversation, they would have found it
a strange thing to be battling about in that I suppose you could perfectly well
find yourself in such a dispute, and participate in it. However, suppose we
were talking about some assertably primitive tribe, proposing that it's a kind
of routine thing among these people that, for something that's not going to
happen, that they acknowledge is not going to happen, if someone calls it X,
then another is not unlikely to say ' 'No, it should be called Y ' ' and, that having
been done, it wouldn't be treated as "Okay you call it X, I'll call it Y, " but that
people will then rather directly pass into fighting about it, verbally anyway. If
that were proposed about some group of natives, it would be something we
could take home as a strange custom, while here it is quite unnoticeable, in that
it is altogether not strange - strange only to have seen such a thing happening,
and to have seen it in this utterly ordinary conversation.
Now to say they do battle is to notice that it is apparently an issue for him
to find some way of dealing with her seeming superiority over how to spend
a Saturday evening, i.e. , going out and getting drunk, where he has proposed
talking. And that he finds, from the materials she gives him, a way to turn
that initial, seeming superiority, into something which ends up with him

3 70
 Apri/ 26 37 1
calling her "kid," i.e. , formulating her evening as something she's just doing
with her parents: "But uh go on out as long as your parents are footing the
bill kid, you just go right ahead. "
We have an initial situation where this guy calls up this girl. Apparently
they're both graduate students; that is how they come to know each other and
in part how he comes to make the call to her. As he puts it eventually, he was
planning to spend the day in the library; his plans to work being frustrated he
devises a scheme which would involve that he spend the evening talking with
another student, presumably about what they have in common, i.e. , school.
His proposed occasion stands, then, in a very neat relationship to what he
might initially have had in mind, i.e., studying.
So they start out as co-students. She then seems to pull some sort of rank
on him, having to do with his invitation being stodgy or unadult or whatever,
not a way to spend Saturday evening. That is, when she says "Talk, you mean
get drunk don't you?" there are plainly a variety of hearings he could give that
utterance. He could, e.g. , focus on that she's saying what he really meant, to
which he could respond as to whether he meant that. He could say "That's
what I meant" or "You've got me pegged! " etc. , or he could be direaly
disputatious, e.g. , "I didn't mean any such thing! " Now apparantly he heard
something in her format different than that, where what seems to be going on
is that somehow 'mean' can have different ways of meaning. He heard that
she was proposing some characteristic project of her own, which she kind of
assents to as what she was intending with "Well my folks are helping us to
do it this evening. "
He then gets oddly intimate in a way that only a conversational sequence
can rapidly provide for, i.e. , it's only by virtue of its locus in a conversation
in which a place for it has occurred that he could say to her ' 'What do you
do, go out and get drunk every Saturday?" That question plainly relies on its
context for it to be seen as not drastically insulting but intendedly light and
funny. And he continues the insult with "That's why you look so bad on
Monday morning, " which invokes that time when we know each other as
co-students - although the conversation could have other statuses for occur­
ring, for the invitation, for our knowledge of each other, etc.
In due course we get into the business of her going with her parents -
which she had initially introduced - which is, for her proposal that Saturday
is go-out-and-get-drunk time, an altogether drastic reformulation of what it
had sounded like. That is, when one is a student, 'going out and getting
drunk' and 'going out with one's parents' are drastically differently charac­
terized events - though they could be the 'same' event, i.e. , she could
perfectly well do the same thing - sitting and talking and drinking - with her
parents as she could with him. But she having introduced 'parents, ' he now
exploits that to make her someone still dependent on, and using, her status as
a 'kid' as a way to find things to do on Saturday night, or to have things to
do found for her.
Now what in the world is matterable enough to have this run through?
Why in the first instance should she have jumped at his characterization when
3 72 Part VI
she isn't in any event going to accept the invitation? And what is it that her
jumping at it did to him? Those questions can provide us with resources for
focussing on "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" and for seeing that in
focussing on it we're focussing on something that seems to have considerable
impact, at least for the conversation. And that is then to say that there is a lot
of life in this conversation, and not merely as to what's happening between the
two people involved, but what can be found out about a society in which just
such things routinely occur.
What I was looking to focus on was sorts of arrangements in the world;
apparently referable-to institutions. Where by 'institutions' I don't mean
events, like evenings spent, but some characterization of them, like 'an
evening spent talking' or 'an evening spent getting drunk. ' And to talk of an
'institution' is then perhaps to say that characterizations of some event, like an
evening, can be correctly or incorrectly done in the sense that parties might
find themselves disputing whether that's the way to characterize it or not. And
their characterizations can have some independence from whether what
they're talking about is some actual evening or some merely possible evening,
though what those investments are remains altogether obscure right now. But
it's not too difficult to at least begin to pick out what could be involved in
considerations of what characterization is to win out.
One wants initially to think of things like religious events, and thereby find
that it would be familiar to you that people might dispute how to characterize
something that could be seen as a ceremony of some sort. With that as a
familiarization, you might come back to 'an evening together' as something
like a ceremony in the sense that what should be said about it, what should
be thought about it, is something that parties can have interests in getting
some consensus on, even if it takes that they have to fight over it. Now 'talk'
and 'get drunk' as characterizations of evenings have a plainly marked
difference between them, having to do with that they name bearably different
types of evenings - one possibly having to do with the world of work, and one
possibly having to do with the world of fun and sin. And that's a familiar
thing that people might well battle over. Again, this is in full independence
of what it is that takes place during differently characterizable evenings, since
it's at least supposable for purposes of argument anyway, if not on the basis
of one's familiarity with such evenings, that they could involve a mixture of
such things as eating and talking and drinking and keeping silent and
touching and looking, etc. , any one of which could be available for use as a
characterization, leaving aside such further ways of characterizing them as
boring or exciting, etc.
At least a first way to address the question of why she picks his
characterization as something that she's going to behave sensitively towards,
is in terms of a sensitivity to how he characterizes what she's being invited for.
Specifically, by reference to that he would be saying that he thinks she is
someone who would be happy to spend Saturday evening in a way so
characterizable. And that could be an insult to her, as much as if the call had
started as it does, and then:
 Apri/ 26 373
B: How ya doing? Say what are you doing?
C: Well we're going out, why?
B: Oh gee, I was just gonna say my kid sister wants to go to the movies
tonight and I wondered if you'd take her.
C: Who the hell do you think I am!

Where the "Who the hell do you think I am" can be rejecting not merely
the evening, but the characterization of the evening offered, since apparently
you had some view of me which you used to generate the invitation, and
insofar as we are in some relationship in the world, like we get together and
you make looks at me on Monday morning, I would like you to know that
now that I know what's on your mind I would just as soon you'd change
your mind.
Now that can give us that sort of grip on why they would be engaged in
a dispute over the characterization of an evening that's not going to take
place, having then to do with the way in which such a characterization could
be treated as revealing what one party thought of the other - a matter that
parties are not, apparently, insensitive to. For one, on a no-pause basis she's
ready to jump with a critique of his characterization. And also, the rest of the
conversation is specifically concerned with what each of us should think about
each of us. That is to say, he then engages in an elaborate characterization of
himself as 'serious student, ' and in due course 'serious student on his own,'
not having such opportunities to be a frivolous child as she apparently has and
makes use of. Which is then to say, he's accepted a re-characterization of
herself which he's seen in her critique of his characterization. He's seen, 'What
do you do, go out and get drunk every Saturday? Oh, that would explain why
you look the way you do on Monday mornings' - as if that had been some
long-term puzzle for him. And again, he has that immediately available;
whether it's hypothetical or not is irrelevant since the evening itself is
hypothetical.
In that regard, then, a possibility is being extracted that, be the events
under consideration utterly imaginary, an attention to 'what you think of me'
is right at the surface - as a dispute, gone through with full seriousness, could
perfectly well take place with "If you got two tickets to the moon, would you
take me or not?" But that puts it in an overt way, where here, and commonly,
no suggestion is made that he's intending to besmirch her or indeed that he's
characterizing her. And of course it's utterly imaginable that the thing would
go quite differently were his talk done by virtue of some sensitivity to being
other than allusive about what he wanted to do, and once she'd said "Talk,
you mean get drunk don't you?" he heard it as saying "You needn't be
allusive" and he would say ' 'I'm sorry, yeah let's get drunk. "
It's possibly something and possibly nothing that if you examine this
invitation for any such ambiguity as it might contain, as might be some
partial source for her focussing on what he means when he says something,
then about the only thing I think you can come up with that is demonstrably
so in the conversation itself, is who is "you" in the initial invitation. In our
3 74 Part VI
language 'you' can be nicely ambiguous as between some singular and some
plural. It could conceivably be unplain as to whether he is inviting her or her
and her husband - as he eventually says in a way that doesn't have that
ambiguity, "I was just gonna call and see if you and your huslfand would like
to come over," though I don't know whether he knew beforehand that she
has a husband, or what his intentions are. But plainly if there were that sort
of an ambiguity involved in the "you," then it might well mesh with the kind
of relationship that 'talk' and 'get drunk' have, i.e. , he could be heard as
proposing quite a different thing if he's proposing it for just her than if he's
proposing it for her and her husband.
I'm not convinced that there's any fragment of her response, "Talk, you
mean get drunk don't you?" which turns on that there is that sort of possible
ambiguity in his initial invitation. As I said last time, technical sources for
finding trouble in the characterization 'talk' have to do with 'talk' being
bearably a second preference, something missing, and then being used to
focus on 'talk' as a non-preferred event replaceable with some preferred event,
'get drunk, ' which is other than the obvious preferred event, 'dinner' - which
in the end it seems is what she's going out for anyway. That is to say, she
seems to say in the first instance that she's going out to get drunk but it seems
to end up that she's not going out to get drunk at all, she's going out to have
dinner with her parents.
Now, in attempting to give a consideration of how "Talk, you mean get
drunk don't you?" can be heard as a preferred characterization of Saturday
evening, we go through a consideration of an understood world in which these
terms 'talk,' 'get drunk, ' 'Saturday' are not so much names of events, but
names of things that if you know any sociology or anthropology, should be
thought of as names of institutions. And Saturday is a sacred time for fun, in
the ways in which she's intending - apparently successfully - to refer to it not
as one day of the week, the day after Friday, but a day which has attached
preferred characterizations of how one spends it. And that's a thing which he
plainly picks up. That is, he uses it to make a describable day of his own out
of it, i.e. , in that Saturday is a day to be devoted to fun, it's now sayable that
he had plans for working all day. Were it some other day, e.g . , Thursday, this
statement "I had big intentions of working all day" would be unsayable, in
the sense of well, what else could one do on that day?
In that regard, then, they're not talking of days in their lives, they're
talking about what some days are to be characterizably devoted to, however
anyone happens to spend them. And that's then similar to what some
evenings are to be characterizably devoted to, without regard to how anyone
happens to spend an evening. Where one can perfectly well be offended at
how someone reveals they figure you might be happy to spend some evening,
even though in the end, not merely aren't you going to spend it in a way that's
better in the sense that you characterize as 'better, ' i.e. , that you might go
out and get drunk Saturday evening, but it turns out that you're doing
something that you could probably accept to be yet feebler than what had
been proposed. That is, he had at least proposed that they get together and
 Apri/ 26 375
spend the evening talking with colleagues and she's ending up having an
evening going out with her parents like some kiddy. And even though
that's what she knows she's doing, she can be insulted at the idea that he
would think she'd be doing anything less than going out and getting
drunk.
 April 3 0
Calling for help
The materials I'll be talking about now were taped on New Year's Eve, 1 964.
It's a telephone call made to a psychiatric operation which advertised itself for
receiving calls from people who, for example, feel that they're suicidal, or
people who are concerned with someone who is suicidal. During the day they
operate as a regular emergency psychiatric clinic devoted specifically to people
who are suicidal, and after hours and on weekends they had a system where
somebody calls the place's number and an answering service routes the call to
whoever is on call at the time. There are usually two or three people on call.
They are not psychiatrists but are characteristically graduate students in
clinical psychology, or other more or less trained personnel. None of them are
specifically lay persons, they all have some professional training. But they are
not yet professionals as is the staff during the day, all of whom have various
degrees, PhDs in clinical psychology or MDs in psychiatry. It's a very large
and well known operation, and people can know about it just by reading the
newspaper. This is one call made on, as it happens, New Year's Eve.

Go ahead please 1
This is Mr. Smith (pt; Hello) of the Emergency Psychiatric
Center; Can I help you.
pt. Hello?
dr. Hello
pt. I cant hear you.
dr. I see Can you hear me now?
pt. Barely Where are you, in the womb?
dr. Where are you calling from?
pt. Hollywood.
dr. Hollywood.
pt. I can hear you a little better.
dr. Okay. uh 2 I was saying My name 1s Smith and L'm with the
Suicide Prevention Center.
pt. Your name is what?
1 The class was given copies of a transcript which, for reasons of space, is not included in
this edition. Instead, segments will be shown. The transcript was produced by Sacks in 1 964
or 1 9 6 5 , and the segments as they appear here are attempts to reproduce Sack's original. The
tape itself hasn' t turned up.
21nitially the line went: " okay. I was , " then the "I was" is struck out and "uh" added, so
that the line now reads: " okay. uh I was saying . " It may be that a decision was made to
include such a thing as "uh" in a transcript. It may also be that, as it happens with such items
as " uh , " it wasn' t attended on an initial hearing.

3 76
 April 30 377
dr. Smith
pt. Smith?
dr Yes
dr Can I help you?
pt I dont know hheh I hope you can
dr uh hah Tell me about your problems
dr I uh Now that you ' re here I ' m embarassed to talk about it.
I dont want you telling me I'm emotionally immature cause I know
l am

The " Go ahead please " is the answering service ' s operator speaking . Now the
matter is slightly different than in other phone conversations because the two
parties are essentially put on the line at the same time. That can partially
account for the overlap that occurs at the start:

Go ahead please
This is Mr. Smith (pt; Hello) of the Emergency Psychiatric Center;
Can I help you .

That is, " Go ahead please " is unclear as to who should go ahead, and both
parties sometimes speak up at the same time, where it would be extremely
odd in telephone calls otherwise occurring that two parties would say hello to
each other at the same time.
I want to begin by focussing on one central theme of conversations like this
one, involving people calling this place and in a more general way, involving
people calling an institution of some sort for some sorts of assistance. And a
first way to catch that special status of this sort of call happens right at the
beginning of the call . It doesn ' t always happen in the same way for all such
calls, but it is so characteristic a problem for such calls that there have been
articles written on the matter. The matter being that on the one hand , one
party introduces themselves and on the other hand, the other party doesn ' t .
I t may seem in this call that it ' s just happenstance that she doesn ' t give her
name and that he does give his name, but that ' s at least possibly not a
matter of happenstance. In any event, the situation of the institutional
person giving his name and the other not, is a problem that occurs for such
circumstances.
I ' ll talk a bit about some aspects of that. What we have is, Mr Smith
introduces himself and then there' s a variety of ' can ' t hear' complications .
Now, I make an argument that she specifically isn ' t giving her name, and that
she has ways of avoiding giving her name . In any event she doesn ' t give her
name here, and it later turns out that she doesn ' t want to give her name when
she ' s specifically asked for it. Though, while she isn ' t specifically asked for it
here, the sheer fact that he introduces himself involves that it' s her business
to introduce herself, too . That' s a kind of general institution for phone calls
and for other situations of parties getting into an interaction who haven ' t been
in an interaction before, so that they aren ' t , then, recognizing each other. And
3 78 Part VI
it is something that this place and places like it use. When I say 'use, ' I mean
to notice that the two names differ severely in their import. Whereas it would
appear that there would be nothing noticeable if one said "This is Mr Smith"
and the other then said "This is Mrs Jones,' the information received by either
party in getting the other's name is altogether different. And that differentness
can partially account for one party's perfect willingness to give his name,
using it to elicit the other's, and the other's hesitancy to give a name.
What are the differences? What use does the name of the person who
answers the phone, i.e. , the person in the institution, have for the party who
calls? Well, there are some altogether obvious uses. One thing is, when he says
"This is Mr Smith" he's thereby providing a name that the caller can use
throughout the call, insofar as they choose to address him. She can thereafter
call him Mr Smith, and she does here and there call him Mr Smith. As a kind
of side aspect to that, in calling himself Mr Smith, there are some obvious
alternative things to call himself, which are interesting. He could call himself
"Bill Smith" which would give her the opportunity to call him either Mr
Smith or Bill; making, then, for possible informality, for the conversation to
appear to be more intimate than otherwise. He doesn't give her that
opportunity, though in some of the calls some of the answerers do indeed say
"Hello, this is Frank Smith" as compared to saying "This is Mr Smith . "
Now, i f he called himself Bill Smith, he would not only be gving her the
opportunity to call him Mr Smith or Bill, but he might also be concealing
something which Mr Smith reveals, something that is relevant for the call,
i.e. , a difference between Mr Smith and Dr Smith. That is to say, in saying to
her "This is Mr Smith , ' ' he's saying to her "This is not Dr Smith. " And in
such calls, if a person is a doctor they always say "This is Dr Smith, " where
that conveys not only information about a title that should be used in the call,
but about their professional status. So that on the one hand "Frank Smith"
says "You can call me Frank, " on the other hand it does not say whether I am
or am not a doctor. And then " Mr Smith" says "You can't call me by my first
name because you don't know what it is, ' ' but it also says ' 'I'm not a doctor, "
as compared to "This is D r Smith" which says "You can't call me by my
first name but you know I'm a doctor. " And indeed when someone says
"This is Frank Smith" the caller may well ask "Are you a doctor?" and
with some characteristicness, if he said "Frank Smith" he will tum out not
to be a doctor.
We have, then, a series of alternatives that are not transparent, i.e. , Frank
Smith turns out to be alternative to Mr Smith, and not Dr Smith. And Dr and
Mr are alternative by reference to the issue of 'Is he a doctor or isn't he?' So
that the " Mr" part of Mr Smith says ' 'I'm not a doctor" and the "Smith"
part gives a name that he can be called, and the whole thing, "This is Mr
Smith, " besides saying what my status is and what you can call me, does a job
of saying "Tell me what your name is" - not by virtue of this institution's
way of working, but by virtue of how phone call and other interactional
beginnings appropriately work.
The caller is also being given some other things in this kind of place and
 Apri/ 30 3 79
in other places as well, and that is, they're being given the name of a person
in the institution which they can use for later dealings with the institution.
Calling back some other time they can say, "I spoke to Mr Smith last time, "
asking to speak to him again. Or they could be asked if they've spoken to
anybody before and if so to whom, and then find that they're referred to that
person again. They can also use that they have his name to do things like
register complaints or provide plaudits to the organization. In other institu­
tions that matter can be a bit more delicate, in that personnel might be more
sensitive to the possibility that their behavior may be complained of. The
obvious sorts of instances are things like policemen taking off their badges
when they go to do things that they don't want anybody to be able to
complain about them by reference to, so as to make themselves unidentifiable
except as somebody in the organization.
Now, on the other hand, when the caller gives his name, while he's surely
giving such a name as he can be called by in the conversation, he also takes
it that he's giving such a name as he can be found out from; that will permit
somebody to go track him down. If, for example, someone calls and says ' 'I'm
suicidal, " then they can figure - and this is not something I'm making up,
but something they say in such calls - that it's possible that if the call doesn't
seem to be turning out too well, then people from this institution will call the
police and have the police pick up the caller and take them to a hospital.
People calling will give that as a reason for not giving their names when
they're asked to give their names, not having given a name at the beginning.
And when that's asserted, the people from the institution will say "Look, we
don't do that. We never do that. " And they don't for various reasons, among
them being that the police won't do it.
Another sort of reason people have for not giving their names is, people
who kill themselves are sometimes interested in not having it known that they
killed themselves. They merely died. If they call and the call doesn't work and
they decide to kill themselves, then if they die under possibly problematic
circumstances and there is no reason to suppose they might have killed
themselves, then it might well be figured that they just happened to die. If,
however, they told their name, it can be known that they had been suicidal.
And that can focus on the possibility that it was suicide, and they can end up
being classified as a suicide.
Persons are deeply concerned about whether they will or will not be called
suicides once they're dead. And over the span of sociology there's been an
enormous interest in this phenomenon, having to do with why in the world
are people who are killing themselves out of the world concerned with that the
world figures that they did or did not kill themselves? Where, when you kill ·

yourself, dying out of the world that you are in, you are doing an event in the
world other than happening to die out of it. So that people are seriously
oriented to the terms on which they leave. It is plain that people care either
to make it certain that it is known that they have killed themselves - and
calling this place is one such way, saying ' 'I'm going to kill myself and you
can find me at this address . . . ' ' etc. - or to see if they can possibly survive, but
3 80 Part VI
to hold as a contingency that they may not be able to, and if they are not able
to, wanting to not have it known - for insurance, the children, the family,
etc. - that they did indeed kill themselves. So their name is known by them
to be a relevant aspect of what they would perhaps be leaving.
And in that regard it's an immensely curious fact that routinely they will
not give their names, but also they will not lie. That is to say, they will be
exceedingly hesitant, argumentative, etc. , about giving a name, they will
refuse to give it, when they could perfectly well just give any name. Now,
that's something to puzzle over. I don't know whether it doesn't occur to
them that they could just give any name, or whether while knowing that
they could give any name, they will not give a name at all if they're not
going to give their own. But again, it has perhaps to do with some way in
which they are indeed more or less seriously involved in this world that
they're in.
In any event, asking them to give a name by offering your name is to ask
of them something that you and they know is much more of a thing than
you're giving them. You're asking them for a commitment of a sort that can
be more or less problematic to them, and which is distinctly more problematic
to them right at the beginning of the conversation. And that has a very
considerable interest to it. From the way he proceeds in the conversation, we
can see that the recipient of the call, this Mr Smith, treats the call as the project
that the party who is calling is engaged in, i.e. , she's calling for help, and
having called him she's done what she should do to call for help, and he's
prepared to give her the help that she's looking for. Whereas for her, that this
place is the place to go is not obvious, and the question is that she wants help,
but that she called here doesn't constitute a solution, only a possible solution,
and she'll see whether it's so. And we can get into some of the details of how,
that he supposes that she's gone to the right place and she doesn't suppose
that she's gone to the right place, work their way out.
One of the things involved in that is kind of simple, and that has to do
with, having introduced himself he says " Can I help you. " Now, there might
be nothing noticeable about " Can I help you" but for the way in which she
in the first instance deals with it. That is, "I don't know . . . I hope you can"
is a notably curious response to " Can I help you" in the sense that having
introduced oneself as a member of an institution, " Can I help you" is
delivered as a format affiliated to the way that, calling Bullocks' rug
department, you'll get "Rug department Jones speaking can I help you?" to
which you say "Yes" or whatever. That is to say, it's a purely etiquettal thing
which says "Okay tell me what you called about," whereas she hears it as
something rather different. She hears " Can I help you" as "That's indeed a
problem. "
Aside from these routinized initial usages, a first kind of thing I want to
point out about the ways in which he deals with her concerns a series of
questions, somewhat interspersed, that he makes to her in the beginning part
of the call. Right off we've gotten "Where are you calling from?" and "Tell
me about your problems. " A bit later we get the following:
 April 30 38 1
pt I guess I just wish somebody' d help me I been helping myself
for over a year and I'm worn out
dr you're not married
pt no, not now
dr you're divorced then
pt yes
dr I see (she sniffies) have any children?
pt no (very low)
dr we how old are you by the way
pt sigh I'm 40 .
dr you're working are you
pt yah (same tone as 'no' above)
dr are you satisfied with that?
pt oh its a very nice job mediocre but very pleasant no problems
dr how long've you been divorced?
pt oh a long time maybe about 1 1 years

These are essentially things that are called, in the mildly technical jargon, 'face
sheet data. ' They are things about which, whether it's so or not - and whether
it's so or not can be irrelevant - one can imagine that the institution person
is sitting with a list of matters he wants to get answers on, which are matters
not merely for helping him do a diagnosis, but, characteristically, for some
statistical investigation that the organization is engaged in. They might be
running a study of where people are suicidal in this city; are people who live
in Hollywood versus West LA suicidal? Are people who live in Hollywood
who are unmarried suicidal? etc. They also want to know with whom they
have more success. And in order to be able to do an appropriate medical
investigation they have got to get some body of answers to questions. And for
a variety of institutions, having not necessarily to do with suicide but pretty
much anything to do with medical and social problems, if you call them, then
you'll find that you're being asked a same series of questions somewhere in the
conversation.
Now there's some neat aspects to that. If someone calls and presents this
variety of information, then by virtue of investigations that have been done on
prior such matters, the called can more or less make an assessment as to the
seriousness of the problem. I'm not saying the called will be right, or the
called will be wrong. But the way those places work is that they can use that
information, by virtue of the information they've collected and other general
census data, to decide how much they need to worry about a case. If, for
example, the caller is a 1 3-year-old girl and she's living at home, then they
can figure it's not too serious, and know how to deal with it, e.g. , they can be
reassuring, they can try to find out what the problem is, but they can know
that she's not going to kill herself tonight. Whereas if it's a 5 7-year-old
divorced lady with no children and no family here, etc. , then it might well be
that they can know that how this call works out is relevant to whether she will
or will not kill herself. So the collecting of that information is on the one hand
3 82 Part VI
relevant for assessing how this person is likely to behave and how important
it is that you deal with them now as compared to saying "Come in Monday
morning, ' ' and also it's relevant by reference to use in later cases. All of which
gets relatively interesting in that each new piece of information can affect the
corpus of earlier information. For example, if it turns out it's a 1 3-year-old
girl who goes indeed kill herself, then that adds a bit of weight to any next
1 3- or 1 5 -year-old girl who calls, even though for this one you figured you
wouldn't have to worry about her very much since, given our earlier ones,
they either rarely attempt to kill themselves or are rarely successful.
But a thing to be focussed on is that the information is not collected as
' 'before I know how to deal with you and for other purposes than dealing
with you, I'd like to have this information. ' ' Instead, it's dealt with as though
it were fully part of the help that I'm giving. That is to say, its interests are
partially concealed. A question then is, how can they be concealed? And at
least one way they can be concealed is by at least partially placing the
questions in such a way as to have it appear that this conversation is as
spontaneous as any other, i.e. , I'm asking you this question only by virtue of
the last thing you said. As, for example, when she says ' 'Where are you, in
the womb?" he then says "Where are you calling from?" which can have to
do in some way with the prior question and with the fact that we're having
difficulty over the line, which could be explained by knowing where you're
calling from. And, for example, when she says "I guess I just wish
somebody'd help me. I've been helping myself for over a year and I'm worn
out," he says "You're not married. " Now that sounds like a picking up on
her indication that she's helping herself. On the other hand, and while it's
doing that, it's also providing an item on the checklist which says things like
'married, divorced, single, ' etc. And the checklist character of it can be
drastically revealed by a kind of routine thing he does thereafter. She says
"No, not now" and he says "You're divorced then," whereas a more
optimistic and non-institutional hearing of it might be "Oh you're going to
get married. " But 'going to get married' is not a title on the classifications
available censuswise, 'married, ' 'divorced, ' 'widowed, ' etc. , and there's an
of-course hearing of "not now" as meaning 'in the past,' 'was,' for which
'divorced' can be one obvious reading.
So there are ways that under some hearing she can find that she's only
being partially listened to in the sense that she says that she wants somebody
to tell her that they care, "somebody that would just, just listen for a minute. "
And while there's a way in which he is offering himself as such a person, she
can see that she's being dealt with as 'a somebody, ' not as the unique person
she'd like to have people recognize that she is. Now that can be no problem
in some places, but in this kind of place it's a distinct problem. The people
calling are in a position of wanting to know if anybody in the world cares for
them; as she says, she wants to kill herself for the same reason everybody else
does; you just want to know if anybody cares. Now it's a seriously
problematic thing when, in order to find out if anybody cares, you have to
call, not a friend, but an institution, a phone number. And where, then, the
 April 30 3 83
way they deal with you is not in the first instance "Who are you, I want to
know you," but "Which are you?" That is to say, part of the thing that
they're doing is getting that information, and regardless of the outcome of this
call it will have been useful to them. Which is not to say that that information
wouldn't help them to help you, and of course it's deeply believed by them
that that's so - and it may be so. But it involves that they have a problem of
collecting information within the call which is, at least in part, not for use in
the call. And though they don't say "Look, before we get started I've got to
know the following things, ' ' that they're doing some such thing has a kind of
apparency to it which could be some source for some of the discomforts that
are involved in these calls.
 May 3
Problem solving; Recipient-designed
solutions
I want to talk this time about two things that are related in a slightly obscure
way. There ' s a specific substantive problem which , stated kind of generally,
has to do with conversation as a vehicle for problem solving , and there ' s
another, more methodological problem which has t o d o with collecting
observables and putting them into some such relationship as permits posing
and solving problems with them. So I want to sort of reproduce a procedure
I used in getting to this problem of a way in which conversation is relevant to
problem solving, by making a group of observations that in the first instance
don ' t particularly have anything to do with each other and don ' t particularly
have to do with the problem that eventually gets dealt with and where, then,
there was some effort to see if there weren ' t some way to collect those
observations and get from them a posable, solvable problem, that problem
coming in the end to some ways in which conversation is specifically relevant
to problem solving .
I ' ll state the general problem we eventually get to , right off. It's noticeable
about problems that people face, that they can know that they have a
problem , suppose that there are solutions to it, and feel unassured that if, say,
somebody offered them a solution , they would be able to assess it, recognize
that it was right. That is, there are problems that you have, where you have
techniques for recognizing when you ' ve got a solution to it, but there are
others where you have a problem , you suppose that there ' s a solution , but you
don ' t know how you would recognize a solution . And that can put you into
a relatively difficult situation, common aspects of which are that you never
know when you ' re being conned by somebody who tells you how to solve it.
If you go to an auto mechanic with a problem and he tells you what the
problem is technically and how he ' ll solve it, then you can often feel
uncomfortable as to whether that ' s what the problem is. There are lots of
things like that, and lots of them have roughly to do with possibly technical
areas . If you go to a doctor feeling some malaise and he tells you that you ' re
suffering from this, and this is what should be done, then while you might go
through with the treatment and it might turn out that you feel better, you
don ' t have some way of deciding , from what he tells you, before you do what
he tells you , that he ' s right or that that' s a solution . I eventually want to
say that there are kind of obvious ways in which that applies in some
circumstances of people feeling suicidal or othetwise mentally disturbed,
and it can be readily enough supposed that they might be in a position to

3 84
 May 3 385
not feel able to assess an offered solution and yet be concerned with its
correctness .
So we ' re going to look for ways that people might have of assessing the
possible correctness of a solution whose correctness itself they can ' t assess in
the first instance, i . e . , before ever trying out whatever it is that' s proposed that
they do, where conversation can perhaps be not merely a vehicle for telling
problems and receiving answers , but can provide resources for assessing
answers . That being said , one can easily enough think of some obvious ways
that it would be so . For example, if you could find out from attending the talk
of the person you ' re presenting your problem to , that they' re being
inconsistent, then you might have a way of saying that they' re changing their
mind or they don ' t know what they' re talking about, and things like that.
That is to say, there are obvious ways of monitoring their talk so as to assess
the possible quality of their solution, even though you don ' t know what a
solution would be. You could feel confident that you could at least rule out
one or another solution by virtue of features of the talk that it was delivered
within, or features of the scene that it was delivered within .
Now then, let me try to get to where this goes, without saying that what
will be looked for is how conversation can play some part in finding ways to
deal with that problem . We can look at the circumstances out of which the
problem came to be focussed on, as both a way of collecting a variety of
observations, and in terms of which that variety of observations might be used
to describe a solution that people might employ for the problem.
I noticed that right off in the conversation she says she ' s having difficulty
hearing him. And , forgetting about whether she is or isn ' t , there are a variety
of virtues to announcing at the beginning of a telephone conversation, that
you can ' t hear. One virtue is that having established that there is some
difficulty in hearing the other when they 've said " Hello , " i . e . , at a point
where there ' s no particular connection between what they ' re saying and any
obvious interest of yours in not hearing what they ' re saying, you ' ve set up the
reusability of that you can ' t hear for future occasions on which it might matter
that you could say "I can ' t hear " for other purposes, i . e . , seeking a delay or
avoiding answering a question , it not now being an obvious strategy on your
part, to have asserted that. And let me say in passing that my remarks on the
usability of "I can' t hear you " tum in part on that we have a transcript and
a bearable tape, so that we suppose that, both the voices on the tape being
bearable, it' s at least some sort of possibility that it was other than that the
voices are not bearable that was involved in her saying "I can ' t hear you . "
There ' s also quite a different possible way of looking at somebody
proposing right off in a conversation, i . e . , when greetings are taking place,
that there are difficulties in their hearing you . When someone picks up the
phone and starts talking into it, they use a voice that they figure the one
they ' re talking to can hear. Now, a feature of the voice you use talking over
the phone is that it is effortless. So if they ' re insistent that you can ' t be heard ,
then it' s not just that you speak louder, but you put that sort of effort into
your talk which is involved in attending whether you can be heard , i . e . , you
3 86 Part VI
attend the sheer production of sound as something you have to work at,
whereas when you're otherwise talking over the phone that isn't treated as
part of the job you're involved in.
Turning that slightly around, at least a possible use of saying to someone
"I can't hear you" is to have a way of making them put more effort into their
talk than they otherwise planned to. Now that way of looking at an insistence
on "I can't hear you" has as an obvious correlate that you could at the same
time make for some further effort in their participation by yourself talking in
a way that would make it difficult for them to hear you. So that you could
skew the effortfulness with respect to talking and hearing: You insisting that
they're not talking loud enough, and recurrently noticing that they're not
talking loud enough, they're then engaged in watching for each utterance, not
only what they're saying but whether it's loud enough. And you're talking in
such a way that they have to make an effort to hear you - where again, in their
routine talking over the telephone they don't think of listening to another's
voice as effortful with regard to hearing it.
Another sort of thing. There's a place in the conversation where she says to
him "Doesn't it bore you to have people like me talking to you? "

pt and I somehow I'm feeling that I'm a nothing (smiling sigh)

dr uh huh
pt And I know nobody's a nothing but I am Its like everybody else \
is somebody or something and somewhere along the line I muffed �
up
dr uh huh This this proves your need for psychological help doesnt it?
pt oh I know
dr I think it does
pt Doesnt it bore you to have people like me talking to you?
dr pardon me
pt doesnt it bore you to have people like me talking to you?
dr no it doesnt
pt doesnt it bore you on New Year's Eve when you want to go out and
get to your party?
dr no not really but there is uh uh I have this strong feeling that you
need this psychological help You could get it through a clinic
pt Like like down at County hospital can go in there with all the
poor people the people that have just never made anything out of their
lives

Now, if one can use as a procedure trying to see what it is that he's been doing
that could lead her to say "I notice your being bored, " then a possible thing
to find here is that he's reasserted a series of times that she should get help at
a clinic, and she's rejected that.

dr you were in therapy with uh private doctor?

pt yah
 May 3 3 87
dr have you ever tried a clinic?
pt What?
dr Have you ever tried a clinic?
pt sigh no I dont want to go to a clinic

and:

pt I try so hard not to be emotionally immature and I am and I know

I am and I hate it I hate it its a disgrace uhhg sometimes I cant help
it I just am
dr why why wouldnt you be willing to go to a clinic for help?
pt oh Cause I dont want to identify with the poor people (sniffle)

and again:

pt I've had some therapy and I've had some group therapy I know
I got a damn good picture of myself (dr I see) n its much harder than when
you dont know
dr you you know then that you should get this clinical help, then dont
you
pt Know but I dont think it would help me
dr well uh
pt It would take me down a step further
dr (talking along with her a bit) over the telephone
pt What?
dr if you're not willing to work at this and help yourself in a clinic or
somewhere how can I help you over the telephone?
pt you cant I guess nobody can Was just a wild (laugh) stab in the
dark

Where at least an available interpretation of somebody presenting repeatedly

a solution to some problem that's posed, that they've offered immediately
upon the problem being posed, is that at some point they're exhibiting that
they're bored. All they're doing is, whatever I say, they offer the same thing.
She's not at this point assessing the offered solution ' Go to a clinic, ' she's
assessing something about how that solution is being delivered, i.e. , that it
was offered first and has been offered again, and again, and now again, across
a variery of things that she says about her circumstances.
Still another sort of thing. There's a place early in the conversation where
we get:

pt I've got a date coming in a half hour and I (sob)

dr I see
pt I cant go through with it I cant go through with the evening I cant
(sniffle)
3 88 Part VI
dr uh huh
pt you talk I dont want to talk
dr uh huh
pt (laugh sob) It sounds like a real professional uh huh uh huh uh huh
sniffle

Similarly to the last thing I pointed to, she is attending that "uh huh" has
been undifferentiatedly used to a lot of the things she's said. And that
recurrence is otherwise characterizable as 'professional listening; ' 'professional'
here being intended in a derogatory way. So again there's an apparent
attention to things he says which focusses on their patterned, undifferentiated
- in a way, for now, 'effortless' - presentation, though in giving that as a way
to think of it I'm already skewing in my favor a line of consideration we
might take. That is to say, there is a plain sense in which, having come up
with, on the first thing she says, that she should go to a clinic, and proceeding
with that thereafter, he can be seen or thought or said to be making no
particular effort other than whatever it is that he first said. And again, to say
"uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," while it might perfectly well involve that he
differentiatedly understands each thing and only uses a same way to express
that, it can also involve that he doesn't differentiatedly hear. It at least
involves that he picks the same, i.e. , the most effortless, way to respond. And
she tells him that she sees that and doesn't like it.
What we're noticing here is that to things he says, she is giving hearings
which can have to do with a problem for her of "how carefully are you
listening to me?" And she's ready to complain when it appears that he isn't
listening to her sufficiently carefully, and further, she is letting him know that
she can find out when he isn't listening to her sufficiently carefully. That is to
say, aspects of his talk may give that away, and it isn't to be supposed that
he himself notices, since he wouldn't then do such talk. And she can be found
to be listening in such a way as to attend not just what he says and its merits,
e.g. , the way that "uh huh" can possibly be understanding the last thing she
said, but, doubting that, listening to find that though he doesn't know it he's
shown that he's being casual or professional or bored - which are plainly
things that if he knew about it, he wouldn't choose to do. He might then
come to figure that she can pick those things up if he is feeling them, so that
if he cares, he had better do something, perhaps not merely to try to conceal
that but to change it.
She also tells him that she's aware - whether it's so or not is kind of
irrelevant - that he thinks he knows a bunch of things about her given
what little has so far transpired, or given just that she has called, i.e. , she
says she knows just what he thinks about her even though he doesn't know
her:

pt I known damn well theres nothing wrong with the world I know
its me
dr uh huh
 May 3 3 89
pt oh I am not blaming anybody else Thats why its so hard for me to
talk to you because I I I know what I am (dr uh huh) I know just exactly
what you're thinking and I know exactly what you see without even
knowing me
dr (chuckle) I see

Now, if the line I took about the series of questions that he asks her is
anything like so, then there are ways in which he's going through a relatively
precast conversation. He has a bunch of things he wants to get out of it from
her: her name, her age, is she working, is she married, does she have any
children, etc. And in that way the event is one for which he is partially
engaged in making a routine for himself. And one can think of this series of
things I've noticed as a possible collection of attempts on her part to take a
situation which she can suppose is one that involves him in dealing with what
she will say in a relatively precast way, and make it one in which if he's going
to emerge from the conversation in a comfortable way, then he's got to put
a lot more work into it than he had supposed. That is to say, at least one thing
that runs through the matters I've noticed here is that remedying them makes
talking in this conversation a lot more effortful for him than it might well be,
in a series of different ways. He has to attend whether his talk is bearable. He
has to see whether some way he uses to appreciate a thing she says captures
that it appreciates the thing she says - and in later parts of the conversation
he gets much more elaborate in his indications of 'I know what you're saying'
than "uh huh" is. He makes paraphrases of what she says, he may generalize
what she says, etc. He is then engaged in exhibiting some understanding,
which may well be the understanding that he otherwise would have used "uh
huh" for, but is at least different from that in that she can look to it to see that
the work has been put in.
So we have a variety of conceivably technical things she uses for making his
participation effortful - specifically making it more effortful than it had been
at any point at which some complaint of hers gets raised. And that can
connect back to how she deals with "Can I help you?" and varieties of other
such things. Now then, what kind of interest is there in the issue of
'effortfulness' as an achievable feature of a conversation? And it's not simply
effortful in the sense that he's going to, e.g. , start varying; saying instead of
"Uh huh" things like "Yes," " Mm hm, " "I see, " " Surely, " "I understand, "
"I get you," etc. so that a pattern cannot be found. It's not so much that
which is involved in the effortfulness as that she can come to see that he is
working at her case, i.e. , that he's now trying to design whatever he 's going to
say by reference to what she's telling him.
We're plainly, then, dealing with conversational matters, and indeed very
heavily telephone matters where she's restricted to the phone and its
properties in order to deal with him. Now the question is, what can be the
virtue of doing this to this guy? And that question sits. To that question, then,
the task is to devise a problem for which the kinds of observations I've made,
and their possible connectednesses, would constitute the makings of a
390 Part VI
solution. That is, starting with a bunch of seemingly unconnected observa­
tions, seeing that they have some technical relationship to each other, that
there's a way to put them into a package of sorts, we then ask 'Is there some
problem in the world that that set of things could be a solution to?' Now the
problem itself can be a relatively familiar one, and indeed the terminology of
the solution can be a relatively familiar one. What we wouldn't have known
is what the technical means are; what people do in solving the problem. And
the problem that I offered was how to assess a possible solution when you
can't assess it on its merits. We can now reconsider that problem in the light
of the sorts of things she seems to be doing, and we can perhaps then come
up with what, in some theorized way, an answer would be for somebody. And
perhaps an answer would be something like: If you can get the other party to
feel that you have ways of deciding that the solution they offer is not fitted to
the problem you've posed, then you may get them to work at putting
together a solution that is fitted to the problem you've posed. Aside from the
sorts of things we've seen, that could also set up strategies for persons with
problems, involving things like giving a specifically wrong version of the
problem first, getting a solution to that, and then changing the problem. If
the solution changes, then you can figure that maybe they're listening. Of
course there are no guarantees involved at all. The idea is what kinds of
things do people have to latch onto, that, furthermore, they do seem to
latch onto?
In a way, you could ask what would be the difference if he designed it for
her or not? It appears that if in offering a solution you can show that it's a
solution devised for just this person, then they will routinely feel happier with
it than they will if you deliver it as soon as they say "hello, " though you could
perfectly well do that. And indeed it's well known among medical doctors
that, while you can often diagnose a patient as they walk into the room, before
they've even sat down at your desk, i.e. , you can look at them and see what
specific disease they have, you will normally ask them for a set of symptoms
and ask them such sorts of questions as will indicate that you're attending
their proposed symptoms with care before you tell them what your diagnosis
is, since their problem is how in the world are they to believe what you're
saying. So I'm not arguing that the solution is better that seems personally
designed and is thereby asessable as 'better, ' but that there are such
procedures, and one can make use of a variety of otherwise available
conversational features.
 May 1 0
Agent-client interaction
I want to introduce some considerations, which will turn out to be relevant to
this particular conversation, that involve some of the sorts of possible
differences in two-party, caller-called conversations when one party is
speaking as an agent of some organization - by which I mean that in the
conversation they are in some way doing the organization's business - the
other being in some way a client. And in this case we plainly have a situation
where somebody is not calling this Mr Smith but the organization he works
in, and he certainly treats the call as having that character in the first instance,
in the way in which he identifies himself - where presumably were you calling
him at his home he wouldn't identify himself the way he does, i.e. , "This is
Mr Smith of the Emergency Psychiatric Center, can I help you?" Now, that
status of his matters for more than how he introduces himself, and I want to
talk to some facets of that.
One relatively delicate way in which a facet of that appears in conversation
is the promonimal way that a party refers to themselves. So that, for example,
if you call a store and say "Do you have any potatoes?" then on the one hand
it's not unlikely that the party you're speaking to will say "No we don't" not
"No I don't, " and on the other hand it's also likely that when you tell another
what happened you'll say "They didn't have any" not "He didn't have any. "
So, in a noticeable way, though only two parties have participated, the
third-person reference to one of them will be a plural. One can say, e.g . ,
"They weren't (or were) helpful" a s compared to preserving the singularity of
the person, ' 'He wasn't helpful. ' ' If one then were to think of 'first and second
person, ' 'plural and singular, ' etc. , those sorts of facts might be puzzling. But
a simple solution to it is to say that 'we' and 'they' are not only plural
references, but also, among other things, 'organizational references,' where
their organizational status operates independently of whether the number
relationship - plural or singular - happened to be present for the person or
persons being described. So, attending the fact that an agent of an
organization is being talked to or of, locates an otherwise anomalous feature
of conversation, i.e. , that some person is referred to as 'they' when he ought
to be referred to as 'he, ' and he ought to refer to himself as T and not 'we, '
in the supposable way that grammar works. There happen to be other ways
in which one can and does use 'we' and 'they' when doing singular reference;
I introduced this only to say that there are relatively delicate and technical
ways that, that an agent of an organization is being dealt with, matters for
conversation.
What I want ultimately to get to is, roughly, that it seems that one possible
eventuality of this conversation might be, she's called and said "I need help"

39 1
392 Part VI
and he's said "Go to a clinic, " that she then says "Okay" or "No" and that's
that. That is to say, it appears that what he is prepared to do at the outset of
the conversation is to offer that sort of help, i.e. , help her to find a place that
will give her help. Now it doesn't turn out to come to that. And I want to
raise as an issue, how can she get him to do differently than he seems initially
prepared to do? And that he is an agent of an organization may be variously
relevant. That is, he could say to her " Look, that's all my job is. I'm here to
tell you where to go. If you don't want to go there, well, I've done my job, "
but on the other hand there may be organizational considerations usable to get
him to do more than he's initially prepared to do, and some of those could be
readily extracted.
Suppose that this conversation is one on which he's going to make a report,
i.e. , it looks like while participating in the conversation he's taking some sorts
of notes on it, if only to check various things off - age, sex, occupation, etc. ,
and also presumably such things as if it looks serious or not. And one can feel
rather certain that there must also be a place to note the disposition of the call,
i.e. , "I advised her to go to County Hospital and she said yes," where, on the
other hand he might have to note, " I advised such-and-such and she
refused. " Now, one thing the place to note 'disposition of the call' does is to
provide a way that the organization can assess his work. So if, after some time,
someone were to look at the series of papers he'd returned, and some
reasonable proportion of them said "I advised such-and-such and they
refused," then the question of whether he was doing his job well might be
raised. And now suppose that he were to get her name also - which definitely
becomes a non-happening only when the conversation ends, i.e. , for the course
of his participation in the conversation he can't be sure he won't get her
name - the name would also serve as a datum in considering the disposition
of the call. That is to say, if it turned out that he had put in some names and
those names appeared on the coroner's list of people who had possibly
committed suicide, then the question of whether he had done his job right
would surely be raised.
That is to say, to be sure he has some considerable leverage over her with
regard to treating her as someone whose fate does not implicate his own, i.e. ,
he could write up a report which indicated she was hopeless. But if his reports
showed that more frequently than others' reports, then it seems reasonable to
suppose that although the organization would back him up in various
instantial cases, it would make him justify his presence in it rather more
seriously than were he able to propose " I suggested such-and-such and it was
accepted' ' or were he to have a long list of names none of which turned up on
suicide lists. Now, particularly where careers are involved, those sheets can
matter a good deal. They can be used to decide whether to promote
somebody, whether to fire them, etc. And it's also possible that a client can
know or suspect that, and can use it to gain some leverage with the person
they're dealing with, insofar as they can bring the possible disposition into
focus as one that would not be happy for the organizational agent.
Plainly there are also other techniques available to a client, to affect the
 May 1 0 393
position o f the agent they deal with . They can write a letter t o the organization
afterwards saying "I spoke to Mr Smith and he was very helpful , " or a
complaining letter. And in the case of suicides it' s imaginable that they can do
rather more drastic things, e.g. , include in the suicide note that they had , as
a last attempt, called this organization and the person there was altogether
callous, and so, coming to the end of that, they figured they had no
alternatives . Now that wouldn ' t do too much good for the public relations of
the organization , and probably wouldn ' t be altogether consistent with the
continuation of the career there of the particular person who happened to deal
with them . Furthermore of course, it can be relevant to the future references,
etc. , that they get. So it ' s not simply that they might lose a job here, but they
might also then be kind of marked thereafter - particularly for someone in
clinical work. In short, there are ways for a client to mobilize the locus of a
person in an organization in the client's interests - without ever having to deal
with the agent ' s sympathy . That ' s quite a different matter.
In that regard we might notice a particular feature of this conversation,
which is that at the beginning of it the lady who is calling is crying . And one
callous way of conceiving an import to her crying is something like this: This
phone call takes place at some time . Any phone call to an organization takes
place at some time. A question is, in what way does the time the call is placed
figure in it? For many calls it can be altogether incidental , e.g. , ' ' I ' d like to
have a checkup on my teeth, when can I get an appointment? " or ' ' I ' m
considering a trip t o Alaska, what' s the situation about reservations? " In
which case, things like the hour you call or whether it was toward the end of
the week might be altogether incidental considerations .
Now this place is open for calls 24 hours a day. It happens that a specific
problem of people who are suicidal concerns others taking them seriously,
where, to approach someone and say ' ' I ' m feeling suicidal " is not necessarily
to be believed , in which case it may be best to only make an approach when
you can bring off the utterly current character of your feelings . Among ways
to do that would be to call in a state of specific emotional trouble. To call up
crying is at least to say that when I called matters for me, i . e . , the problem
that I ' m telling you about is a problem I have now. And of course her crying
will quite unavoidably be heard as having to do with the call, i . e . , it would
be altogether ludicrous were she to say, sobbing over the phone, " Look, I have
a suicide problem . Excuse the crying , I just stubbed my toe. Don ' t worry
about it, it has nothing to do with this. " So, crying can bring off not simply
the seriousness of her business but its current seriousness, and can be a way to
attempt to affect its disposition . Calling up crying, one can hope that
somebody won ' t say " I can get you an appointment for next Fall, " but that
they will come to feel that unless they do something soon you might be a
trouble on their record . Crying isn ' t the only way in which she shows the
current character of her trouble. At one point she says " I just drove home
from somebody ' s house where I was being ((sarcastically)) really gay, and on
the way home I fell apart. " Where that business of giving its local history is
affiliated to making the thing now-serious, where making the thing now-
394 Part VI
serious can provide some sorts of bases for the other attempting a disposition
now. And again, without their having any particular sympathy for the client
or in any way getting involved with the client, dealing with them purely as
someone in an organization for which records are made by them, the use of
which records are part of the way they're assessed as to their current and
future state in that organization or other such organizations.
So there are ways in which, that somebody is situated in an organization -
which is characteristically thought of by us as a position of strength,
untouchability, impersonality, etc. - makes that person available to manip­
ulation by an otherwise weak client; in our case, somebody who is suicidal.
Somebody who is suicidal can, calling some organization, have some sorts of
power over the persons that they just happen to deal with, by virtue of that
person's position in the organization. And they might use those powers, and
that might affect how they get dealt with. And the idea is to see what sorts
of strategic matters are available to an interactant with regard to that they're
dealing with someone in an organization. In that regard, then, one can see as
a kind of a bluff, that Smith says "If you're not willing to work at this and
help yourself in a clinic or somewhere how can I help you over the telephone?' '
Where that might get her to feel that if she won't acknowledge being willing
to go to a clinic, then she's not g-oing to get help over the telephone, and she
has no place else to turn. On the other hand, she could see it as 'He can't get
away with that. Our lives are now locked together in some way, and whatever
he thinks of me he's not going to let me off the line so fast, ' so that she can
call his bluff, and when asked "How can I help you over the telephone?" say
"You can't. I guess nobody can . " He won't hang up.
I'm trying to focus on how it .is that, where there's an initially proposed
solution, " Go to a clinic, " some sorts of interests of the person proposing that
can be mobilized to get them to propose otherwise. And in the first instance
I wanted to deal with such sorts of interests as have nothing to do with the
caller, and have only to do with the career contingencies of the one who is
giving that advice and who is prepared perhaps to give only that advice. Now
plainly there's more to the world than that, but the idea is to see that there
is that. For one, that's what people have to start out with, i.e. , what she has
to start out with is that it's Mr Smith of the Emergency Psychiatric Center,
and they're on the phone so she can't use other vehicles for getting him
interested in the case.
And clients will routinely try immediately to mobilize the agent to interest
in their case, and a variety of rather common occurrences should be considered
in that light. For example, first therapeutic sessions are a special sort of event,
where a first session is not necessarily a first in a series, but may be the basis
on which a therapist decides to take or not take a case. And a common thing
for those, where the possible client is female and the therapist is male, is that
she will check out if she can mobilize the male interest of the therapist in her.
One altogether simple thing is to make some move toward smoking a
cigarette at the beginning of the session; an unnoticeable thing, since at the
beginning of a session persons are, after all, nervous. The key problem is, is
 May 1 0 395
he going to light it or not? If he lights it, then that suggests that other than
the professional relationship can be actuated between them. That's not to say
that he's going to become a lover or anything like that, but one can count on
those energies as available for use. And senior therapists will often twit the
young therapists they're supervising, if, e.g. , they're watching a videotape of
the first session, with "Well why did you light her cigarette?" or "What did
you feel like when she reached for a cigarette?' ' in order to see whether the
therapist under supervision has any interest in the case (some people figuring
if you have an interest in the person you might have an interest in the case,
and others figuring the reverse) . This is distinctive from the conventional issue
of that males light females' cigarettes, where if one refuses to light the
cigarette then one is being less of a male. What is involved here is the kind
of way that a male can be attending the female's body for its movements,
which would be something he would discover when she happened to make
some gesture and he found himself reaching for his matches, i.e. , psychi­
atrically he could learn that he wasn't just dealing with some client, but was
attending to pleasing this woman.
Let me just note that the call has an incredible economy to it, not only in the
sense that she sets out a series of demands and constraints on those demands,
like that she has a date coming in half an hour, and that she wants certain
sorts of help and refuses to get other sorts of help, where the call proceeds
within those constraints and finishes in time and finishes with her getting what
she wanted out of it. But also there's a sense of its economy in the way in
which events in the call are turned to the specific business of the call. So, for
example, at one place we get:

pt My father used to say unless I change no man'd want to touch me

with a ten foot pole
dr uh huh so you decided to prove it
pt laughs you're making me laugh I must be feeling better.
dr laughs
pt laughs

So she laughs and says "You're making me laugh, I must be feeling better. "
Now the laughing can be something interpretable simply by reference to that
someone says something possibly funny and someone else laughs. Laughs are
not routinely talked of in terms of some course-of-the-interaction character
they might have, or for the issue of what-you're-doing-to-me by reference to
the business of the interaction. But here she does her laugh, apparently a
spontaneous laugh, and then gives an interpretation of it having to do with
its position in this conversation - this conversation under its narrow formu­
lation of 'I want help from you now; such help as has me feeling better by the
end of this, so I can go out on my date.' And the question I've been trying
to get to here is, why in the world should he care about that, and how does
she bring him to care about that, so that in fact, in the end, the two of them
have accomplished that.
 May 1 7
Poetics.· Spatialized characterizations
I'll start this time by noticing, for a variety of different types of things, some
similarities. Within some 26 lines of talk we get three characterizations of
facets of a course of life:

pt I dont know Mr. Smith I I guess that I got to a point where I all
therapy's done for me was give me a good fat clear look at myself

a bit further down:

pt you go through a period where its everybody else's fault and you
understand its just fine as long as you can blame everyone else

and further on:

pt Its like everybody else is somebody or something and somewhere

along the line I muffed up

These are three temporal descriptors in a fashion; characterizations of time in

the sense of time in a course of a life. They're each perfectly good as
characterizations of time in a course of life. They have a common feature
which is separate from that, i.e. , each of them distinctly spatialize the
characterization. They do that not simply with the use of words that are
alternatively temporal or spatial, like 'point, ' 'period, ' 'line,' but, where such
words could be made more temporal with the use of 'when,' "where" is used
in each of them: "You go through a period where . . . , ' ' "I got to a point
where . . . , ' ' " . . . and somewhere along the line . . . " Plainly enough, one
could have course of life descriptions that were not temporal and spatial; they
could be purely temporal. Here's a group, each of them is spatialized, i.e. ,
turned to a spatial sense. So that's just a something.
Now let me shift to another sort of thing present in the conversation. There
are some more or less neat idioms used, and I want to offer a partial list of
them. On page 2 :

dr do you have any friends or relatives around?

pt nope not anybody I'd ever tell this to I'd
SCARE THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF THEM.

On page 4, rejecting clinical therapy:

396
 May 1 7 397
pt I dont think it would help me
dr well uh
pt It would TAKE ME DOWN A STEP FURTHER

Again on page 4:
dr if you're not willing to work at this and help yourself in a clinic or
somewhere how can I help you over the telephone?
pt you cant I guess nobody can Was just a WILD (laugh) STAB IN
THE DARK

On page 9 :
pt I'm not perfect but god damn it I've GOT SOMETHING ON THE
BALL

On page 1 1 :

pt My father used to say unless I change no man'd want to TOUCH

ME WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE
And on page 1 7 , again and finally refusing to give her name, she says:

pt I'm kinda HIDING UNDER A PAPER BAG at the moment.

These are not all the idioms or proverbials used in the conversation, but
these are sprinkled across the conversation from its beginning to its end, and
there is a notable facet to each of these, i.e. , each involves an idiom which is
Jpatialized. Obviously there are many idioms which do not have spatializa­
tion to them. So now there are two domains which are kind of separate from
each other, one having to do with course of life characterizations and the other
having to do with idioms. Both of these are spatialized. Does it mean
anything?
Let me now turn to the initial problem in the conversation, i.e. , hearing
him:
pt I cant hear you.
dr I see Can you hear me now?
pt Barely WHERE ARE YOU, in the womb?
Now one might not at all attend that the initial possible solution to why she
can't hear him has anything intriguing in it, but again, plainly enough one
could have another way of formulating the difficulty in hearing than by
reference to "Where are you?," i.e. , trouble on the line is a more obvious
thing than distance.
The next problem that emerges has to do with her hesitancy to tell him
about her problems, and she poses that as "Now that you're here:"
3 98 Part VI
dr Tell me about your problems
pt I uh NOW THAT YOU'RE HERE I'm embarrassed to talk
about it.

Clearly there are special ways that he is "here, " i.e. , it has to do with 'now
that we are in contact, ' "here" being a way of spatializing a co-presence which
is in the first instance an abstract co-presence, i.e. , over the phone.
Later, with respect to men who like her:

pt the only time that I have anybody FLIP OVER ME is when I'm not
interested in them
dr uh huh
pt An Its a challenge and I cant GO ROUND ALL MY LIFE
being a challenge

And other problems which she poses are posed in partially spatialized terms.
Also, this spatialization is something that Mr Smith turns out to be employing
as well. Whether he begins to employ it by virtue of her use of it, I have no
idea. In any event, I at least suppose that neither of them has any idea that
there is anything spatial going on in the conversation in such a way as it is here
going on. Let me mention some of the things he does. On page 1 3 ,
characterizing himself:

pt You sound very young to know so much

dr ho huh huh
pt hhhhh
dr well like you, I'VE BEEN AROUND too

On page 14, characterizing her circumstances:

dr yeah well YOU'RE IN A SPOT NOW at your age and in your

situation that you've gotta MAKE SOME KIND OF A MOVE

Where "make some kind of a move" as a way of describing what she has to
do, i.e. , make changes, has a spatial character, in part perhaps by virtue of
"you're in a spot" and whatever else has been transpiring, in which the world
has been surfaced and flattened out and rounded, and that's what's being used
as the source of characterizations of whatever in it. Also on page 1 4 :

pt yeuh well you know after talking to you I dont feel quite so much
right now
dr uh huh
pt You know why cuz you told me you hated yourself once and you
sound so confident hhhh
dr heh eh
pt laughing
 May 1 7 399
dr well I feel like I'VE GONE THROUGH IT AND COME OUT
THE OTHER SIDE

I suppose one could think of the conversation as an exercise or a game, but

you must know that it's no such thing - in part by virtue of the fact that, e.g. ,
just reading through the transcript no one ever sees any such thing happening
in it. And for all we know, lots of conversations may be as involved in some
way of formulating the world, where whatever it happens that you're saying
now, you do it in a way that is just running through the whole thing.
Now I don't have much to say as to what this adds up to, and what I'm
going to point out now I do not offer as an explanation or as more
central - though I imagine anyone would be willing to make more of it than
I think we can - and that is to focus a bit on the way she talks about her
suicide problem. Among the reasons she gives for suicide are "I just want out
of the world anyway if that's the way it is who wants to be in this world" and
"oh I I guess suicide's an escape too" and she talks about "in church you
know they teach that you die and you go to heaven and then you become one
of God's children? and uh that sounds pretty nice; " that "they keep teaching
you, you know, to be with God and I really want to be with him. " I suppose
one has heard that kind of talk without seeing that it can have a certain sort
of sense, under a spatialized view of what dying involves, i.e. , going from
somewhere to somewhere. It is perhaps by virtue of a spatialized view of
circumstances that one can treat dying not, as one of the options has it, as the
end, no 'you' after, but as going somewhere and thereby an escape. Under
that kind of consistency suicide becomes a voyage, a trip, one way to get away
from somewhere to somewhere else.
An argument was made in some work, discussing The Inferno by Dante, a
book from many centuries ago which gives a very detailed characterization of
Hell, and where the people are located in it who have committed the various
sins. The argument was about the use of Hell in Medieval literature, and
proposes that the people who used it did not have a literal notion of Heaven
or Hell but that the conception was used as a way of organizing the sins that
are to be avoided, i.e. , 'placing' each sin such that one could keep in mind the
things one should avoid doing. And if that's so, then one isn't to suppose that
the Late Medieval-Renaissance Christians specifically believed in a Heaven or
Hell, but that they used a spatializing technique, which was at that time
attractive by virtue of, e.g . , New World discoveries and interest in maps,
etc. - as a way of organizing and keeping in mind, moral issues.
There are, then, some apparent virtues to spatializing. Whether it's that by
virtue of a spatialization it looks reasonable to talk about death as going ·

somewhere, I don't know, but it does seem plain that with the stuff I pointed
out here, and masses of other stuff in this conversation - and perhaps, for
other conversations, this or other simple such notions - one may find oneself
collecting an enormous proportion of the characterizations present in a
conversation, present in consistent ways, ways that seem to provide both
problems and solutions. That is, a suicide problem getting formed up within
400 Part VI
a spatial format can perhaps give one the notion that what we want is to get
out of this world and go somewhere else, and that that's an achievable thing,
where lacking that spatial conception no such solution may be available. But
whether the spatial format of the suicide problem is core, or is just derivative
from the rest, or gets the various participants into a mind where the possible
absurdity of what's being proposed is not visible via the way in which the
language has now put them into such terms as make it a reasonable proposal,
are things which I'm simply in no position to say.
But I do take it that, that one classification of terms - in this case
spatial - can collect such a large amount of one conversation - a long
conversation going on about all sorts of things - is worth some attention. And
it is a different kind of organizing than I've talked about so far in the course.
We again see a way that large, disconnected, about-different-things, by­
different-parties events have exceedingly simple similarities.
And furthermore, I at least suppose for now that nobody in the
conversation at all notices this organization. I guess that, that I say it goes
unnoticed has to do with that I'd imagine that if it were noticed anywhere it
would begin to be picked up on, giggled over, treated as embarrassing, and
various other things that people begin to do in a conversation when something
is just happening in it, beyond their control, that neither of them figures either
of them is responsible for. That is to say, as when they begin to see puns
popping up in a conversation, or when they find themselves using some odd
word again and again, they do things that bring it to each others' attention.
Now, how something as prominent, as striking, as overwhelmingly present as
that goes unnoticed is a question. And it isn't particularly obscure, nor do you
need a very abstract view of things in order to find this.
Now I'm wondering, is it possible that if someone does such a thing this
much and the other does not notice it, that the other will not do it also?
Supposing that one talks in such a way - spatializing in this case; I have no
idea of what the list of classes are that can be used to so fill a conversation -
but supposing that one talks in that way and doesn't see it, and the other
doesn't see it either, then is it not sort of inevitable that the other person
nonetheless now begins to exhibit an attention to it in some way, i.e. , begins
themselves to form problems up, to characterize events in the way this
Mr Smith ends up doing?
In that regard, there's a kind of routine observation made about something
that happens to people who are crazy, i.e. , they get the idea that other people
are controlling their minds. Now that came up as a topic when I was working
on a piece of data that involved somebody saying "Remember that car you
had?" It sounds like a question, and you could think of it as just a question.
In some ways it's not that at all, it's a command which says "Remember that
car you had. ' ' And now you find that the car you had pops into your head,
and you say "Yeah," not, however, "Yeah I was remembering the car,"
because the car wasn't on your mind at all. So if we wanted to know the
sources for people having the view that others control their thoughts, then one
kind of transparent thing is someone asking you if you remember something.
 May 1 7 40 1
The first thing you know is that you remember it; they ' re telling you what to
do with your head . And it ' s imaginable that somebody could go through a
conversation like this one and have a sense that the other took over their
mind , i . e . , the other person ' s spatial terminology has now become how you
are thinking whatever you ' re thinking about, across a series of things you ' re
thinking about, i . e . , while topics change.
And a thing we can come away with is that people aren ' t crazy for thinking
that other people control their minds. That could not be a source of their
craziness. That could only be a matter of wisdom . Now, people may well be
differentially sensitive to it, and indeed those who feel it may only feel it and
not know why it ' s so . Plainly we go through conversations like this figuring
we were being spontaneous and our own person , when some immense
amount of the things we say are cast by reference to a way that the other
talked - that they didn ' t even know that they were using . But it is imaginable
that somebody could feel queasy about it, feel that they ' re talking in a way
that ' s not their way of talking . You feel that you are not yourself - maybe
' phoney , ' maybe somehow something else . And what I ' m wondering is
whether if you had a tape of the conversation you might not find that in ways
like this the other has taken over your mind . Of course it might have been
educational - you might have found a different way of thinking about things
you ' ve thought about - but the thing is that you wouldn ' t in the first instance
know what had happened . If you knew what had happened you might well
have picked up on it, giggling over it or whatever.
Again though, and as a further lesson for this , certainly it would be silly to
take the complaints of crazy people too lightly. It' s much more interesting to
consider whether what they say is at all so, not how is it nonsense . And for a
thing that ' s very dramatically present and has been much talked about - the
notion that others control my mind , influence my thoughts , etc. - there are
simple and transparent ways in which that ' s obviously so . And thereby,
people could not be crazy for asserting it. Why they feel it and no one else
does? That ' s another question . I ' m saying that they ' re right. People do control
their minds , and not theirs only. Now I ' m not saying that they ' re right for the
reasons they think they ' re right, but certainly one might explain a feeling in
an incorrea way and nonetheless have the feeling right. You can ' t , after all ,
complain about things like " Remember that car you had ? " You can' t say
" Oh , go to hell . " Nor can you not remember. It' s a nice sort of power to
consider.
 21 May
Closing; Communicating a feeling;
Doctor as 'stranger'

This fragment is from the New Year's Eve conversation we've been working
on. I'm going to talk about some facets of its dose.

pt well well gee thank you I urn I'm terribly now I'm very
ashamed of myself that I bothered you but I was in the house and
I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it another minute I just cant
dr uh huh
pt Then I thought you know its like I know you're a stranger but
its the feeling that there is somebody that would just just listen for
a minute
dr right
pt And I didnt know anybody that would even understand what I
was talking about and that makes you want to do it even more
dr right thats right
pt there isnt anybody in the world's gonna even know what I'm
saymg
dr uh hJih uh huh Thats right I understand that an you really
didnt bother me because thats why I am here for thats what I'm
here for
pt well
dr so I'm glad to have helped you I wish I knew who I was talking
to
pt hhhhh oh I
dr really if you would be willing to give me your name I dont give it to
anybody I just file it and uh If you should call back again we
pt Yud say theres that nut again
dr right heh heh
pt laughs
dr we'd just know a little more about you so that we could help better
pt I really rather not cause right now I'm a little ashamed of
myself and a little embarrassed
dr alright if you need
pt I'm kinda hiding under a paper bag at the moment
dr heh heh if n you need us again you'll call back wont you?

402
 May 2 1 403
pt I will and I just thank you so much I think I can go wash my face
now and put on my pretty dress n
dr good and remember Wilshire Methodist
pt Wilshire Methodist yeh I will
pt n What do I do just go in and ask about it huh?
dr Yes I believe I'd give em a telephone call and ask em how to do it
pt Yeah
dr An I think you'll find help there
pt I sure thank you and I certainly wish you a very happy new year
dr thanks very much and the same to you
pt thank you
dr good by
pt good byyy

We are, with this section, fully into the closing of the conversation. Now
this closing bears some notable relation to the talk that just precedes it, and
a first thing I want to point to involves us in looking at that. The talk that
precedes this closing concerns another scene, therapy that she was in, about
which she says that it stopped at an inappropriate time.

dr this means you havent gone far enough in therapy

pt I stopped at a very bad time I know I did (m hmm) But I uh
job situation got moving and I I stopped right when I was beginning
well I would a been better if I had no therapy then to stop when I
stopped (dr yeh sounds like it) Cause I stopped right when I was looking
at the whole gory mess (dr uh huh) Before it started you know Before I
started a clean it up a little
dr uh huh
pt Was like a surgeon getting down to the disease you know and all of
a sudden he opens you up and there's the disease whooah yeay
dr he he he
pt He knows what it is and quits there ha laughs
dr yeah I suppose that thats it
pt laughs
dr thats a good example, thats good
pt well well gee thank you . . .

So when talk about the therapy she was in stops, we get into the close of this
conversation. And it is contrastive with the talked-about close, by virtue of the
way in which this close does not have the sort of inappropriateness as the prior
one did, i.e. , this close occurs, not before some help, but after some help. So
the positioning of the close here does not just come about by reference to one
way in which it appropriately could be placed, i.e. , after she's gotten some
help, but it is also an ending that is positioned after a discussion of the
positioning of endings.
404 Part VI
I want now to point out some aspects of a relationship between the start of
this closing and earlier events in the conversation. One kind of marked,
relatively formal thing can be noted by comparing her report now, and her
report at the beginning of the conversation, of her feelings before the
conversation. On page 2 she says:

pt I've got a date coming in a half hour and I (sob)

dr I see
pt I cant go through with it I cant go through with the evening I cant
(sniffle)

and here she says:

pt I was in the house and I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it
another minute I just cant

Plainly, a sequence is reproduced, roughly involving an initial - for a hearer

eliptical or allusive - statement ("I can't go through with it" and "I just can't
last"), an elaboration on that ("I can't go through with the evening" and "I
just can't go it another minute"), and then an emphatic end ("I can't" and
" I just can't").
Now the replication of that triplet raises questions as to whether that
format has anything interesting in it. Is it just a remembered version of what
she'd earlier said, or does it capture something else? Like, does it in some way
capture something having to do with how she felt? I want to point to
something that suggests, yes, there are neat things it captures. One such thing
is plainly present in the first version. What we have here is that the initial
formulation of the thing, " I can't go through with it," contains a pronoun,
" it, " which is then explicated. I want to suggest that a statement like "I can't
go through with it' ' may reflect how the feeling was felt, in contrast to the
assertion "I can't go through with the evening" which is involved in a
characterization for a listener, not a characterization for the speaker-feeler, of
the thing being reported.
Here's the kind of thing I'm thinking about. Among the great, now 'early, '
explorers in the novel of inner states was Virginia Woolf. And a way she
differentiated between the way the world was felt and observed, stood in
contrast to novels of the time where, if a known person entered a room, then
the person was identified: " Mr Jones came into the room," "Her husband
came into the room. " Now that kind of identification serves very well for a
reader. The question is, does that kind of identification reproduce the way a
person who is in the room, who knows the person entering, would have
formulated it for themselves? Virginia Woolf argues that that's not so, and
her characterizations of people entering a room involve things like "He
walked into the room," the pronoun "he" involving that she knew who he
was such that she didn't have to pick some identity of his in order to
characterize him. That is to say, she identifies him, not for the telling of it, but
 May 2 1 40 5
for that 1 know him, it being enough for purposes of identification for the
reader, to indicate by ' 'he' ' that he might be known, and in various other ways
indicate who he might be, e.g., by the way the person who is now having their
consciousness explored in the novel would feel about him and things they
would notice about him.
The idea then is that things like non-complete, non-objective, non­
nominalized references do perhaps reproduce in some way, how a person
having feelings that they're not in the first instance having by reference to their
communicatability, has them. And if what she's trying to do is say how she
felt or what she thought, then a sequence which goes, "I can't go through
with it, I can't go through with the evening" would involve first the felt thing
and then some explication of it to the hearer. The upshot then is that a
sequence in which an amplification occurs second and follows a something
that, for a hearer, needs to be amplified, may well be at least a way that a
person reporting on feelings and thoughts of their own can bring off that this
was something like what their initial thoughts were. Such a sequence does,
then, have a point to it, in its connection to such proposals as "at some point
I thought, " "at some point I felt, " discriminating a narrative designed
primarily for its listener following what's being said, from one designed also,
but designed to first say how it appeared to me then.
And plainly things like that are used by participants to a conversation in
order to elicit interest, etc. , by doing what would be heard as 'musing aloud, '
e.g. , "I wonder what he meant by that, " thereby getting a question from
someone who makes themselves an overhearer of it, taking it that they may
not have been addressed. Where the format of not identifying the 'who' or
explicating the 'what, ' etc. , is one that occurs, and is affiliated with 'private
thought. '
I want now to notice that in her thankings she apologizes for having
'bothered' him, and talks of him as a 'stranger. '

pt now I'm very ashamed of myself that I bothered you but I was in
the house and I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it another minute
I just cant
dr uh huh
pt Then I thought you know its like I know you're a stranger but
its the feeling that there is somebody that would just just listen for a
minute

I'm interested in the connection between "stranger" and "bothered, " and the
way in which he deals with that. And I want to make certain kinds of points
about some selectional possibilities that permit one to see the kind of directed
work that goes into what looks like an altogether natural characterization of
something.
First of all there is an obvious relationship between calling what you did 'a
bother' and calling the person to whom it's a bother a 'stranger. ' For one, not
anyone who is a candidate for being called a stranger will be called a stranger.
406 Part VI
That is to say, if a stranger is thought of as someone who doesn't know you,
then plainly there are lots of people who could give one help whom one
wouldn't call a 'stranger. ' If you broke your leg and went to a hospital, then
you wouldn't thank the doctor who fixed your leg for fixing the leg of a
stranger. If you walked into a department store and the sales personnel were
very helpful, you wouldn't say "Thanks for doing this for an absolute
stranger. ' ' There are all sorts of people one encounters, who do one good, who
are not conceived as 'strangers' though to be sure they're strangers.
If one now tries to figure who among those who are strangers gets called
a stranger and who doesn't get called a stranger, then plainly with a little
thought one could see at least that somebody who could be called a stranger
is not called a stranger when what they did is what they hold themselves out
professionally to do. The doctor or dentist or butcher or policeman, etc., who
does a service to some previously unknown person is, for that encounter,
'doctor, ' 'dentist, ' etc . , and not 'stranger. ' And connected to that can be that
what they did is not a 'bother. ' They may be thanked, but they're not to be
thanked for the bother - though were they to do something beyond the call
of duty, then it could be talked of as a bother. For that matter, someone who
is not a stranger would perhaps not be thanked for the bother. These terms
are then involved in ways of formulating social relationships; 'bother' being
ways of characterizing things done between persons related in some way,
i.e. , related as 'strangers' but not as, say, 'professional-client. ' In a way,
then, calling it a 'bother' is focussing on that we might be intimates but
we're not. What I mean by 'we might be intimates' is 'I'm not thinking of
you as somebody like a doctor or dentist, I'm thinking of you as a
candidate for someone I could know, and you're not, and therefore it's a
bother. '
In that regard, at least one way she comes to call him a stranger has to do
with the way she puts together how she's come to call him in the first place,
that having to do with that she's looking for "somebody" and her friends
can't be called.

pt sob I want somebody to talk me out of it I really do

dr uh huh
pt Cause I cant call any of my friends or anybody cause they just gonna
say "oh that's silly" or "that's stupid" I guess

Now, consistent with a conception of looking to 'somebody, ' finding 'friends'

ineligible, then the group left are 'strangers, ' persons she sees herself turning
to by reference to not being able to tum to others. A characteristic that
'stranger' involves, then, is that it is not merely one way of characterizing
some person, an alternative to, e.g . , 'doctor, ' but it's an alternative charac­
terization in the sense that somebody is called a 'stranger' when one would
have liked to have turned to somebody else.
Now, he is not treating himself as a 'stranger. ' Nor is he treating himself
as a 'friend, ' but as someone who's doing "what I'm here for. ' '
 May 2 1 407
dr Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because
thats why I am here for thats what I'm here for

And someone who's doing what he's here for is not a 'stranger' though you
don't know him in the first instance. In that regard, there is an issue of their
mutual agreement on the terms of the contact, she calling him a 'stranger'
while he may be conceiving of himself as something else. And that can make
for such issues, in a closing, as that the offered terms of a thanks might be
rejected by the recipient. If, for example, one thanks a stranger for the bother,
he might say, "It was no bother at all and you owe me ten dollars, " it turning
out that it's his business to tow cars, and here you're trying to make
something of a gesture to an unknown Samaritan. So the negotiation over the
terms of the closing can be connected to such sorts of things as ' 'Do I thank
you or pay you?" aside from do I thank you and pay you, do I thank you and
not pay you, do I not thank you, etc . , where some people wouldn't get either
thanks or payment, e.g. , if they were some sort of friends doing something
expectable for a friend.
Taking a slightly different facet of the issue of 'a stranger, ' there's a
relationship berween 'stranger' and 'bother' that can involve that what the
person you're calling a 'stranger' did was something like 'help,' i.e. , you're
not merely reporting on somebody in some conversation with you. So that if,
e.g . , you got into conversation with someone on the subway, then you might
not report it as "I was talking to this stranger on the subway" but "I was
talking to this guy on the subway, " nothing being reported but what we
talked about. Where, then, if somebody on the subway helped you, it might
well be that they would now be called a 'stranger, ' that being kind of
intimately related to that what you're saying about them is that they helped
you, where 'stranger' then focusses on that the deed they did was something
they weren't relationally obliged to do.
The whole thing then gets a funny blowup when one way that persons
measure the moral state of society is in terms of whether strangers help others,
'strangers' being persons who, the fact that they help others makes it notable
that they are strangers and remarkable for them to do it. So people talk about
New York or America or whatever going downhill by reference to that
strangers don't help people; again, with that strong connection between the
formulation of a somebody as a 'stranger' and the talked-about thing being
the giving or not giving of help. So we're getting sharper and sharper
constraints on 'stranger' and its use, even though plainly a vast number of
people are eligible to be called 'stranger' in a vast number of interactions. It
isn't, then, as though nothing is happening when someone calls someone a
' stranger, ' by virtue of the fact that after all they are a stranger. Involved in
the choice of that term are matters having to do with its alternative status,
that help was involved, that one is taking someone to be a non-professional.
And those matters can themselves be operative for the other ways that one
then orients to someone so called, i.e. , thanking them for the bother and
things lik� that.
408 Part VI
Now, insofar as what he ' s doing is characterizing himself as ' not a
stranger, ' there are, as I noted before, issues about the terms of his treatment
of her appreciation . It is then of some interest that he says both 'it's no bother'
and ' that ' s what I ' m here for, ' which are quite separable things . One could say
" I t ' s no bother, I really enjoyed it, " or "I got a lot out of it too , " etc. The
' that ' s what I ' m here for' is a different way of making it ' no bother' than the
others . It has , then , a slightly curious relationship to what follows it, i . e . , an
acceptance of the thanks, " So I ' m glad to have helped you . "

dr Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because

thats why I am here for thats what I ' m here for
pt well
dr so I ' m glad to have helped you

This might look like merely a matter of ' you thanked me so I accept your
thanks' but it turns out to be something quite different in this conversation .
Let me work toward that by noticing first that things like that are often other
than sheer etiquettal relationships where you thank me and I thank you for
your thanks . Then I want to notice that we get such a series at the end :

pt I sure thank you and I certainly wish you a very happy new year
dr thanks very much and the same to you
pt thank you

And those things can go on rather elaborately, depending , perhaps, upon

anybody' s wishes to go on with them .
Now a thing we can notice about this end thanking sequence is that she
does a thanks and then follows it with something that he can do a thanks for.
And the situation of parties exchanging thanks at the end of an interaction
which was plainly one-sided in some fashion, is of interest in that we can
notice that a party will , in doing thanks , somehow also get themselves into a
position of getting thanks . It happens here that there ' s an event, New Years ,
where happiness can be wished on this occasion, but the patterning of
that - that somebody having done something relatively effortful being
thanked , the thanker will find something to be thanked for in return - is of
some interest. Specifically, there are apparently some sorts of events that
should be exchanged, and for which, that they' re not exchanged can be a
trouble about them . A more dramatic such sort of thing is, e.g. , if somebody
says "I love you " then you don ' t merely say " Thanks, " or you shouldn' t , or
if you do then you ' re doing something different than an exchange.
And it is that potential of an initial thanks opening things up for an
exchange - which the thanker can set up or the thanked can set up, which
can end up with " Thanks for your service, " " Thanks for using our
service " - which is in this case exploited in his earlier acceptance of her
thanks, i . e . , ' ' I ' m glad to have helped you . " Having done his acceptance of
the thanks, he then uses the exchange issue to himself make a request whose
 May 2 1 409
fulfilment would then allow him to do a thanks , the request being now for her
name.

dr Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because

thats why I am here for thats what I ' m here for
pt well
dr so I ' m glad to have helped you I wish I knew who I was talking to

So that we can see here that via the exchange property as an appropriate
potentiality given the occurrence of a thanks, he sees in her thanks an
opportunity to himself do a request that she should comply with by virtue of
the fact that it will then permit him to do a return thanks . In a way she might
have forestalled that, had she earlier done not simply a thanks but a thanks
plus something which would directly end up with his doing a thanks. That
might have cut off the way in which he could sequentially use her thanks to
get his request done .
And of course the general situation is one where, having some request to
make of another you can , when you get into a conversation, hold off making
that request under the possibility that the other will ask you for something or
you will end up doing something for them, at which point your request stands
as something they can do for you in exchange for the thing that they just
acknowledge that you just did for them . And people routinely do offers when
they have some request in mind as well, i . e . , I ' ll do an offer, if you accept it
and thank me then I can have an occasion to do a request. So, what seems like
sheerly a form: " Thank you and have a happy new year, " " Thank you , "
involving as i t does the ' exchange' feature, can b e a serious part o f the business
of interaction, with one party awaiting and watching for chances to do a
request they have, by reference to that general principle that I ' ve raised : If you
can do something second, prefer to do it second .
 May 2 4
"Vh huh;" Questioner-preferred
answers
I want to deal with a couple of things which are otherwise not particularly
related, where the common interest for them is to give a kind of sequential
cast to some objects other than I have previously given them. The two
things are "Uh huh, " and some differences between "Yes" and "No" as
answers.
Starting off with " Uh huh," I had for a long time made the argument that
a business of "Uh huh" , was something that we talked of as serving as a
'continuer. ' The idea being that it said to the person who was speaking before
it that they could go on after it with whatever it is that they were talking
about. And that's I suppose a reasonable enough interpretation of what "Uh
huh" seems to have happening in its environment, i.e. , if you look at talk in
which it occurs, then somebody is talking about something, "Uh huh"
occurs, and they thereafter go on about whatever they were talking about.
And consulting your own sense of what you're doing with "Uh huh," then
you can figure you're saying 'go on. '
I essentially want to sharpen that picture up only a little bit and consider
the matter from only a slightly different angle. Now, we think of "Uh" as
doing something called 'filling a pause. ' It's not normally added, though I
guess it goes without saying, that the pause it fills is the pause in the talk of
the person who's speaking around it, i.e. , in the middle of your own
utterance, were you to pause, and choose to not have that pause filled with
silence, then you might do an "uh" there. There are indeed some issues about
that sort of way of conceiving it, but let me just use the notion 'pause filler'
to notice that with it, one might need to collect not just "uh" but "Uh huh"
and raise for consideration that what "Uh huh" does is to fill a pause in the
other person's talk. That is to say, "Uh huh" is the same thing as "uh,"
only it's done by you when the other person is talking, not when you're
talking.
Why bother to mention a difference like that? For one, there are intriguing
things about the use of "Uh huh" which the characterization of them as
saying 'go on' doesn't focus well enough upon. One such thing is the way that
"Uh huh" can be done within the talk of somebody else in such a way as to
have their talk fully bounded, i.e. , they talk, "Uh huh" occurs, and they talk
again, and there isn't any gap between speakers. "Uh huh" can in that sense
anticipate a possible pause. It doesn't occur after the other has paused, it
occurs at a place where they might now pause and fills that pause, and fills it

410
 May 24 41 1
in such a way as to have on its completion the other start up again. So a first
thing that we're adding about "Uh huh" is that a really kind of characteristic
place for it is within the talk of one speaker by another, done in such a way
as to have no gap on either side of it. And, equally characteristically, no
overlap between speakers on either side of it. And things that preserve that
feature 'no gap and no overlap between speakers' have a very large sort of
interest because it can then at least be asked, how can such things be done
spontaneously between speakers? That is, that with two or more people
talking they are able to so monitor their talking that they don't overlap and
also don't have a gap between utterances. Where by 'gap' I mean things that
can be as fine as one tenth of a second.
A second sort of thing about its use is that instead of its saying 'go on' to
a just prior speaker, "Uh huh" can be conceived of as noting that while the
speaker is now about to pause, he intends to go on. That is to say, the
speaker's talk so far is available as merely syntactically complete. And
routinely, after the "Uh huh" speakers continue a sentence, using things like
"because, " "and," etc. , etc. , as compared with starting something new. In
that way, then, one doesn't want to think of "Uh huh" as simply saying 'go
on, ' but as anticipating the other's intention to go on, and saying something
a bit more elaborate; something like: I see that you're reaching a point
where - maybe for altogether technical speech reasons, e.g., you have to get
a breath - you're going to stop at a syntactic node in your talk, e.g., the
possible end of a sentence. At that point I could start talking if I chose, by
virtue of the kind of rules that operate in conversation, where a listener can
treat a possible sentence as a total utterance and start talking. I also see that
you want to go on, and I'll let you. But do not treat that you're getting a
chance to go on as indicating either of these things: ( 1 ) that I'm not listening
and didn't notice that you'd come to a possible completion point, so that you
happen to be going on just because nobody is listening to what you're saying,
or (2) that I've just given you the floor for as long as you want it.
What's involved, then, is a listener's registering the kind of attention that
could be turned to his taking the floor, noting points at which he could take
the floor and resigning that floor use of now to the other. And in that regard,
that for "Uh huh"s what the prior and thereafter speaker does is to 'go on
with' the talk, i.e. , continue a sentence, is a rather non-incidental feature of
the thing. For one, that will be informing the one who did "Uh huh" that
they indeed saw that though a possible completion was reached, the speaker
intended to go on.
There are several sorts of things that this discussion can lead one to note:
How finely placed "Uh huh" is within the talk of another, and that indeed
"Uh huh" is bounded by no gaps on the other party's part. Then there is the
kind of talk that routinely follows an ' 'Uh huh, ' ' in terms of the way that,
e.g., that talk syntactically connects to the talk that preceded. And there are
the differences between all that, and no use of "Uh huh, ' ' with a speaker
simply being allowed to go on, where we can ask whether there are ways that
a speaker will attempt to find out whether the other party is listening, i.e. , will
412 Part VI
attempt to get the other party to speak - though perhaps only to indicate
with an "Uh huh" that indeed he's listening. And then, there is a kind of
trouble that the whole thing sets up, which is in part why I raised it for this
conversation.
The sort of understanding of the use of "Uh huh" which I've described,
permits a sort of exploitation, which is that one party to a conversation can
employ "Uh huh"s where the other party has no intention of going on.
Hearing "Uh huh" they are then in a position of seeing that they said
something that the other party figures to be as yet incomplete, and they then
proceed to find that they ought to go on. ' 'Uh huh' ' can, then, be heard
directively. And it's not a matter of a statement, e.g. , "Well you've said this
and that but it doesn't sound complete, " but it's something which will simply
elicit a feeling of "They must have thought I was going to go on since they
said 'Uh huh, ' so I guess I have more to say. " This interviewer technique
(psychiatric or otherwise) of using "Uh huh"s can operate, then, off of the
way in which "Uh huh" tells you that the other person is granting you the
floor again though they could take it over, by virtue of the fact that they figure
you want it, i.e. , that they're doing you a favor. Now obviously if it gets done
enough, the speaker can become aware that there's an intended distribution
of talk which involves them doing the talk and the other person not saying
anything except to mark possible points where they could have talked. The
speaker might then make an issue of " Do you ever intend to talk? And if not,
is it a matter of your thinking I intend to go on, or of your telling me to just
go on until you stop me?"
One further consequence is, if the sort of argument I make has some sense
to it, then one would expect that "Uh huh" would occur much more
commonly in two-party conversations than in multi-party conversations by
virtue of the fact that whereas in two-party conversation the listener can be
gracious and give the floor to somebody who seems to want to go on, in
multi-party conversation there's nobody of the non-speakers who has a
distinctive right to give the floor to the current speaker. If one listener doesn't
want to talk, then there may well be somebody else who does want to. And
my impression is that "Uh huh" is dramatically lessened in multi-party
conversation, except under kinds of special circumstances, e.g. , that it has
become a two-party conversation by virtue of, in effect, only two people out
of a group talking, or where in effect only one person talks and the others
become an audience. Somebody telling a long story in a multi-party
conversation might well get "Uh huh"s. Now if anything like that is so, then
the question becomes why does "Uh huh" distribute in two-party conversa­
tion and not in multi-party conversation? And an answer to that question
might well involve its connection with floor management.
The next thing I want to talk about occurs on page 6 of the New Year's
Eve transcript:

dr do you have some church affiliation, now?

pt What?
 May 24 413
dr Do you belong to a church now?
pt No I went to church I havent been to church for a long time and
I went its a funny thing I went Christmas Eve with my family the
Episcopal Church and I took communion and uh
dr uh huh
pt I that triggered me somehow its kinda been building up since
then

I want to talk a bit to ' ' Do you belong to a church now? ' ' ' 'No, I went to church
. . . etc. ," but let me just make a passing observation on a difference of an
obvious sort between "Do you have some church affiliation now?" and " Do
you belong to a church now? " It's kind of a minor law of conversation that if
somebody does a question or statement and the other person says "What?"
then you can get a repeat. If you don't get a repeat then what you will get will
stand as a more simply phrased version of what was prior said, i.e. , 'affiliation'
is replaced with 'belong. ' That replacement is not exactly perfect; one could
have some church affiliation and not belong to a church, and there might be an
intended delicacy to the question - the guy happens to be a minister. In any
event, he might well be wishing to allow for a wider range of 'yes' answers than
'belong' might involve, for reasons that have to do with something which
occurs towards the end where what he does is to use the church affiliation to
give her a recommendation on where to go for a clinic. He might be looking for
that when he asks about her church affiliation here.
And a question can be raised as to why the replacement is simpler than the
initial when you get "What?" At least some suggestions on that matter might
be offered. "What?" says at least 'I didn't hear what you said, say it again, '
but it's employed and is well known to be employed as a substitute for 'I
don't understand what you said, ' i.e. , when one doesn't know a or some of
the words used. Now asserting that is apparently something that is lesser to
be chosen than asserting that one didn't hear. But while asserting that one
didn't hear it is preferredly said, the speaker can, in making himself more
hearable, also choose to attend the possibility that some word he used isn't
known by the other, and not simply speak louder or enunciate better, but also
speak in a simpler way. "What?" then seems to serve as a generalized
instruction: Find whatever kinds of trouble the hearer could have with that
thing, clear them up, and say it again. People can then use "What? " knowing
that they will often get a chance to not have to disclose the source of their
difficulty. And plainly, speakers and hearers can be variously friendly or nasty
about the whole business. A speaker can very clearly enunciate something he
figures contains a word the other doesn't know and, getting a "What?, "
enunciate it very clearly again and force the other to say " I don't know what
that means. ' ' Or the other can choose in the first instance not to say something
that could be interpreted as ' I didn't hear what you said' and - brashly or
embarrassedly or whatever - announce " I don't know what that means. " In
any event, we have a sequence of: A version, a "What?" and a simpler version
following that. It's an exceedingly lawful thing.
4 14 Part VI
Let's tum now to "Do you belong to a church now?" "No, I went to
church . . . etc. ' ' One way to characterize that is something like, the answer
to the question is "No, " but but while they're talking about churches and
their relationship to any problems she might have, she offers some thoughts
on that. Now that way of looking at it provides for this sort of a difference:
Suppose she had said "Yes. " If she had said "Yes," then I figure she would
not have taken the opportunity to talk about recent involvements with church
in the way she did here. She would have said "Yes, " period. And I want to
focus on a kind of difference between " Yes" -period and "No" -plus. What I'm
interested in is questioner-preferred answers and their occurrence and non­
occurrence. Questioners can of course prefer a "no" as well as a "yes," e.g. ,
"You don't want that lamb chop do you?" where the questioner has designed
a question that says he's looking for a 'no' answer. But for purposes of this
discussion we're just going to talk about situations where "Yes" is the
preferred answer and we get "Yes"-period or "No"-plus, though it could
perfectly well be "No"-period and "Yes"-plus if the preference were put the
other way.
A while back I gave some discussion about question design, that involved
questioners preferring one answer and not preferring another, and indicating
in their talk which one they preferred. When I was talking about those sorts
of things I didn't have any particular sequential characterizations of why a
preference is put in, I had other sorts of reasons. Like, by putting in a
preference the questioner could show that he had access to what the answer
was, i.e. , a preference would be the questioner's way of saying 'I already know
the answer in part by virtue of what you told me, ' e.g. , "You're not married
are you? " and things like that. 1
Now there's another way in which the preference thing operates, and that
sets up an observable - I think - difference between "Yes"-period and
"No" -plus. It has to do with that for some sorts of questions, if a preference
is put in, answerer can see that questioner has asked it for some reason which,
if the answer is the preferred one, questioner will then proceed to develop, i.e. ,
the question is part of a line of direction that they're planning to take and the
continuation of that line of direction turns on the answer. Now, you don't
know what that line of direction is, you only know that the questioner has one
and is showing you he has one, so if your answer is consistent with the
preference, give the answer and stop so as to allow him to pursue that line.
On the other hand, if your answer is inconsistent with the preference, then he
isn't going to take up the line of direction he intended to, and if you can find
some line of direction yourself, you are free to take it up. And, for example,
we can see an effort in this piece of conversation to make something in the
world, of 'church . ' Though the preferred answer isn't present, the answerer
seeks out 'What can I say about my life that would be interesting to you, with
regard to the church, with respect to the current problems I'm having. ' So
that the doing of "Yes"-period involves returning the matter to the

1 Such a discussion does not occur in any of the transcribed lectures.

 May 24 415
questioner, by virtue of his having by his preference indicated that he wants
to go somewhere but where he's going to go turns on whether "Yes" is said,
and "No"-plus involves that, given that he won't be taking up the line of
direction he intended to, you yourself are free to take it up.
Now, possible evidence for this sort of a thing is something which goes as
an alternative to "Yes"-period and "No"-plus, and that is " Yes, but. " Now
the "Yes but' ' s often seem to involve something like this: You ask me a
question to which the answer is indeed "Yes," and I say "Yes . " But what I
try to tell you is that although I don't know where you're going to go with
it, I doubt that the implication you would take from my "Yes" is the kind
of implication you ought to take, e.g . , ' ' Are you unemployed now?' ' ' 'Yes but
I'm independently wealthy. " So you have some line you want to take about
how come I'm troubled and now you're going to fix in on that I'm
unemployed. I can see that that's a line you could be pursuing, and although
it's true that I'm unemployed, you can't take the line you seem to be taking.
And it may be a responsibility of the answerer to indicate that while you seem
to be wanting to use this answer for some line of direction, and this answer is
indeed the one that is preferred, and it's so, it doesn't carry the implications
you'd probably care to have.
Again, then, for "Yes"-period and "No"-plus or the converse, one of
them, by virtue of the preference put into the question, becomes something
which should be followed with a period, whereas the other can be developed.
That is to say, the answerer can see that the questioner wants to take a line,
and if they have the preferred answer they can allow the other to take a line,
whereas if they haven't then they are free to take up a line. What I'm saying
then is that "Yes" and "No" become quite different sequential objects under
this kind of a situation.
 Part VII
Fall 1 9 71

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 Lecture 1
On hypothetical data; Puns;
Proverbial expressions
I will be occupied throughout the course with a phenomenon, storytelling in
conversation. In the first several lectures I'll be occupied with two sorts of
lessons. The first is - I will attempt, anyway, to show - that storytelling in
conversation bears and will repay close looking. The second lesson may appear
to be somewhat more exotic. It has to do with this: In that the kinds of
observations on stories and storytelling that I'll be making in these beginning
lectures involve catching some of their details, then a thing we can come to
find is a difference between the kind of way I'll proceed and one characteristic
kind of way that social science proceeds, which is to use hypotheticalized,
proposedly typicalized versions of the world as a base for theorizing about it.
I imagine that in the things you may have read, or in the courses you will have
had, you find that somebody will say, "Let us suppose that such-and-such
happened" or "Typical things that happen are . . . " and you find yourself
perfectly willing to grant that such things happen. Where, on the basis of
those assertions, suppositions, proposals as to what's typical, some explana­
tion about the world is built.
What I want to argue is that if a researcher uses hypotheticalized or
hypotheticalized-typicalized versions of the world, then, however rich his
imagination is, he is constrained by reference to what an audience, an audience
of professionals, can accept as reasonable. That is to say, theorizing in that
fashion has as one boundary on it that only those things can be offered which
pass under some notion of believability. There are things that somebody
might present as "Let us suppose . . . " or "It's typical that . . . " to which the
response of an audience would be "Ah come on, that doesn't happen. " So, a
researcher might perfectly well be able to imagine a large range of things. I'm
suggesting that if how he proceeds is by offering hypothetical examples or
typicalized versions of things, then he's limited as to what he can theorize
about by reference to what he figures anybody can accept as happening or as
typical. Now that might not appear to be a terrible constraint, except when ·
we come to look at the kinds of things we'll be seeing as occurrent. Then it
should be plain that if those were offered as hypothetical or as typical, we
would be laughed off the floor. These materials could not be successfully used
as a base for theorizing if they were urged as imagined. One is then debarred
from using these kinds of materials. And that debarring of lots of things that
actually occur, at least presumably affects the character of social science theory
very strongly.

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks 419

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
420 Part VII
Now our business will be to proceed somewhat differently. And one of the
gains of proceeding somewhat differently is that we can start with things that
couldn't be offered as imagined, by reference to showing that they happened.
Then the question is, can we proceed to explain those things that are otherwise
debarred from being explained, where we might then gain some increased
satisfaction with or commitment to the use of observation as a basis for
theorizing. That is to say, a base for using dose looking at the world for
theorizing about it is that from dose looking at the world you can find things
that we couldn't, by imagination, assert were there: One wouldn't know that
they were typical, one might not know that they ever happened, and even if
one supposed that they did one couldn't say it because an audience wouldn't
believe it. Where, then, if we can add to the stock of things that can be
theorized about we will have done something more or less important - if the
things that we've added have any import to them. So my business in the first
several lectures will be to point out that there are things to see that you
wouldn't have noticed, and that we can then use those things to begin to try
to develop explanations in which they are the materials. That is to say, I want
to encourage the sense that interesting aspects of the world, that are as yet
unknown, are accessible to observation. And then we'll see what can be done
with them. And that particular theme is going to be developed by reference
to stories, since over the semester I will time and again be engaged in a dose
look at storytelling.
The fragment of material I'm beginning with will initially yield a rather
fragile observation. And what I mean by 'fragile' will become more or less
apparent in due course. Let me first say some things about the fragment. The
names along the side are pseudonyms of the speakers, three teenagers
approximately 1 6- 1 8 years old. The conversation from which this fragment
has been extracted is a group therapy session for teenagers. It was done a long
long time ago, some seven years ago. Ken is telling a story about his
1 2-year-old sister.

Ken : Wuh-d- her whole room jus' got it wallpapered. She jus'­
she jus' got done rewallpapering it about a month ago,
Louise : -with the pictures of the Beatie/ js.
Ken : No. A-a month ago Mom had it done in this gra:ssdoth, like
junk r"know it looks like // Hawaiian-
Louise : Yeah I know we have it.
( 1 . 5)
Ken : She came in there the other night with Scotch tape an'
every inch of the room. You couldn'- The roof I think she's
got done, in Beadle pictures. An' she lays in bed at night,
(2 . 5)
Roger : She's doing that 'cause all'er friends're (doin' it).
( // ) over th'Beadles.
Louise :---+ Mm they need some kinda idol y'know, something to //
look up to,
 Lecture 1 42 1
Ken : !;dol! They look like little kangaroo: 'I'I: :s.
Louise : hheh!

My interest now is in this particular utterance, "They need some kind of idol
you know, something to look up to; " in particular, its relation to the story
told about the 1 2 -year-old sister; in particular, this utterance of the story, ' 'The
roof I thing she's got done in Beatie pictures. And she lays in bed at night. ' '
Louise uses the word 'idol' and then goes on with a proverbial expression
that continues and partially explicates a sense of 'idol' relative to what she's
talking about, i.e. , "something to look up to. " Now what I want first to point
up is that "something to look up to" stands in some possible punning
relationship to the story. That is to say, the story has the little sister lying in
bed with pictures of the Beatles on the "roof, " and what's asserted in Louise's
utterance is that they need something to look up to.
That's the initial observation we're going to be doing some coming to
terms with. And I take it that the phenomenon might be of the sort that
would be hard to put into an imagined story on the basis of which one was
going to theorize about storytelling. That is to say, if we look at linguistic
philosophy or linguistics, then things like this are not the common sort of
objects used. And were I to say "I made this story up and I'm going to
consider it' ' then you might feel hesitant about what I would make of this, by
reference to whether such things happen.
Now the observation that there is a pun here is fragile for varieties of
reasons. We can wonder whether she put the pun in, or whether it's just a
matter of my having seen something here that really has nothing much to do
with whatever is happening, i.e. , it's just some assertion by somebody who's
looking at it, as we all know that people can make things of talk - and other
things - and we could feel queasy as to whether they were really there. And
in the case here of a possible pun there are some good reasons to doubt its
serious presence, by reference to that we know how people respond to puns
that they produce or hear others produce: If they catch it they will
characteristically mark it; laugh at it and point it out. And no such thing takes
place here. The pun that happens - if it happens - is unnoticed. And if the
argument is that there's a pun here, then presumably we'd be better off if
there was some indication that they'd noticed it. I say 'presumably' because
while we would in some sense be better off, we might in other ways not be.
It might be that if we could establish that the pun is there, then we could do
some interesting things about how come nobody noticed it.
Now the way I'll proceed here is kind of characteristic of the ways I will
proceed throughout the course. Let's hold the pun in abeyance and work our
way up to some assurings that it's there. The way I'm going to work our way
up to that is by examining this utterance, " . . . something to look up to, " in
terms of what is to be a persistent theme of the course; something roughly to
be called 'sequential analysis of storytelling. ' And we'll arrive at an initial
sequential feature of storytelling, and do some specifications of that, relative
to this utterance.
422 Part VII
The utterance is done by a recipient of the story. It's one of two utterances
done on the completion of a story, by recipients:

Roger : She's doing that 'cause all'er friends're (doin' it).

( II ) over th'Beadles.
Louise : Mm they need some kinda idol y'know, something to I I look
up to,

Both utterances can readily be seen to be explanations of the reported event;

morals to the story; more generally, indications by a listener that the story was
understood.
I want to suggest that part of the common business of storytelling
occasions, involves story recipients positioning an appreciation of the story on
its recognized completion. That, of course, differentiates stories as they occur,
say, in books, stories as told in a variety of other occasions, from stories told
in conversation: Stories told in conversation have commonly on their
completion, a recipient or a series of recipients offering an appreciation of the
story. There's no particular news to that, except that there's an initial sense for
a sequential organization of stories: On their completion something is done by
somebody else. And that something can be said, roughly, to constitute an
understanding of the story.
Now, if one looks at the objects with which stories are understood, then,
again quite commonly, proverbial expressions are used. One can turn the
matter around slightly and say: Examining the distribution in conversation of
proverbial expressions, one characteristic place they occur is on story comple­
tions. And one characteristic use of them is as understandings of the stories
they are produced directly after.
That sort of fact turns out to have a variety of interests to it. A common
kind of puzzle about proverbial expressions is that for almost any proverbial
expression it's possible to take another proverbial expression, counterpose it to
the first, and see their inconsistency. That is to say, it's often been noted about
proverbial expressions that they're not a consistent package of things, but that
as one says "A rolling stone gathers no moss," so another says that
"consistency is the something or other of small minds, " etc. Now the question
is, is that a defect of proverbial expressions? Or is it that, if it turns out that
what proverbial expressions do is that they are used to understand something
else, then the question for them is, are they applied to something that they
evince an understanding of? If so, it's quite irrelevant that, as a package, they
can turn out to have an inconsistency among them. The problem is not, on
any given one's use, is it true relative to other proverbial expressions, but, does
it, as something one understands with, understand what it applies to? Where,
what it applies to is the story it's used after.
So what's being recommended is: Take an object like proverbial expres­
sions. Subject them to a distributional investigation. Use that distributional
investigation to see what's done with them. One then comes up with that
they're used to understand other things; that what they are, are things to
 Lecture 1 42 3
evidence understanding with. What's done with them is to take one and see
how, for what it's positioned after, does it understand that. It can then be seen
as irrelevant, somewhat arbitrary, to say "Let's take the set of them and
consider whether they're consistent, to determine whether they're true. " That
may be not at all how, empirically, they work.
Okay. We have, then, at a point where understandings are properly done,
a possible understanding offered. And that possible understanding is done
with something that is an instance of things commonly used to exhibit
understandings, and commonly used in just such a position as this one is used.
What we're doing now is holding aside the question of the serious presence
of the pun; we're engaged in finding that the utterance that has the pun does
have a serious presence. That is to say, it has a methodical source for being
where it occurs, not simply as something that understands the story, but as
something that is commonly used to do just such a job. We are now in a
position to see, for many many more stories, that things just like this occur in
just the position that this does, and do just the job that this does, so that we
begin to get a sense of some relatively abstract object being produced here.
And furthermore, we can come to see that it's one of a variety of types of
things used to do a similar job in a similar position.
This particular understanding has a relatively nicer fit to the story than
we've so far noted, that nicer fit turning on that one sense of the form of the
story is that it constitutes a puzzle or a problem. That is to say, what Ken is
telling is something he is offering as "Here's something weird my sister did.
Why in the world would she have done it?" And at the point where an
understanding for the story is appropriate, what's done is something that
stands as an explanation for the puzzle that the story contains. So that a thing
one might see is that the understanding-object that is used stands in some
methodic relationship to the form of the story, i.e. , the story is a puzzle and
the understanding is an explanation. And one might then look to see whether,
for stories that are not of the form of puzzles, the things that are used to do
an understanding fit them also.
I want now to note something about proverbial expressions, and that is
that they commonly have a relatively empirical content. And while having a
relatively empirical content, they're not to be understood themselves as the
empirical assertion they might be. That is to say, one misunderstands "a
rolling stone gathers no moss ' ' if one supposes that the talk is about rolling
stones and moss. One might not even particularly notice that facet of it, i.e. ,
that is has some empirical content.
Now that particular fact about proverbial expressions can tum out to bear
on the question, why, if the pun is here, isn't it noticed? At least grossly we
can say that when proverbial expressions are heard, they aren't heard for their
empirical particularities, such that if what the pun involves is a relationship
between a particular sense of the proverbial terms and other materials - like
the particular sense of the story - then, hearing the thing for its proverbial
sense, one wouldn't at all notice that it has its non-proverbial sense also apply.
It might then be not at all unusual that if it happened, for whatever reason,
424 Part VII
that a pun of this sort were present between a proverbial expression and what
it's talking to, the pun wouldn't be noticed. The fact is here that the pun isn't
noticed, if it's present. And what's now being suggested is that the way
proverbial expressions are heard is such as to have it common for them that
if some sort of pun is present, it won't be heard. One will have focussed on
what is a specifically alternative sense of the utterance that contains the
proverb. Which is still not to say that the pun is present. But it is also to say
that since proverbial expressions always have at least two possible senses - one
being their particular empirical sense and the other being their lesson sense -
then they might kind of commonly have the possibility of a punning
relationship, not to just anything in the world, but to precisely what they're
talking about.
And what I didn 't yet notice about this situation is that the pun in the
proverb is a pun precisely for the story that's being talked about. The pun
could perfectly well be a pun, and be a pun about almost anything that
happened priorly. It could pun on itself, it could pun on a fragment of the
story that had nothing much to do with the story's business. But what I want
in due course to argue is that the pun is very finely related to the story's
problem.
 Lecture 2
Doing *understanding;' Puns
I'll begin by reviewing the kinds of things I was doing last time -
substantively, anyway. I started out by noticing a possible pun, and then
proceeding to attempt to see what kinds of resources could be deployed to
begin to turn the pun - or if not the pun, at least the object which contained
the pun - into one which had a more or less fine methodical place where it
occurred . That involved leaving the pun aside for a bit and proceeding to
propose about the utterance that contained it, that there were a variety of
aspects of its positioning which had an orderliness to them. So, for example,
that the utterance was done by a recipient of the story on the story's
completion and constituted a way of 'understanding' the story, was a
collection of features of that utterance relative to storytelling, which at least I
asserted were a common coincidence, i.e. , on the completion of a story,
commonly a recipient talks, and what a recipient does is to produce an
utterance that exhibits an understanding - where the question of how it
'understands' remains open for investigation. Precisely that kind of question
is one that's intended to be looked into somewhat closely, since one of the
things that can be done with it is to determine what do 'understandings' look
like, how do they show sorts of hearing of what has preceded, etc.
Sequentially, then, there is a place for 'understanding' of stories; that place
is directly on the completion of the story. Such things are done by other than
the teller, i.e. , by some one or more recipients. In this case it's done by several.
Now there are lots of ways that intended understandings are exhibited, such
that, for example, it's quite possible that someone produces what is in various
ways recognizable as a 'possible understanding, ' and that is then taken to task
by the teller, who argues that it's not an 'understanding' but a 'misunder­
standing: ' "No, that's not what I meant; that's not the point of the story. "
Which could, of course, have a variery of functions right then and there; of,
for example, giving the recipient a second chance; letting the teller know
whether the teller's intended point - if there was a point - was caught, and
if not, to correct it, etc.
The assertion that a place for putting in 'understandings' is directly on the
completion of a story, can itself get firmed up in lots of ways. One additionally
methodical way that such a claim can be developed involves the possibility
that there are objects with which such things as 'stories' are 'understood. ' That
is to say, there might be a form of talk that people commonly use, which can
be recognized for its 'understanding' business. Where, then, in a way, that
doesn't involve simply looking at the talk, and the story, to see "Does it
understand?" but what you have is an object that suggests that it's such a
thing as is used to do just that job, independently of its use here. Now, that
42 5
426 Part VII
can happen in some places and not happen in other places, and it happens
here that an object that is commonly used to do 'understanding' is used to do
the understanding here. So that we see a kind of formal thing used.
And what I'm suggesting for that is that the status of the remark "they
need something to look up to" as a 'proverbial expression' involves the use of
just such an object as does 'understanding' in this 'understanding position. '
One could then look to varieties of stories and see whether indeed there are
objects which are specifically for 'understandings, ' as there are objects for lots
of other things, like 'promising, ' 'cursing,' 'betting,' etc. That is to say, if
someone says such a thing as we known can serve as a 'promise, ' then we can
see that they're not just doing promising, but they're doing promising with
one of the ways that promising is done. It may be less commonly asserted and
therefore less obvious that there are objects with which one understands -
except in the obvious and trivial and possibly incorrect sense of things like
"Uh huh . " That is to say, we take it that one obvious use of a thing like "Uh
huh" is that it proposes at least "I heard" and maybe "I heard and
understand what you've said . " Now what I'm proposing is that a character­
istic job of proverbial expressions is just that kind of thing. They are things to
understand with. So there's a proverbial expression used in the position that
'understanding' are properly put; proverbial expressions being a particular
type of utterance used to do 'understandings' - in that position and in other
positions.
I'm in addition asserting that proverbial expressions are more or less ideal
objects to do understanding with, since they have an appropriate way of being
heard. Where that appropriate way of being heard involves hearing them in
one specific way, of the alternative ways that they can be heard. So, e.g. , one
could hear ' 'A rolling stone gathers no moss ' ' as being asserted about rolling
stones and moss. In that sense one can hear it to be making an assertion about
the things to which it, in content, refers. Alternatively, one can hear it as
making an assertion about something other than to what it obviously refers.
Now, proverbial expressions characteristically have a thing in it which it could
refer to. I made a remark last time that people do not hear proverbial
expressions as referring to the thing that they can be heard to empirically be
referring to. And that's a kind of well known fact. Indeed in classical tests for
brain damage and schizophrenia of various sorts, persons are given proverbial
expressions and asked to say what they're about. And at least it has been
traditionally observed that brain damaged people of various sorts, when asked
"What does 'a rolling stone gathers no moss' mean?' ' cannot do much more
than say "Well, it's about rolling stones . . . " or something like that, whereas
others can take it that it's not particularly about rolling stones and moss, and
can readily give an abstract version of it, for a whole range of proverbs.
If that's so, then one can see that what can be done with proverbial
expressions is to take them and look with them for what they apply to. Now
that makes them kind of ideal objects for use for exhibiting an understanding,
in a particular sort of way. They can propose to be applying to something
other than the objects which they refer to, where there could then be a job for
 Lecture 2 42 7
one who receives one of them to find what does it apply to, and does it apply
to it well.
Now, how do people go about finding, for an utterance that intends an
understanding, what it intends an understanding of? The argument is that an
utterance's positioning can be used to do that. The positioning of an utterance
can be a resource for finding what it's talking to. And that's altogether
obvious in the sense, for example, that if someone says "Are you going to the
movies tonight?" and another person says "Yes," the question is how do
people find out what "Yes" is talking about? Where you don't characteris­
tically say "Yes I'm going to the movies, " you say "Yes" or "No" or things
like that. What's involved, obviously, to anyone, is that the positioning of the
"Yes" after a question is part of the information that's used in interpreting it.
So the position of an answer is a resource for determining to what the answer
applies: Look to the question to find to what the answer applies.
Notice that the speaker of the answer obliges someone who is going to
understand it, to have understood the question. So the very questioner is put
into a position of having to understand the answer though the questioner
produced an object which itself needed to be understood. That is to say, it's
not as if the answer alone exhibits to anybody how it understands, but it
makes a job of understanding, just like the job of understanding what was in
the question. And stories are precisely that kind of object. A story is a puzzle.
There's a job for the listener to understand them. When the listener does the
job of understanding, he puts the original teller in precisely the position that
the listener was put in originally, i.e. , when the listener produces his
understanding the teller himself has to keep in mind the story, to understand
that the story is understood. And the teller uses the positioning of the
listener's utterance right after the story, to see that what's being done with
that utterance is to 'possibly understand, ' rather than that this is an altogether
new utterance, make of it what you want.
What we're doing, then, is extending, from an obvious base - things like
questions and answers - the relevance of positioning of utterances for
determining the kinds of jobs that they do, and what they oblige people who
are dealing with them to do. In a way, then, we've taken a story which has
a whole series of utterances, and suggested about it that it can be treated as
any object relative to something that follows it. And we can then begin to get
an idea about why it is that the utterance that understands it goes right after
it. That is to say, positioning might not be usable if a whole bunch of talk
went on between the end of the story and the possible understanding of the
story, particularly if what was adapted was a relatively simple situation of
'look to the last possible object to find what was being understood. ' It's not
at all incidental, then, that story-understanding goes directly on the story­
completion. Since the understanding needs itself to be understood, and a way
it gets to be understandable is by one's finding what it refers to, and
positioning can be used to find that and thereby help it to be understood itself,
then its positioning right after something is an obvious kind of solution, any
modification of which makes for enormous complications. In any event, if
428 Part VII
positioning is used and can then be counted on, there are ways in which it's
obviously easier to do an 'understanding, ' i.e. , you don't have to indepen­
dently locate the thing you're intendedly talking to.
And with that kind of a discussion we get into a position to see that if that
slot is filled with a proverbial expression it wouldn't be too odd for it to
contain a possible pun, by virtue of the fact that the proverbial expressions
have an empirical sense apart from their proverbial sense, and if they do, then
at least one empirical sense they may have may be one that somehow puns on
the story. In addition, if they're not heard for their particular empirical sense
but heard for their proverbial sense, then we are in a position to appreciate
why, if there were a pun present, it might not be caught.
So what's being suggested is that this position is a specific environment for
the occurrence of puns, and unnoticed puns. And a common object with
which they will occur is proverbial expressions used to do understandings of
stories. Now, when these things occur, something somewhat parallel to the
visual-illusional duckjrabbit phenomenon may be present. That is to say, we
all know about those illusions where if you look at it one way it's a duck and
if you look at it another way it's a rabbit, etc. Here we might have not simply
that sort of a phenomenon, but maybe even a rule that tells you which one is
going to be seen. Where, in the typical situation of an illusion it may be that
we don't know which is going to be seen, we only know they're exclusive, here
it may be that we can say that a first hearing will be not the pun, and maybe
even that the pun will not be heard. And that is a very neat kind of thing to
know, i.e. , it's neat to know for objects that people hear, that are plainly
ambiguous, that without even specifying which particular proverbial expres­
sion it is, we can say that it won't be heard for its pun sense. That's telling us
some rather strong things about how minds work - if it's true.
Notice of course that if the pun is seen, then the 'understanding' kind of
dissipates; all she's said is the same thing; an 'explanation' of a story detail
turns out to be simply another version of it. You can then see the importance
of hearing the proverbial expression abstractly. That is to say, Ken having
remarked that his sister put Beatle pictures on the ceiling of her room, we
would take it as an altogether strange thing for Louise to have said "Well,
they need something on the ceiling to look up to. ' ' Why would they need
that? Whereas, having said "They need something to look up to, " it sounds
like she's saying something abstract. By differentiating the thing that way, one
might begin to get an idea of the important difference involved. And
commonly one does deal with proverbial expressions as though something
more abstract has been said - and indeed maybe something more abstract is
being said, in some other sense.
Now, forgetting about that issue, we can have at least partially arrived at
an appreciation that something like the following was in Louise's mind: The
story is over, she's in a position now of, if she's going to produce an
understanding she's got to produce it right now. She can look for an object
with which to do it. Proverbial expressions are one class of ways to do it; find
now a proverbial expression that exhibits an understanding. That can be the
 Lecture 2 429
job she has to do within this period of time, which happens to be two seconds
in this case. The question is, then, how does she go about finding the
proverbial expression that will work?
There are two sorts of things relevant to her finding the proverbial
expression that will work, which are independent of the way her remark puns
on the story. Those two sorts of things are the occurence of an error in the
story, and that the story stops before some obvious senses of its appropriate
completion. That is to say, it drifts off in the middle of its close. What I want
to propose is that - even independently, but interestingly enough they conjoin
- those two sorts of matters might have a bearing on where her mind is while
she searches for a proverb. The way they could have a bearing on where her
mind is, has first of all to do with that a correctable thing was said, and she
didn't correct it, and nobody corrected it. The misused word here is of course
"roof, " the correct word would have been 'ceiling. ' Now, a common
occurrence on a word misuse is that recipients focus on it and sometimes aloud
and sometimes not aloud, correct it. 1 So, if they understood what Ken was
saying, then they would have mentally corrected it. They would see that
"roof " is wrong, not intended - the story would be far more bizarre if that
were intended - but that 'ceiling' was intended. It happens that I have lots of
materials involving these people, and it's a very common thing for this kid
Ken to make mistakes like that one, and it's also kind of common for
Louise to correct him. It doesn't particularly add all that much to these
materials that that's so, since in any event the correctable status of such a thing
like "roof " for 'ceiling' is enough known. It happens that she doesn't correct
him here.
Now in the case of this thing, " . . . the roof I think she's got done in Beatie
pictures. And she lays in bed at night, " a variety of things can be said. One
is that such sorts of things are characteristically brought to completion by
another speaker, i.e. , when somebody drifts off or stops within the course of
a sentence that they've given enough materials to allow others to finish, then
others quite commonly do finish it. It could be heard as a search for some
words, and others will - not always, but characteristically - finish it off. In this
case, were it finished off, it might well involve something like ' ' . . . looking up
at' ' the pictures. So that both the error and the incompletion, if they were
dealt with by recipients at all, could involve them in focussing on something
like the thing that gets put into Louise's 'understanding. '
I want now to make some slightly parenthetical remarks to this issue of the
incompletion here. That incompletion itself has a variety of kinds of
orderlinesses to it. One has to do with that the story is developed as a puzzle
and it ends as a puzzle - at least it ends as a puzzle in this particular sense of
not having its ending presented - i.e. , apart from the question of why is she
doing what she did, there is the question of what was she doing? It is
commonly observable that for some 'what is it they're doings' a party will

1A bit of this consideration comes from the last moments of Fall 1 9 7 1 , lecture 1 , not
retained in the edited version of that lecture.
430 Part VII
break off their talk before they say it, when they might well say it. And those
have to do, not untypically, with obscenities. Where there is a kind of plain
allusion here to that she's doing something dirty. The question is, what is she
doing lying in bed at night looking at the pictures of the Beatles above her.
That he drops off at that point is something not at all peculiar, and is at least
a typical kind of incompletion which won't get completed by someone else.
That is then to say that there are places in talk where it is, in a fashion, not
wrong to stop your sentence in the middle. And one such place is where
you've given sufficient indication that you're going to report on something
dirty and then you stop without reporting it. Where, then, the sheer fact that
others don't continue can in some way evidence that they see what you were
saying. And furthermore, that you don't continue can inform them that that's
what you were indeed going to say. So the incompletion here is not merely a
fault of the story.
What we get to, then, is something like: Possibly in search of a proverb to
produce an understanding with, a thing used to find one of them - where
varieties of them will work - is to use materials from the story that were
themselves needing of treatment, as resources for arriving at a proverb. In any
event, it looks like the content of this expression, aside from its proverbialness,
does pick up on relevantly-to-be-picked-up-on aspects of the story. And a
thing we can look for is to see whether, if someone produces a possible error
in their talk, it happens that others later exhibit that they picked up on the
error, though they didn't say anything to it then. That is, a piece of research
that we're then led to do is to see whether, when someone doesn't show that
they saw an error when they could have shown that they saw an error, they
nonetheless at some point later on evidence that they saw it. And the same
might go for incompletions.
So we've put together a bunch of pieces from this fragment, which deal
with it kind of neatly, but which also suggest that rather abstract events are
taking place which can also be seen in lots of other places. And in that sense
we can have some kind of a vision of relatively abstract machinery operating
in this particular event. The abstract machinery, however, does not have the
consequence of not handling the details of this event. That is to say, we have
as a typical sense of abstract versus detailed considerations of things, that as
soon as we get abstract, for example in social theorizing, then we're
committed to losing the details. It's a credo of social science reasoning that we
can suffer the loss of details while we build abstract models. It's a feature of
abstract models, as compared to the real reality, that they do not preserve the
details. Possibly it needn't be.
 Lecture 3
Allusive talk; Poetics

One thing I'm interested in doing in a casual fashion in these introductory

presentations, is to allude to a view going around that pretty much all of
what's interesting in conversation doesn't happen via the use of its words.
Now, I figure that such a theory is held, not by virtue of an investigation of
what words do in talk, but by virtue of a doctrine about words which assigns
them a particular, narrow import. The consequence being that insofar as we
know that lots of other things happen in conversation, we suppose that they
don't happen with the use of words. That is to say, if we undertook an
investigation of how words mean, then we might find, for example, that they
mean more interestingly than we had supposed. And an interest I've had,
then, and that I'll continue to have - particularly in the introductory direction
- is to deal with the view that holds 'everything interesting takes place apart
from the words' by indicating that there are some delicate, interesting things
that happen distinctly with the words.
The last two times, in talking about a fragment and the presence of a pun
there, one of the things that we ended up with was not simply that we could
see that the pun might have really been there, but also that proverbial
expressions, given their features and the places where they're used, have a
distinct aptness for a possible punning usage. The import of that being that
we will have seen something about the language, or the language and its
users, that involves the particular occurrence noted being turned from some
private, occasional event into one that can have a sort of generality of presence.
Where in part the question is how does one go about explaining such an
occurrence? Does one, finding something neat and delicate, need to try to
build into the particular person who uses it some sort of virtuosity which we
suppose is unusual? Or is it that if it's a virtuosity then it's a virtuosity that
maybe anyone has, or the language gives them.
Now let's turn to a fragment. The series of remarks I just made will
continue to apply to what I'll be saying this time and perhaps the next time
as well. Again, the talk is from a group therapy session, the same series as the
materials from last time. Al and Ken and Roger are the kids, Dan is the
therapist.

AI : ((sung)) Ba: :rney Google with his goo goo googuly eye: :s. Ba: :rney
Google hadda wife three times his si:ze,
Ken : ehheh
AI : ((sung)) She sued Barney for deevorce, now he's living with his
ho: : : : :rse
43 1
43 2 Part VII
Ken : heh heh hh
AI : ((sung)) Ba: :rney I I Google
Ken : heh heh
( 1 . 0)
Roger : Did he buy the horse before he got divorced?
Dan : Well so far, all of you skirted around the subject. That see(hh)ms
to b(h)e predominantly uh on your minds at any rate,
( ): ((clears throat))
Ken : heh heh
Roger : hmnYeh well we're at that sta(hh)ge.
Ken : ehhI lheh hehh
Roger : hhehh hehhh hehh I I hh hehh hh
Dan : Yeah?
AI : Yeah.
Dan : What stage is that,
( 1 . 5)
Roger : Awareness.

I'm going to focus on the utterance "Well so far, all of you skirted around the
subject. That see(hh)ms to b(h)e predominantly uh on your minds at any
rate, " particularly on the phrase-part "skirted around. " Let me just note that
the utterance doesn't refer merely to the Barney Google ditty, but to talk that
had been preceding the Barney Google ditty and that the ditty is consistent
with.
Now, a plain sense of the assertion of Dan's utterance is that the talk that
he's talking about was allusive. And a first thing to note about his utterance
is that there are obvious senses in which it, with respect to the talk that it's
talking about, is also allusive. That is to say, if what he's proposing is that
they've talked around some unstated subject, then he, too, does not name that
subject. There can be a variety of kinds of issues involved in such an assertion.
One of them being, for example, if what he's proposing is that the talk has
been talk around the edges of some topic, the topic having gone unstated,
how does he indicate that he knows the topic that they've been talking
around? He could say, "So far you've been skirting around the subject of
sex. " Then of course he wouldn't be doing 'skirting around' that topic.
What kinds of resources can he deploy to bring off claiming they're being
allusive while himself also being allusive, while indicating that he knows
the topic?
There is plainly present and used, a resource for doing that; that being the
ambiguity involved in this case - and obviously more availably than just this
usage - in the term 'skirted. ' That is to say, "skirted around" is perfectly well
a way of talking about how, for any topic, persons might talk to it, while the
term 'skirt' is one way of talking about, e.g . , women, and perhaps thereby
indicating that the topic that's being skirted around is a topic for which the
word 'skirt' is itself indicative of the topic. Where there are a variety of ways
of saying about some talk that it's, e.g . , 'beating around the bush,' 'evading
 Lecture 3 433
the issue,' etc., etc. , not all o f which but not only 'skirting the subject' can
also, for at least 'sex' as a topic, indicate that you know that 'sex' is the
topic.
So there are these sorts of things possibly present here: He's saying that
they're talking allusively while he talks allusively, and he's saying that he
knows what the topic is, and indicates that he knows what the topic is,
without naming what the topic is. Now, with those at hand, we might ask
what would be the business of doing such a thing? Here's one possible use: If
the talk of the topic has been allusive, then at least what he can do with this
way of noticing it is to preserve both the topic and its allusiveness while
inserting himself into the talk with a note about it. That is to say, he hands
them back the topic in almost the state it was in. And that sort of a treatment
can have its own interest, if one considers some other ways that some of the
jobs he's doing can be handled by the recipients of his utterance. So, for
example, if he asserts what the topic is, then it's possible for them to deny it
or to accuse him of reading into the talk what it didn't involve, and to tum
it, then, to issues about his dirty mind.
Alternatively if he does that, and does it as a complaint, then the correctness
and adequacy and appropriateness, etc., of his complaint can be themselves
addressed. That is to say, what the topic has been can be ignored for a
consideration of the appropriateness of the complaint offered. Now I'm going
to put something maybe a bit more abstractly than it's characteristically put:
One of the problems about making complaints in conversation - complaints
that are perfectly well fitted to something that's just happened, complaints
about the course of a topic, etc. - is that there's a way in which the production
of a complaint can free the talk from what the talk has priorly been. The
complaint itself now becomes the topic. So, for example, there are a range of
ways that, a complaint having been made, the course of the talk can be
siphoned into a dealing with the fact of a complaint, like, "You always
complain" or "You're being a killjoy" or whatever else, that has nothing to
do with the particular complaint's connection to what's preceded it. It's a
characteristically known thing that talk on any topic can "end up in an
argument, " and one of the ways that that's a formal possibility for
conversation has to do with there being places in it where some kinds of
interactional events can be freed from whatever they were about, and
themselves multiply. So a complaint can be met by a counter-complaint and
the counter-complaint can be met by another complaint, and one can kind of
rapidly get into an argument that - intendedly or not - loses the course of talk
out of which it seemed to come. Where, then, there is a particular difficulty
in, for example, holding a topic while also talking to it or about it. Such issues
are roughly known, and commend attempts to allow the preservation of a
topic across a comment on it: How to make a comment on it a comment in
it. How to possibly avoid giving too much of a chance to persons who have
now been embarrassed, to tum on the embarrasser.
Returning to the allusive utterance itself, let me just note that the
allusiveness of the talk continues after it: While acknowledging that he's
434 Part VII
correctly alluded to the topic they're allusively talking about, they continue
talking in an allusive way.

Roger : hmnYeh well we're at that sta(hh)ge.

Ken : ehhl lheh hehh
Roger : hhehh hehh hehh 11 hh hehh hh
Dan : Yeah?
At: Yeah.
Dan : What stage is that,
( 1 . 5)
Roger : Awareness.

Now, the resources he had for building his complaint allusively and
sufficiently were this ambiguity in the term 'skirt, ' which can refer to women
sexually. I want to make two sorts of points about the resources used: First,
for not just any topic is there such a resource. And on the other hand, for
referring to sex, there are lots of such resources. At this point I'm trying to
locate the scope of usability of this deployed ambiguity. Last time I suggested
that proverbs have a specific aptness for a punning relationship to the talk that
they might be 'understanding. ' What I want to be saying now is that as 'skirt'
is a way in which some unstated topic can be talked about, and also alludes
to a particular topic, that sort of thing is relatively special for ' sex' as a topic,
but is not exclusive to the term 'skirt' at all, for 'sex' as a topic. In effect, then,
in some fashion, you can't as readily employ ambiguities to allude to just any
topic, but you can specifically deploy them for ' sex' as a topic.
What is being noted has a variety of sources. One of them is - to put it in
a slightly paradoxical fashion - that the proper literal way to talk about sex
is to talk about it allusively. So that if you talk about sex literally you're not
talking about sex properly, you're talking about sex 'frankly. ' That is to say,
what would othetwise be ordinary talk about some other topic, talked of in
the same way for sex, it's 'talking frankly. ' And what would be for some other
topic talking about it allusively, is talking about sex, in effect, literally. So the
language for talking about sex - and a variety of other things - is specifically
allusive. I mean to be noting such a thing as that a perfectly reasonable, literal,
but not ' frank' reference to sex is 'going to bed with, ' 'sleeping with,' etc. And
that has correlates for other sorts of events as well, as when announcing what
one is doing one says ' 'I'm going to the bathroom. " That is to say, there are
other descriptions which would come off not as literal but as 'frank' or as
'crude. ' And one wouldn't be heard as speaking allusively if one said ' 'I'm
going to the bathroom. " Though, on the other hand, one might be heard as
being allusive if one said ' 'I'm going to the kitchen" when one was intending
to get something to eat.
In a fashion, then, 'allusiveness' is the way sex is properly talked of, if you
used the term 'allusive' as it would apply to some other topic. Then, too,
there is the fact that obscene puns seem to have no particular locus, in the
sense that there seems to be no particular topical talk that has, more than or
 Lecture 3 43 5
less than any other topical talk, the possibility of having obscene puns emerge
in it. Obscenity, then, is something that if one wants to avoid it one needs
always to keep it in mind so as to keep one's mind off of it. It looks as though
our language is one in which the possibility of obscenity is the ambiguity to
be avoided in talk anywhere, such that sex is always latent in a way different
than, say, politics or any general topic that one might get into is always latent.
The pun organization is, then, sexual.
The reason for my raising this is again to say that it takes no particular wit
of somebody's to use the particular resources of an ambiguity in order to
invoke sex as the topic that's being alluded to. That isn't the kind of thing
about which what we have to see is what kind of a mind does this fellow have,
or has he done something distinctly clever. In using the ambiguities of a term
to invoke sex, he's done it in just the way that it's altogether easy to do. And
if sex is to be talked of allusively, and is the primary allusively-to-be-talked­
about subject, it isn't surprizing that much of the language would turn out to
be deployable that way. As persons sought to find ways to talk allusively on
that topic they would have generated a more or less large range of otherwise
punning terms that could have a specific sexual sense. 'Sex' doesn't have its
own terms being used, so what happens is that the language in general is
being raided for usable terms. And every time a raid is successful we have
another obscene pun possibility added. And when, say, that term is otherwise
used, the possibility of a sexual reference lies latent.
So we've added to our prior stuff a way that can be seen to have some sorts
of generality and also some sorts of anyman usage, to deploy ambiguity - a
feature which is considered to be delicate on any occasion - systematically for
interactional purposes.
Now I want to move to another fragment, again from the group therapy
sessions (these were excerpted from a collection of five two-hour sessions) .

Roger : When I say I wanna be something, it's not that I just wanna be
this, it's just 1-1-1 just- that's the only thing I tell people that I
wanta be an artist. It's really a whole way of life, y'know, an' I
guess that's- -- an' that's the way my brother feels too, so he just­
just tells everybody, b'cause he won't be accepted, y'know, the
idea is I I not standard.
Dan : Yeah.
Dan : Uh huh.
Roger : Y'know this is- this is just haifa the situation.
( 1 . 0)
Dan : Mm hm,
Roger : You visualize yourself uh living a certain way. An' the only
thing'tchu tell people is uh whatcha do as yer occupation.
Dan : Yeh
Roger : I see it as a whole picture.
Dan : It is.
Roger : Y'know
436 Part VII
Dan : Yer right.
Roger : Not just uh -- ( 1 . 0) -- Like my father, you know, "Well I -- I'm
a painter. "
Dan : Mm hm,
Roger : Y'know? But I-I don't see it that way at all.
jim : Huh.
Roger : I- How am I gonna live, what am I gonna do for a living, an'
the whole- whole scene.
Dan : Right.
Roger : And uh since most people don't think along these lines . . .

Briefly, what he's doing here is asserting that he's unsatisfied with the ways in
which it appears he has to describe his preferred occupation. He's unsatisfied
because that seems to treat it as merely an occupation, i.e. , an eight-hour-a­
day thing. For him, the occupation he wants is one that he treats as
life-pervasive. Now, a plain kind of issue is, he could say that; how can he
make it believable that as compared to others it's so for him. That is to say,
there's a large difference between claiming something and proving it. And
maybe there are ways of proving something like this assertion. What we can
do here is to look at a kind of neat thing happening - and again, we're dealing
with spontaneous talk. The kind of neat thing happening is: The occupation
he proposes as the one with which he's life-pervasively occupied is being an
artist. Now let's note that while there is a whole range of ways he could
describe the problems of having that occupation being life-pervasive for him,
what he does is to use, a bunch of times, specifically visual terms to
characterize his preoccupation. He talks about "You visualize yourself," "I
see it as a whole picture," "and the whole scene, " "along these lines . " Any
of these things could be formulated in a way that had nothing to do with
some occupation, or he might use terms specifically of that occupation's
mental state. What he's done is to show a listener that his mind is indeed kind
of totally occupied with a visual way, i.e. , a painter's way, of thinking about
the world.
What's been done here is that someone has taken description situations
which would allow for descriptions that had nothing in particular in common
with each other, and isolate terms that all had a visual aspect. He has, then,
mobilized, out of the range of ways that all of these things could be
formulated, each of them as distinctly have a visual sense to them. He's
thereby exhibited the visual character of his mind, and thereby proved that it
isn't only a job for him, it's "a whole way of life. "
 Lecture 4
Spouse talk
This fragment comes from a conversation with five people present. Ben and
Ethel are father-in-law and mother-in-law of Lori; they're visiting Bill and
Lori, their son and daughter-in-law; Fred is Bill's grandfather. They drove
down from Los Angeles for the afternoon. The first utterance, "When are
your folks coming down," refers to Lori's parents who are also expected.

Ben : When're yer folks comin' down.

Lori : They should be he:re.
( 1 . 5)
Ben : There wz the one spot there, -- they must have hadda, -- I I some
kind'v a-
Lori : Will they get into it too? 'r I I wz it- more up by yer house.
Ben : Yeah.
Ben : No, no they'll get into it. They must'v had some type of a
showing. -- A camper sho:w or uhm- I I flea market,
Ethel : At the great big drive in theater. =
Ben : = or they mighta hadda swap meet, and there were, so many cars
parked there en' so many people walkin' on the bridge across the
freeway thet people were slowin' down tuh look.
Bi ll : Huhh
Ethel : Brother I mean it slowed up I I a:ll, the traffic y' know,
Ben : An' there- there wz at least ten mi:les of traffic bumper tuh
bumper.
Ethel : -because a' that,
1 .0)
Ben : [[Damn idiots,
Lori : An' how long did it- So-so it took a while tuh get through­
What time I I didju leave.
Ethel : Mm hm,
Ethel : Well, let's I I see, we­
Ben : 'Leven thirty,
Lori : But that wz- Then you wentuh Fre:d's.
Ethel : We, I I we left- we left-
Ben : No. That's the time we left Fre:d's.

I've been engaged in pointing up some relatively delicate aspects of

storytelling and attempting to make something of them. I'm continuing that
now. And the delicate aspect of storytelling that I'm going to focus on is
involved in Ethel's utterance, "At the great big drive in theater" and her

437
438 Part VII
utterance ' '-because of that. ' ' I want to develop an account of her usage and
what it is; what she's doing and why.
What she's doing in a transparent sort of way is producing specifically
completions to sentences begun by Ben; such sentences as, so far as he's
concerned, may already be complete, at least in the case of ' ' -because of that: ' '

Ben : An' there- there wz at least ten mi:les of traffic bumper tuh
bumper.
Ethel : -because a' that,

In the other case he's going to go on in any event:

Ben : They must'v had some type of a showing. -- A camper show or

uhm- II flea market,
Ethel : At the great big drive in theater.

The phenomenon of people finishing off other people's utterances, or

extending and re-finishing an utterance that somebody else has already
attempted a finish to is not all that rare, though it has a great deal of technical
interest to it and I'll suggest some of its technical interest in a bit.
Now I want to locate one class of such occurrences and explain them. In
doing so we begin at a place that seems very far away from where we shall end
up; we begin with among the most general sorts of maxims for the production
of talk in conversation, and specifications of this maxim will recur throughout
the course. It runs: A speaker should, on producing the talk he does, orient to his
recipient. We're concerned with one specification of that, for now. If the
maxim is so - as it is - then a sort of consequence is that ifyou've already told
something to someone then you shouldn't tell it to them again, or if you know in
other ways that they know it then you shouldn't tell it to them at all. So that
a typically complainable-about event is: Two parties walking along, both
watching the same sorts of things, and one narrating what's happening to
which the other can characteristically reply, "I see it, I see it. " Alternatively,
one telling the other something that they've already told him, to which the
other will characteristically reply, not awaiting its completion, "You already
told me that. ' '
That's a very general rule, and it can present difficulty under certain
standardized situations of which possibly the most interesting - interesting
not so much for technical reasons but interesting for the plaintiveness of the
problems it poses - are those in which one or more couples are present and
talking in the environment of others, possibly other couples. And hereafter
just imagine other couples so as to make it a little bit more interesting. If a
couple is present and conversing with other couples, and there's a rule 'Don't
tell your recipients what you know they already know; what you've already
told them, ' then, if that rule generically applies to conversation, there would
be a kind of dramatic bind on this sort of conversation which would involve
that if, e.g. , one person is going to tell a story, then, considering whether
 Lecture 4 439
others know it, if that person is a part of a couple then one thing they're very
largely going to know is that their spouse will know the story by virtue of the
fact that the stories they tell in the presence of others, they've already told
their spouse. That is then to say that when couples get together they might
find that they have almost nothing any member of the group can tell the
group without feeling that at least some other members of the group already
know what they're telling them.
A general problem, then, is how to deal with the situation of a couple in
conversation with others. One obvious solution - that spouses shouldn't tell
each other anything that they might have occasion to tell other people -
obviously has massive troubles involved in it which are reflected in such a
situation as someone telling a story and having their spouse complain "How
come you never told me that. " However, spouses don't much get into that
situation. And that has to do with, if they are in each other's daily presence
then on any occasion that they have anything to tell, there are rather strong
bases for their telling it to their spouse. So that they will daily use up, with
regard to their spouse, any possible news they have. The reasons for that are
themselves rather technical and general, having to do with things like: When
people gather, including spouses but not uniquely to spouses, then, via the
rule 'orient to one's recipient, ' one of the businesses is to inform the person
they're with of any possible news relevant to that other that they acquired in
between meetings. And this will partially explain how come spouses don't
withhold from each other, until a scene in which many are present, the stories
that they have.
Now let me try to develop kind of an explanation of why, when something
is news, spouses tell that news to their spouse first, i.e. , not necessarily first of
anyone, though sometimes first of anyone, but on the first occasion they
can. But I want to hold the problem and develop an explanation which will
tum out to be an explanation of it, without at the moment referring to
spouses.
Everyone has encountered the following sort of scene: You meet somebody
and they ask you, about someone you mutually know, "How is X?" Now, at
least theoretically it's quite imaginable that you could say, not having spoken
to the asked-about one in the last ten minutes, half hour, week, two months,
that you don't know, and refer to as your source for not knowing, that you
haven't spoken to them in the last ten minutes, half hour, two weeks, three
months, whatever. That occasionally occurs to you, and we'll try to say why
it can occur to you, but very characteristically you feel altogether confident in
saying that they're fine or not so fine, and maybe adding some more or less
close characterization of how they are. Now, how can you feel confident that ·
you know how somebody is whom you haven't spoken to recently? After all,
people suffer all sorts of contingencies in one's absence. But for some sorts of
people - roughly, close acquaintances (people in such sorts of relationships as
involve others asking one party to the relationship about the other, i.e. , others
know what sort of relationship you're in with the one they're asking about),
it's their business to inform each other of any more or less dramatic events that
440 Part VII
happen to them. In some cases it's their business on the event's occurrence to
sit down and start calling people up. Deaths, marriages, changes of jobs,
whatever, are occasions for making a contact that otherwise one would not
have then made with a variety of people. On the other hand, there is a variety
of news which can await some other sort of contact; either one's normal
contact-occasions, or however it is that a contact happens to occur.
Now, parties in what we can call a ' reason for a call' relationship - and by
that I mean that there are some things as between them, that if those happen
it's their business to make a call or make a contact - can feel assured about
the status of someone; assured enough not to call them to find out, or assured
enough to answer somebody who asks about them, by virtue of the fact that
they haven't received a call. That is to say, one can figure, about a whole
bunch of people, that they are more or less as they were by virtue of the fact
that they haven't told you otherwise. So we wander through the world feeling
confident about the states of people with whom we aren't in moment to
moment contact.
That can be consequential if at some point you encounter them or
encounter someone who's encountered them, and you discover that such an
event as should have occasioned a contact has happened and a contact hasn't
happened. That is to say, you meet someone and they tell you that some time
ago X got married or X moved or some such significant thing, and X never
told you. Not that they 'never told you' by virtue of the fact that you've seen
them and they didn't say anything about it, but they never called you to tell
you. If that happens then you can begin to doubt whether you know what's
up with them. And if someone asks about them, you can end up saying -
though you've spoken to them with as much frequency as you normally do
- that you don't know how they are: "We aren't close anymore. " People can
feel "we aren't close anymore" about people they see with as much a rate as
they ever saw them, by virtue of discovering that things have happened with
them that they haven't told you.
Now, spouses are plainly an instance of that sort of thing, i.e. , there's a
large body of news that a spouse should hear about as soon as it happens, or
on the first occasion thereafter. Indeed, pretty much anything you would
properly tell anybody else, you will have or should have told your spouse on
the first occasion you could have - which will characteristically be before
you've had occasion, in public with your spouse, to be telling someone else.
It would plainly be bizarre, seeing your spouse every day, to announce on a
Saturday night in the company of others that you got a raise on Wednesday.
She might well figure that something is up in that you didn't tell her. Or she
would also feel strange if on Friday she were to hear from somebody else that
on Wednesday you got a raise. She might well figure, not that you were
holding it for a surprize, but that you were holding out on her.
So, by virtue of what are really rather general considerations, spouses
should end up telling each other pretty much anything they ever tell anybody
else, before they tell - if not anybody else, anybody else in the company of
their spouse. Unless, e.g . , they happen to arrive and the spouse is there with
 Lecture 4 44 1
somebody else. But that has nothing much to do with spouses, it has to do
with rules for telling and classifications of items that are tellable.
Now, among the few occasions where spouses end up telling news to a
spouse in the presence of others is when they're talking about the long and far
ago, and it just hasn't happened that we've ever had occasion to tell of this,
since the issue is I didn't know you then, so it never was 'news' for us. And
in the coutse of our relationship since I've known you, such a matter as leads
me to mention this never came up. But nonetheless spouses are often bothered
by much of that happening, i.e. , they are bothered if, in the presence of
others, too many reminiscences occur which they haven't already heard. And
there are reasons for that, too. I can't develop them fully here, but roughly
what it has to do with is that, in ways that we'll see eventually in the course,
stories get occasioned by a current course of conversation. There are many
occasions for any story getting occasioned. If we've known each other long
enough, the course of conversation should have naturally provided that
anything substantial at any time in your life will have been occasioned to tell.
And people telling, then, the most antique stories for them, in whatever
company, it will tum out that after they've been spoused for a while they've
already told that to their spouse. So spouses can figure that if much of your
early life occurs to you in conversations, not with me but with others and me,
then you haven't been participating in conversations with me in the way you
participate in conversations with others and me. Like, you only turn on when
other people are there. Which is plainly a complainable.
What we've been coming to, then, is that, not so much by virtue of being
a spouse but by virtue of the consequences of being a spouse, one will have
told almost anything worth telling to one's spouse before one has an occasion
to tell it with one's spouse and others. Furthermore, it's kind of likely for lots
of news that on any given occasion when one might tell it to one's spouse and
others, one will already have told it - not simply to one's spouse, but to one's
spouse and others, i.e. , for any given story one is going to tell, one's spouse
will be publicly hearing that story maybe many times. Now, that is already
to suppose a modification of the general rule, 'don't tell someone what you've
already told them; ' a modification which says, 'in the presence of others, relax
the don't-tell rule in the case of spouses. ' One question, then, is what do
spouses do when their spouse is telling a story they've already heard? That's
a professional problem for spouses, since a good deal of time that they spend
in the company of others, they are rehearing what they've already heard.
Another aspect of it is, spouses will jointly have participated in some of the
events that they will have occasion to tell in the company of others - where,
e.g. , having gone to the movies together they wouldn't come home and tell
the other that they went to the movies. But the next night, having been asked
"What did you do?" they would plainly be in a position to say "We went to
the movies. ' ' Well, who of them is it that's going to tell of any event that they
mutually participate in? The problem is after all simple in other circum­
stances. Whoever it is that something happened to can tell it. But what
happens when it happened to both of them? It's common enough that
442 Part VII
something that one's reporting has happened to more than oneself, but it's
also common that in any group of participants they'll find something to tell
which has happened to only one of them. So that of all the people who went
to some event, they will disperse backwards, such that each of them will end
up in some environments in which they're the only ones to whom it
happened. Milions of people go through wars, etc. , but for the millions of
people who go through a war, there are events of the war that for some
environment there will be recipients who weren't in it, or weren't in it in the
way they were, and will thereby be proper recipients for the story that's
available. But again, spouses are peculiar in that a great deal of what either
of them have to tell in the company of their spouse to others is something in
which they jointly participated. How then do they divide up the work of
telling?
There are some plain and classical solutions. In some places if couples
gather for an evening, then the first thing they do after gathering is split apart.
Men go into one room, women go into another room. That has as an obvious
nice consequence to it that stories in one room can reproduce the stories in the
other, while allowing everyone to tell a story, not having to compete for that
story with their spouse. And in this culture, such things take place. An
alternative thing might well involve some relatively simple rule, like if it
happened to both of them then one of them has distinct rights to tell it. It
would, e.g. , presumably be one index of male-female relationships if what
held were what seems to have held often enough - that any story that happens
to both man and wife, the man tells. Then of course the wife is in a position
such that she not only listens to stories that she knows by virtue of the fact
that her husband has already told her about things that happened to him, but
she also listens to - or at least doesn't tell - the stories that she knows by
virtue of the fact that she too was one to whom they happened.
Now all of that is rather problematic by virtue of other technical features
of conversation having to do with some of the reasons for the rule 'don't tell
what you've already told. ' These have to do with how it is that people listen
to stories and should listen to stories. For example, one kind of rule for
listening to stories which I'll discuss in great detail eventually, is 'listen to a
story to find out if a similar thing or the same thing happened to you. At the
end of the story, if you've found such a thing, tell it. ' Plainly that would have
bizarre consequences for one spouse telling a story that the other also
participated in. That is to say, the one spouse having told the story, the other
would say "The same thing happened to me," and tell the same story. Which
isn't all that funny because just such a thing happens not that rarely, except
that the parties to the story didn't do it together, i.e. , a first person reports on
something they did and the other says "Isn't that a coincidence? I did just the
same thing today" and then tells it again. We then get questions like "How
come I didn't see you there?" etc.
So at least one major way that listeners are occupied, is one that a spouse
cannot be engaged in. What are spouses to do? It rums out that there doesn't
seem to have been any formal solution arrived at for the culture, and spouses
 Lecture 4 443
have to work out a solution, each for themselves if they can, though they tend
to work out more or less similar solutions, some of which are to get angry and
annoyed and bored. And one recurrent thing that happens is that insofar as
one of the spouses is, if not a famous person, then a sort of a conversational
star, i.e. , someone who, in the company of a variety of people, ends up telling
lots of stories to the amusement of those other people, then while everybody
else loves them their spouses hate them, in that what happens is that the
spouse ends up hearing time and again the same stories told, and can't
possibly find themselves being amused by them. It's a distinct problem of
stars that everybody else is amused with them and their spouses are bored
with them. And typically they don't know what to do about it, either of
them.
Now, one sort of solution is, if they do a lot of hosting themselves, then
while one is telling a story, the other can behave also as a host by wandering
around filling up drinks, making themselves busy, all in all not listening. But
are there listening techniques available? Yes. One such listening technique is
present in our materials and is altogether kind of common, and that is, a
spouse listens precisely to the story they already know, for its more or less
correct presentation, and engages in monitoring it - as a listener should -
utterance by utterance. But now, however, for whether it's correctly presented
as they know it. If not, what they do is put in corrections at the proper places.
This can be a more or less happy solution. It can also be a more or less
unhappy solution. For its unhappy version, one routine situation for spouses
is that at the end of the evening, when the spouses get together, the news that
they have is their anger over the corrections that have been done to the story
I told, or the way in which the story that I know has been fudged by its teller.
That is to say, given the earlier remarks I made about spouses when they're
together having news for each other, then an evening together can generate
news for each other after the evening; the news being what either spouse did
to the other in the course of the evening. And that can have to do with each's
talking behavior.
Again, then, an altogether common kind of thing is that spouses listen to
each other's stories, and among the few ways they can listen to it to retain
interest, is to listen to it by virtue of the story they know; that ending up in
their engaging in modifications on the story, one telling it and the other
modifying the told story. This situation also occurs when groups of people
who are currently friends and also had a past together, are reminiscing
together. Then, too, one finds some party telling a story they all know -
indeed, that's the nature of the reminiscence - and the others engaged in
modifications and elaborations of the story being told. Occasions of reminisc­
ing are, then, specifically occasions in which the general rule, 'don't tell what
the others know' is lifted, and where it's lifted its consequence is precisely the
consequence that occurs for spouses generally.
 Lecture 5
Selecting identifications
This time I'm going to begin a consideration of a story which will take a
bunch of time. I'm not sure how long, but maybe several lectures. The
fragment comes from the same group therapy sessions that we've been pulling
stuff out of. It's told by the girl, whom we call Louise, to the only other person
present at the time she's telling it, Ken.

Louise : One night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An'
uh (3 . 0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the
( 1 . 0) Ash Grove for awhile, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't
stand a car. 'n he II has a small car.
Ken : Mm hm,
Louise : So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house
an' we stayed there half the night. ( 1 .0) We didn't go to bed to­
t' each other, but- it was so comfortable an' so I I nice.
Ken : Mm hm,
Ken : Mh
Louise : Y'know? There's everything perfect.

This particular lecture will be devoted to developing an apparatus that sets

up a consideration of the reference in this story to "this guy that I liked a real
lot. " The analysis will be very general. I deliver it here because it's appropriate
here, but it holds for identifications in stories and in conversations very
generally. I'm going to present a typology for identifications and some rules
for use of the typology, and then offer varieties of evidence for the operation
of that small mechanism. What I want to be getting to with regard to the
story is to be able eventually to focus on aspects of the way that "this guy that
I liked a real lot" is an identification that's 'topically selected. ' But right now
we're not going to talk at all about topical selection of identities; we may
eventually be placed in a position to be able to do that.
I'm going to describe one non-exclusive procedure for selecting identities.
That procedure has two components plus the rules. The two components -
ways of classifying persons - I'll just give very non-descriptive names to. I'll
call a first type Type 1 and the second Type 2 . And I'll propose that a rule of
their use is that you use Type 1 if you can.
One way of differentiating identifications made of persons in conversation
is by reference to whether the speaker intends the recipient(s), or differentially
among the recipients, that they use the presented identification to find from
that identification that they know the person being referred to. And we
intend, by Type 1 , to be naming such a type identification. That is to say, a

444
 Lecture 5 445
Type 1 identification is one that the speaker produces with the intention of
having the recipient use it to find some person that the recipient already
knows. And a Type 2 identification is one that a speaker uses to indicate to
the recipient that he should not employ it to attempt to find who, that he
knows, is being referred to. In recipient terms, given a Type 1 identification
it's the recipient's business to try to find from it who, that he knows, is being
referred to. And given a Type 2 , it's his business to recognize that he's not to
try to find from it who he knows that is being referred to.
Now, there are some obvious members of either group. So, for Type 1 ,
obvious instances are things like first names: Jim, Joe, Harry, etc. and obvious
instances of Type 2 are things like "a guy," "someone, " etc.
Q : You can say that the Type 1 is specific and the Type 2 is general.
HS : Why is that so? "Someone told me" refers to some one person. What
makes it general?
Q : It's not telling you which one, so it's general. It's indefinite.
HS : How about "a guy. " Is that indefinite?
Q : Yeah because there's a lot of different types of guys. There's only one
Jim.
HS : Oh is that so? There's only one Jim?
Q : Talking about Jim it's understood as being one that's known by the
recipient.
Our problem is to find out how people interpret identifications. It's
obviously not so that there's only one Jim. It's obviously not even so that for
any one person they only know one Jim. The specificity of names does not, can
not conceivably, tum on the uniqueness of the assignment of a name to a
person. 'Someone' can be just as particular a person as 'Jim. '
Indeed, the formulation I first gave, 'recognize the person whom you
know' is not quite correct and I would amplify it to 'recognize the person that
the speaker knows you know. ' So that there can be Jims who you know, who
you don't recognize when they say "Jim" because you figure they don't know
him, or they don't know that you know him. So there can be a person, Jim,
who you know and who they know, and that's not the person you
recognize, but you recognize the person who you know that they know you
know. The issue, however, is not to take the classification and see that it
says that "this guy" is such a person as I suppose you don't know or have
no reason to suppose you know, but to see such things as: Is there a rule which
says which one to use? The rule is kind of important. And also, we want
to see what else this thing will do besides assign a classification to types
of terms.
Last time I said that one - if not the most - general maxim for talk
production in conversation is 'speakers should design their talk for recipients. '
In a way, we're dealing here with another specification of that general maxim;
here by reference to identities of persons. That speakers do design identifica­
tions by reference to recipients is available from materials particularly used in
that fashion. I'm talking about the combinations of pronouns and relational
446 Part VII
terms; things like "my mother, " "your brother, " and things like that. Where
plainly for those, a speaker who uses one of them should use it by reference
to himself and the recipient such that, e.g. , one shouldn't use "my mother"
to a recipient for whom that person referred to is also the mother - one should
use, instead, "our mother. "
It would then seem as though that combination - pronouns and relational
terms - constitutes the body in terms of which an orientation to recipients by
speakers is done. That turns out not to be so for these, taken as a combinable
group by themselves. Which is to say, one shouldn't use a term like "my
brother, " though it's true that the person being referred to is both my brother
and not your brother, if other things are so. One obvious instance would be,
suppose he's my brother but he's also your husband. Then one is in a position
where referring to "my brother" is kind of a special activity. Or, say, she's my
mother but she's also your friend. Is the issue then that one chooses between,
e.g . , "my brother" and "your husband" or between "my mother" and "your
friend" in such a circumstance? That's not the way it's done, since what
alternates with, e.g. , "my brother" or "my mother" is not just another term
from the same corpus of pronouns and relational terms, but other terms
altogether. So if, e.g. , the person you might refer to with "my brother" is a
friend of the recipient's, then the issue isn't should I use "my brother" or
"your friend," but what I should probably use is his name.
At least a consequence of that is that this is not a self-contained group to
be used for selecting identifications relative to indicating who, that we know,
is being referred to, but at least this list plus, say, names, are obviously
selected-among together. That is to say, it's not sufficient to analyze the
combinations the pronouns and relational terms yield, in order to find how
identifications which could have those things as their instances are selected.
One needs to at least add to the list such things as names.
What I've then been suggesting is something like this: If I wanted to make
a case for ' recipient design' of identification-selection, then there's an obvious
body of materials in terms of which a case might be made, i.e. , the
combination of pronouns and relational terms. Now, while it remains so that
pronouns and relational terms are used to do that job, focussing on them will
not yield how that job is done. They are not a self-contained group selected
from amongst each other to find which terms to use, but their selection
involves some of them in alternation to other things, like names - and yet
other things as well.
Now, the way I'm going to proceed is first to look at what I'll call
'modified identifications, ' instances of which are things like:
Lottie : And Jan, uh this friend of mine, uh well she- I let her stay at the
house this weekend.
Another one:
Roger : New Year's we: : split up the dues so we each hadda buck fifty
tuh buy booze with for the New Year's party?
 Lecture 5 447
AI : Mm hm,
Roger : So we wen' around the room they were takin' orders. So Jack s­
uh one guy bought a dollar fifty worth of glue.

So we've got "And Jan, uh this friend of mine . . . " and "So Jack s- uh one
guy . . . ' ' What we plainly have here is a modification, specifically a
correction, of one identification by another. "Jan" is said and then replaced by
"this friend of mine" and "Jack" is said and then replaced by "one guy. " 1
Now, a question is in the first instance, why replace the names by the
second identifications - 'replace' being what I'm emphasizing. I ask that by
virtue of a differentiation between bases for correcting identifications and
bases for doing, e.g. , cumulations of identifications. That is to say, there are
familiar, obvious bases for correcting names. One is where you mis-name the
person, e.g. , "And Jan- uh Mary . . . " where there's a person you're
attempting to identify and what you've done is to use the wrong name. And
you can correct an identification where what you're intending to bring off is
that you referred to the wrong person, e.g . , "And Jan- no, not Jan, I mean
the other girl, what's her name, uh, Mary . " I bring up that kind of
. .

correction because it's an obvious place where one is replacing one identifi­
cation with another.
That's relevant because there's an altogether different thing which is
perfectly legitimate, which is to cumulate identities. One can refer to a same
person as "Jan, this friend of mine" where, then, one has two identities. And
obviously you can have a large list of identities: " My friend Frank, a computer
programmer who recently moved here from Kansas because he got a new job,
he and his wife are coming over, they're leaving the kids home . . . " all those
constituting an accumulation of identities for a single person. So identities
plainly can be cumulated. Since they can be cumulated, if some two identities
are correct for the person, then why replace one with the other? One can
plainly see a basis for replacing one with another if one of them is wrong. We
want to know why, when several identities are used which can all be correct,
are they not done as a cumulation but as a replacement?
That replacement is done suggests that some identities, both of which are
correct, can stand in an alternation relationship to each other. The question is,
how do they alternate with each other? If we look at those that are used in an
alternating relationship, they map onto the types we proposedly started with,
i.e. , "Jan" is an instance of a Type 1 and "this friend of mine, " on its own,

1 Sacks ' version of the talk in the second instance is simplified, and the phenomenon is a bit
more complex. The transcript goes :

Roger : So we wen' around the room they were takin' orders. So Jack- k- this uh one
guy bought uh dollar fifty worth a· Ripple, next guy bough (hh) t a dollar fifty
worth a· glue hheh
jim : heh heh II heh heh
A! : hehheh heh heh!
Roger : hhhmhhh heh " Planning on gettin' gassed . huh Jack ! "
448 Part VII
is an instance of a Type 2 . And if what's proposed about them is that one says
'try to recognize' and the other says 'don't try to recognize, ' then we have a
basis for the fact that one is corrected to the other.
Now, that they're ordered starting with a Type 1 and replacing it into a
Type 2 is also consistent with the proposal which says 'try to use the Type 1
if you can,' i.e. , one would start with a Type 1 . Furthermore - forgetting
about names or identifications - with respect to the issue of 'orientation to a
recipient, ' the occurrence of a correction operation in speech is rather direct
evidence for an orientation to recipients. And the positioning of the correction
is also material on that issue, in the sense that to put the correction directly on
what's to be corrected as compared to putting it anywhere else, involves some
sort of very close monitoring of one's talk by reference to how recipients will
deal with it. Having said something, and with an idea of what it is that a
recipient will do with the thing you said, then it can be in point to put the
correction right then and there, so as to try to have them relieved of a job that
they might be at this point engaged in, i.e. , to take "Jan" and try to figure
out who, that you know that I know, are you trying to tell me to recognize
with that name. The replacement, then, says "Don't try to do that, I made
a mistake, it's not someone whom I suppose you know . "
And there are materials relevant to that indeed Type 1 s and Type 2s are
heard in terms of the work they impose on recipients, differentially. Here is a
characteristic fragment, again from the group therapy sessions. Two of the
fellows, Al and Ken, are having a sort of mock fight. At one point Al says
' 'I'll give you til three to move" and starts counting, "One, two, ' ' and we
get:

Ken : hheh heh heh hhh Alri(hh)ght.Alright D(h)addy, hh hh hh hh

hhhh!
(3 . 0)
Ken : whhhh
( 1 .0)
Ken : Ohhh
(0. 7)
Dan : Da--
( 1 . 0)
Ken : hh Huh?
Dan : Daddy,
Ken : Yeh at'sa new word t'day.
( 1 . 0)
Ken : --Joelle's Mommy, (0. 6) He en be Daddy d'day,
Roger : -- Who's Joelle.
(0. 8)
Ken : -- Th'girl th't lives nex'door. Sh's a li'l brat.
She's about, fourteen fiften years old.
Roger : Girl'oo lives nex'door? hehh (0.6) Haven'even med'er.
(2 . 0)
 Lecture 5 449
Ken : Butchu don'needa meed'er. She's homey. (0.6) Show y'a
picsher of 'er.
AI : Oh hey! Eez gotta picture of 'er I'm II (sure we'll)
( ).
Roger : - Oh you mean nex' II door t'yer house.
Ken : hhh!
Ken : Yeah.
Roger : - oh I thoughtchu men'nex'door tuh he(hh)re hheh
(2 . 5 )
Roger : There's a vacant lot on that side 'n another head sh(h)rinker
joint ne(h)x' door.

I want to focus on ' 'Joelle's Mommy," "Who's Joelle," "The girl that lives
next door, " etc. What happens is, "Joelle" having been used, Roger engages
in an attempt to try to figure out who it is that Ken knows that he knows, that
is being referred to. The 'Who is X?' is something specifically done when a
Type 1 has been used. Now, in a fashion, one could perfectly well say "Who
is X?" for the other type of identification, e.g. , "Who is 'this guy'?" And there
are some particular circumstances under which such a thing is done. Here is
an instance of that sort of thing, where one of them, Jessie, is a visitor to
California and the other, Goldie, is an old acquaintance living in more-or-less
west Los Angeles. The old acquaintance asks if the visitor is planning to come
into the city. The visitor is saying 'yes,' and the way she says it is:

Jessie : Yes. I will. I, I, uh as a matter of fact uh this friend of mine uhm

uh who's lived out here all these years. She lives in uh the Valley?
Sherman Oaks?
Goldie : Yeah?
Jessie : Uh she's gonna pick me up Thursday morning.

After a brief interlude:

Goldie : Uh uh what is your friend's name. 'Cause my son lives m

Sherman Oaks.

The name of "this friend of mine" was not given by virtue of it not being
supposed that the friend would be known, in part by virtue of her living so
far away. However, the name of the place has now been used to establish a
possible warrant for her knowing that person, that then being a basis for
asking 'Who is the friend, maybe I do know, though you would have every
reason to suppose I don't, and I offer you a reason for my possibly knowing
it. ' So there are some rather special circumstances under which, in producing
a Type 2 identification, one can give off materials that allow the other to ask
for a 'Who is X?' They may then include information about why, though you
wouldn't know it, they have reason to believe that they might know the
person.
450 Part VII
Now if a Type 1 has been used, like "Joelle, " and the question is "Who's
Joelle?," i.e. , who that I know that has that name are you referring to with
that name?, then the answer to such a question should be materials which I
could better use than the name to find who that one is. And such possible
materials come up: "The girl that lives next door. " What happens is that
"next door" doesn't solve that problem. He engages in a consideration of who
might live next door and finds that he doesn't know such a person, i.e. , "I
haven't even met her. " He thereafter discovers that "next door" was meant
to do a different job, i.e. , in that Ken was referring to 'next door to my house, '
it was such a thing as would say 'you don't know her. ' Having found that it's
next door to Ken's house, Roger finds out that he's been misled by the use of
"Joelle, ' ' and also by "the girl that lives next door" which wasn't intended to
assist him in finding the person that he knows, but to indicate that he doesn't
know the person.
So that deals in part with the issue of the way in which the use of a name
can be heard, and the kinds of operations that indeed a recipient will engage
in, and also the way in which a recipient will treat possible materials he's given
in aid of that search, to find who it is that he knows. Now this doesn't yet
really directly go to the issue of the preference for Type ls over Type 2s,
though it could, if such a thing could be established, bear on it. And kinds of
materials directly relevant to the issue of the preference for Type ls can be
gotten.

jay : Where' dju get the filing box from.

George : From uh: : that fellow who usetuh sit in back of you, who, who
got fired.
Jay : Jordan?
George : Jordan, yeah.

Another fragment:

Marge : Uh she asked me to stop by, she bought a chest of drawers from
uhm (4.0) what's that gal's name? Just went back to Michigan?
(2 . 0)
Marge : Helen uhm
Bea : Oh I know who you mean. ( 1 .0) Brady- Brady.
Marge : Yeah. Helen Brady.
Bea : Mm hm

Another:

Rose : Uh because uhm I think uhm what's her name? uhm

Bea : Oh
Rose : That's on in the morning?
Bea : Sue?
Rose : Sue Brown, I- she usually stays until eleven.
 Lecture 5 45 1
What's happening in these is, speaker doesn't have the name. Not
having the name, what speaker does is to ask recipient to give them the
name. Now if Type 1 and Type 2 were not preferredly organized such that
Type 1 is preferred over Type 2 , then if speaker didn't have the name,
speaker could used some kind of identification. The question is, why do the
speakers, if they don't have the name, attempt to get the name from the
recipient? One thing that's evidenced, anyway, is that speaker in these cases
is oriented to whether the recipient knows the person. Being oriented to
whether recipient knows the person, and knowing that recipient knows the
person, they can show that without having the name, by getting recipient to
give them the name. Now, if the issue were only 'use Type 1 if you can,'
by reference to 'if you have the name then use it, ' then if you didn't have it
you'd use some other identification. But the preference for a Type 1
operates to get speaker to try to find the name if he figures that recipient
knows the person - even if that involves getting the name from recipient.
Such materials, then, bear directly on that there is a preference for Type 1
over Type 2 .
It also can happen that neither patty can remember the person's name.
Speaker can produce an identification intending to show 'you know who it is,
I don't remember the name, do you have the name?' and recipient can say 'I
know who you're talking about but I don't remember the name either, ' and
give an identification which indicates that they recognize the person without
the name. An instance of that:

Ken : No some people-some people wish fer things that are beyond
their reach. Now uhh with that father and- you know that
family thing that- that we had here with that dod, that I went
--+ to, that I didn't like?
Roger : Huh?
Ken : Uh that- On-on Monday nights I used to come II here
Roger : You're talking about my parents, son.
Ken : No! That that jerk that was tee- he was supposed to be the
doctor.
(2 . 0)
Ken : You know? uhm the I I (
Roger : --+ Y-the quack! hhehhh
Ken : Yeah. Well I was sitting in here and he kept . . .

Where Roger than produces an identification, "the quack, ' ' which says 'I
know the clod you're referring to. '
The matter is a little bit stronger yet, since the preference for Type 1 s can
operate where a speaker doesn't figure that recipient knows who's being
referred to, but knows something that involves it in being an 'almost,' i.e. ,
that you know someone in some close relationship to that one being
referred to. The kinds of materials I'm talking about here involve things
like:
452 Part VII
Bea : I'm reading one of uh Harold Sherman's books.
Marge : Mm hm
Bea : I think we read one, one time, about life after death or
something.
Marge : Mm hm
Bea : And uh this is how to make uh ESP work for you.
The idea here is, a book is being referred to. The book is not taken to be
known by the recipient. It could be referred to as ' 'I'm reading a book you've
never read. ' ' Instead what's done is to find some way of referring to the book
- here, via the author - which makes it an 'almost known' thing: You know
the author of books of which this is one book. Where here we can see a rather
elaborately found way to make this an 'almost Type 1 ' identification.
Another instance of that sort of thing is from materials in which people
went into houses and watched the children of the house for very extended
periods, and wrote down, as much as they could, everything that happened.
Here, 'she' is this little child that's being observed.

She turned and went into the kitchen and asked her mother very
definitely, " Mom, didn't they almost- Who is she?" Her mother said,
"That's Rita. Do you remember the other day when you went to the
party and met Una? Well that's Una's mother. "

Now here, a person unknown is being asked about. The identification that's
given is one which says 'You don't know her, but I can find someone that you
know, that she is related to. ' And that's then the way it's done, to provide that
this is an 'almost Type 1 ,' as compared to simply a Type 2 , "A friend of
mine. ' '
The business of all this for our purposes here is to set up that a thing
involved in "this guy" is that its use says 'the person who I'm referring to is
someone whom I identify in such a way as to indicate that I have no reason
to think that you know him. ' Now this leaves open the issue of, if one is going
to pick a Type 2 identification, what are the constraints in choosing among
possible such identifications? What I want to be getting to eventually is that
if you're going to give a Type 2 , then there are lots of Type 2s you could give;
how do choose among them? We've said at least that quite different things
can be done with Type 1 s and Type 2s. Now one thing is that if what you're
doing with a Type 1 is identifying the person with a name, then for Type 2s
you're freed from that in some way, and you can mobilize the identification
for other purposes. So you don't have simply that all it says is 'it's someone
you don't know,' but you could have things like, for "this guy," "this guy
that I liked a real lot, " which is another thing, but you could also have "this
older guy that I liked a real lot" or varieties of things like that. We're in a
position, then, to try to focus on how the particular thing that's used for this
particular Type 2 got selected, and we'll go on to that next time.
 Lecture 6
A 'defensively designed' story
Louise : One night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An'
uh (3 .0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the
( 1 . 0) Ash Grove for a while, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't
stand a car. 'n he II has a small car.
Ken : Mm hm,
Louise : So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house
an' we stayed there half the night. ( 1 .0) We didn't go to bed to­
t' each other, but- it was so comfortable an' so II nice.
Ken : Mm hm,
Ken : Mh
Louise : Y'know? There's everything perfect.
We've so far arrived at that "this guy," as an identification, is rectptent
designed in at least the sense that it proceeds from a determination - or a
claim, anyway - that the person being referred to is supposedly not known by
recipient, and it instructs recipient to not try to find who, that speaker knows
that recipient knows, is being referred to. Under that circumstance, that
speaker is going to pick a Type 2 identification, then there are other possible
Type 2 identifications that can be picked, and a question is how do they go
about picking some Type 2 identification - or some set of Type 2
identifications, since they can perfectly well cumulate them.
What we at least have as features of "this guy that I liked a real lot" is that
it proposes about the person identified that it's male, and that there was an
affectional relationship from speaker's side, with respect to that male. Those
aspects of the identification have an altogether apparent relationship to an
obvious business of the story - reporting on a date, and setting up what I shall
claim is a decidedly focussed characterization of the occurrence of sex on the
date.
A thing I'll want to propose is that the story is rather elaborately organized,
and that in a very detailed way its elaborate organization is recipient designed,
in a fashion we've not yet focussed on. The recipient design seems roughly to
be involved in bringing off something like the following point, under certain
constraints. The point being that a particular variant place for sex was used,
the constraints being that the story is being told to a partial colleague; one
who is a teenager and unmarried like her, and in that sense a colleague, partial
in the sense of being male not female. And by virtue of the maleness of him
- and some other facts - the story is defensively designed. By that I mean
something like this: By virtue of that he is male, a way that he has, that she
can know of, of reading the story that she tells, is in terms of it possibly telling

453
454 Part VII
him the terms of her availability; a thing he could be interested in on his own,
or, insofar as he has male acquaintances, then the terms of her availability can
be used by him to advertise her. In due course I'm going to be arguing that
she tells the story in such a fashion as to rather sharply locate what she will
do and with whom, given that she's telling it to one for whom such a story
told by an eligible female is readable, and known to be readable, to find out
just such a matter.
In that regard then - though I'm not going to rely all that much on it, but
for now just introductorily - an obvious point is the use of ' ' . . . that I liked
a real lot" in her characterization of the guy she was with. She didn't have to
use it. It's not, for example, a feature of the course of events on this particular
evening, nor is it for that matter, even a current characterization of the person.
And in that regard there is kind of a marked difference between 'like' and
'liked. ' If she'd said "One night I was with this guy that I like a real lot," she
might be saying 'you can't use this to see whether it will happen with you or
any friends of yours whom you might arrange for me, because I'm currently
occupied. ' Insofar as she's not reporting 'like' but 'liked, ' the question is, well
why put in 'liked' since the person who is being referred to is no longer in the
picture? And the point of its presence may have to do with the way in which
it locates a condition for her doing what she did, where, in proposing what it
is that she was willing to do, it can be heard as saying 'that which I was willing
to do on that occasion is not something that one can suppose I would do on
any occasion, ' such a matter having a specific relevance if she's talking to
someone who could read what she did for its advertising purposes - to himself
or to someone whom he might arrange such an occasion or such a relationship
for.
Now, I want to deal with some of the ways that their colleagial relationship
is used for putting together the story, and for focussing its business. But first
let me just note one sort of organization the story has, that seems to be
elaborate and detailed, and that is, its tense organization. Consider one
obvious alternative to the tense organization the story has; that being that
insofar as the whole thing takes place in a past, then it could be given simply
a past sequential narrative organization, a stringing together of "then"s: We
went to the show, then we did this, then we did that, then the following, then
. . . etc. It's a perfectly natural, if not canonical, form to stories. This story
doesn't have that form. The form it has involves the arrangement of its pasts
in such a fashion as to have, in the middle of it, a kind of present, i.e. , its pasts
lead up to a present from which a future is looked towards - where the future
is itself a past for the story's purposes. So we have "One night I was with this
guy that I liked a real lot. " Then we start to move toward a present: "We had
come back from the show, we had gone to the Ash Grove for a while; " we're
now somewhere in a present. "And we were gonna park. " At that point we're
in a present looking forward to something - that something has of course
already happened when the story is being told. It stops at that present,
looking forward to a first future, rejecting that future and taking up another,
i.e. , not to "park" but to go to the "back house. " And the story then preceeds
 Lecture 6 455
into a continuation of its past tense format. So in a way, a present is designedly
isolated. By 'designedly' I mean to point up this fine organization in which a
range of tenses are manipulated such that the pasts before that present are set
up to arrive at that as a present, and that present is used, then, as a platform
for projecting futures.
Leaving the tense organization aside for the moment, and going back to the
issue of the colleagiality of the characterization, I want to notice that the story
positions the occurrence of sex in it, in a fairly elaborate way. What I mean
by that is that there is a characterization of a variety of events, temporally
occurrant in the evening. The sex in it is positioned among those as, after
some events and before others, i.e. , it's bounded fore and aft. So it's
announced that "we had come back . . . , " what we had done before that,
that we did whatever we did after all those things, and that it lasted ' 'half the
night. " What's the point of that positioning? For a colleague, i.e. , another
unmarried teenager, the positioning asserted is the normal positioning of sex
for a date. That is to say, one could plainly produce a story in which what one
was pointing up was the unusual positioning of the sex on the date, e.g . , "We
were going to go to the Ash Grove, but we decided not to, and right then and
there we went off to park. "
Note that the positioning is not said to be normal or abnormal. What's
done is to employ the colleague's knowledge of normal positioning to indicate
that that was normal. Which is then to say, in effect, 'I'm not telling you the
story by virtue of that the positioning of sex in it was abnormal, don't look
to its positioning to find what I'm telling you to be the story. ' Such a story as,
' 'One night I went out with a guy who I liked a lot and we went to the movies
and after the movie we parked and eventually he went home" is no story for
such as they. Though it perfectly well might be a story if she was 1 2 years old,
or if she was considerably older than she is, in which case it might be 'doing
something like unmarried teenagers. ' After all, for a married couple or
unmarried adults or varieties of other combinations, this same positioning
would be not be specifically 'normal. ' The sex only has its normal positioning
vis-a-vis that they are unmarried teenagers.
So we have an elaborateness of the tense organization and an elaborateness
of the positioning of sex. And of course the two needn't combine in the way
they do, since we could have the sex positioned via a narrative course-of-the­
date organization, and not one that focusses on the 'just before the sex' as an
arrived-at present. But here we have an interesting tense organization and an
uninteresting positioning, where at least a possible business of using the
positioning when it's uninteresting, can be to isolate what it is that is
interesting that's present. Again, there could be a variety of things interesting
and present. It could be that the sex took place in a variant place and also at
a variant time, and that's readily enough doable: "Instead of going to the Ash
Grove we went to a motel, ' ' which would do both positioning and place
variance.
Let's move on to the issue of place. I want to suggest that the story's tense
organization is built so as to allow for the assertion of a place for sex that
456 Part VII
wasn't used. Plainly, the place that was used could simply be asserted: "We
went to the Ash Grove and then we went to the back house. " But what she
does is to arrive at a present, the present being treated in the story as a decision
point in terms of which alternatives are assessed, and one alternative is
rejected, another accepted. I raise the question, why put in a rejected
alternative? I would suggest that for people like them, had that second
alternative not been involved, then one wouldn't have presented a rejection of
one and an acceptance of the other.
Now, that is to say something like this: If an event is alternative to another,
then it's not necessarily the case that the other is alternative to it. While one
may report one as done 'in alternative' to the other, if the other was done one
wouldn't report it as done 'in alternative to something. ' That is, one could
simply say "we parked" and not, e.g . , "we rejected going to the back house,
and parked, " though one could present a rather different story, e.g. , "He said
we should go up to his apartment and I said no, so we parked. ' ' But there are
some events which can, under some circumstances, be presented as 'alterna­
tives to something else, ' where that something else, if it happens, is not
presented as an alternative to some other. So parking is presented as 'an
alternative' where parking is rejected, and going to the back house is
presented as 'an alternative' where it's accepted.
At least one aspect of the defensive design of the story, then, is that she
would be telling an altogether different story if she simply said "We went to
the back house" without noting "parking" as an alternative. What that
involves is that as there is a normal positioning whose variance can be used to
assess the terms of availability of the person telling the story, so there is a
normal place, whose use or non-use can also be employed in the same fashion.
Knowing that there is a normal place, at least for one's recipient and their
supposition of colleagiality with you, if you ignore reference to that normal
place then youy're making a rather different claim, i.e. , that something else is
normal for you. So that if what she were telling were that for her the normal
place is her back house, then she would be isolating herself as someone having
different conditions of availability than if she indicates that parking is the
normal place.
Again, then, another aspect of the story's defensive design is that she
indicates that she knows what, for them, is the normal place, which she can
use to specifically locate what happened here as 'distinctly unusual. ' And the
tense organization she uses allows that to have been present in her mind on the
occasion she's now telling about. That is to say, she can use a decisional
organization to invoke the normal priorities, in which, for unmarried
teenagers, parking is 'preferred. ' I don't mean that it's favorite, but there's
some way it's preferred over the back house, if at least only in moral terms.
That is to say, she brings off that she prefers the back house, but there is a
more abstract sense of 'prefer' which involves her in invoking the parking ­
that which is 'preferred' in the more abstract sense - as a first alternative. And
she can do that via the decision situation which she gets to via her tense
organization.
 Lecture 6 457
Now, having done this variant event - going to the back house - she
proceeds to temporally bound it - half the night as compared to staying there
all night. And also she proceeds to indicate that they didn't "go to bed" with
each other. Presumably what she didn 't do is something that she figures she
needs to say, by virtue of the question now arising: "Okay, if she would do
that, what else would she do?" So that in proposing that she did something
that she knows is unusual - and she knows it's unusual by virtue of her
commitment to the normal preferences - she then engages in bounding it as
to what she didn't do. And again, were she telling her girlfriend, or were one
guy telling another guy, then they might perfectly well choose to leave what
they 'didn't do' allusive.
So what we have are a series of technical resources mobilized to isolate a
particular variant to a series of known normal structures - i.e. , that we had
some sort of sex at an abnormal place - in the context of which elaborate
materials are also used to delimit what it is that happened. All of which can
be read by the male and thereby only partially colleagial recipient as a
relatively sharp specification of what sorts of terms she has. Where issues as
to her terms are made relevant by her wanting to say that she did a particular
variant thing. By virtue, that is, of her having done 'going to the back house'
for the sex, a whole range of other materials are stuck in: that she liked the
guy a real lot, that they had gone to the Ash Grove before, that it just happens
that she doesn't like cars and he had a small car, that they stayed in the back
house half the night, and that they didn't go to bed with each other. So we
can see a sense in which she's telling, from her point of view, a rather
dangerous story. And in that she's telling a rather dangerous story, its size has
to do with the warding off of inferences that could be made from the specific
event that she intends to tell of.
One can, I hope kind of readily, see how a specification of a range of
venturesome acts, sexual and non-sexual, could have a similar way of being
constructed, in which, to bring off a particular point, a whole range of
resources are employed to indicate 'what I'm not saying . ' And those resources
are employed in distinctly technical ways; i.e. , like this rather elaborated tense
organization which isolates a present in terms of which the alternatives are
projected, so as to get those alternatives into the story.
And one can see that, as complicated as it rums out to be to tell this story
to even a colleague, what a job is involved if one is trying to tell it to someone
who isn't. She couldn't, then, use the positioning, place, etc . , the sense of
"half the night," in order to bring off precisely what she's bringing off and
defending against.
 Lecture 7
The 'motive power' of a story;
'Ex-relationals'
Before I get into the discussion let me just note that the Spring 1 970 lectures
are also on storytelling, and in those lectures are a variety of technical
materials which are much relevant to understanding how stories work. I figure
I did them then as well as I would do them now, and I'm not going to
repeat them. You should, if you are at all interested in how stories work,
read them.
A thing I want to address now concerns the motive power of stories. By
that I mean, assuming that they get told in the first place, what keeps them
alive; what keeps them being retold? I will address that question rather more
specifically when I deliver a couple of lectures on jokes. This time I'll begin
by making a bunch of points about aspects of the telling of a story, which
are not available from the story itself though they're more or less pro­
foundly related to the story that's told. Then I'll see what can be done with
them.
The guy who tells the story, Tony, is around 40, and he works in a
nondescript job at an insurance company. He's telling the story to a younger
co-employee of his, Jay, who is quitting as of tomorrow and going back to
school. This is a possible last conversation for them before Jay's going back to
school. That he is going to quit and that he is going back to school is
something that was known as between these two, and the conversation begins
with that matter. They then go on to talk about a bunch of things having
nothing to do with quitting, and eventually get into the following sort of talk:
They are both of Italian extraction and they get into a discussion about being
in Italy - Jay was there on a long trip, and Tony was there during his time
in the navy during the Korean War. They talk about how they came to be in
the military, and Tony says how he went into the navy because he was
insecure and didn't know what to do with himself. He goes on to say,

Tony : But I'm t'ankful anyway. I came back ali:ve, (4. 0) I'm thankful
fer some things, (4.0) I could be a lot worse off.
( 10 .0)
Tony : T'day is money. -- Uh- people don't- pee- people respectchu for
how much money yuh have. (4. 0) They don't care how yih get it.
(2 .0) We're talkin'- When I say 'people' I'm speakin' in
generalities. (3 .0) They don't care how you get it. -- Jus' so long
ez yuh have it. (2 . 0) See if they see you gotta fifty thousan' dollar
ho:me? or a hunnuh thousan' dollar home? They don't care how
458
 Lecture 7 459
yuh � it. (2 . 0) What is it Brentwood? Belaire, -- or Pacific
Palisa:des or -- or what have you. Or Laurel Canyon? (3 . 0) They
don't care how you get it.
(8.0)
Tony : Bud ! care how I ged it.
(7 .0)
Jay : Hmmh.
(3 ,0)
Jay : Well, (2 . 0) I think it's, ( 1 .0) I think it's useless. for a man tuh spen'
iz life, making money, if he's not doing what 'e wants tuh do,
Tony : Oh I agree with you. Wholeheartedly.
Jay : I mean 'e c'n make all the money he wanz but what good is it if he's
not really doing what' e wants tuh do.
Tony : Yeh.
(5 .0)
Tony : Very true. (2 . 0) You c'n become president a' the company. (3 . 0)
Buh what if yer not doing really whatche wanna do. -- Whad if­
whad if- whad if uh: : y'know.
Jay : Whad if yer so bored.
Tony : I met a guy in Jersey.

And the story is produced. Now let's look at the story. It involves the report
of a conversation that Tony had with another guy some seemingly long time
ago when Tony was younger, and prospectful relative to the circumstances of
the other guy. That is to say, at that time he was a 'manager trainee' and the
other fellow was an insurance salesman, and an insurance salesman in part
by virtue of failed prospects he had once had. And he's telling Tony of the
failed prospects that he had, and where he is now by virtue of those failed
prospects.

Tony : I met a guy in Jersey (3 .0) I wz working inna department store

in New Jersey -- for a short while. Right- In Newark New
Jersey. Right on Broad Street. -- Big department store. (4.0)
And uh. I was a trainee there. A manager trainee. -- Butche
hadda learn the business. Y'unduhs- They putchu in sto:ck .
-work. Yihknow, the k- behind the counter I mean uh- to
learn the business.
Jay : Mm hm,
(2 .0)
Tony : And this- this guy wz selling us, insurance. -- He was, he- he
wen' aroun' tuh all the employees sellin' insurance. En 'e wz a
nice lookin' guy. Jewish fella, -- about, oh I guess he wz about
-- oh about, thirdy fi:ve, -- sum'n like dat. Said he wentuh
acting school with Kirk Douglas. -- Eh' I believe 'im. -- So I
sez "What happena you. " -- Kirk Douglas is Jewish too. -­

Bud �ay. Dat's immaterial. -- So I sez "What happena

460 Part VII
you" I sez uh "How come you didn' make it. " He siz "I got
ma:rried I gotta coupla kids" -- he sz "I hadda struggle" -- he
sz the- -- He sz "The interest was there" he sez "but- -- then
the kid came along, I bought a nice home out here in, in Jersey"
he sz "I gave it up. " He sez "Kirk, stuck it out. " -- I seh "Well
that's the way it goes . " -- He wz, selling insurance.
(3 . 0)
jay : ((clears throat))
Tony : Maybe he wasn't �py but he's doin it, -- A !Qtta people by­
sometimes by circumstances. -- Circumstances prevail where you
haf to, do something -- not exacly to your liking. (4.0) I know
it'd be a real catastrophe if all the people in the worl' did that. I
unnuhstan' that. -- Somebody's gotta do it,

It's of some interest to consider the way Tony positions himself in the story.
It isn't just that it happened some time ago, " Once I met a guy in Jersey, he
was selling insurance and that occasioned the conversation, and he told
me . . . , " but Tony locates a sort of point in his life at which this occurred.
That is to say, we want to account for why Tony puts in the particular job that
he happened to have at that time, since what he's doing in some fashion is
telling about a guy he met. He could tell about the guy he met in a way that
could have all this interaction occur without mentioning that he was a
"manager-trainee. " Except that in saying that he was a manager-trainee he's
locating a time when he had prospects.
Now the point in Tony's life that this occurred, in the way it relates to the
insurance salesman, has a kind of distinct interest to it, and that is in the way
in which the telling here relates Tony and Jay. Tony's characterization of his
situation at the department store does a positioning of him, in his own life and
relative to the insurance salesman, which makes the story he was told
something that can have a possibly nice relationship to the story he now tells.
The story Tony was told, was told when he had prospects, and is the story of
someone who at an earlier time had prospects that, at the time of the telling
had failed. Tony is now telling the story at a time of his life when his prospects
are no longer there, and he's telling it to someone at a time in their life when
they specifically have prospects. These are not merely abstract prospects that
anyone at any point in their life might or might not have, but he is described
in this story as someone who had prospects, and the insurance salesman is
described as someone who no longer had prospects. And the situation of the
current telling is one in which differential prospects are specifically available to
both Tony and Jay, as they were originally available to both Tony and the
insurance salesman.
Let's give some consideration now to the question, why did the insurance
man tell Tony the story? The insurance man could just try to sell him
insurance, and could go about selling insurance in various ways. I want to
suggest that the selling of the insurance and the telling of the story are rather
nicely related to each other, and that the selling of the insurance to someone
 Lecture 7 46 1
who is a manager-trainee and the telling of the story are nicely related. That
is to say, what perhaps in the first instance looks like merely a report of failed
prospects, can be something we can see to be well used by the insurance man.
As compared to selling varieties of other things, selling insurance involves a
focus on current circumstances relative to future ones. And plainly it is a thing
sold by reference to possibilities not turning out quite as you had hoped, but
also turning on that you have possibilities for which you have hopes. Where
there is a difference between selling someone, e.g . , burial insurance, which
simply involves that you're going to die and people are going to have to bury
you so here's a way of taking care of that, as compared to catching someone
at a point in their lives when, not only do they have prospects, but that they
have prospects is a working feature of their lives. So that you can appeal to
their hopes and possibly their fears in order to get them to buy insurance
commensurate with not simply their current circumstances but their notion of
their future prospects.
So, future prospects are something that insurance men are very much
attuned to, and they're also very much attuned to the fears incumbent on the
possibility that future prospects will not pan out. And of course they could
perfectly well have materials in terms of which they talk about others' future
prospects panning out or not. But there may be some more or less special
virtues to your telling that about yourself. That transforms it from merely a
sales pitch to something which perhaps isn't even seen as a sales pitch but is
nonetheless appreciatable for its relevance to the recipient.
The point then being that for the insurance man, the tale of his failed
prospects can have virtues in selling insurance, in a way in which that
wouldn't be the right sort of thing to tell if you were, e.g. , selling a
refrigerator or a car or other things. It's not, then, simply that a personal story,
or a personal story about failed prospects is apt for a sales pitch, but that a
personal story about failed prospects can be apt for the sales pitch of the
insurance man. Particularly where he's talking to someone who is now a
person with prospects, as compared to someone with failed prospects or
someone who conceives of himself as specifically a success. If the insurance
man tells of his own failed prospects to someone who conceives of himself as
a success, then he might be appealing for charity or whatever, but he isn't
alluding to a way in which life can tum out to be not what you hoped, which
plainly is one basis for the recipient of that kind of story considering insurance
seriously. Which is then to say that this is a rather ideal story for an insurance
man to tell, as part of the insurance sale, to someone who conceives himself
specifically as a 'manager-trainee. ' There is, then, a kind of real aptness of the
story told on the occasion on which it was originally told, as between the
people who were involved in the telling and receiving of it.
Let me just mention some things about the failed- prospects phenomenon.
Kirk Douglas is a very relevant object for that, in two related ways. The one
obvious way is that if he went to acting school with Kirk Douglas, Kirk
Douglas now being somebody plainly a success, then the fact that Kirk
Douglas is a success and he isn't, makes for that he did, indeed, fail. But also,
462 Part VII
that he went to acting school with Kirk Douglas who is now a success, also
turns that he is a failure into something different than merely being a failure;
it's a failure given that one had prospects. Where the question of the reality
of prospects is relatively complex, in the sense of how you're to be in a
position to have others believe that whatever your fantasies were, those
fantasies had any reasonable chance of proving to be real.
So, for example, Tony reports, "He said he went to acting school with Kirk
Douglas. And I believe him" where what's involved in that is that the listener
to the original story takes it that he can decide whether the prospects that the
guy proposes to have had, he really had. He also puts in, "He was a nice
looking guy, " where that report of his appearance would not occur with a
male telling another male a story, both of them figuring they're not queer, if
that feature were not a way to say 'I now looking at him, I can see he could
have been an actor, in the sense that he looks like someone who could have
been an actor. ' The question is whether one could say "I always wanted to be
an actor and now I end up an insurance man" and someone could believe that
you are now someone who had failed prospects in a way that's relevant to
their own possible failed prospects. Where, e.g. , the guy he's talking to has
'realistic prospects, ' i.e. , he has this job, 'manager-trainee, ' a job that could
become manager. It's not just that he's someone who says ' 'I'd like to become
a department store executive' ' - although the reality of the prospects with
respect to the manager-trainee business has a very interesting kind of status
which I'll talk a bit about in a while.
Let me make a parenthetical remark about Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas is
an instance of a thing that has been described by an anthropologist named
David Schneider who's done a bunch of work on American kinship. Among
the things he proposes is something like this: Americans have a kinship
system with respect to their knowledge of the members of their families which
involves knowing all the close relatives and how they're related to them, and
then not knowing distant relatives - except for some relative at a distance
whose specific feature is that they know no other relatives at that distance, and
furthermore, they know hardly any relatives at any distance between. And
that relative is a famous relative. I'm now adapting that to call it 'ex­
relationals. '
There are people who are recognized as being in the family by virtue of
their turning out to be famous people. Nobody knows them for some whole
time in their lives. Nobody at this point knows them. Then they pop into the
papers, and various people rediscover that they are relatives of theirs. Where,
then, at some point if you asked them for a list of their relatives, they can tell
you up to, say, typically not even second cousins, and then say "X, a famous
person, is a third cousin. ' ' They can't give you any other third cousins. The
point is, there is a special category, 'ex-relationals. ' That special category is
much larger than actual relatives. It includes ex-relationals of all sorts and it
works in exactly the same way: People cannot name anybody in their
kindergarten class except for somebody about whom they say, "You know
who was in my kindergarten class? X. ' ' Where X is a famous person. Or, they
 Lecture 7 463
can't tell you whoever lived in the apartment house that they lived in when
they were five or ten years old, except someone who now turns out to be a
famous person. And the insurance salesman didn't go to acting school with
Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas was nobody. He went to acting school with a
variety of people, one of whom turned out to be Kirk Douglas, when Kirk
Douglas turned out to be Kirk Douglas.
At any place in your life that you encounter large batches of people all of
whom are forgotton, somebody may pass through your life who is later
rememberable, by you or by other poeple in the same group, as having been
in that group. And now you can say "I went to grade school with" or " My
next door neighbor when I was 1 2 years old was" some X. Where, again,
that's not true because there were all these other next door neighbors and
people you went to grade school with and people you went to' acting school
with, and X only became such a one when they became the someone they are.
But that's sufficient to generate a comparative situation for you.
And there's a rather large, complex kind of mechanism involved in
rediscovering these people. A circle that's hardly even alive will go to work to
tell the members of it that for our circle, a member of it has now become X.
So, two girls age 30 who don't see each other anymore may have one of them
call the other up and say "Remember me?" "Yeah of course, we were really
good friends. ' ' ' 'Well, if you watch TV tonight you'll see that so-and-so, that
guy you once went out with, is now a TV star. " So the circle becomes alive
to establish its ex-relationals. That's important, because if lots of people can
have famous ex-relationals, then the fact that somebody becomes famous or
known to be successful can reverberate back to a pool of people who now see
that they had chances once. Where if no one they ever knew becomes
somebody other than somebody they might as well know now, then that they
ever 'had chances' is something they cannot say.
The difference, then, between a relatively mobile system and a relatively
fixed one is that in a relatively fixed one you 'have no chances' in the sense that
no one you know will ever tum out to be somebody whom you could tum out
to say you once knew. That is to say, a poor black kid in the ghetto 2 0 years
ago had no prospects of anybody they ever knew becoming somebody they
could ever say they once knew - or they had that in vety narrow ways, i.e. ,
it could tum out that some athlete is an ex-neighbor. But to tum a life into
a reasonable failure you have to have these ex-relationals around. And there
are many more of them than people figure. Like, it's a thrill that the insurance
salesman knew Kirk Douglas, but everyone knows someone like that. Lots of
people would have had Kirk Douglas and all the other people equivalent to
him - if not actors then a whole bunch of other things - as ex-neighbors or
ex-classmates, or whatever. At least in a world where people do pop out from
nowhere and others move around a lot.
Now, there's an important parallel to that, in the phenomenon of the
'manager-trainee. ' Large businesses need lots of young men to do jobs that, if
described in terms of what those jobs involved, they could not get the kind of
young men they want. That is to say, you can get people to sell stockings
464 Part VII
behind the counter. The question is, can you get people who are, e.g. , highly
motivated, obviously middle class, etc.? No you can't. How, then, do you get
them to do it? A way that's been devised is to make that a position in a future
development, i.e. , one isn't doing 'selling stockings behind the counter, ' one
is doing something else, for the future of which one does this. Now, most
people who do this eventually quit. Some people who do this eventually get,
not much higher, but somewhat higher. That they can conceive of themselves,
while doing 'selling stockings, ' as 'manager-trainees' provides them a way of
seeing that they're not doing what they obviously are doing, and by virtue of
their not seeing that they're doing what they obviously are doing, they come
to be able to do it - at least when they're young.
So that 'manager-trainee' is a name of a job whose specific interest to those
who are wanted to do it, i.e. , people who 'look good, ' is in terms of the future
prospects it has. Though plainly that set of people cannot become the future
it promises. That is to say, in no business will you ever have anything like the
number of managers out of the set of manager-trainees. And of course, had
it not been that you wanted a certain sort as a salesman or a stock clerk -
someone who cares enough to try to sell a lot and look good and all the rest
- then you wouldn't call it 'manager-trainee. ' But the people who come into
it can think of themselves as having prospects. And thinking of themselves as
having prospects, they're available, not only for working hard and keeping
clean and doing all that sort of thing, they're also available for being sold
insurance as a future manager. And they're also available for having failed
prospects.
What I wanted to be getting to was the motive power of stories. By that I
mean, this fellow Tony hears a story, say 1 5 years before he tells it here. And
when he hears it, it's not his story at all, it's a story that may be offered in an
advisory fashion by someone else, but is heard as 'having nothing to do with
me because I'm not going to turn out that way. ' But at some point in his life,
that story also turns out to be his story. It's not like you're told a story and
you realize then and there that it's your story. That's one sort of thing. What
is intriguing about the motive power of a story like this is that it's a story that,
if it's going to work, it's only going to work at a substantial delay. It's only
going to be realized, made available for retelling, some long time afterwards.
He doesn't know it's his story, he wouldn't think of it as his story when he's
told it. Some time later it comes back to him as his.
Now, characteristically a story you get is, if it's to be retold at all, to be
retold the next day or shortly thereafter. Here's a story that, once we can
uncover its bases for being retold, it will turn out not to be retellable for a long
time. And in that way one can think of it as planted with an enormous delay
fuse on it. The delay fuse not only having to do with its retellability, but for
ever seeing that it's about me - if it ever is. Though again, one can imagine
quite well, not that one guy just met one guy in New Jersey and told him a
story at a time in his life, but that there are a series of delayed fuse stories put
into people at various times, that they carry around, that sometimes turn out
to be their story. And then there may be an occasion for them seeing that, and
 Lecture 7 46 5
then seeing it as something to be told to someone else, for whom it has
precisely the same character.
That is to say, the story Tony is now telling, is to somone who is also a
'trainee' - who is going out to learn in order to become something other than
he is, and who in that way has specific prospects. That story is, for the person
it's now being told, also specifically 'not my story, ' though it may happen that
at a point 1 5 years later that story may have become his story. And,
encountering someone in the situation that he was in, it may tum out that he
now retells a version of it. Though of course if things are otherwise, he may
retell something else, which was also planted in such a fashion.
And apart from its delayed reaction relevance, one can get some kind of
bases for the insurance man telling the story in the first place. And one can see
that he has reasons for analyzing his life in such a way as to make it one of
'failed prospects, ' and to analyze the life of the person he's dealing with so as
to be telling the story to someone who is now 'someone with prospects' -
prospects that may fail or not; someone to whom the story has a local
relevance with regard to why they might buy insurance.
 Lecture 8
Preserving and transmitting
knowledge via stories
There are things about the story we started with the last time which I didn't
bring to completion. I'll try to re-say some of what I said, while adding some
new things.
Most of the stories I've ever dealt with in the past, if they get retold, then
they get retold quickly. This story is peculiar - but altogether non-unique -
for having as a systematic aspect of its retelling that it will be retold by a
recipient only a long time after its initial telling. Now that aspect, that it's
retold only after a long delay, is affiliated with at least one other feature of it,
and that is that its reteller retells it when his recipient identity - who he was
when he received the story - has now been more or less radically transformed,
and he is now in something like the position of the original teller.
That transformation of identity - from being an appropriate recipient;
someone with future prospects in this case, to being an appropriate teller;
someone with past 'future prospects' that have not panned out - is what
accounts for the delay, and that transformation is also key to that it gets
retold. That is to say, other transformations, and even other orderly
transformations, are obviously possible given an initial position of being, e.g.,
a manager-trainee. And by 'orderly' transformation I mean one that has a
systematic relationship to the original identity as compared to, having once
been a manager-trainee one is now, at some later date, a one-armed tennis
player, or ranges of other things that a person can become having once been
something. But having been a manager-trainee, one could become, say, a
manager, but then one wouldn't be in the position of the original teller. So,
not just any orderly transformation of identities yields that the original
recipient becomes a future reteller of such a story.
Further, even if the original recipient does become somebody transformed
in the way in which this original recipient was, they may have no one to give
it to, i.e. , someone in the position one was in when one originally received it.
Also, there are issues about having some reasons for telling it and occasions for
telling it. Last time I talked about how the insurance salesman had, not
merely this story, but bases for telling it - he could use it as part of his sales
program - and occasions for telling it - he was engaged in conversations with
people who were appropriate recipients for it, in the course of which the story
could be told. And it's imaginable that the current teller in this case, though
he has become someone with failed prospects, would have had either no one
to tell it to who is now like he had been, or, though he'd been engaged in

466
 Lecture 8 467
interaction with people who are now like he once was, he might have lacked
reasons for telling it or occasions on which to tell it. That is to say, here it
comes up at a distinctly apt time - the day before his recipient is leaving the
job for a prospectful future. And it comes up in an occasioned way - the talk
being about whether people should do things other than those that make
them happy, what they should be willing to do for money, and things like
that. And one can adduce other reasons for him telling it then and there.
Roughly, it can serve as some sort of experience-based defense of an
acceptance of a fate that does not involve the fruition of one's hopes and
possible prospects. The story justifies an acceptance of things not having come
to what it looked like at one time they might. And as such, it can defend his
current circumstances.
We can ask a series of questions: What are the bases for there being stories
with long time delays involved in them? What kinds of work can they do?
And, if they are important, what are the kinds of mechanisms that can more
or less assure that they get told? Some of the things I've said answer those
questions in a fashion, but one thing they have to do with concerns the kind
of object that stories can be. A question that can be either banal or deep, and
has a series of alternative forms, is this: Why do people transmit information
to others? How could they be gotten to transmit information to others? How
is the world organized so as to have more or less important information
preserved and transmitted?
The kinds of lessons that stories often contain can perfectly well be
delivered in the form of simply a lesson, a proverb, an idiom, a general
expression, a general truth. Like, "Sometimes circumstances prevail where
people have to do something not exactly to their liking. " And in considering
things like that, relative to stories, one wants to know whether there are
differences between them and stories which account for the use of stories. A
seemingly dumb difference between them is just this, that the story that the
insurance salesman told - which could be given, in a fashion, in the lesson at
the end of Tony's report - is something that happened to him. Or, as we
should put it, it's something that happened to him, too. That is to say, if there
are such lessons in the world, then presumably there are lots of happenings
which they characterize. The story here may not be something that only
happened to the insurance man. And it need not be a condition for his telling
the story that, not only did it happen to him, it happened only to him so far
as he knows. But maybe that it happened to him can serve to make him a
possible carrier of it, and it happening to lots of people, then one gets lots of
carriers of it who have a particular basis for telling, i.e. , that it happened to
each of them.
A question is, well, so it happened to them. Why does that make it
something that they are interested in preserving and telling? It's imaginable
that the world would be arranged so that people are not interested in telling
a story unless it happened to them, without it being a consequence of that that
they are also specifically interested in telling stories that did happen to them.
But the gross fact is that the stories they are interested in telling are those that
468 Part VII
happened to them. People in this world in any event are built to be the
custodians of just about only their own experiences. And a lot of things that
people are built to be the custodians of, i.e. , that they can be made to care
about keeping, taking care of, defending, and the like, are more or less
whatever it is that the world has them conceive of as 'their own . ' Their
experiences are but one class of such things. And in the prior course on
storytelling I've discussed some ways of motivating people to make available
their private experiences, and ways of having them analyze situations
so as to have available to them more or less antique private experiences of
theirs. 1
I'm trying to suggest a picture in which lots of things are happening in the
world, out of which people are catching the way in which what happens,
happens just to them. Where the world is arrangeable nonetheless to have that
be a vehicle for the culture reproducing itself in terms of its body of
knowledge. That is to say, one kind of problem a culture faces is getting its
known things kept alive. A basic thing it uses is people's heads. Where
people's heads are not just to be repositories for known things, but they have
to be repositories that are appropriately tapped so that those known things get
passed to others. And, having been put in some others' heads, there need to
be ways that those known things again get tapped and put into yet others'
heads.
Now plainly one can think of various ways that the passing on thing could
happen. Having been told a story about an experience of someone's, one
might tell it to the next five people one encounters, and they in tum do the
same. Or it might be that one holds a story for some specified time - a week,
a year - and then tells it. Or it's imaginable that every person would be the
passer of one story which is their property, and everyone they encounter, they
tell that one story to. Or it's imaginable that someone of an age that would
involve them in being able to understand stories at all, could be sat down with
story-repository persons and have the culture's stories committed to their
memory. Such a technique is employed in various places at various times, and
it works in a way and doesn't work in other ways. So that, e.g. , the Iliad, the
bible, and other objects like that, get told and retold in some independence of
recipient or teller situations - though it's notable about their telling and
retelling that occasions are designed to have them appropriate for being told.
That is to say, a way of thinking about sacred occasions is as occasions that are
simply made for the purpose of telling large batches of information which is
to be remembered and to be passed on on other such occasions, independent
of what's now happening.
But plainly, telling occasions can be distinctly more powerful if what a
story does is to proposedly analyze the occasion on which it's told, mobilizing
the parties to the telling into the story itself, where their retelling occasion will
be also an occasion that they analyze. A thing that's interesting about
storytelling, then, is the way in which the telling of stories is done for persons

1 See Spring 1 9 7 0 , lectures 4 and 5 respectively.

 Lecture 8 469
located to be distinctly ripe for them, and done on occasions that they're
powerfully relevant to. It's as though the stories in people's heads are more or
less constantly alert for the occasions for which they are distinctly apt. And
they come out then, and are maybe never thought of any time else.
So, what the world uses is persons' interst in analyzing any situation they're
in - e.g., to know how to deal with it - in order to get them to see that a story
that they know, insofar as it analyzes the situation they're in, is tellable. That
is, on analyzing a situation they're in, they discover that they know about it
with some story, which can be made, then, something they now recall, have
at hand, and may tell as a proposed analysis of our current situation. They're
not, then, doing simply telling a story for no good reason, or telling of
something that happened once, or telling of something that happened once to
somebody else, or that happens to people, but they're offering something that
does something now, i.e. , describes, explains, accounts for, our current
circumstances - mine, or yours, or mine and yours. And that usefulness of
stories is not simply a usefulness to its current teller, but would be precisely
the kind of usefulness which would in the first instance motivate a culture to
have stories used. That is to say, what a culture wants to do is not simply have
what it knows preserved, but to have what it knows used when it should be
used.
Now, that can be appreciated by persons in such a way as to lead them to
regard the knowledge that's passed on as indeed worth keeping. That is to
say, the knowledge that they get, they see as possibly usable. And that is of
interest for the situation of a story being told that, when it is received and
when it is retold, it will be understood in altogether different ways, which is,
in its fashion, extremely common. Old people are routinely telling young
people stories that they were told when they were young by someone old,
where, when the story was told them they thought it inapplicable to them but
when they tell it they now agree with it, though they tell it to someone who
is in the position they were once in. So there's a large amount of stuff that may
only become apposite to tell long, long after it's been received. And when it's
received it's either not understood or not figured to be 'for me, ' and
nonetheless it's preserved.
There is, then, a serious problem in the preservation of knowledge for a
society, under this particular constraint of the information involved being
appropriate to an initial recipient only a long time after he's received it. And
I've tried to suggest that there are massed cultural resources for putting
information into a shape that makes it acceptable to very long-delayed
transmittal, and that those things have to do with the usability of the story
form particularly, to analyzing possible current circumstances. Where, again,
the knowledge persons get in a story is seeable by them for its possible
usability, and they can then come to have regard for the usability of such sorts
of things, such that, though it's not on the occasion of its being received
figured to be 'for me, ' it is nonetheless preserved.
 Lecture 9
The dirty joke as a technical object;
Temporal and sequential
organization; 'Guiding' recipient
I'm going to begin a presentation that will take a while. It will involve an
analysis of a dirty joke, eventually leading up to a theory of some of the
business of dirty jokes. This time I want to argue the artfulness of this joke.
Where, by its 'artfulness' I mean to be referring to that not only is it
elaborately organized, but some aspects of its elaborate organization can be
found to be occupied with two sorts of jobs. One is concealing some of the
ways the joke works on its recipients from those recipients, and the other is
direaing its recipients to attend it in rather sharp ways. A motivation for
beginning by characterizing some aspects of its organization with an orienta­
tion to the artfulness of its construction, is to develop a basis for giving careful
attention to the joke. That is to say, if we come to see that it's extraordinarily
carefully put together and extraordinarily carefully put together in a way to
direct a recipient's attention, then we have a basis for looking at it closely in
other ways.
Roughly, I want to make a case for the dirty joke as a technical object
worth attention. One way I think of this investigation - which is only partially
correct - is under a tide like A Detoxification Program for Dirty Jokes.
Which is to say that one might imagine that dirty jokes are kind of frivolous
objects, or that what's interesting about dirty jokes is necessarily the ways that
they're dirty, and I will suggest that there may be ways in which that's not so;
that they are serious technical sources of information, and not merely at all
sexual information. We'll get to that kind of a position rather later on.
I'll proceed in the following way. I'll begin with an overview of some sorts
of organization the joke has, and then proceed to take it apart rather more
closely.

Ken : You wanna hear muh-eh my sister told me a story last night.
Roger : ! don'wanna hear it. But if you must.
(0. 7 )
AI : What's purple en 'n !sland. Grape, Britain. That's w't iz
�if jster--
Ken : No: . To stun me she says uh (0 . 8) There wz these three girls 'n
they jis got married?
Roger : ehhh/ jhehh hhh hhh
470
 Lecture 9 47 1
Ken : A: :nd uh
Roger : Hey waita seco(h)nd.
AI : [ heh!
Roger : Drag th(h)at by ag(h)ai(h)n hehh I I hehh
Ken : There-
Ken : There wz these �hree g!:rls. En they were � sisters. En they'd jis
got married tuh three brothers.
Roger : You better have a long �alk with yer sister.
Ken : Waita waita I / minute
Roger : Oh: I I three hrothers.
AI : eheh
AI : ehl lheh!
Ken : A: :nd uh, so
AI : The Qrothers of these sisters.
Ken : No they're different- mhhllhh
AI : heh
Ken : Y'know different families. I I (No link-up.)
Roger : Th's clo�ser th'n before, II hhh
Ken : [ So-
AI : heh! hh hh
(0. 7 )
Ken : Quiet.
AI : hh hh 11 hhhh
Ken : So: , first'v all, that night, they're on their: : : honeymoon the- uh
mother in law says- (to 'em) well why don'tcha all spen'th'night
here en then you c'n go on yer honeymoon in th'morning.
Th'firs'night, th'mother walks up t'the firs' door en she hears this
uuuuuuuuuhh! hh Second door is HHOOOHHH! !bird door
there's NOthin' . She stands there fer about twunny five minutes
waitin' fer sump'n duh happen. -- Nothin' .
( 1 . 0)
Ken : Next morning she talks t'the firs' daughter en' she s'z -- uh how
come yuh- how come y'went YAAA: : : las' night'n daughter siz
�ell it gckled Mommy -- second gi�rl, -- How come yuh
screa:med. Oh: Mommy it hu :rts. -- !bird girl, walks up t'her.
(0 .7) Why dido' y'� anything las'night. -- W'you tol'me it wz
always impolite t'�alk with my mouth full,
( 1 . 5)
Ken : hh hyok hyok.
(0. 5 )
Ken : hyok.
(2 . 5)
AI : HA-HA-HA-HA!
- - - -

Ken : ehh heh heh II hehhh

(A/) : hehhhehhheh hhh
Roger : Delayed rea�clltio(h)n.
472 Part VII
AI : hehh I hadtuh �hink abouj /t it awhile y'know?
Roger : hhh heh
( 1 . 0)
Roger : hehh hh hehh hhh You mea(h)n th(h)e dee(h)p (h)hidden
meaning there rloesn' hitcha right awa-ay heh heh // hehhhh­
hhhh hehhhehh
AI : hh hhh 11 hhh
(Dan): (Yeh. I // guess so.)
AI : What' e meant tuh say is the t- thet u:m
(0. 5 )
Roger : Ki/ jnda got ps: :rchological over/ /tones (to it),
AI : ( )
Ken : 1ittle sister's gittin' // older.
(Roger) : hehh hh hehh
Ken : ehheh heh That's w't I m(h)ean tih // say,
Dan : Sounds like it,
Ken : Fer twelve years old tellin' me- ! didn' even // know-
Roger : How do yuh know she's jis' not repeating what she heard'n
doesn'know whaj/t it means.
AI : She haftuh explain it to yuh Ke:n?
Ken : Yeah she had to explain it to detail to me,
(0. 5 )
AI : Okay, good. Gladju gotta sister thet knows // somethin' .
Ken : hh hhh
Ken : She �old me she wz eatin' a hot dog,
(0. 3 )
Ken : hh
Roger : Wha'does that mean,
Ken : hh hh
AI : Yeah �orne // on. Ex,e_lain // it to us, hnhh
Ken : heh
Ken : heh
AI : Explaijj:n, explain everything you kno:w Ken,
Ken : hhhh! Nuh I: D(h)ON'KNOW I j's' sai:d tha(h)t.
AI : Explain �verything.

A first, very gross pair of related facts about the joke is that it's both
temporally and sequentially organized. With regard to its temporal organiza­
tion, it has what I earlier called the canonical form for narratives, 1 that it
proceeds in what we might take to be directly the temporal ordering of the
story's events: They just got married, then there is the first night and the next
morning, all ordered in that kind of a natural way. But we have to keep very
well in mind that when we say that the joke or story preserves the sequential
form of its events, then one has to remember that it's made up. There weren't

1 See lecture 6, p. 4 5 4 .
 Lecture 9 473
such events. And in that regard, it adopts a format which such events might
have. If it were a real story then this might be its events sequence. But it isn't
a real story, or isn't to be supposed to be real story, and therefore, that it has
its events presented in a canonical temporal form such that they are heard by
recipients as mapping onto some actual sequence of events that went off in the
fashion it reports them, turns out to be a type of organization that can do
other sorts of jobs that we'll get to in due course. Among the other sorts of
jobs it can do is to array events in such a fashion as to have an otherwise
extraordinarily implausible set of events appear plausible.
So we have this overall temporal organization. Now, I separated temporal
from sequential organization by virtue of that a sequential organization is such
as for each point in it that is subsequent to some other point, an appreciation
of that point turns on an appreciation of its position. Which is to say, e.g . ,
"next morning" i s a term that requires for its understanding that one have
kept in mind that there was a "last night. " And, for example, there's a
"second door, " and to understand what is going on by reference to it one uses
that there was a "first door. " In detail: The mother "walks up to the first door
and she hears this uuuuuuuuuhh! " She doesn't "walk up to" the second door,
nor does she "hear" the sound. It's just "Second door is HHOOOHHH! " To
understand what's happening at the second door, that event is appreciated by
virtue of what we know about the first. We see that the second is similar to
the first except by virtue of the different sound. We don't repeat the whole
organization for the second. And in due course I'll show that the sequential
aspect of the joke's organization is distinctly powerful in the way in which it
leads a recipient to understand the joke.
Now, one could have a temporal organization that did not employ the
resources of sequential organization. One could have simply dates or times;
ways of referring to events which don't require the connectedness that a
sequential organization employs and thereby leads its listener to use to
appreciate each of the subsequent events. So that temporal organization could
involve things like, " 8 : 1 0 p.m. , conversation with mother, 9 : 0 5 p.m. ,
mother standing at door, " etc. Those are just times. They happen to be
temporally ordered, and one might use them to see their relative positioning
to each other, but their terminology doesn't require that one keeps their
positioning in mind in understanding what they are.
So there's an overall temporal organization and an overall sequential
organization. Now, the body of the joke is composed of rwo sequences, the
"first night" sequence and the "next morning" sequence, each of which is
composed of three events which are themselves ordered temporally and
sequentially. The "first night" sequence poses a puzzle and the "next
morning" sequence yields a solution to the puzzle. And that, of course, also
has a sequential character to it, i.e. , first puzzle, then solution. Now, the
solution is nicely positioned for a joke. Which is to say there's a puzzle­
solution form which is fitted to the joke form such that the solution to the
puzzle matches the arrival at the joke's punchline. We want to kind of begin
to feel our way into that there is a story-structure type that the joke is
474 Part VII
operating within, and it can more or less fit the story-structure type. That is
to say, you can imagine that there could be a puzzle posed at some point in
the story, and a solution to the puzzle which will complete the story. Now, if
it's also a joke, the punchline of the joke might fit somewhere relative to the
solution to the puzzle. A more or less perfect meshing would involve that the
punchline of the joke is the same event as the solution to the puzzle. But if
one's going to be putting together a joke with a story structure, then, plainly,
arriving at it in that kind of a fit might be something that would take some
kind of constructional work.
Let me start to deal with the first sequence.

Ken : Th'[trs'night, th'mother walks up t'the firs' door en she hears this
uuuuuuuuuhh! hh Second door is HHOOOHHH! Third door
there's NOthin ' . She stands there fer about twunny five minutes
waitin' fer sump'n dub happen. -- Nothin' .

What we have here looks simply like an ordering of the mother's behavior
relative to a series of doors behind which we know are the newly married
couples, where this just happens to be the order in which she approaches the
doors. She gets a puzzle from this sequence, which she proceeds to attempt to
get resolved by her interrogation sequence the next morning. But one wants
to think of the mother as something like a shill in the story, to direct the
recipient's attention. The figure of the mother serves in part as a way to lead
the recipient to hear the story in certain ways - 'the mother' being, now, not
a person for our purposes, but a guide in the story (though of course recipients
don't treat 'the mother' that way) - so that if the mother is puzzled, then
there's a way in which the recipient can come to adopt the mother's puzzle as
the recipient's. So the mother is puzzled by this silence at the third door. And
now the recipient is engaged in trying to figure out what it will turn out
happened there. The mother's sequence, then, leads the recipient to focus in
a way that the mother does.
How is it that the mother operates as that kind of a guide? There's
apparently a merely temporal ordering to her going to the doors, and there is
no statement in the story of what it is that she's interested in at the doors.
That, however, is very powerfully conveyed by her behavior. Which is to say,
she goes to the first door and hears a sound, and then directly proceeds to the
second door where she hears a sound, and then directly proceeds to the third
door where she hears nothing, and waits. Now, that tells us that what she's
interested in and what then puzzles her, is the sounds and the absence of
sounds. Plainly, one could have a story where she goes to the first door and
hears "uuuuuuuuuhh! " and then she stands there listening for some extended
period of time, and a whole range of sounds or various other sorts of things
could be reported. By the faa that she moves promptly on, we know that
what she's heard there is what she was interested in. And by the fact that she
moves promptly on again when she hears the "HHOOOHHH!," and by the
fact that she then waits extendedly when she hears nothing, we know that
 Lecture 9 475
she's interested in hearing some sound. We thereby get the puzzle that she has,
from the way in which the story reports on her movements, and what it is that
seems to be adequate to have her move on or stop. So that by the end of the first
sequence we know that the puzzle is 'why no sound at the third door?'
I want to give some attention to the fact that we have three events; two of
them sounds and one of them silence. If we're going to have those three
events, then, for the development of a reasonable puzzle it's crucial that the
silence comes third. That is to say, the mother isn't surprized that she hears
a sound; what she's surprized at is that she hears no sound. Well, to have that
be the nature of her surprize, then it has to be that the third door is the place
where the silence occurs. Now, that is different than a merely temporal
ordering. It involves that a temporal ordering is used to convey a sense of a
natural ordering - where such a natural ordering could yield the surprize, but
whether in a natural ordering it would happen that way is an altogether
different question. But following 'the mother' and imagining that 'the
mother' is a reasonable person proceeding along, then a recipient is led to
appreciate the possible surprize of no sound - rather than, e.g . , to be amazed
at the coincidence of the two earlier sounds occurring just when she arrives at
the door. And it's for those sorts of reasons that we are focussing on the way
in which a temporal ordering adopted for a constructed story can do a job of
leading recipients to suppose things about what's reasonable and unreasonable
in the events being imagined to come off that way.
Now, for the silence to be a puzzle, not only is it important that the silence
be third in the sequence of three, but it's also the case that you need at least
three to get the silence as a puzzle, and that you need no more than three.
Three is then a perfea economical use of a number of events to get some
puzzle. Imagine there were two doors; at the first door, sound, at the second
door, silence. So? One was sound and one was silence. How could there be an
issue of why was there silence. It could as well be why was there sound. But
the two doors' sounds suffice to make the third door's silence noticeable, and
you don't need more - though you could have eleven doors, at ten of them
the mother hears sounds, at the eleventh she hears silence, and we'd say
"Huh! Wonder why that was. " But three will give you that, whereas two
can't give you that. Three suffice, as long as you preserve that arrangement of
the silence occurring last, so as to build up an appreciation of the expectable,
normal, majority character of the sounds. Three is, then, a minimal but
sufficient number for making the minority event peculiar and therefore
focussable on as a puzzle.
Let me go on now to the second sequence.

Ken : Next morning she talks t'the firs' daughter en she s'z -- uh how
come yuh- how come y'went YAAA: : : las' night'n daughter siz
�ell it tickled Mom!!!Y -- second gi�rl, -- How come yuh
screa:med. Oh: Mommy it hu:rts. -- !hird girl, walks up t'her.
(0 . 7 ) Why dido' y'say anything las'night. -- W'you
- tol' me it wz
always impolite t'falk with my mouth full,
476 Part VII
As I said, the second sequence specifically connects to the first via its use of
"next morning," and now we get again an apparently natural sequence: First
daughter, second daughter, third daughter. Where again, that's given as a
temporal thing and again it works as a sequential thing. And again, what I
mean by a sequential thing is that "she talks to the first daughter and she says
how come you went YAAA last night, " but we don't get for the second
daughter a statement of "She talks to the second daughter and says . . . ; " we
get simply what we hear as a quote of her remarks to the second girl: "How
come you screamed. "
Also, "How come you screamed" is of interest for what it begins to say,
which is that this second inquiry is addressed to someone who has been a
listener to the first. Imagine that the second girl is inquired into in isolation:
"How come you screamed?" "How come I screamed when?" That is to say,
the second girl is using - and we as well use - that she is second having heard
the first, to know what is being referred to. A statement like "How come you
screamed" properly occurs when somebody has just screamed. Well, she
hasn't just screamed, so she wouldn't know what she's being asked about. It's
the "last night" scream that's being asked about, and that scream is found by
reference to the question to the first daughter, that we are now told that the
second daughter is hearing.
And the presence of all the parties in the same room is kind of crucial to
getting, not just the second daughter, but importantly the third daughter, to
know what's being asked her. Because in a way, the question being asked the
third daughter, "How come you didn't say anything last night?" is rather
more bizarre yet. "Last night" is a long time, and presumably there are a
whole range of things that she did say last night, at any time in it. But she
knows what's being asked. And she knows it not only by virtue of the
questions that have been asked the others, but the answers that they've given.
Their answers have been consistent with regard to an allusion to the sexual
activities involved. And for the third to be in a position to explain how come
she was silent, to see that it's a puzzle, then that the others made sounds is
something important for her; it lets her see her relative circumstance.
Now, forgetting about jokes or stories, this is the normal form for talk
involving a series of parties present. One doesn't have to review, for each
party, what it was that was asked the last, and what their answer was. But
having at hand that the daughters must have been present to each other when
this "next morning" sequence went off, we're in a position to see that what
is presented as simply a natural temporal ordering of an inquiry to the girls,
is not that sort of a thing but is parallel to the first sequence, and for reasons.
That is to say, if the daughters were all present to each other, why inquire of
them in precisely the order that they were encountered last night? We know
that last night's order of encountering was functional for setting up a puzzle.
And it is functional in this second sequence for setting up the positioning of
the solution to that puzzle at the end of this sequence, and for having the
solution be where the punchline is going to go. So we have this apparent
temporal ordering. Layered onto it is a sequential ordering that builds off of
 Lecture 9 477
it and employs it so as to preserve the apparent naturalness of the parties while
concealing the way in which that temporal ordering is used to make an
appreciatable problem in the first place.
 Lecture 1 0
The dirty joke as a technical object
(ctd); Suspending disbelief; 'Guiding'
recipient; Punchlines
I'll continue on with our consideration of a dirty joke. Last time I talked about
the ordering of the second sequence (the interrogating of the girls) which
repeats the ordering of the first sequence (the listening at those girls' doors).
I remarked on the detailed ways in which the ordering is used in the
construction of the second sequence. And that involved, for example, that all
the daughters needed to be present in the scene from the beginning, as the
very understandability of what the mother is talking about in her capsulized
question to the second girl, and the very plausibility of the inquiry to the third
girl, required the kinds of sequential attention that I've been talking to.
Now, one of the persistent themes of the analysis so far is a kind of massive
consistency throughout the story. That is to say, the storyjjoke employs a
series of co-occurrent coincidences; things like: It happens there were three
sisters who got married at the same time. It happens that their mother got all
of them to agree to stay the first night, as compared to it being perfectly
possible that she proposes, "Why don't you all stay here tonight and go on
your honeymoon tomorrow" and two of them say "Fine" and the third says
' T d rather go somewhere else; " so it happens that the three are willing to
stay. It happens that the mother goes to listen at the doors in some order, and
that arriving at the first she promptly hears a sound, goes on and promptly
hears a sound at the second, and goes on and hears nothing at the third, and
waits, and hears nothing. It happens that the sounds were made by the
daughters exclusively, though of course it's perfectly well imaginable that if
a sound were to be heard at one of the doors it could just as well be a
son-in-law, or both, or whatever. It happens that the next morning the
mother interrogates the three daughters in the sequence in which she listened
at the doors, though, since they were all there together she might perfectly
well have interrogated them in some other sequence.
It also happens that for each of the three daughters, their answers involve
that the overheard event is interpretable as a sexual event though, for one or
another or all three, it could have been other than sexual. So, the first
daughter says "it tickled" and the second says "it hurts. " Both use a same
format answering, in which there's this something-or-other "it" which a
recipient can take it has a common, presumably sexual, interpretation. And
that then sets up an interpretability of the third as consistent with the first and
478
 Lecture 1 0 479
second, i.e. , all the answers are interpretable as intendedly sexually allusive.
Where one intrusion of an interpretability that wasn't sexual would make for
rather extended problems in interpreting any later answer, and also for the
parties being able to use allusive language which is understandable as
specifically sexual. That is to say, instead of, e.g. , "it hurts, " it's after all
perfealy possible that the answer could have been "I stubbed my toe," but
the intrusion of such a possible event would have consequences for the
consistency of the interpretability of events - a consistency which yields the
kind of starkness that stories charaaeristically have.
There is, then, this series of co-occurent coincidences. Now, these turn out
to be organizationally crucial to the story. That is to say, we wouldn't have the
joke without them. And we can begin to visualize a series of components that
need to go into the joke, where, with rather slight variations on the
components, we wouldn't have this storyjjoke. Now, seeing the necessity of
this co-occurrent set of coincidences, and seeing that they all happen together
just as they're needed, makes their happening rather implausible. That is to
say, we're seeing now a stock of materials that have to be put into the joke for
it to come off, i.e. , the collection of a series of coincidental events. One or
another or many of them might perfectly well be there, but they're all there,
and they're all there necessarily. They become, then, distinaly implausible.
But for the joke to come off, it is central that they are not implausible. The
question then to be raised is, how is it that they can be put into the joke and
have their implausibility not seen?
This kind of harkens to a really ancient theme in the construction of things
that have storylike form, i.e. , Aristotle's notion that for drama or tragedy we
engage in a willing suspension of disbelief. Now, the notion that what we do
is simply suspend disbelief is, if aaual stories are going to be examined,
nonsense. What we should see is that while for the story to come off we may
need to believe, the story is built in such a way as to not lead us to have to
figure "This is implausible but I'll suspend disbelief. " And the thing then is
to look to see what kinds of ways a recipient is led to not have that occur.
First of all, of course, the canonical temporal ordering does a good deal of
that. The sheer narration of the thing as having happened in just this
sequence, delivered flatly, does some of the work of having us see that it
happened as it happened. The burden of work, however, seems to be
accomplished in the following sort of way. I've made a good deal of that the
story is sequentially organized, meaning by that, that to understand at all what
some second component says, one needs to interpret it in the light of a prior
component. It's built so as to require that kind of usage. That is to say, in
order to understand what "Oh mommy it hurts" refers to, one needs to ·

position the thing in a sequence involving the prior question and answer,
the prior night, and the setup having to do with just having gotten
married.
Now, if it's built sequentially in that kind of intense fashion, then the
recipient is indeed engaged in doing a job of analysis on, say, roughly, each
sentence of the story. He is always engaged in figuring out what each sentence
480 Part VII
means, using the rest-so-far and what it looks like it's developing into. The
story, then, by its sequential organization, directs certain sorts of work that the
recipient is going to do to understand it. And having done that work, the
recipient finds himself in a position of understanding it so far. Where, then,
the story's sequential organization poses jobs for recipients, whose success is
demonstrable when the next thing happens. So, if you suppose that "it
tickled" is sexual, then when you hear "it hurts" and consider that it might
be sexual also, then you find that "it tickled" was indeed sexual and "it
hurts" is sexual. So the story's sequential organization can be said to guide a
whole job of work that the recipient will engage in.
Now, one has further evidence for the rationality of the things happening.
Last time, I talked about the mother as something like a shill in the story,
operating as a kind of a guide to the recipient. What I want to be noticing now
is that there are characters in the thing, who also are engaged in sequential
work, i.e. , they need to figure out what it is that they're being asked, and they
produce talk that appears to involve that they understand what they're being
asked. They're not puzzled, though plainly there's plenty of places where they
could be puzzled; as in the second sequence the girls could be altogether
puzzled about what's being inquired of them, and how anyone would ever
know that they said any of those things. That is to say, whereas the recipient
can know what the mother is asking about, by virtue of the fact that the
recipient has been told that the mother was listening at the doors, this is
something that isn't to be presumed that the daughters know. But the
recipient apparently doesn't have to figure there's an issue with regard to how
the daughters know what the mother is talking about, by virtue of that the
daughters do seem to be able to answer the questions. Or, an answer having
been given like "It tickled, mommy," the mother perfectly well could say
"What tickled?" But there is a sufficiency to "it tickled" and "it hurts" by
virtue of the fact that nobody in the scene questions what they refer to.
Nobody questioning it, the recipient, also making an interpretation, can
figure that unquestioned interpretation is correct.
So we have that in order to understand the thing in the first place, the
recipient is engaged in a continual act of analysis of what's being said, in
sequential terms. And that act of analysis yields an understanding, and it
parallels an apparent act of understanding that the parties are engaged in. The
recipient, finding that he can understand things in the way that the parties do,
the parties' understandings can serve as a further confirmation of that the
recipient is doing the right sort of work. And this borrows from a usual sort
of business for stories and for observable events, which is: If it looks like the
parties to some seen event know what's happening, or if the persons in the
story seem to understand what's happening, then an observer or story
recipient will not readily figure that those who are participating are all that
crazy. And so far, then, as one can build characters who give off, if nothing
else, that they understand what's happening, a recipient will not see that the
thing is implausible - and crucially implausible. That is to say, without this
set of implausible events, the joke collapses.
 Lecture 1 0 48 1
What I'm suggesting as a picture is, there are a series of components put
into the joke. Getting those components arranged in a way that makes the
joke, can suffer the consequence of ending up with an extraordinarily
implausible sequence of events. But the story can be built so that the attention
of its recipients is directed away from its possible implausibility, i.e. , the
question of disbelieving it need never come up, one being altogether fully
occupied in understanding it. One is not, then, ever in the course of it, in a
position to assess the complex of its components. And, arriving at the end,
one's problem right then and there is to solve the punchline as fast as
possible. Having solved it as fast as possible, the whole thing is over as soon
as you've laughed. There's no room in the story to engage in assessing its
plausibility.
Now, the reasons for wanting to solve the punch line as fast as possible are
given by knowing that it's a joke, where a delay can involve that one isn't
'getting' the joke, and therefore reflect on one's sense of humor, sophistica­
tion, etc. So the social circumstances lead a recipient to attempt to be finding
what the punchline means. Having found that, they've demonstrated that
they understood the joke. Having been involved in trying to understand the
joke as the thing that they know from the beginning will be the test of them,
questions about believing or disbelieving it need not emerge so long as they
can, indeed, understand it as it goes along, and come up with an interpreta­
tion of the punchline that they can exhibit by, e.g . , laughing, and laughing as
soon as possible.
I want now to talk a bit to the mechanisms involved in the punchline
sequence, i.e. , the third question-answer sequence. There are some altogether
standard joke, and dirty joke, components. First of all we're in a position of
having a puzzle solution arrived at; the puzzle having been set up in the first
sequence, and again in the second sequence with the first and second answers.
Now, in a joke, it will be characteristic that while the puzzle is solvable from
the punchline, the solution won't be asserted in the punchline but will have
to be interpreted out of the punchline. And that, of course, has to do with
making it the recipient's business to get the joke, where getting the joke
involves being able to assign to the punchline an interpretation that solves the
puzzle that's been set up. So in this case, the third answer isn't a solution to
the puzzle, it's what the answer means that's a solution to the puzzle, that
being 'gotten' by the recipient. And routinely the materials used in a punch­
line involve an altogether well-known expression - an idiom, a proverb, a rule
- produced in such a way as has its sense for the joke or story be other than
its normal sense. In this case it's transformed into something obscene, and that
is one characteristic way that dirty joke punchlines get produced, i.e. , there's
a common expression with a properly obscene interpretation of it to be
assigned by a recipient.
That's one aspect of the punchline's work. But in this joke something new
has been added. And that is, while the answer to the third question, like the
answers to the first two, constitutes an explanation of why something was or
wasn't done, in the third case the explanation operates as a squelch. Now, for
482 Part VII
the squelch operation, some things that are in the story become rather crucial.
That is to say, the daughters' answers could operate as explanations to anyone
who happened to ask them that question. Had anyone been standing at the
doors and then the next morning interrogated the girls, then the answers they
give are satisfactorily and understandably answers. But the third answer
wouldn't be a 'squelch' unless it's 'the mother' who was standing at the door
and does the asking. Saying it as to somebody else, "My mother told me not
to talk with my mouth full, " it isn't a squelch to them. So, while there are a
series of identities of the girls in the joke, i.e. , they're first introduced as 'girls, '
they're collected a s 'sisters, ' that they just got married makes them 'wives, '
that they function in these two interactions largely as 'daughters' becomes, in
the third interrogation of the second sequence, crucially a 'mother-daughter'
interaction. With her answer, the 'daughter' is doing something to 'her
mother' . And what she's doing is squelching the mother's question. So we
have an 'explanation' which is an 'excuse' of a very particular sort; one
which says, 'What I did that might violate a rule, I did by reference to
some other rule that you told me to follow. ' And that is one form that
squelches take.
I'm asserting, then, that the power of the punchline involves a series of
things: It permits finding a solution to the puzzle that the first sequence
yielded as a 'story. ' For the 'joke', an obscene interpretation is to be applied
to the answer to 'get' the joke, and that obscene interpretation is to come off
of an otherwise non-obscene common expression. Further, however, the
punchline constitutes a squelch on the question to which it responds - the
squelch in this case involving 'mother' and 'daughter. ' So that there are, then,
a series of ways that the punchline works, one of which, the squelch involving
mother and daughter, is the surprize of the joke structure. That is to say, while
we're all prepared for some sort of interpretably obscene punchline, we're
not prepared for the squelch. That is a new, surprize element in the punch­
line. And I will make a lot of the mother-daughter aspect of the squelch
when I get into the second sort of discussion I'm going to build off of this
joke.
 11 Lecture
The dirty joke as a technical object
(ctd); Packaging and transmitting
experiences

Continuing with our consideration of the dirty joke, let me now begin in a
quite different fashion. I want first to consider some similarities and differences
between stories, jokes, and dirty jokes. Stories are plainly ways of packaging
experiences. And most characteristically, stories report an experience in which
the teller figures. And furthermore, in which the teller figures - for the story
anyway - as its hero. Which doesn't mean that he does something heroic, but
That the story is organized around the teller's circumstances. To give what can
pass as a bizarre instance - though it's not bizarre and is altogether
characteristic - I'll more or less give a couple of stories told shortly after the
assassination of Robert Kennedy. Two ladies are talking on the phone and one
of them, talking about the helicopter that carried Bobby Kennedy's body
back to wherever they took it, says, ' 'You know where the helicopter took
off? That was the exact spot where our plane took off when we went to
Hawaii. " To which the other responds, "Oh for heaven sakes, weren't you
lucky. If it had happened when you were going to take off, it would have
ruined your trip . "
It's i n that sort o f way that an event which, i n the, quotes, objective reality,
has the current teller figuring altogether incidentally, gets turned into an event
in their lives specifically - or an almost-event in their lives specifically. In
another conversation two women are talking about the tragedy of the
assassination, and one is telling about her daughter's response - her daughter
first being proposed to be someone who is highly political and who did a
variety of things in the primaries, and how she was broken up and all that.
The teller says "So she was really depressed" and then goes go on tell how the
next night her daughter's ten-year-old son was in a little league game, and
they didn't put him in until the fifth inning, and when he got in he hit a home
run with another kid on base and they won the game and carried him around,
and how her daughter was so thrilled and said, "It was the only good thing
that happened to me this week. ' ' Again, for an event in the world - the
assassination - it is her life that the assassination has happened to. That is to
say, even indeed recognizing the character of the assassination, it happened
to her as something depressing her, such that something that also happened
to her could lift her depression.

483
484 Part VII
Now, that's one aspect of the way in which stories happen to their tellers:
The teller figures in the story, and figures as the hero of the story. Related to
that is that it's pretty much the teller's business to tell it with respect to its
import for them. And, recalling some remarks I made earlier in the course, by
virtue of it being the teller's involvement in it that provides for its telling -
and, indeed, for 'what happened, ' it has a very short motive power. 1 That is
to say, teller can tell it to somebody who knows and cares about teller, and
maybe the recipient can tell it to someone, but it goes very little further than
that. So, in the case involving this ten-year-old boy, then his mother tells it as
happening to her; she tells it to her mother, and her mother is now telling_it
to her sister, i.e. , an aunt of the ten-year-old's mother. And the story has no
base for going much further. So there's an initial power but it's short-lived
since insofar as people tell stories in which they figure, most characteristically
they're not much telling stories in which others figure except to the extent that
the others are in some way 'themselves, ' i.e. , their children, etc. So recipients
do not serve automatically as future tellers of the stories.
That's reinforced by other kinds of considerations which involve that if,
e.g. , someone is telling their experience of the assassination, then the person
they're telling it to will also have such a story. And the person they're telling
it to will tell back their own. So the scene will be one of an exchange of stories:
You receive one and tell back one of your own. And on some next occasion,
receiving another you will again tell back your own rather than now tell back
the one you received. Though I don't mean to say one cannot tell stories at
second hand. There are classes of second hand stories that are told, but they
are plainly special, and the reasons why a recipient would retell are relatively
limited.
Now some differences between jokes and stories. Jokes characteristically
have a story format, i.e. , they report some sort of single experience in which
someone is some sort of hero. A first difference is that the teller is specifically
not a character in the joke. One may tell funny stories in which one figures,
but that's something different than a joke. In a joke the teller is not a
character. And there is considerable importance to this. Obviously, insofar as
one is a character in a story one tells, then, in telling the story, one is
permitting or encouraging or desiring to have others get a view of you as
courageous, thoughtful, frank, God only knows, whatever it is that stories
will convey of someone. Jokes, then, can contain kinds of different sorts of
events than stories will characteristically contain, since the characters in jokes
can do things that tellers might not like themselves to be thought to be doing
if what were heard were that the teller is a character in it. Whereas if one were
to be heard as a character in it, there are lots of jokes one wouldn't tell. They
wouldn't reflect well on you, for example. So, in a joke there's a specific
disaffiliation between teller and the characters.
A second feature of jokes is that any recipient is a possible future teller.
Having heard a joke, having 'gotten' it, that's enough to be able to tell it.

1 See lecture 7 .
 Lecture 1 1 48 5
A third thing is that jokes are not placed in the ways that stories are. One
constraint on telling a story is that it needs to be fitted into an appropriate
place in the conversation. It doesn't make its own place, and any free time that
there might be, e.g., a silence occuring or whatever, is not an occasion for
telling some, any, story. But jokes can make their place in a conversation. If
nobody is talking one can say "I've got a joke" and tell the joke; it has no
bearing on the conversation so far or thereafter. So that, as compared to
stories, jokes 'go around' rather more extendedly than any particular story
does.
Now, one marked difference between jokes and dirty jokes is that while
what holds for jokes holds for dirty jokes, there's one serious addition. Dirty
jokes come with a restriction on them that says 'tell them with discretion, ' i.e. ,
don't tell them to just anyone. That is to say, their obscene character serves as
a restriction on their passage. In effect one could say that a dirty joke is a story
that comes with 'top secret' printed on it; 'pass it, but pass it with discretion. '
Tell it to only some sorts of people, not just anybody.
With that kind of differentiation, let's suppose that stories, jokes, and dirty
jokes contain some sort of information. Now, what sort of rational institution
might dirty jokes be? One might be led to suppose that for dirty jokes, their
information is their obscene information. But that would be irrational in a
way which I can better propose by saying what would be rational for their use.
Their obscene character serves as a restriction on their passage. If you have a
way of restricting the passage of something, then plainly a use it has is to put
in some other information than that, whch its restriction guarantees will only
be narrowly passed. Having a vehicle which, by virtue of its dirtiness or
whatever, has a restriction on it for passage, that vehicle would be rationally
exploited if it were used to pass information other than just that information
that restricts its use; things for which restricted passage is relevant. If there are
any sorts of information which it's relevant to pass, but to restrictedly pass,
then such things could be put into dirty jokes. All that the 'dirtness' aspect of
the dirty joke needs to do, then, is to say 'pass with discretion, ' and it might
then be simply a formal aspect of the joke having to do with its transmission
and not particularly with its information. So that in some ideal form, one
would have dirty jokes whose information had nothing to do with sex.
What we're doing then is to examine the transmission considerations
involved in something put into a story format. A story format can be
powerful, but it has a short motive power. Turn it into a joke and you increase
its motive power. Use the format for building a dirty joke and you preserve
its increased motive power while also adding a restriction on its transmission.
Under those circumstances you could put lots of information into, say, the
dirty joke format.
Furthermore, that information that you might put into a dirty joke format
has a sort of safety to it in that, specifically, teller is not a character. So, insofar
as the joke contains possibly embarassing or denegrating information, it isn't
information to be affiliated to teller - nor, of course, to any recipientjfuture
teller. And in that regard, the safety of it as a vehicle is also given for someone
486 Part VII
receiving a joke, in dramatic contrast to receiving a story. Receiving a story,
i.e. , something in which teller serves as its hero, the business of a recipient is
to specifically exhibit in a variety of distinct ways that they understood the
information. Those include, e.g. , telling another such story in which they
figure as the teller did in the first - and that's discussed in the earlier series of
storytelling lectures 2 - or in other ways asserting the lesson of the story. And
failing to properly assert the lesson of the story, the teller can say, "You didn't
understand. ' '
Whereas, in jokes and in dirty jokes, the recipient sufficiently indicates an
appreciation of the joke by laughing in an appropriately timed way, i.e. , as
quickly as they can after they realize the joke is over - where, whether they
understood or not is something that is private for them. So, whether they
understand or not, recipient can laugh, and that suffices to bring off that they
understood the joke. Furthermore, it's also in no way guaranteed or
inspectable whether teller understood the joke, since what teller does is to
repeat a joke they've heard, and all they need to do is be able to have the joke
that was told them be available for retelling by them.
So we see that there is a distinct safeness to jokes and dirty jokes as
compared to stories; a safeness involving both teller and recipient; one that's
in part presented in a joke telling, when a teller begins a joke by announcing
that it's something he heard - not merely in the sense of it not being his
experience, but that it's specifically something that he's passing on. Having
preserved it correctly, then, whether he understood it or not is not to be
inquired into. So that jokes can be passed among people when neither teller
nor recipient understands them in the way that some others might figure that
they understand them. And the knownness of that is present in our materials;
one of the boys asks "How do you know she's just not repeating what she
heard and doesn't know what it means. " That is to say, the boys here, who
figure that they surely understand the joke, can figure that the 1 2-year-old girl
who told it may not have understood it. They don't know the sister, they only
know that she's 1 2 years old. What they know about jokes is that one doesn't
have to understand them to retell them, much less be a person for whom
what's being told is a real experience.
With those kinds of features to dirty jokes, and the possibility that the dirty
joke can be a vehicle for passing information which is intendedly restricted -
that argument having as a support for its seriousness that we have already
seen that the joke is extremely elaborately put together, and it being the case
that the joke is reported as having been told by a 1 2-year-old girl, I want now
to argue that this is a joke for 1 2-year-old girls. It's told here by something
like a 1 7 -year-old boy to a group of other more or less 1 7 -year-old boys - told
by the boy as having been told to him by his 1 2-year-old sister. The boys
know they understand it and they don't find it particularly funny, and they
also don't figure that the girls would have understood it. I'll argue that the
boys don't understand it, that the girls would understand it, and that it

2 See, e.g., Spring 1 9 7 0 , lecture 5 .

 Lecture 1 1 487
involves some information that is distinctly and peculiarly relevant to
1 2-year-old girls.
If one is thinking of a joke involving sex, then one of the kinds of questions
one might ask is, if there's a drama in the joke, who is involved in the drama?
And then, by reference to real persons, for whom is such a drama
characteristic? Where what I'm suggesting by that is that it isn't for just
anyone that the drama of sex involves, as it does here, 'mother and daughter. '
Whereas, for 1 2-year-old girls the drama of sex involves to some considerable
extent, not their relationship with males, but their relationship with their
parents; perhaps in particular their mothers. The conflicts about sex, dating,
etc. , concern what mother will and will not allow, what mother wants to find
out, etc. So the fact of a drama involving mother and daughter in the joke can
indeed capture what for such persons would be a specific drama of their lives,
whereas for lots of other groups that would hardly be a relevant kind of
circumstance in their lives.
We also have that the girls get married together. Now, while it occasionally
happens that, say, two sisters get married on the same occasion, and maybe
conceivably three, we might ask why that's put into the joke, and whether
putting it into the joke at all reflects some interest that could be more or less
distinct to, say, 1 2-year-old girls. I'd like to suggest that 1 2-year-old girls are
perhaps in some way interested in sex and marriage and things like that, but
I think it can be found that what they are rather more interested in is each
other. That is to say, one of the really distinct features of that age group of
girls is that they travel in packs, i.e. , they have a group life among themselves.
And when they fantasize about a future, one of the things they know in some
way is that that future will involve the end of their traveling in packs, that
being replaced by, e.g. , that they get married and end up in two-person
relationships, the other persons being a male. Now, one of the things they do
when they fantasy about the future is attempt ways to project their
pack-traveling into that future. And one characteristic feature of such
fantasy is that they get married together. That's about as far as they can go
as a projectable aim because they know that having gotten married, they
are now split up. Indeed their getting married together might in some not
too bizarre way be about the only condition under which they could accept
as interesting that they have to get married. That is to say, for a group
traveling in packs together, that the marriage take place in a pack is a way
in which the future, of a marriage for each of them that splits the group
apart, can be accommodated to their pleasure in their pack status. Notice
again that in the joke the males play almost no part. They're introduced as a
foil for the marriage and never appear again. So the event of the three sisters
all getting married together can project a common fantasy that 1 2-year-old
girls have.
Now, insofar as the future of sex and marriage has an interest for them as
something they could look forward to, then again a common object with
which they would be occupied - and with which many others would not be
occupied - is the First Night. For many of the purposes of the joke, the first
488 Part VII
night is an altogether incidental event. It could take place on any night. But
some groups would find the first night a particularly interesting event, e.g. ,
those for whom a first night is a future.
Having, then, some hints of a special interest that 1 2-year-old girls might
have in this joke, what we're now going to do is look for interests of
1 2-year-olds in some materials the joke contains. I'll go on to do that next
time.
 Lecture 1 2
The dirty joke as a technical object
(ctd); • • what is sex like?; ' ' Possible
versus actual applicability of a rule
I'm going to finish up this discussion of the joke. The interest so far has been
to see that there are extremely well developed constructional forms that can
be used to handle components - 'components' now being, roughly, pieces of
information - in a way that allows for a story to be built our of them which
is observably understandable and observably not implausible. I suggested that
dirty jokes can involve a way of packaging information which is distinctly
relevant to a particular group, where that packaging has a series of important
virtues, i.e. , it provides that the information will be passed, and that it will be
passed with discretion. I've been leading up to that this is a dirty joke for
1 2-year-old girls, and that as such it contains in it, extractable by them but
perhaps not by others, information of distinct interest to them, and not of
interest to others. Two sorts of such information seem to be present in the
joke; one is specifically sexual and the other has nothing in particular to do
with sex, but has to do with rules in general, and the way in which kids
encounter rules.
The sexual sort of information packaged in the joke seems to be
specifically something for girls, and young girls; girls old enough to be
interested in what sex is, and young enough to have only particular sorts of
experiences. One such experience is that of encountering sex from behind a
closed door. So: sex may be going on, it's going on behind the door, and
not with you as a participant, but, e.g., with your parents as participants. A
question is, what is it like? Where, encountering sex that way, what it's like
is specifically ambiguous. And that is so by virtue of the fact that the
sounds that might be the sounds of sex are ambiguous, i.e. , hearing them
one hears sometimes sounds that seem like pleasure, sometimes sounds that
seem like pain, and sometimes no sounds. So that, encountering sex that
way, listening from behind a closed door - whether intendedly or overbear­
ingly - one doesn't get a solution to 'what is sex like?' but finds instead
that a problem is posed: What is sex like? And furthermore, encountering it
that way one faces the situation that whatever the sounds may mean, the
question is, is that the way it is, or is that the way it is for my parents? Is
the puzzling character of its sounds unique to my parents - they don't have
fun at it or they only sometimes have fun at it - or is that the way it is for
anyone?

489
490 Part VII
And the problem yielded by the information so encountered plainly has
difficulties in getting an answer to it. It's supposedly illicitly acquired - you
shouldn't have listened at the door. And a question then is, has anybody else
acquired the same sort of knowledge, i.e. , have my friends also done the same
thing? The illicitness of the acquisition of the information can serve to
constrain getting a solution to the problem that acquiring that information
yielded, i.e. , on presenting that information so as to get it checked out. As
well, of course, that it's about my parents, my family, might provide a source
for not telling it; for not saying to a friend, or indeed to a parent, "Listening
at the door I heard . . . what does it mean, and is that the way it is?" And in
that regard, then, if there were a package of information that was floating
around which tells someone who knows of sex that way that, yeah, that's the
way that people like us encounter sex, and indeed it is sex, and indeed it has
its ambiguity; a package that could be transmitted without providing that its
teller or its recipient had experiences such as the package preserves - its teller
by virtue of that its teller is not a character, its recipient by virtue of that its
recipient, laughing, doesn't reveal that he had such experiences - then such a
package would have distinct transmission virtues.
Now the second kind of thing involved here is something that the punch­
line provides for our looking into, in that it involves, as we talked of earlier,
a squelch on the mother. 1 Recall that the girls being referred to have a
multitude of identities in the joke. They're 'girls, ' they're 'sisters, ' they're
'wives' , and they're 'daughters. ' In the punchline, specific to the character of
it as a squelch is that the one who does it is operating as a 'daughter' to 'her
mother. ' Now I said that squelches are not unusual ways for jokes to close.
And there is a particular type of joke for which squelches are distinctly
characteristic. Those are political jokes; political in the sense of, say, conflict
between groups. For such jokes, certain things are present. One is that they
involve some known-to-be-lower person squelching some known-to-be­
higher categorial person, i.e. , a citizen squelching a governmental official, for
example. And the victor of the interaction will characteristically have an
identity which the teller has, and also the recipient has. So that we have a
common identity occur between the victor, the teller, and the recipient. And
in this squelch, in which 'mother' and 'daughter' are involved, the victor is
the daughter.
I mentioned earlier that the squelch is of the form of the use of some rule
that the mother gave the daughter, as an explanation of some itself possibly
wrong, violative act of the daughter's. I want to propose that with this
squelch, i.e. , a rule in response to a question that might locate a violative act,
we have captured here aspeas of an altogether characteristic, problematic
phenomenon for children.
Children in various ways learn rules. They learn them by inducing them
from events, and they learn them from being told them. One sort of occasion
on which they're told them is on some rule's relevance, when the rule is used

1 See lecture 1 0 , pp. 48 1 -2 .

 Lecture 12 49 1
to correct some action that they did or didn't do. Now, a thing they can and
do suppose is that they can be freed of correction - and whatever accompanies
correction, e.g . , punishment, sanction, 'being a child' - by learning to use
rules. That is to say, living under rules can provide a source of freedom for
them; freedom from corrections, sanctions, and the like. All they have to do
- it's not a small "all," but all they have to do is to have their activities
conform with rules.
It rums out that they discover, are taught, something else besides this. And
that is, that the domain of a rule's possible application is not the same as the
scope of its actual proper application. Instead, rules are to be used more
narrowly than they might be used. Which is to say that not all occasions that
any given rule might apply are the occasions on which it should be applied.
This is an altogether pervasive problem. It's a problem, e.g. , in language use
strictly. That is to say, when following the apparent rules of a language one
comes across places where, using a rule, one ends up talking incorrectly, it
happening that the language has 'irregular forms' which need to be learned
separately. One very characteristic source of children's erroneous talk is that
their talk is, in a way, more lawful than the language. it isn't that they're
simply making an error, but their error is due to having applied some rule of
grammar beyond its actual scope of application. The same goes for many, if
not all other rules.
That situation itself is non-unique to children. It is known for adults, by
reference, e.g., to rules for which their scope of application can be precisely the
kind of question that people in authority make decisions about for other
people. And such decisions don't have the same sort of rule base that other
decisions seem to have. The whole range of questions such as "Is this a
government of laws or men?" etc., preserve that circumstance. But a distinct
problem is posed for children, by virtue of the fact that in following a rule,
they sometimes tum out to be behaving incorrectly and are then sanctioned by
adults. What the size of that problem is, is something that they can't get a
handle on, in the sense of coming up with a systematic solution. When a rule
will tum out to be incorrectly applied is something they can only 'learn by
experience. ' And, that rules tum out to be incorrectly applied by them is
something that preserves adult authority over them. So that the dream that
rule use can lead to a freedom from authority never materializes. It turns out
that acquiring rules involves them on the one hand in finding constraint - that
of living under the rules - and also in finding that they nonetheless are subject
to the authority of those who engage in actions of correcton, sanction, etc. , for
what seem like private interests - where they acquire in other ways,
knowledge that adults can be capricious.
Now, two sorts of things: For any given child, for whom the problem is,
"I learned the rule and followed it and it turned out that sometimes - at times
I wouldn't have known about beforehand - I nonetheless did wrong," the
question is, is that a problem of theirs or is it a problem that is not particularly
theirs? That is to say, it's their parents who taught them what seem to be
general rules; rules having nothing to do with their parents. It's from their
492 Part VII
parents that they induced rules that seem to have nothing to do with their
parents. But it's their parents who inform them of the violations that their
rule use has produced. A question is, "Is it that my parents are introducing all
these exceptions, or is it that that's the nature of the game?' ' Is it a 'my
problem' or an 'anybody's problem'? How would anybody ever learn that it's
not a 'my problem, ' that it's an 'anybody's problem'? Where it's easy enough
to suppose that insofar as it's my parents that introduce the corrections, and
obviously have an interest in preserving their authority over me that way, then
it's my parents who use rules against me that way.
That's one sort of thing. The other is that one charaaeristic way that
parents do that correcting is to juxtapose some rules: ' 'You applied rule X
here, but rule X doesn't apply here, rule Y applies here. " What children are
then learning about problems of rule use is that at some places where a rule
might apply, it's not that nothing applies but that some different rule applies.
And the question then, in part, is learning which rules apply in any given
scene; a problem which seemingly has to be handled empirically. In evolving
ways of dealing with that problem, a special skill is to be learned which
involves mobilizing multiplicities of rules to be juxtaposed against each other
in handling circumstances. So, as adults characteristically use a rule to correct
a child's intendedly rule-governed activity, one thing that can and does occur
is the child using a rule to counterpose a proposed violation.
Children come to learn to answer complaints about possible rule violations
by introducing another rule which yields the very thing that is being treated
as a violation. And they get a special kick out of it. So they can be motivated
to acquire skill in rule manipulation by reference to the way that that can save
them in situations of possible sanction. They can be found to be acquiring skill
in the use of rules, to do things like make excuses. What will have happened
is, having done something possibly wrong - ideally something that they know
has no rule for it - they can come up with an offered rule as why they did it,
and, again ideally, a rule that they were told to follow by that one who is now
threatening to sanction them. This is one perfect fantasy solution for children
who live with the authority of adults. And just such a thing is what the
punchline here involves. The punchline has, then, one of the specific ways
that children dream of turning the tables on adults present in it. It is then of
specific interest to - if not 1 2-year-old girls specifically, then 1 2-year-old girls
among other children.
So, while there are various sorts of squelches, this sort of squelch is
specifically the child-desired squelch. Therein we would find one way in which
what's proposedly characteristic of some dirty jokes, i.e. , their hostile sense, is
present here. And with this squelch we find one way in which this joke can be
understood and appreciated by kids who have come to deal with the problem
of the scope and domain of rules' applications; a way which others would
hardly focus on as of any interest. That it has this thing, and that it involves
a child using it and coming out a victor, seems then to be a specific occupation
of this joke. And one that has nothing particularly to do with sex. The dirty
joke, then, contains information and a drama that has nothing particularly to
 Lecture 12 493
do with sex, but that does have particular interest for the group within which
it might pass; where these are groups that do not have obvious other sorts of
vehicles for transmitting information relevant just for them. That is to say,
there's no child's newsletter that transmits distinctive information relevant to
them. But, recalling my discussion about the transmissability of jokes and the
transmissability of dirty jokes with a 'discretion' marker on them, then these
sorts of things can move within the groups interested in them, informing its
members of problems, solutions, fantasies, possible outcomes, of distinct
interest to just those groups, in the way that, e.g. , private newsletters for small
or large stockholders can do that kind of a job, or a motorcycle magazine can
do that for motorcyclists.
So we're dealing with what are learned in the first instance as possibly
unique problems, possibly just my problems: Possibly just my fantasy solution
to it, in the case of the rules; possibly just my parents' problem or my lack of
knowledge of what it means, in the case of the sounds of sex. But both of
these are distinctly problems of persons of a certain age, and in the case of the
sounds of sex, more or less distinctively the problems of girls, i.e. , the sounds
of pain are at least characteristically thought of as female sounds - if not some
of the sounds of pleasure. So that the joke can then serve to package
information which any of such persons interested in such information can pull
out of it and see to be not merely 'mine' but 'ours. '
The joke passes, of course, in another guise; as simply an oral sex joke. I
would propose, however, that there are a variety of themes of dirty jokes, of
which oral sex is one, which in no way discriminate jokes in terms of their
transmission. That is to say, oral sex jokes are told by all sorts of groups,
where, however, not all oral sex jokes are treated as equivalently funny,
equivalently reliable, by any group that tells oral sex jokes. So that the boys
here don't find it particularly funny, but also know that they understand it ­
where what they understand is not the same sort of thing as 1 2-year-old girls
would possibly see in it. And the fact that the boys don't find it funny doesn't
mean that they wouldn't tell, and find funny, other oral sex jokes. So what
happens is, it gets into their hands, it's not going to go anywhere, and
furthermore, they're not going to see what's in it for others, since they figure
they understand it and also doubt that the girls would understand it - which
may or may not be true for its oral sex aspeas, but would have nothing to do
with whether it's true for these other things it contains - that 'daughters' are
involved, that they get married in packs, that it takes place the first night, etc.
- which can turn them on to its special interest for them. Where, again, they
can distinctively understand the power of the squelch solution. They are the
victors in it. And the victor in it is a victor in just the way they will have
dreamt of being a victor; if not for some sexual matter, then for some situation
of rule use.
In that regard, a chance feature of our materials - that the joke is told by
1 7 -year-old boys - turns out to be relevant to appreciating that the story form
can be adapted to the joke and dirty joke form, to get itself moved and to have
kinds of information put into it that differentiated groups would be interested
494 Part VII
in. Because one sees that the boys don't like it, they figure they understand it,
they understand it by reference to its oral sex. So at least that aspect of it, that
it is safe - i.e. , it could pass among others and they wouldn't know what they
had - gets some sort of support.
All in all, why this thing is so intricately put together can be given an
account, having to do with that it has a very serious job. It isn't intricately put
together simply to bring off the oral sex punchline, because the question is,
why would effort, anonymous effort, be devoted to building these things?
And unless there were some serious business they do, then that becomes
obscure. They live and pass on rather extensively, no one having a particular
interest in telling them - as for ordinary stories one might, having been in
them. In this case it's precisely the situation that if one were in them, one
would be hesitent to tell.
 Lecture 1 3
Two floor-seizure' techniques.·
Appositional expletives and "Vh "
The thing I'm going to talk about this time turns out to have a series of
aptnesses to it; to what's just ensued, and to what's seasonally forthcoming.
It's a Christmas story, and it's about - among other things - private feelings
and their public expression. But I'll begin with something not particularly
related to the sorts of things I want to focus on about the content of the two
stories which make up the fragment, but present in the fragment and related
in a fashion. And that is the beginning, "Oh God! Christmas has gotten so
damned painful! ' ' 1

Bob : Oh, God! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know there's
always this great no one likes what they're getting. You know what
I mean? So you say, "thank you, " and like my mom, "shit, when's
that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I wanna
coat, or I wanna sweater, "

I t has a form to it which I would like to develop a basis of. The form is an
utterance which goes something like this: A word or brief phrase, comma,
sentence. In linguistics it could be talked of as an 'appositional construction, '
and there are other instances of that sort of thing present in these materials,
e.g. , "Shit, when's that guy going to learn that I don't want an electric skillet,
I want a coat or a sweater. "
So we get "Shit" or "Oh God" or a variety of things like that; some
expletive, followed by a sentence. A question is, are there some interactional
bases for utterance constructions like that? There are some kinds of relatively
obvious things one can say about them in the first place, one of which is that
it looks like there is a relationship in which the expletive previews the business
of the utterance. So that, e.g. , "Oh God" expresses a pain, and "Christmas
has gotten so damn painful' ' explains the pain that's been expressed. With the
expletive, then, one is told to listen to the sentence that follows, by reference
to what the expletive expresses; to hear what follows as an account of how
come the expletive was produced. And that kind of thing, in which one
prefaces a construction by a 'reading rule' for what follows, is altogether
common. Of course a question is, well why should you preface what, after all,
is itself kind of plain? That " Christmas has gotten so damn painful" ts a

1Transcriber unknown. For the full fragment see Winter 1 97 1 , March 4 lecture.

49 5
496 Part VII
complaint, an expression of annoyance is plain enough; why would one have
to say beforehand, ' ' I'm now going to say something in which I complain or
express annoyance. " It's not as if the sentence that follows cannot itself be
readily decoded. The answer is perhaps one for which one needs a consider­
ation of some of the rather basic rules of the organization of conversation. I'm
intending, then, to take a typical syntactic form - here, appositional
constructions - and give it a motivation out of rules of conversation.
Let me begin with a different thing; something that looks somewhat alike
to 'expletive, comma, sentence, ' and that is an utterance that goes "Uh, ' '
comma, sentence. A kind of common way that utterances are constructed is
that the utterance is begun with an "Uh," then there's a pause, then a
sentence. One might not think of them as constructed that way, but they are
constructed that way. Obviously that does not have the same kind of syntactic
organization as 'expletive, pause, sentence. ' That is to say, you could cut off
the "Uh" altogether - but in a way, you could cut the expletive off
altogether. In any event, a question is, is there some basis for beginning
sentences with the "Uh," pause, sentence form? And I'll develop an account
of why that's done which would put us in a position to see why the other is
done. The 'why' having nothing much to do with persons' motives
particularly, but with the ways in which the organization of conversation has
this be done as a systematic event.
The problem has to do with how persons get the floor. Roughly, there are
two sorts of ways persons get the floor. One is that someone selects them to
speak. In particular, the current speaker selects the next speaker. That doesn't
mean that current speakers always select next speakers, but if anyone is
selecting a next speaker it's current speaker. So one can get the floor by being
selected, and one is selected by the last speaker. The other way that one gets
the floor is by self-selecting oneself. Those two are not equally alternative
options. Obviously they can't be. Obviously if they are both going to be
present, then that current speaker selects a next speaker has to be preferred.
Otherwise current speaker could select a next and self-selection could be done,
and one would get two or more people starting. So we have a situation in
which that current speaker selects next speaker is the first possibility. If current
speaker has not selected a next, then self-selection can be used.
Now, if self-selection is possible, a question when there are three or four or
more present is, how does one get what one gets with current-selects-next, i.e. ,
that only one speaks? Various people could self-select themselves, and one
would then get two or three people talking. But that's not what happens. The
rule is 'first starter has rights to speak. ' (None of this is very obscure.) So, if
first starter has rights to speak, then there is an issue of rapidly positioning the
beginning of an utterance relative to the end of some prior one. A consequence
of that is that one gets very fine relationships between utterance doses and
next-utterance starts, particularly where no one has been selected. That is to
say, where someone has been selected, then in that they have the floor they
could take a bit of time before they start. If, however, no one has been selected
and one wants to get next position, then the possibility that someone else
 Lecture 1 3 497
might want to get that position will involve that speakers will attempt to
place the beginning of their utterance as close to the end of the last as they can.
And it's a non-rare, really common occurrence that they do it so that there's
no gap between the end of a last and the beginning of a next.
So that if there's a seeming completion and no one has been selected, then
the silence that ensues is such a silence as anyone's talk can occupy, and the
beginning of someone's talk involves that they now seize the floor. Once
they've seized the floor they have exclusive rights to produce an utterance.
One could expect, then, that persons would attempt to seize the floor and
have ways of attempting to seize the floor which would stand in some
independence of having already prepared an utterance. That is to say, they
could do it before they had formed up the sentence they were going to say.
Which would then lead one to an expectation of a partial separation
between what they seize the floor with - that being an issue of getting it in
first - and what they're going to say. Once they've seized the floor there can
be a silence. That silence is now not a silence in the conversation such that
anybody can start talking, but a silence in the course of their utterance, i.e. ,
a pause.
If the argument so far is so, then one expects that there are pure floor seizure
techniques of which "uh" might be just such a thing, if it occurs close to - if
not precisely on - the end of a prior utterance and is followed by a silence (the
silence now being a pause within the utterance of someone who has taken the
floor) and then a sentence. One doesn't, then, produce "uh" because one is
hesitating with what one is going to say, but one produces "uh" to get the
floor so as to be able to say what one isn't prepared to say. If one is hesitant
with what one is going to say, one could after all say nothing yet. However,
if one says nothing yet, then someone else may take the floor. So, routinely one
doesn't get utterance completion, silence, new sentence start, but utterance
completion, "uh," silence now, new sentence start.
Obviously there can be various states of preparation for producing an
utterance. If one wants to produce an utterance on a latter speaker's
completion, then while one may not have it formed up, one may well be in
a position where one knows the effect of what one wants to say. One may
know that one wants to 'disagree,' or say something 'positive, ' or 'complain'
or be 'joyous' or varieties of other such things. Then one might be in a position
to not simply claim the floor but to also give some materials as to why one is
claiming the floor, and thereby put persons in a position of beginning to work
on what one will have said. That is to say, one can provide them with
something other than "uh," something that tantalizes, that partially is a
puzzle in a different way than "uh" is a puzzle; something about which, in the
pause that follows, they can be asking why that was said, for which they will
now be attending what's said next as an answer. And expletives are just such
an object. An expletive will work to seize the floor, and in it one hears, e.g . ,
an expressed emotion, without hearing why it's expressed, and with respect to
which one knows that one can listen to the sentence that follows the expletive
plus its pause, to see why it was said.
498 Part VII
So the appositional form - particularly the appositional form with an
expletive beginning - can then be seen to be a floor seizure device that will
allow time, after the floor has been seized, to form up the utterance-sentence
that it previews, where it also indicates not simply that I want the floor but
that at the point at which I say I want the floor I know the sort of thing I'm
going to say. Where, again, the appositional format has as its source that
non-selected speakers can seize the floor and once having seized it they needn't
produce talk consecutively to retain it. That is to say, they do not have to fill
all the time of their current rum with talk, but they can produce pauses in that
current rum and nonetheless yet have the floor. But they don't have the floor
unless they've initially done seizure of it. Once they have the floor they can
have silences of various lengths at various points in their talk without others
taking over. Now in that regard, "uh" may be considerably weaker than an
expletive, in the sense that "uh" plus a relatively extended silence will get
someone else starting up, whereas it may be that using an expletive you get
a longer time to form up your utterance.
So then, the fact that one begins with something that can be read to
preview what one wants to be saying, that that's done appositionally, that it's
done appositionally with a pause following it, that it's done appositionally
with a pause following it and a sentence following that, are orderly fearures
of utterance construction for a system that has first startership as a way to get
the floor. And the preview-explanation relationship between expletive and
sentence is consequent on those sorts of things.
 Lecture 1 4
The workings of a list;
Doing 'hostility'
Bob : Oh, god! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know
there's always this great no one likes what they're getting.
You know what I mean? So you say, "thank you," and like
- my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't
want an electric skillet, I wanna coat, or I wanna sweater, "
and uh-
Ted : Well, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint, or even-
Kim : What's even funnier is, his father said, "Well after 2 5 years,
I don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just
ridiculous!
Bob : It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so,
he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on
that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother
went to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York.
So jeez! They were pretty low! And so my father, you know,
was being very rational about it. "Well you know we just
haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and
I'll forget it, you know. " So, the day before, Christmas
afternoon, we were over there, and Kim was in talking to
mother. And then Kim came out to me and said that my
mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents.
And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother was
afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was
supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd
gotten her anything. (laughs)
Kim : We should've just left everything alone!
Bob : - No. I'm glad we didn't. But, my father'd gotten her a
lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs)
Ted : - At least it was for her use.
Bob : Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure. 1

I'll begin by examining a relationship between the first quoted thing the
mother says, "Shit, when's that guy going to learn that I don't want an
electric skillet, I want a coat, or I want a sweater, " and Ted's response, "At
least it was for her use," to Bob's announcement, "But my father'd gotten her

1Transcriber unknown. For full fragment, see Winter 1 9 7 1 , March 4 lecture.

499
500 Part VII
a lighter. A little Zippo. " I want to propose that Ted's remark picks up on,
not just Bob's announcement but also the mother's earlier quoted remark,
and that it exhibits one rather formal product of an analysis that Ted has
thereby shown himself to have been doing of Bob's story. With regard to
maybe the most obvious topic in the study of communication, i.e. , do people
understand each other? How do they understand each other? What do they
understand? we can examine this material for, not just an exhibiting of that
understanding takes place, but a way in which the understanding that gets
done and shown, involves more or less formal operations.
Let's look for a bit at the mother's remark, presumably produced in her
husband's absence, presumably with a recipient being either son or daughter­
in-law. Among the sorts of jobs being done in the utterance is that it expresses
concern with the husband's learning something, but it also turns out to be
itself educational, in that it proposes what's not wanted and what is wanted.
And a thing to initially fix on about what's wanted and what's not wanted is
that there's a difference in their number. One thing is noted as not wanted and
rwo things are noted as wanted, with their status being alternative ("I don't
want an electric skillet" and "I want a coat or I want a sweater"). A question
is, why does she have two things that she wants, and what will people make
of that? At least an initial suggestion is that if she says "I want a coat" then
presumably she wants a coat. But if she says "I want a coat or I want a
sweater, " then it isn't that she wants one or both of those, but, giving rwo
things, it may be that she's thereby locating a sort of thing she wants, where
something else would also satisfy that, in a way in which something else
might not satisfy "I want a coat. "
The presentation of what she wants is, then, to be treated as instantial by
virtue of the alternatives. That is to say, perhaps it's not a list which is
specifically exclusive in its full character, i.e. , "I don't want an electric skillet,
I want either a coat or a sweater. " Instead it might be, "I don't want
something like an electric skillet (whatever sort of a something that is), what
I want is something that can be seen to contrast with an electric skillet, of
which a coat or a sweater are instances. " And that, then, is to propose a way
she could be producing this utterance and also a way in which she could be
heard to be locating what she does want and what she doesn't want.
If we then look to what Ted says, "At least it was for her use, " we may find
that he's examined the Zippo for its relationship to the prior asserted items
and found that the Zippo is more like a coat or a sweater than it is like an
electric skillet, it standing as a sort of thing she wanted as compared to a sort
of thing she didn't want. And I talk of it as a formal matter by virtue of that
such a classification operation could obviously be performed - dividing the
rwo groups, attempting to extract their differences; e.g. , a kitchen item for the
mother's use in doing things for the family versus something for her own
private use, something to wear or things like that. The question then would
be, how does the Zippo stand, relative to those rwo groups, such that he can
conclude that it belongs in the latter group and is thereby, if only minimally,
a good gift.
 Lecture 1 4 501
Ted has, then, treated the Zippo by reference to an analysis o f the
classification that can underly the way in which she produced her alternatives.
And to do that is to show that he caught on to what she was saying in her
proposal. Where, in a way, that could involve not just catching on to her
proposed wants and dis-wants, but perhaps to their delivery as something
intendedly educative. That is to say, from "when is somebody going to learn
that I want this and that, ' ' he could himself try to learn what she wants, and
then monitor what she gets by virtue of what he himself has learned. It's not,
then, like he's monitoring the father's gift by virtue of himself independently
knowing what she would figure to be correct or wrong, but by virtue of his
having used her assertion to learn what it is that she might have wanted. We
can then say that Ted subjected this bunch of talk to an attentive, analytic way
of listening to it, which he then kept in mind to be used by reference to the
actually-bought item.
It turns out that the same would hold for the gift that Bob and Kim
bought, a bracelet.

Bob : But, my father' d gotten her a lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo.

(laughs)
Ted : At least it was for her use.
Bob : Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure.
Kim : So we went out-
Bob : So we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had this
tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my mother to
know that we did this . . .

It, too, exhibits an education from the mother's initial proposal, presumably
falling on the same 'wanted' side. Notice that what Bob has talked of as the
problem is, did the father get her anything, which is simply delivered in terms
of number, i.e. , "and my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads
of presents, " with the father's gift delivered as a ' one little thing. ' So,
presumably Bob and Kim could have helped the father out had they but
gotten her a variery of some other things. However, they don't just get her
three or four any other things, or any one other thing. What they get is a ' one
other thing' that also is such a thing as she might have wanted, given her
statement of what she wanted. Which, again, is not treated by Bob and Kim
as what they should get her. If Bob and Kim treated what she said as, not
classificatory but a list, then presumably they could satisfy her by going out
and, instead of buying a bracelet, buying a sweater - which they don't do.
And nobody says "How come you bought her a bracelet? She wanted a
sweater. " Where, of course, in delivering wants, insofar as one is delivering
wants about gifts - which are supposed to be chosen by the giver, where the
giver is supposed to be not just buying you an X but buying you a
present - the wants should be delivered as instantial, i.e. , one doesn't properly
isolate items as "That's what I want and nothing else . " Consider "I want a
coat or a sweater and he bought me a new car. " And in that regard, 'coat and
502 Part VII
sweater' are not only for her in particular, they also have a possible price range
involved in them. They're not, in some fashion, her fantasy gifts, they're
realistic gifts.
So, it's apparently evident to all that the kind of operation that Ted did is
correct, that the kind of thing the father bought was correct, and that the kind
of thing that Bob and Kim bought is also correct. All of those things perhaps
turning on the list that presumably was available to Bob and Kim, and that
is made available to Ted. Where perhaps in making it available to Ted, Bob
makes available the sensibility of the thing that he will have turned out to
have bought. That is to say, he doesn't have to put the list into the story at
all. But Bob having put it in, Ted uses it for the father's gift. He could also
use it to see the reasonableness of Bob and Kim's gift - though presumably
were he to deal with the list otherwise, i.e. , empirically and not formally, he
could find it a strange thing to do: "If you wanted to satisfy her and you knew
what she wanted, why did you buy her something else?' '
Now I want to return to the mother's remark, as a complaint against the
father. As such, it carries at least an aspect of its hostility to the father in a
usual place for putting in intended hostilities, and that is in the way in which
he's referred to, "that guy" being a way of exhibiting some sort of intended
hostility. Now, a reference to a person is one obvious place that can be packed
with endearments and hostilities, as one can also do varieties of other things
there, some of which have been talked about earlier, e.g. , when I discussed
types of identifications - those intended to indicate that the recipient knows
the one being referred to, and those intended to indicate that the person is not
known to the recipient. 2 Here he's referred to as "that guy. " How is "that
guy" hostile?
"That guy" can be a perfectly reasonable, non-hostile characterization of
somebody, as compared to "that son of a bitch" or "that dope", which have
rather weaker potential for being turned into merely a way of referring to
someone. So "that guy" is then hostile not by virtue of that the term is hostile,
but by virtue of other things. One obvious facet of those are that the person
being so referred to is her husband and the recipient's father or father-in-law,
and the term used makes it a task to determine from it who's being referred
to, where such a person can be altogether readily characterized in a way that
doesn't provide such a task. I'm not saying it's a difficult task; it's a task
differently than is "When is your father going to learn" or "When is Bill
going to learn" or whatever. And again, that doesn't necessarily convey a
hostile intention, though it can be a component in producing a hostile
charaaerization. Also, "that guy" is a reference to someone who, its use
suggests, is relatively distant from the parties involved. One will use a term
like 'guy' where either you don't know the person's name or the recipient
doesn't know the person's name, and in that sense they're not well-known
persons, and in using the term you indicate at least that sort of distance
between speaker and the person or recipient and the person. "Just a guy I

2 See lectures 5 and 6 .

 Lecture 1 4 503
know. " "Some guy who's name I forgot, " as compared to "Bill . " Now,
plainly the person involved is not such a person. He's not distantly related or
distantly unrelated. And plainly, a way of producing a hostile reference to
someone is to increase the apparent distance via the use of a reference to them,
beyond the actual known distance. Altogether simple instances involve, for
families, instead of "our child, " referring to "your child: " "You know what
your daughter did today?" - which is for that moment to remove her from
what's also so, that she's "my daughter. " So, picking a term that asserts a
distance that solving its reference will yield to be no such distance, is plainly
a way of producing hostile references.
One can, then, do the hostility by reference to that use of an apparent
distance which will not, however, create a puzzle. That is to say, it's by virtue
of the utter solvability of who's being referred to that the distance term can
work to exhibit hostility. One needs somehow to already know that it's the
father being talked of, so that you use the term to see he's being 'talked of as
distanced, ' rather than using the term to try to find the person and thereby
find you don't know who's being talked of, since plainly it couldn't be the
father, since he isn't someone who's at that distance, and could be much more
directly referred to.
So, "that guy" will isolate an intended distance involved. And "guy" has
a rather nicer relationship yet; one that we can approach by considering some
alternatives and the way they would fit to the complaint. Consider a term like
"When is that dope going to learn. " In calling him a dope, one has picked
a term that fits the complaint very nicely. What's being complained of is that
he doesn't learn, and the term used is 'dope, ' which would very nicely satisfy
a complaint in which an assertion of lack of learning is done. But, while both
'guy' and 'father' are possibly identifying characterizations, 'dope' isn't.
'Dope' just says 'I'm hostile to someone and find out who I'm hostile to by
virtue of dumb things they did which I may tell you about in the course of
my utterance. ' But, again, 'dope' is very nicely fitted to a complaint about a
lack of learning. Now I want to suggest that in this case, 'guy' is a term like
'dope,' in this sense: As one characteristic use of "that guy" is for someone
whose name I don't know, then the accusation that he hasn't learned about
her, can be claimed, in a non-serious fashion about herself about him. We all
know about such a thing as, in trying to think of the name of someone one's
angry at, one can't. I'm not suggesting that in trying to think of a way of
referring to him when she's angry, she can't find it. What I'm suggesting is
that in her concern for "after all these years that we've lived together he still
doesn't know what I want, ' ' then a way to show her anger about that is to say
" . . . whoever he is. " The upshot is, then, it may be that a term of reference
to a person can carry not just such a thing as one's hostility towards them, but
the sort of hostility one has; the reason for your hostility, or the consequences
of your hostility, for example.
 Lecture 1 5
'Fragile ' stories; On being 'rational'

A question I want to raise is: Consider the variety of kinds of jobs that
forming up a story might have for someone. For one, the sorts of relationships
building a story out of some events might have to the character of those
events. There are varieties of obvious options involved. There can be, e.g . , the
production of a story simply devoted to telling about some interesting or
amazing or extremely odd thing that happened to you, where in telling it, a
thing you're asking of the recipient is, say, " Isn't that odd?" and they tell you
"Yeah it's odd" or "No it's not odd . " One can think of varieties of ways that
the job of a story can fit an event. Now, in the light of that one option - and
there are plainly plenty of others - I want to introduce another sort, having
to do with this possibility: Some rather complex events have happened, and
a thing you're trying out is whether you can put together a more or less
compelling version of them, that version isolating one or another of the
happened things, to find "That's what happened, isn't it?" "I have a correct
version of it, don't I?" What's involved, then, is that you may in some fashion
present to your audience materials which are more complicated than your
story has them, where your audience could suggest about the proposed upshot
of your story that you may not have it right.
Of course it would be curious if you gave them materials to allow them to
say you may not have it right, but varieties of bases for that could be found.
For one, the sheer announcement of a story involving, say, family troubles can
tell that we're going to get a biased version of it. But the sort of thing I want
to be talking about here is that you have in mind a bunch of things that
happened, and as you're forming the story up, parts of it that you're not
forming up as the story nevertheless appear in it. And by that I mean things
like, in the Christmas story Bob's version has it that nothing is to be made of
the money that he and Kim spent on the bracelet.

Bob : So we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had
this tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my
mother to know that we did this, but how are we gonna give it
to my father without hurting his feelings? Oh, shit! And we
---- finally got it to him. I don't know, we spent about an hour and
a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna
manage this thing?" I don't know how we did, but-
Jan : He probably knew.
Ted : I know just what you mean. We go through this thing every
year. My father said, "No gifts. " And we tried to analyze what-
5 04
 Lecture 15 505
Bob : Does "no gifts" mean no gifts, or does it mean more gifts?
Ted : ---+ No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts. " And I was
questioning the reason. I didn't think it was his a legitimate
reason. I don't think it was his real reason.

So, nothing is to be made of the money that Bob and Kim spent on the
bracelet, where, listening to the story, one could easily enough figure that they
might have some feeling about having to have spent the money. And he may
have left some aspect of that in the story when he says ' 'We spent about an hour
and a half, ' ' which focusses on, not that they spent money but that they spent
time. Or consider, e.g. , that when Ted complains of his father's "No gifts"
decision, he doesn't complain about - he maybe very carefully avoids any
suggestion that he was bothered by - not getting gifts. Bur in a way, some such
possible complaint, which the story is built to avoid, bur which a recipient
plainly could raise, is left in when he does a thing like saying "he gave us one
reason. " Where one could hear that "one reason" is something not alternative
to "a compelling reason, " but alternative to "giving us something else. "
There is, then, an aspect of both stories as possibly fragile. By that I mean
that a recipient could say, "That's not what happened is it, really?" That is to
say, first Bob and then Ted are in no way assertedly bothered by not getting
any presents, though they are complaining by reference to there being no
presents. And those are delicate paths to be able to move amongst safely.
Bob's story could easily be heard as one in which he is after all complaining
because it looked like they weren't going to get anything, and anything else
he says rationalizes that. And Ted is after all complaining because his father
said that he wasn't going to get anything, but he's proposing that he's
bothered by the reasons, not by the no gifts.
So there's a way in which the two stories can be seen as ordering materials
out of alternative versions of what transpired, such that a recipient could,
from the materials nonetheless left in there, pick away at it as to whether what
happened is other than your version of it. Of course one can adduce reasons
why one or another recipients might not do that. In this case there can be good
reasons why Ted doesn't do it, one of which is that if he doesn't do it, having
such a story himself, then his second story supports Bob's and is supported by
Bob's. That is to say, if he supports Bob and thereby gets a chance to form
up his story as "See, I wasn't annoyed either by not getting a present, what
I was annoyed by was that he didn't seem to have a good reason for it, " then
it's not likely that Bob is going to say, "Oh come on, you were just bothered
because he didn't give you something. " So that there's a situation in which
just letting the version go can serve to have the two of them, as it's said, wash
each other's hands. 1
I've offered some allusions to possible ways that a story might be fragile or
weak. Where, while any story might be heard in a way that leads to a
questioning or a doubting of the version the teller gives, this one has

1 The discussion co this point comes from lecture 1 4 , pp. 1 0- 1 4 of the unedited lectures.
5 06 Part VII
discoverably formal sources for its possible fragility. Saying it in a sentence for
now, they have to do with that the stories involve a character who happens to
be the teller here, doubting the motives, reasons, things of that order, of
another character, where the doubting that's been introduced could, readily in
this case, be applied to the teller-character's report of his own behavior. So:
That the story involves doubts, where one might extract the doubts and
reapply them to the teller-character, yields one sort of characterizably formal
basis for the story having a fragility to it. Where what's of interest in some
ways is that it can be told and not have its fragility exploited by a recipient.
And there may be bases for, and some sorts of assurances that, the fragility
won't be exploited. Those can be kind of readily gotten at also, and have to
do with - again, in a sentence - the possible similarly situated character of
the recipients to the teller. In this case they, too, are children of parents, and
in a position of being the proper recipients of gifts, such that they might well
- as they turn out in this case to be - ones who have a similarly fragile story
to tell.
There's another sort of fragility the story has, which is perhaps not quite so
obvious. That has to do with a relationship that is by and large suppressed in
the story as a possible source of difficulties, and that's the relationship between
spouses insofar as it deals with Bob and Kim. Which is to say that what takes
place between them goes largely unsaid, particularly what takes place between
them that could in various ways parallel the difficulties that take place
between the spouses who are spoken of, i.e. , the parents. The parents
reportedly have problems about getting gifts for each other, are sensitive to
each other, unable to talk to each other about how to deal with getting gifts
for each other, need intermediaries to deal with that. That there might be such
problems closer to home, i.e. , involving Bob and Kim, goes unsaid. And
furthermore, how these two went about dealing with dealing with the
parents' problems goes unsaid. So, e.g. , we have the assertion of the father's
problem, the assertion of the discovery of the father's having gotten "a little
Zippo, " and then, "So we went out and bought her a bracelet. " Where, how
they came to arrive at that, whether they were initially altogether in
agreement about that, is unsaid.
That is to say, there are a series of ways in which Kim might turn out to
be a non-ally, i.e. , she could turn out to argue with Bob's version of the story.
And that would involve, now, an interaction in which locally present persons
are conflicted. It could lead to, say, the development of an alliance between
Bob and Ted and one between Kim and Jan, in which their own conflicts
about gifts emerge. And there are hints of it present, having to do with, e.g.,
that Kim proposes "We should have just left everything alone. "

Bob : So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father and see
if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs)
Kim : -+ We should've just left everything alone!
Bob : No. I'm glad we didn't. But my father'd gotten her a lighter.
(laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs)
 Lecture 15 507
And there's a possible sense in which that source of what could turn out to
be a present conflict is picked up on, e.g . , via Jan's remark "He probably
knew. "
Bob : I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to
figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this
thing?" I don't know how we did, but-
jan : -- He probably knew.
Ted : I know just what you mean. We go through this thing
every year.
Where does that come from, and to whom is she talking when she says it? I'm
guessing a possibility that "He probably knew" is responsive to Kim's
inserted remarks in the story, where Jan, as 'also a wife' is talking to Kim,
telling Kim "I kind of see that you don't have quite the same view of the
whole thing as Bob has. " My interest in mentioning this is, I offered some
hints about a way that the story can be fragile, having to do with Bob's
version of it being subject to treatment by Ted and Jan which could turn into
other than what he's forming up. Now I'm suggesting that Bob's version is
subject as well to treatment by Kim, which could have it be other than the
version he's formed up. And each of those possibilities yields a rather different
interactional development than we get here.
I want to devote <: bunch of time to something else. It will involve a
discussion similar in its fashion to the thing I did last time, i.e. , the
development of formal materials which would permit Ted, having analyzed
a collection of earlier materials, to have said "At least it was for her use. "
What I want to turn to now is that Bob says about his father that he was
"being very rational about it. "

Bob : and so, he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on
that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went
to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. So jeez!
They were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very
rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's
get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it, you know. "
I want to collect and order a bunch of things Bob says which can tell us what
"being very rational" means. Where at least one interest of that, apart from
seeing that he possibly provides for his recipients a very nice set of materials
for that job, is in how it locates what kind of a thing "being very rational" is
- and I specifically want to allow the distinction between "being rational" and
"being very rational. " Now, there is a kind of prejudice that we have
academically, though not otherwise, about something like "being very
rational. " We treat it as though, whatever it is, it's certainly the best thing to
be. I want to bring under some control that the assertedness of "being very
rational" is specifically not the best thing there is; it's something less than the
best.
508 Part VII
Let's look to the kinds of materials we can extract from the story which
seem to go into the conclusion "being very rational. " One sort of thing that
could alert us to an order of delicacy involved in the use of that character­
ization is the connection between that we're talking about Christmas, and the
rypes of financial expenses that are introduced to make their circumstances
"low. " Very characteristically when persons are engaged in considering a
current expense, they introduce, in finding that it can't be done, some old
expense, some other actual expense that has already transpired. Now, the fit
between a current proposed expense and the expenses that are offered to make
it un-doable tends to be extremely nice. Consider, e.g. , some things that can
be introduced as grounds for not doing a possible current Christmas expense.
Then, while it can be said, "Let's not go out to dinner tonight, we went out
to dinner last week, " it can't be said, "We can't buy any Christmas presents,
we just went out to dinner last night. " Nor, e.g . , can it be said, "Let's not buy
anything for Christmas, we had a very large grocery bill last week, ' ' though,
engaged in purchasing things at the market one can say, "Let's not buy
imported Swiss cheese, we just bought a ham. ' '
That is to say, there are ways of isolating items to be juxtaposed to a
possibly current expense, such that items to be juxtaposed to a given current
expense are not to be juxtaposed to any current expense. So, e.g . , a feature of
Christmas is that it comes once a year, such that, in consideration of how
much to spend or whether to spend, one may adduce extraordinary expenses
of this year, plus other difficulties of this year. The Teamsters strike, and that
mother made two trips to Florida and father went to New York, are
introduceable as circumstances for Christmas, though plainly other things
would not be circumstances for Christmas, and, on the other hand, those
which work for Christmas may not be circumstances for other expenses. That,
in the story here, there's a review of extraordinary expenses of the year, used
to assess their circumstances for Christmas, can let us feel some assurance that
the proposed rationality involves rypes of decisions for which the rypes of
grounds have been accurately isolated, and does indeed involve possible ways
of making assessments and using materials to make them.
Notice, too, that while there could have been a perfect sufficiency to
mother's involvement in "this teamsters strike" and that mother "went to
Florida twice, " there is a sensibiliry to the inclusion of that "father had to go
to New York. " And that is in the way in which it turns what could be
claimably not 'our problem' but 'your problem' between the parents, into
something in which both of them are involved, and furthermore, neither of
them are responsible. That is to say, the Teamsters strike is something in the
world in which she was involved - she didn't cause it - and he had to go to
New York - no need to say why, enough to say he "had to go to New York. "
So that both of them are involved in that they now have specifically
unexpectedly low resources. Things happened that they could not have
planned on and that did not involve their own casualness to their financial
circumstances, e.g . , "Okay, collect the year's expenses, we can't buy presents
because we took that trip to Hawaii. " They're difficulties over which we
 Lecture 1 5 5 09
had no control, that affected both of us. Those are what are introduced,
and thereby, that there are no recriminations as between them can be
achieved.
So we have, then, appropriately isolated extraordinary expenses - 'appro­
priately' in that they are for the year, they are extraordinary, they are
unexpected, they aren't in our own interests, and they involve both of us - as
one complex of materials being apparently employed in coming to the
problem of what to do about Christmas. Now, what to do in the light of those
collected circumstances? Sacrifices are proposed. And while proposing that
he's not going to buy her gifts he's also offering that she doesn't have to buy
him gifts, so that he's not asking that she make a sacrifice and he not, but they
both are to make a sacrifice. Nor is it just that they're both going to sacrifice,
i.e. , ignore Christmas. They will attend Christmas while themselves not
getting anything for each other, and that is to be used to do getting gifts for
specifically proper recipients of theirs, i.e. , their kids. Where, by 'specifically
proper recipients' I mean that Christmas is a specifically family event and they
preserve it as a family gift-giving event by having the sacrifices between them
for the kids, and not, e.g . , between them for something else, like the lady next
door, some charity, or things like that.
So what we have then is, grossly, a non-ideal circumstance, i.e. , limited
resources, with some principled way of making a decision that employs
altogether conventional means for analyzing that situation to get a solution.
Now, there are ways in which one perfectly well might say, "Since gifts are
so important to her, he can't be said to be rational unless he buys her gifts. "
If he bought her a gift, however, it wouldn't be said that he was 'rational. '
Not that it would be said that he was 'irrational, ' but the issue of his
rationality wouldn't be posed. What's involved, then, is that he proposes that
they do something which isn't the thing to do, and he proposes it by reference
to the ways of doing what should be done. Where, also, one can't latch onto
any private gains for him, or any particular nastiness of his. What he's doing
is proposing an 'allowable second best' decision, which is what, I take it,
"being very rational" is here, i.e. , putting together materials which turn
what's in the first instance the wrong way to proceed for Christmas into a
second best way. Where, again, if things went as usual and gifts were bought
by all for all, it wouldn't be called 'a rational decision, ' which again isn't to
say that it would be called 'irrational. ' Rationality comes up by virtue of its
possible wrongness.
At least one consequence of this exercise of seeing the use of "being very
rational" and noticing that there are materials here which might be collected
so as to see what it is that the storyteller is talking about, is that we come to
see the place in the tale of some otherwise possibly 'merely in there' features.
Things like the Teamsters strike, that the mother went to Florida twice, that
the father had to go to New York, and the character of the proposal, " Let's
you and I forget it. "
In the course of this discussion I've remarked on the way in which arriving
at the father's "being very rational" in his dealing with Christmas, involves
5 10 Part VII
an at-all-points use of the conventional materials for isolating Christmas as an
event. And there are a whole range of other, seemingly particular, personal
aspeas of this tale which make use of or otherwise reflea altogether
conventionalized versions of the Christmas scene. One of these has to do with
that as the father is asserted to be rational by Bob, so the version of the mother
we get is of someone not rational, but emotional. And that malejfemale
partitioning is done in the conventional way that, those terms being allotted
to such people, they are to be allotted, i.e. , something extra would be being
done if it would involve that the father was emotional and the mother was
rational. Now, the story is not a soap opera, i.e. , specifically only about types
of persons, but having introduced these conventionalities, there's a way in
which the story is indeed about nobody in particular. And that has to do with
that Bob doesn't know who he's talking about, in the sense that it's perfectly
adequate for him to talk about his parents that way. Which is to say, he
doesn't know them as anything other than these persons whom he can
adequately talk of as 'a rational father' and 'an emotional mother. '
It's a very commonplace thing that people, when they're being frank or
intimate to someone and talking about their parents, will say things like they
can't imagine that they ever have sex. And they may remark that they hardly
know them, i.e. , hardly know them in the way in which, say, they figure they
know the person they're talking with, or they figure they know themselves.
That's only one cute instance of what is much more massively present for,
e.g . , children and parents. It can be gotten at by noticing that while to be sure,
Bob is not here fully developing his father as he knows him, nonetheless the
picture he portrays may be adequate to Ted. And the piaure he portrays is of
someone who is sufficiently known by knowing 'he's a father and he does this
sort of rational event, ' and ' she's a mother and presents are so important to
her, ' without having to say, e.g. , how it comes about for her that presents are
so important. That is to say, nothing being introduced as to why, for this
particular person, presents are so important, then it's by virtue of what anyone
would know about a somebody of whom it's only been said she's a mother
and a woman. She has no particular known biography which enriches or
substitutes for just the adequacy of 'presents are so important to her' as
needing no further development.
Now, I raise all this because it's talked of as though the recipient should
be able to see why, e.g. , we went to these lengths to avoid confronting the
father with what we did. That is, the hearers could figure, "Yeah, you never
could talk to him, ' ' where it's altogether reasonable that a very same story is
tellable by the parents as persons, i.e. , of their difficulties with the kids. They
are then, by virtue of what it is that is figured to be unsayable between them,
achievedly strangers to each other. So it's not just that there is an altogether
non-individually worked out version of how to deal with Christmas, but also
an altogether non-individually worked out version of who these people are
that he's known for 2 5 years.
Furthermore, in a fashion, the very same thing is happening in this occasion
of the story's telling. They are allowing each of the other participants to
 Lecture 15 511
present a version of what happened which, in the way it retains a
conventionalization of whoever else they're talking about, also preserves for
each of them as the tellers, such a position relative to their recipients. That is
to say, it would look like these people are doing intimate talk, e.g., Bob is
telling about an intimate problem that he has with his parents. But he's
telling it in the presence of Kim, and in no way is their intimacy brought up.
As Bob says that his parents can't talk of what it is that happens between
them, and is intimately telling of that, and how he deals with it, so precisely
is the person in that position to him as his parents are to each other, i.e. , Kim,
also treated in the same fashion in this conversation. Which can then tell Ted
and Jan what the boundaries of this conversation are, i.e. , the way that it's
unintimate in the very way that the conversation being talked of was
unintimate.
 Lecture16
On dreams
What I 'll propose at least tentatively for the purposes of discussion today is
something maybe kind of bizarre, and it has some sorts of interests. The
fragment is excerpted from a conversation among four people; Ethel and Ben
are husband and wife. Some version of the topic 'art' is being talked about
when Ethel goes into this:

Ethel : ___.... Y'know Ben, I was thinking of you, d-eh it w- yesterday

morning after you went, to work y'know en I tried tuh fall
back tuh sleep 'n, "hhhhhh I couldn't, hhhhhh en I thought
well? tch! you'd be so goo:d. (0. 5) -in doing, ( 1 .0) -the
geometric type of artwork, the-the type of thing you like so
much. You don't haf to d- force yerself tuh do, "hhh
whatchu think other people feel you, sh' d do: : ,
Ben : I d o what I wanna do.
(0. 5)
Ben : En I I if I wanna paint I'll paint.
Ethel : And I think y-you oughta set up the easel now en start
going at it, eh becuz I think yer very �:d.

The thing I'll propose is this: She's not remembering what she "thought"
yesterday morning; what she's remembering, though she doesn't know it, is
a dream she had yesterday morning. Maybe she discovers it later on, may be
discovers it in the middle of telling it, maybe she never even notices it - and
of course maybe I'm just making it up. But if I'm making it up, I'm making
it up on the basis of some knowledge I have otherwise. That is to say, I saw
this and began to puzzle about it by virtue of having had such an experience.
I've found myself telling people things that I remembered as, e.g . , "Some­
thing happened to me that I wanted to tell you about" and then in the course
of telling it I realized it never happened, it was a dream that happened. So I'd
had that experience and never really seen anybody report it, and then in
looking at this fragment in the course of analyzing the conversation, it
occurred to me that there was good reason to think that it might be an
instance of the same thing.
It's a thing that could be very important theoretically, under the following
sort of problem. Stories are largely told as occasioned memories. That is to
say, stories are finely placed; occasioned by the current course of talk. As you
hear someone tell a story, a story like it, for example, will pop into your head,
of a something that happened to you. Now, what sorts of things get
remembered for the story? Plainly an enormous mass of stories do not get

5 12
 Lecture 1 6 5 13
told, or even noticed, and those are stories that occupy people when they
dream. What happens to them? What happens when the brain searches for
memories out of which it's going to get the next story it's going to tell?
There's all these stories that happen to you in your dreams; is it that there's
a massive separate classification of experiences such that some experiences are
labelled 'dreams' and some are labelled 'non-dreams' and only those that are
labelled 'non-dreams' are available to your memory as 'stories'? Or is it that
some other kind of thing works, such that you might not know?
Dreams are, after all, available for some sort of remembering. For one,
having a dream, you can remember you've had a dream like it. And lots of
people know that they have 'recurrent dreams. ' So there is a memory for
dreams. And sometimes in the course of the day something happens, and that
leads you to remember a dream you had. So that actual real events can yield
memories of dreams. And a kind of thing I'm wondering about is, is the
classification 'dream' assigned to an experience? And does that, for ordinary
people or in ordinary states of affairs, keep an experience so classified as to
provide that however it's used it's always used as 'this was a dream, ' but
maybe in special states of mind you don't know that it was a dream? Now,
that's what's relevant here.
The initial clues for me are, first, the way in which she sets it up: "I was
thinking of you yesterday morning after you went to work, and I tried to fall
back to sleep and I couldn't, and I thought . . . ' ' Okay, that's a very common
state. You're awakened by something - noise, somebody leaves, dogs
barking, garbage trucks, whatever it may be. You're awakened. And now you
do 'trying to fall back to sleep. ' And you can commonly have the experience
that "I tried to fall back to sleep and I couldn't. " But if you've ever thought
about it at all, you know that you don't know whether you "couldn't. ' ' That
is to say, you often lie there in a state which is sometimes awake and
sometimes sleeping, and whenever you're awake you kind of feel "I can't fall
asleep," but you may well have slept. And then while you're awake you're
having thoughts, and while you're asleep you may be having dreams, and
there can be times when it's very clear that it's a dream, but there can be states
when it's not clear that you're asleep and dreaming. And in those states you
may have things which you think are thoughts, which are dreams.
There are reports in the literature on experiences like that. In a paper by
Edward Sapir, a very famous anthropologist, he reports that he was sitting
and talking to somebody at night and he fell asleep while he was talking, and
continued talking. And the talk he then generated turned out to be a report
of the dreams he was having. It wasn't that he's now in the dream and talking
to whatever persons are in the dream; what he does is he narrates the dream.
And that's not all that rare. Such experiences happen, are known to happen,
I've heard people tell of them. People who, when they're very very tired are
talking to somebody else, can slip into sleep and nonetheless keep talking.
And the other person at some point hears what can only be an extraordinarily
bizarre kind of talk coming out. So it looks like there are times when people
don't know that they're sleeping, don't know what the state is that they're in,
5 14 Part VII
might well think they're awake, so that they could think it's a 'thought' they
had when it's a 'dream. ' And this point, early morning, having been
awakened and knowing that you want to go back to sleep, is a characteristic
place for such an experience.
So, by locating the time and the occasion when she has this thought, there
became reason to suspect that she might be remembering, not a thought, but
a dream she had. Now, that's not enough to say "Well, she's reporting a
dream, ' ' though it is enough to say we can be suspicious about whether she
knows what she's saying.
A second clue is that the thing itself - let's consider it as a possible dream
- has dream characteristics to it. Among the most striking is that when people
talk in this state of just having fallen asleep, the talk they produce is
something that if they were awake would be treatable as characteristically
schizophrenic speech. And there is one perfect instance here: Among the most
classical instances of what schizophrenic speech looks like, is 'paradoxical
talk. ' And here she gives him an instruction which says, "Don't do what other
people tell you to do, do this: Do what you want to do. ' ' Now that's a
perfectly characteristic piece of schizophrenic speech. In some of the modem
literature this phenomenon, called 'double bind, ' is treated as the character­
istic instance of the way in which a mother produces a schizophrenic child;
telling him, "Be free, do whatever you want. I insist that you do this. This is
what you want. ' ' So there's that aspect of a dream.
There is also this "geometric artwork" thing. And again, if you put
yourself in her position and think of yourself as lying in bed, semi-asleep, then
among the things that people have happen to them - and of course there are
perfectly good physiological reasons for having it happen - is you see
geometric light patterns; like you're looking at the inside of your eye, and you
see colored light patterns. So she may well have seen these geometric patterns,
and seen them as the possible artwork he could produce that would be
beautiful, as they are, indeed, beautiful. So there's a sense in which she could
have been visualizing something; something very much like "geometric
artwork. ' '
Now, one likes to have as well, some personal materials involved. And it
turns out that we have sufficient information to say something about what
indeed might be happening in the dream, besides that she's seeing
something on her eyelid and thinking of the husband who just left. She's
proposing to him that he ought to do something, and the thing he ought to
do is paint. Now, it happens that this couple has a best-friend couple of
long standing. The other couple is one that, if not both of these people then
at least Ethel, is overtly, distinctly jealous of, though they're best of friends
- that doesn't mean anything, she's also very jealous. She's jealous on
various scores, one of them being that the other man is much more
successful in conventional ways, i.e. , he makes more money than Ben does.
And he's also an amateur artist. This husband of her long-term friend is,
then, someone with whom she compares her own husband negatively. And
she could perfectly well have dreams that involve that she wished that her
 Lecture 1 6 515
husband did some of the things this guy does - perhaps as a way of wishing
that she had this guy.
There are, then, in some absolutely ordinary ways, some plausible
psychological interests in her having a dream about wishing that her husband
painted. Now, that might connect up with an annoyance she has with her
husband right now, i.e. , she thinks she's awake, and she thinks she's awake
because he woke her up. She might then tum that immediate annoyance into
how she can otherwise be dissatisfied with him. Which is, after all, a common
enough sequence, i.e. , having one grounds for annoyance with someone, one
can readily enough find oneself in a chain in which one finds other grounds for
being annoyed with them. And particularly, one can find such grounds out of
the current environment; the current environment in this case possibly being
these light patterns that she's viewing, that she can see as 'artwork, ' which
turn her to a dissatisfaction with her husband that involves a comparison with
his friendjher friend's husband, as someone who does such things.
So, one could put it together as a possible dream. A question then is, are
some dreams subject to being remembered as non-dreams? Dreams like this,
which occur in 'twilight states' and are not even experienced as dreams? Let me
tell one story of mine. It has two parts to it. I have a friend who is interested in
jazz and in transcriptions of jazz, and transcriptions of jazz are hard to come by.
He was in my house one day, I'm mixing a drink or something, and I'm about
to call to him to tell him ' ' Hey I just remembered something I wanted to tell
you. I met a guy who has transcribed music. " Then I thought, "Gee, that's
ridiculous, there's nothing rare about transcribed music. " Then I realized "It
never happened! It was a dream. " So I didn't tell him. Second sequence. We're
at his house some time later, and I'm sitting telling someone else this story
about remembering a something I'd wanted to tell my friend, and how I had
realized, no, it was a dream. My friend was mildly listening in to this conver­
sation. He breaks in and says "That's not true. You told it to me. And first I
thought, 'Thanks, ' and then later on I thought 'That's strange, what's so rare
about transcribed music? ' but I never thought more about it and just forgot
about it. " Now I, for my part, don't remember ever telling him. I thought I
didn't tell him, but he says I did tell him. And I take it that he didn't dream
that part. So that was the specific occasion on which I became aware of that sort
of thing, and then the question was, well why wouldn 't you remember things
that were not real stories? And then it's the rarity of it that's odd. And I'm just
interested in whether anybody has had the occurrences to them of a thing that
they think of, or tell someone, as a thing that happened, that they later on or in
the course of it realize didn't happen but was a dream.
Q : I remember a bunch of people sharing their childhood experiences, and
as I recalled it everything was right about the story, then as I began to retell
it some of the things were just so absolutely incredible that it couldn't have
happened, and it must have been a dream. But I had considered it as an actual
experience until the time I began to tell it.
Q : I was just remembering an experience I had when I was about five years
old. At Easter time in the morning when we got up we'd go in the kitchen and
5 16 Part VII
we'd have our little basket there. Well, evidently I dreamed that I got up
and went into the kitchen and everything, and I saw the basket, but also,
outside the kitchen door, I saw the Easter Bunny leaving. And it was as big
as a man, and I swore I saw him, and he had other baskets on his arm and
stuff. And later that morning I was telling everybody in my family, and they
said "Oh sure, you saw him. " But to this day, I know there's no such thing,
but I'm sure I saw him. But I know I couldn't have. It must have been a
dream.
HS : I guess if you put it back in your youth you'd have good reason to
imagine that you would have a store of early memories which are not known
to be dreams or not, since you would have acquired that information about
experience, and applied it, only later on.
Q : I remember when I was really young, my parents telling me something
and then maybe months later they'd tell me something just the opposite and
I'd get really confused and ask them why they told me this other thing, and
they'd say "I never told you that. " So if you could begin to add that as a
corpus, things where people say "It never happened, " we could now think
maybe it was a dream.
HS : Yeah, that's good. Those sorts of things might be very interesting.
Q : It seems to me that in a real life experience you have a basic orientation
to that experience all the while it's happening, and it doesn't change; and
when it does change it's change that progresses rather than jumping to
something else. But in a dream the basic orientation can change; like you can
be with somebody but that person can change in any second and become
somebody else. And I interpret that as irrationality. Like somehow for the
purposes of a story you don't trust that; it goes into another bag.
HS : That may be so for you, but even in our culture people use dreams in
much different ways than that. I certainly know people who use dreams as a
better informational source than other sources. So, e.g . , I want to know how
I feel about somebody. When interacting with them I figure I don't get a
good chance to know them. There are lots of constraints which prevent me
from knowing how I feel about them because I will behave towards them,
and feel by reference to my behavior, all kinds of things. Like, if they seem
enthusiastic then I might seem enthusiastic. And there's no one to talk to who
could give you a better angle on that person. They'll either agree with you or
disagree, but they have their own feelings about them. Well, how do you then
get to have some idea that you have real feelings about somebody? How do
you get to know what your real feelings are? Some people treat their dreams
as non-interactional occasions for finding out their feelings about somebody.
And supposedly there are people who can instruct you how to have a dream
about how you feel about someone; there seems to be a way to develop that
as a thing, and you can do it.
See, the question is, how do you believe your brain? How do you believe
whatever it is that gives it to you? I mean, it doesn't just come out with answer
like a fortune cookie: "You like them very much . " And what you want is
something trustable. Let me talk a bit about my own analysis of my own
 Lecture 1 6 5 17
dreams, where the question was, how do I believe it? The way it would come
to be believed by me was that it would use exceedingly private information of
my own; such things as nobody else knows about me, that I don't particularly
think about. Such things would be put into the dream. For example, I had a
cat that I really liked. Some people know I liked the cat, nobody really knew
how much I liked the cat. And the cat died. And there were times in dreams
when, if I had a puzzle, the dream would use the cat as an indication that it
knew how I felt about things, so that I could say, well, yeah, it's got good
information that nobody else would have, so I really shouldn't treat it lightly.
Or you could think of it as a fortune-teller. You meet her, she doesn't know
anything about you. Ideally, the way in which she can make herself credible
is by telling you things that nobody should know about you.
But you can come to believe about your brain that it really knows a lot of
things about you that nobody else knows, nothing else knows. And when it
tells you something, give it some credit. Particularly if it does it in intricate
ways. Now, that's a way of using dreams which doesn't treat them as
irrational in the sense of 'less than rational. ' It can be an extremely clever mind
presenting you with information about things like how you feel about
someone. And there is a long history of people asking questions to their
dreams, i.e. , to their non-waking brain. Now while people can think that's an
irrational procedure, what we have to come to see is that there's good reason
why you can't trust your waking states as to, e.g. , your feelings about people.
You just have no chance. You have no time out in which you can say, well
what do I think about them? You're always involved in activities relative to
them. And there's good reason not to trust how you behave to them to tell you
how you feel about them, since there are people who know how to control
your behavior.
Q : Maybe that's the key, then, to why you don't use dreams in stories.
Because they're too intensely personal.
HS : Why you don't tell anybody, you mean. And why they don't occur to
you. Well, that's interesting. That's now altogether different than that they're
irrational. There's good reason not to tell people your dreams. If you put
things in that way, then it's interesting. It's a serious loss in some fashion.
Conversation would be a lot more fun.
Q : I often have dreams of people, maybe I haven't seen them for a week
or so, and whether I liked or disliked them before the dream, when the dream
happens it's not a story that I can relate, but if I was warm and friendly in the
dream then I wake up the next morning and I want to see that person and be
warm to them that day.
HS : See, now there's an interesting connection that a lot of people do know
about, which is, you come up to someone and you feel annoyed with them or
happy with them. You haven't seen them in a while, what are you annoyed
or happy with them about? And you realize at some point that it's not by
virtue of anything that happened, but by virtue of their appearing in a dream
of yours. So that's a place where the stuff certainly floats over very
dramatically.
5 18 Part VII
I guess if you're interested in the extent to which dreams influence your
wide-awake behavior, then you probably should latch onto those sorts of
things, e.g. , figure that a great many of the people who count to you at all
appear in your dreams, and then look at your feelings to them as you happen
to encounter them, and start to see whether you can figure out the sources of
your feelings. It would be nice if it turned out that some amount of your
feelings are dream-based. Now, one thing I wonder about is whether dreams
influence ordinary behavior rather more dramatically than we suppose. How
would we know that at all? One thing we could do is to see if we can't isolate
feeling-states when we encounter people, to determine that those feeling­
states are dream-based. And that isn't to say that you really shouldn't feel,
e.g . , angry at them since you only feel angry at them because of the thing they
did in the dream. Because the dream might be a good source of information
that, independently of the dream, you should feel angry with this person. The
dream is not necessarily wrong. It might be perfectly insightful about the
person.
 Part VIII
Spring 1 9 72

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 1 Lecture
Adjacency pairs: Scope of operation
For the bulk o f this course the lectures will be devoted to something I ' m
calling 'adjacency pairs. ' This time I'll kind o f run over the scope o f operation
of these things. First of all, one is perfectly entitled to think that any naturally
occurring conversation is a more or less extraordinarily complicated thing. By
virtue of an interest in knowing how complicated it is, or on the other hand
how simple some parts of it are, I am isolating for examination a type of
organization for conversation which is extraordinarily simple, and may have
aspects of its simplicity relevant to the vastness of its occupying of conversa­
tion.
The initial observations are something like this: Aspects of certain
sequences that occur in conversation can be isolated, for which the following
features obtain: They're two utterances long, and the utterances that compose
them are adjacently placed to each other. Note that from these two features
alone one can derive a third, that being that alternative speakers produce the
utterances. If the two utterances were not adjacently placed but were
separated, you could easily enough have a two-utterance sequence which
would involve only one speaker, i.e. , both utterances could be produced by a
same speaker. But if they are adjacently placed, then it follows that they're
produced by alternative speakers. Now, characteristically there are names for
the components of such pairs, for example, greeting-greeting, question­
answer, "goodbye-goodbye" (whatever you want to call that), complaints
followed by an excuse or a request for forgiveness or an apology or a denial,
offers followed by acceptances or refusals, requests followed by acceptances or
rejections, compliments followed by acceptances of a compliment, etc. , etc.
Once we have these named and affiliated pair parts, then a couple of other
features fall out. They are such things as, that for some classifiable pair the
parts are relatively ordered. That is to say, as compared to the two utterances
going in any order, that's not so, but there is something that goes first and
something that goes second. So, for example, that's obvious for questions and
answers, but even for things like greeting exchanges there is plainly, bearably,
a first greeting and a greeting return; they're said differently. And the same
goes for, e.g. , exchanges of "goodbye"s. But plainly, acceptances of compli­
ments follow compliments and do not precede them, etc. , etc. So there is a
relative ordering feature. Another immediate feature is that given the possible
list of pair parts, for any actual sequence a first and second are discriminatively
related. Which is to say that given a first pair part, not anything that could
be a second pair part goes, but given some first, only some seconds are
admissable and are done. After a question one puts an answer and not a
greeting return, for example.
52 1
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
522 Part VIII
So then we have this small list of features to start out with: There are some
natural two-utterance sequences; their parts properly go adjacently, not
separated; for a large number of them there are known names; given the
names, the parts are relatively ordered and discriminatively related. In a
fashion, then, we're talking about something we can think of as 'the class,
greeting exchanges' or 'the class, question-answer sequences, ' and when we
consider them as 'adjacency pairs' we are talking about them as a class of a
class of utterances. In due course I'll go into what is involved in that.
But if we start out noticing about, e.g. , something like the beginnings of
conversations, that they characteristically begin with "Hello-Hello" or "Hi­
Hello" or "Hello-Hi, " etc. , etc. , then we might make such a set of observa­
tions as I've made, about just those pairs. And we might suppose that those
features hold for greeting sequences. We might note also that they hold for
question-answer sequences. And then, by virtue of that they seem to hold for
lots of obvious paired utterances, we might see whether we could construct a
class, which we'll call adjacency pairs, which is the class that has those features.
Then we get such things as greeting sequences, question-answer exchanges,
etc. , as being particular sorts of types that are instances of the class, adjacency
pairs. That is, we're trying to abstract from types of pairs to see if there is not
a type of organization which we can simply characterize as 'adjacency pair
organization, ' and from which we can perhaps get a lot of mileage.
And we'll see what some of the virtues might be, of talking about
adjacency pairs generally and not just talking about given pair types. Among
the things that are gained is an ability to make the following sorts of noticings:
It's perfectly plain that lots of conversations begin with a greeting exchange.
And also that lots of conversations (and of course often the same conversa­
tions) end with a dosing exchange, a terminal exchange, i.e. , an exchange of
"goodbye"s. Now, that's more or less a fact. But if we're looking to the
possibility of talking about adjacency pairs, then we can turn that observation
into something else, and ask whether there are some bases for it happening
not simply that conversations begin and end with greetings and closings, but
that they begin and end with adjacency pairs, where the answer might not
have particularly to do with features of greetings and closings, but with
features of adjacency pairs. Proceeding in that way we can run through a large
range of organizational problems for conversation, and see how many areas
tum out to have adjacency pairs operate for them. So, for example, there's this
thing that I call 'overall structural organization of conversation, ' which is the
means whereby parties get into conversations and out of them. And it turns
out that at the precise point of getting into them and at the precise point of
getting out of them, adjacency pairs are used. So, then, at key points in the
overall structural organization of conversation, adjacency pairs are used. And
that's initially a bit interesting.
Let me tum to another sort of issue. It's a plain enough fact about any
actual conversation that it has some order of speakers in it. So that you could
sit down and write out for some historical - i.e. , finished - conversation, in
some fashion, the order of speakers in it. Now, one attempt at seeing if there
 Lecture 1 523
is any lawfulness to the order of speakers would obviously be to attempt to
use some kind of notation for it. And the simplest sort of notation would be
letters, using a same letter, obviously, for a same speaker (or a same number,
for that matter). That sort of notation can hold and be used for a series of
conversations, where, then, one can see whether the order of speakers has any
apparent orderliness.
Consider what would be some conceivable, obvious, simple orderlinesses.
Imagine that there are two parties to the conversation; call them A and B.
They talk for some length. Plainly we would have a sense that there's some
orderliness to the order of speakers in a two-party conversation if, writing it
this way, we got sequences that ran A-B-A-B-A-B. Now, that's not a
necessary order. It's imaginable that you could get A-B-B: A talks and then
B talks and then there's a silence, say, of 2 0 seconds or 1 0 seconds or a
minute, then B starts up again. So we might get A-B-B-A. But the matter is
much dearer when one begins to introduce more than two speakers. If you
imagined, as this A-B-A-B suggests, that the rule was that you alternate, then
as you increase the size to, e.g . , three speakers, you have one possible
beginning ordering being A-B-C with, as possible expansions, A-B-C-A-B­
C-A-B-C. One could then ask if there is an organization to taking turns in
conversation which operates via something like the following sort of rule:
Given a set of parties at the beginning, any party may speak first and any
other party may succeed the first speaker, but neither of those are to go again
until all other parties have spoken. You'd then have something like 'rounds'
in which every party talks. The rounds could be built in such a way as to
reproduce themselves, i.e. , A-B-C-D, A-B-C-D, or they could be built to
provide only that nobody who has already talked in a round talks again until
that round is over. Then you could have something like A-B-C-D, C-B-D-A
or whatever else.
That seems awfully simple and possibly very neat. But if one begins to
think of how it would work, one could begin to derive sorts of problems with
it, i.e. , difficulties that would emerge if that were the way that a conversa­
tional system worked. Imagine, for example, a situation in which A speaks
and asks a question, and then B speaks and says in effect "I didn't hear the
question. " Now, under a round system with, say, three or four speakers, A
could not go, and repeat or clarify the question, but would have to wait until
after C and D spoke in order to get a chance to do a clarification.
What I'm doing now is considering some possible turn-taking systems and
considering some of the consequences that follow from a given tum-taking
system. For example, that it does not admit that a same speaker go twice in
a round seems like merely a feature, but it turns out to be consequential for
the way in which our conversations operate. It would plainly be kind of
troublesome that you could not, in your utterance, address the last speaker
and get the last speaker to put an answer to your utterance, unless you were
at the end of a round. So, if you take this lettering system and apply it to
American conversation, then, while it has some apparent sensibility for
two-party conversation, it obviously does not apply for more-than-two-party
524 Part VIII
conversation. The latter does not constitute a simple expansion of the ordering
features of two-party conversation, if we imagined A-B-A-B to be the
ordering features of two-party conversation. And it is not organized in terms
of rounds. So a possibility that looks like it might be present given two-party
conversation, turns out not to be general to conversations of any size.
If it happens that the way in which parties come to speak in a conversation
is not via such a formula as, e.g . , A-B-C-D, how do parties get to speak at
any point in a conversation? Are there or are there not some rules? It turns out
that there are techniques for arriving at next speakers. That seems like an
altogether bland statement. Concealed in it, however, is a possibly distinct,
possibly general feature of a particular turn-taking system. And that
concealed feature is that this turn-taking system operates for next speakers.
Now again, it's imaginable that you could have a turn-taking system that did
not intend to control how to get a next speaker, but to control, e.g. , the next
two speakers, or the next speaker after this one. Those are just as imaginable
if we're just playing with formal possibilities. It wouldn't be a problem
theoretically, once you got started. And just to suggest the sorts of things
we're empirically talking about, it turns out that there are ways of selecting,
not next speaker but next two speakers. Consider one of these possible
exceptions to the next-speaker feature: A party is now introducing two people
to each other: "Jim, this is Harry. " Now, by reference to the rules for dealing
with an introduction, that obviously provides that those two people are now
to speak next, in series. One goes "Hi" and the other goes "Hi . " So it seems
as though the speaker who did the introduction is someone who can select the
two next speakers, i.e. , it looks like there's an exception. But notice about the
exception that it's not an exception, because the one who speaks first post the
announcement of an introduction, i.e. , the one who does the first "Hi," selects
a next speaker. That is to say, those two people order their responses to the
introduction in such a way as to provide that there is a first and a second of
those, and it's by virtue of the first that the second is done. So that one can
set up an introduction sequence, but the introduction sequence operates with
the first speaker in it selecting the second speaker in it. This is a fairly minor
sort of thing; I only mention it to bring up that there are occasionally seeming
sorts of exceptions to the next-speaker selection feature of the turn-taking
system, but that even the exceptions may not be exceptions.
What, then, are the speaker-selection techniques? There seem to be two
classes of techniques, and they're ordered. One technique is that current
speaker may select next speaker, and the other is that next speaker may self-select
himself To say that they're ordered is to propose that as between these two
types, both types plainly cannot operate for any given next utterance. If they
did then we'd get that A speaks and selects B, and C also being present selects
himself, where B and C then talk at the same time. That's unlawful, given
that there should be one speaker talking at a time - and we' 11 deal with this
feature soon. So there has to be an ordering ofpreferences as to the types. And
the ordering obviously is, if current speaker selects a next speaker, then that's
the way the next speaker is to be arrived at.
 Lecture 1 525
Now I want to propose that maybe the total class of means whereby
current speakers select next speakers are instances of the use of adjacency pairs.
The whole range of ways that anybody can select a next speaker involves the
use of something that, for now, we'll call first pair parts. Again, things like
complimenting, making offers, requests, complaints, questions, etc. By using
a first pair part one can select a next speaker. So that we now find that
adjacency pairs, besides being in key places in the overall structural organi­
zation of conversation, are at the core of the tum-taking system as well. We
have adjacency pairs not only at the beginning and at the end, but occurring
at any place where some party engages in selecting another. So we have these
things strung throughout conversation by virtue of considerations about how
tum-taking works.
Let me raise a third area in the organization of conversation: Parties should
talk one at a time. That parties should talk one at a time provides what we can
call a local control problem for conversation. And that is, how do you achieve
that one and just one talks at a time in a conversation? Plainly there can be lots
of problems, e.g. , someone interrupts another. How is it that the conversation
system administers itself? Now, analogizing it to problems of social order
more generally, there are imaginable solutions. Suppose somebody engages in
a violation, like interrupting somebody in the conversation. You could call the
police, write a letter to his mother, do something involving the use of the
usual means for getting sanction or remedy. Lots of the imaginable means,
however, wouldn't particularly help out the conversation when the problem
happens. Now, there are a class of things to which a name has been given by
Erving Goffman. Those are things he calls 'remedial exchanges. ' And I'll just
use that name, although he doesn't apply it with the kind of import that I
want to give it. The business of remedial exchanges is to handle problems of
local order in conversation; failures to understand, failures to hear, interrup­
tions, silences, more than one person starting up at the same time, etc. It turns
out that the means for remedying local problems of order in conversation are
adjacency pairs. For example, if someone has been addressed and they didn't
hear or understand, then what they do is to produce a first pair part, e.g . ,
' 'What did you say?' ' And i f somebody has been interrupted, then they can
produce a complaint or some such thing, to get a return to it like an apology,
an excuse - "I thought you were finished, " etc.
So the pairs, then, occur at the beginning and at the end, wherever
someone is selected to speak next, and wherever there is any trouble in the
conversation. For each of these we can ask why is it that adjacency pairs occur?
But now as we start to ask each of those questions we begin to ask it with
some suspicion that the answers to all of them may well be related, That is to
say, there may be something about adjacency pairs which commends them for
a whole range of uses. And it's by virtue of that, that we want to be asking
these sorts of questions about adjacency pairs and not, e.g . , about greeting
exchanges or turn-taking or remedial exchanges.
Consider yet some more things. It is said about 'utterances' that either a way
to define them or a way to describe them is that they are some string of talk
526 Part Vlll
produced by one speaker exclusively, bounded on either side by the talk of
others. There are obvious ways in which that is wrong, i.e. , parties can be
talking at the same time as somebody producing an utterance. But if all that
was wrong was that sometimes errors or violations occur, then it would still be
a perfectly good definition of an utterance. And one doesn't need to point to
those things in order to show that that characterization of an utterance is not
correct. Instead, we can notice that for a class of things that we can loosely call
'long utterances, ' commonly it's not true that the speaker is the exclusive
speaker. And of interest is that the two or three parties who talk in the course
of somebody's utterance can talk in such a fashion as to yield that, though a
variety of people talk in the course of one utterance, nobody ever talks at the
same time as anybody else. That is to say, there is always just one party talking.
Now, the rules for doing that involve the use of something like adjacency
pair construction: The one who is producing the utterance makes room in his
talk for others to speak by putting together clauses or phrases of an utterance
in such a way as to have, not at sentence endings but at clause or phrase
endings, 'question intonation. ' At the completion of the phrase with question
intonation another party goes, and does something like an " Uh huh. " And at
the completion of the "Uh huh, ' ' the party who is producing the utterance
continues. They can continue rather extensively, the others inserting "Uh
huh"s into that talk, without the "Uh huh"s ever overlapping that talk nor
that talk ever overlapping the "Uh huh"s. So the way in which we get more
than one speaker lawfully talking in the course of someone' s utterance
involves, again, the use of adjacency pairs.
In these last remarks, one thing I've been pointing up is the possibility of
a rather fine shifting among speakers. One party talks and another party talks
and the first party talks again and another party talks, and nonetheless there's
no gap and no overlap between the speakers. That feature, no gap and no
overlap between speakers, can obviously obtain, not for an utterance that has
places in it for others' talk, but for a string of utterances. It is, that is, a
generally oriented to feature in conversation - which isn't to say that it
always happens. But a question is, how is it that speakers are able to talk in
such a way as to have, for a sequence of utterances, the possibility of no gap
and no overlap between them? That's an awfully fine constraint. Plainly one
thing it means is that people have to listen to each other's talk to see when it
might end so that they can be in a position to start talking precisely on its end.
But the problem of ending is a very complicated one. And it's complicated
because of the following sort of thing: Utterances are, roughly, constructed
out of sentences. Now, that yields a kind of problem; that being that for the
construction of sentences, essentially one can only characterize productionally,
sentence possibilities. That is to say, anything that is a possible sentence is also
possibly extendable beyond, say, its first possible ending. For example, having
produced a possible sentence you can add an ' and' or an 'or' and make what
was a possible sentence now the first clause of a larger sentence. And there are
a range of ways of making sentences longer than their construction up to a first
possible completion. That being the case, possible next speakers have as
 Lecture 1 527
something they can use, only a notion of 'possible sentences' which they can
apply to anything produced. And they cannot use a notion of a sentence
definitively ending, in order to see when they could start speaking 'safely, ' i.e. ,
without interrupting somebody. On the other hand, they want to start
speaking as soon as possible so as not to have a gap.
We have, then, an orientation to no gap and no overlap, but the use of the
possibility structure of sentences makes that complicated. Are there means for
systematically achieving no gapjno overlap transition? Where in conversation
does it systematically happen that you get no gapjno overlap between
utterances? You get it when you use adjacency pairs. Something like a reason
for that is involved in the rules for completion of utterances. One rule is: If
a party is talking, then when they've arrived at a first possible completion,
which would be a first possible sentence ending, they may stop. And also,
another may speak. Now, none of those might happen. A speaker may not
stop and another might not speak, or they might not stop and another might
start talking - in which case you get overlap, or they may stop and another
may not speak - in which case you get a gap.
Now, for adjacency pairs you get a special rule which says: If an utterance
that is being produced is a first pair part, then on its first possible completion
the speaker should stop and, if somebody has been selected, then whoever has
been selected should speak. So if you're a possible recipient of, e.g. , a
question, you can attend its first possible completion and know that when that
occurs the speaker will stop and you can start safely. And for questions in
particular the signalling that this is the first pair part can go very very early
into the utterance. It can go in the first word, e.g . , those called the 'Wh' words
in linguistics (where, what, why, etc.), all of which signal right from the very
beginning that this is going to be a question, and in signalling that, permit a
recipient to begin right then and there to analyze the thing so as to see what
it will take for it to be finished, knowing that at its first possible completion
it will be over and it will be the recipient's business to start talking.
So, what's being proposed now is that while there certainly are places in
conversation where no gapjno overlap does not obtain, i.e. , where there is
gap or overlap, there are systematic means for achieving no gapjno overlap,
and those systematic means involve the use of adjacency pairs.
So far we've been going though considerations about the overall structure
of conversation, considerations about tum-taking organization, about prob­
lems of local order in conversation, about utterance construction and the
building of long utterances, and about the achievement of no gapj no overlap.
In all of these places it's been at least asserted that problems of those areas are
handled distinctively by adjacency pair construction. That begins to give us
some idea that this is indeed a more or less fundamental type of organization
for conversation. And in the first instance, as a type of organization, it has a
very small list of features that characterize instances of it; those things I
mentioned at the very beginning: Adjacency pairs are two utterances long,
adjacently placed, have various names, a relative ordering of parts, and a
discriminative relationship for the parts. I will go into those features at length
528 Part VIII
eventually, but I hope I've provided at least a glimpse of that something
drastically simple is involved and is utterly pervasive in the operation of
conversation.
Let me extend the sense of the pervasiveness of these things by considering
something slightly different. We're talking about two-utterance sequences;
not any two-utterance sequences but two-utterance sequences in which the
utterances are adjacent. Now, we could consider, for example, whether other
sorts of two-utterance sequences, those in which the utterances are not
adjacently placed, have anything like the pervasiveness that two-utterance
adjacently placed sequences have. While there are such non-adjacently placed
two-utterance sequences, they're not very easy to think up, and they obviously
don't have the kind of scope of use that adjacently placed ones have, which
suggests that adjacency placing is a very important feature. Alternatively we
can consider, not two-utterance sequences but longer-than-two-utterance
sequences. There are obviously such sequences, even as types. For example,
there are three-utterance sequences, an obvious instance of which is a riddle
sequence: A: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" B: "Why?" A: "To get
to the other side. ' ' An interesting thing about the riddle sequence as a
three-utterance sequence is that it's obviously a variant of the adjacency pair.
That is to say, if we have question-answer as one sort of adjacency pair, then
a riddle sequence is something like a question which has as its subsequent
another question, and an answer following that. So, the components of
adjacency pairs can be used to build longer sequences.
There are some sorts of, e.g. , four-utterance sequences which are also
specifically built out of the adjacency pairs. Consider a remedial exchange type
of thing, the 'not hearing' situation. For example, somebody produces an
utterance, then "What did you say?" and the answer to that. Now,
specifically where a question is asked, followed by "What did you say?, " then
the answer to that, and then an answer to the question, what we have is
[Q [q-a} A}. We call these things ' insertion sequences. ' Not any question can
follow a question, and the questions that can lawfully follow a question are
insertion sequences. And, roughly, an insertion sequence's questions are such
questions as propose "If you answer this one I will answer yours. " There's a
paper called 'Formulating place' by E. Schegloff which includes a consider­
ation of insertion sequences and has some fairly elaborate ones discussed.
Now, we can consider some versions of these four-utterance things
involving pairs, where again our interest is in seeing that even when we get
out of adjacency pairs their components still comprise the four-utterance
sequences. Let me begin to locate such four-utterance or larger-than-four­
utterance sequences built in terms of pairs. Consider things like invitations,
offers, requests, and things like that. When they are done as first pair parts,
i.e. , as questions, "Would you like to come over for dinner sometime?"
Would you lend me your car?, " etc., then one of the consequences is that the
response to that - which is not merely an 'answer' but something like an
acceptance or a rejection - has to go right now, i.e. , right on the completion
of the first pair part. We have, then, for one, a motive for why one would do
 Lecture 1 529
things like invitations and the like as first pair parts; that's the way to get a
response now as compared to, e.g., having it as a rule that invitations are only
done by mail and not in an interaction, and are then to be responded to at
some point later, or that they're to be done in an interaction but they don't
involve being responded to in a next utterance.
Now, for some things, that the response has to go right now is no particular
bother. For others, it can be a systematic issue. There are places where parties
might like to do a delay, not respond right now. And among those places are
where they've been given an invitation or request, etc. Now, how do they do
a delay without doing something violative, i.e. , ignoring the question?
Among the ways they do that is by producing insertion sequences there. So
they can do things that attend the question, don't answer it, provide for the
other to talk in promise that I will do the answer when you're done. Though
again, yet another insertion sequence can be inserted after a first. So you can
get, "Can I borrow your car?" "When?" "This afternoon. " "For how long?"
"A couple of hours. " "Okay . " You have, then, a delay of the response to the
request until a series of insertion sequences has been done: [Q [q-a} [q-a} A}.
I'm proposing that one place where delay sequences built as insertion
sequences go is after certain sorts of first pair parts. And we have an obvious
sense of why delay sequences would go for certain sorts of things done as first
pair parts, i.e. , those delay devices happen by virtue of somebody 'springing'
one sort of first pair part on another party. Now, someone who is going to do
such a first pair part can produce their talk in such a way as to avoid the
consequence of having 'sprung' their invitation, request, etc., on another.
They can do other sorts of first pair parts before the one that they're intending
to do. So, for example, before an invitation they can pre-signal 'invitation to
come. ' And they do that with adjacency pairs. Instead of saying "Would you
like to come over to dinner tonight?' ' they can say ' 'What are you doing
tonight?" where the answer to that controls whether they're going to do the
invitation. And the person who gets "What are you doing?" can assess it so
as to see that an invitation is forthcoming and deal with the possible invitation
in a variety of ways, before the invitation is ever done. So that's another way
of expanding what could be a pair into a larger sequence; characteristically,
again, the larger sequence being composed of pairs. The point being that in
talking about adjacency pairs, while we're in the first instance talking about
two-utterance sequences, it turns out that when we come to consider larger
sequences, then not a few larger sequences are composed of series of, or nested
sets of, adjacency pairs.
Let me turn now to another sort of thing. I've talked about building long
sentence-utterances and proposed that, via adjacency pairs, they are built in
such a way as to provide for others to talk in their course. Now, there is one
interesting phenomenon, that is characterizable by contrast with the way that
'utterances are normally constructed out of sentences. ' It involves utterances
that are specifically grammatical but not sententially grammatical, i.e. , they
are grammatical non-sentences, e.g. , phrases and clauses. For example, the
clause "Because I wanted to, " or the phrase "To get home," as total
530 Part VIII
utterances. A kind of question is, are the grammatical non-sentences
characterizable as to their positioning in conversation? It turns out that they
are. And it turns out again that they are characterizable by reference to the
adjacency pair organization, their presence being as 'answers, ' i.e. , as second
pair parts. Answers are lawfully, and if not always then very commonly, not
full sentences.
Focussing on second pair parts - for example, answers or greeting returns
or second closings or acceptances, etc. - we can focus on them via one
altogether general problem in the construction of utterances in conversation.
We characterize that problem in the following way: A general problem for
positioning an utterance in a conversation is showing with that utterance why
you are producing it now. If that sounds a little puzzling, then consider for
example, that when you say "Hello" at the beginning of a conversation, the
account for saying "Hello" is that it's the beginning of the conversation. So
by putting an utterance like that where you put it, you provide an explanation
for why you said that thing. And there are whole ranges of ways whereby
parties position their utterances. By 'position' I mean that they show, in an
utterance's construction, that they know where they're doing it, and why
they're doing it then and there. Things like using "too" at the end of an
utterance. For example, A is asked a question, "What did you do last night?"
A says "I went to the movies, " to which someone else might say "I did, too,"
thereby locating, not that they went with A, but that they're putting their
answer after somebody else's answer. That it's "too" has nothing to do with
'going with,' it has to do with where this utterance is placed .
Now, a question is, are there any means for building a class of utterances
in such a way as to have why the utterance is done now be made available?
It appears that the only class of utterances that needs no extrinsic character­
ization of why it's done now, i.e. , which always has an explanation available
for why it's done now, is second pair parts. Second pair parts are done now
by virtue of first pair parts having been done just before.
I want to very briefly mention another sort of organization for conversation,
and that is storytelling. I'll merely observe for now that the organization of
storytelling in conversation uses adjacency pairs. Characteristically stories
begin with something that we call a 'story preface' which contains varieties of
information and does a range of businesses, of which a perfectly prototypical
instance is " Something really weird happened to me on the way to work this
morning . " That announces more or less that I want to tell a story, and it tells
various things about the story relevant to listening to the story. For example,
it tells �ow to listen to the story to find out when it will have been over; where,
say, the term "weird" as a characterizing adjective in the story preface gives
a listener a something with which to monitor the story so as to see, when
something 'weird' has been told, then that's what the teller was intending to
tell as the ' story, ' and until then the story isn't finished.
Now, the speaker of a story preface stops when the preface - typically a
sentence just like the one I gave - is done, and thereafter other parties speak.
And they either accept the offer or request to tell a story, or reject it. And
 Lecture 1 531
among the occurrent ways of accepting the offerjrequest to tell a story is to
do something like "What?" which is an adjacency pair first pair part. The
story then can be delivered as an answer to the question. So, I'm saying that
built in to the organization of storytelling in conversation (not necessarily the
organization of, e.g. , written stories or those told not in conversation) we get
the insertion of adjacency pairs at a locatable spot. And that can be contrasted
to, for example, the topical organization of conversation. One might say
about the topical organization of conversation that for sure, for lots of topical
talk, things like questions and answers, offers and acceptances, etc. , will occur.
But one might not be able to say about the organization of topical talk that
topics begin with or end with adjacency pairs, or that adjacency pairs must go
somewhere in any topic, as one may be able to say, e.g. , for the overall
structural organization of conversation that conversations begin with adja­
cency pairs and are brought to a close with adjacency pairs; that for
tum-taking organization the means for selecting next speakers involve the use
of adjacency pairs; that for story organization the preface response will involve
adjacency pair organization, etc. 1
Let me bring this all to a close by returning in a fashion to what I began
with, overall structural organization of conversation. I said that conversations
begin with adjacency pairs, i.e. , greetings. Now, that use of adjacency pairs
can be given a rather more extended scope than 'at the beginning of
conversation. ' Consider the following sort of problem: How, for somebody
you're not eligible to be in conversation with, can you so talk to them as to
indicate to them that while you're talking to them you're not trying to get
into conversation with them? Are there means for doing that? Yes. The means
for doing that is the use of adjacency pairs. You can say to someone, "Do you
know the way to Main Street?" or "What time is it?" or "What time does the
plane leave?, ' ' where, in producing one of those without a greeting, one is
indicating that if the other will answer this, they are not committed to being
in a conversation. So that we have not merely the use of adjacency pairs for
beginning conversations, but also the use of adjacency pairs without greetings
for doing something that is specifically to be 'not a conversation. '
Also, if you're dealing with someone who is eligible to converse with you,
and you're trying to indicate "Let's acknowledge that we see each other
without getting into a conversation, " then again, adjacency pairs are used. In
this case, a greeting. Exchanges like "Hi. ' ' "Hi. ' ' So that for minimal
exchanges that will not become a conversation - though of course a
conversation can tum out to happen - adjacency pairs are again used.
Furthermore, one can indeed find types of things which are somewhat like
conversation, which might be considered conversation, which involve ex­
tended talk between two or more than two parties, which consist wholely or
almost wholely of adjacency pairs. For example, an interrogation of a witness
at a trial, or an interview. Where a question is, are there other types of

1The materials from the start of the discussion of storytelling to this point are taken from
the beginning of leaure 2 .
532 Part VIII
organization for conversation which can also characterize an entire possible
conversation?
I hope I've shown the following: Out of the apparent morass of talk we can
find a sort of thing, the adjacency pair, i.e. , two-utterance, adjacently placed
sequences, which are massively present - directly and through expansions -
which are used for a whole range of types of organization for conversation,
and can be at least initially characterized in fairly simple ways. We can then
get some idea that while conversations are not always composed of sequences,
for the sequences that they are to some extent composed of, a great many of
those are, commonly, adjacency pairs.
 Lecture 2
Adjacency pairs.· Distribution in
conversation; A single instance of a
Q-A pair
Last time I ran through a consideration o f the scope o f presence o f adjacency
pairs, more or less in terms of types of organizations for conversation. For at
least some of the types of organizations I mentioned, it would take at least a
complete lecture series to lay out approximately what we now know about
them. For our purposes here I wanted only to be noticing that in various
types, some of which obviously are more or less central to conversation,
adjacency pairs can or must go at key spots. And that's one way of
characterizing the scope of operation of adjacency pairs, i.e. , in terms of a
series of types of organizations which involve at some structural point in them
the presence of adjacency pairs.
I want to address another way of doing the same sort of task, i.e. , locating
the presence of adjacency pairs in conversation. This way is naturally
subsequent to the former way because it already supposes that we can extract
the class 'adjacency pairs' out of the particular types; greetings, question­
answer, etc. Having extracted the adjacency-pair aspects of the pair types from
the pairs, we move naturally to another possible way of locating the scope of
presence of adjacency pairs, which is to attack the question directly. Can we
come up with what we call a 'distribution rule ' for the occurrence of adjacency
pairs? That is, a rule which says where such things can go or must go?
Let me first notice that if we're interested in the possibility of a basicness of
a type of organization, then there are various ways of attacking it. Now, one
possible way is in terms of the other types of organization. That is to say, if
you had a type of organization and various other types of organization, and
you wanted to say that they weren't just a list of types, but that, say, one type
was more basic than the others, then a natural way to do it would be to show
that it was involved in the operation of some other types of organization
which weren't involved in its organization. So, for example, if it turned out
that adjacency pairs operated in storytelling organization, but storytelling
organization didn't operate in adjacency pairs, then adjacency pairs would be
basic in some way to storytelling, and not the reverse. And maybe you could
layer the whole set of them in some fashion, coming up with a yet more basic
one; something which was essential to adjacency pairs, for which adjacency
pairs were not essential, etc. So, instead of just talking about a list of types of
organizations, we could have a way of integrating the types of organizations.

533
534 Part Vlll
That would be one way to attack the question of how basic is adjacency pair
organization.
Another way is in terms of a distribution rule. Where can a thing go? Now,
if we were to look at the particular types of pairs rather than at the class
'adjacency pairs, ' there's a way in which, say, greetings might be more or less
basic to conversation in that they go at the beginnings. But they plainly can
be dropped from conversational beginnings, and furthermore there are things
that substitute for greetings, i.e. , instead of saying "Hi" you can say " How
are you" which is not a greeting but something slightly different. So you can't
say that greetings go in any conversation; they don't. And if that were a
criterion for their being basic, then they're not basic. Further, they can only go
in some places in a conversation, i.e. , their positioning is restricted. And
furthermore, having been done, they can only be redone in very limited ways,
i.e. , we can have a telephone conversation that goes, A: "Hello. " B: "Hello! "
A : "Hi! " B: "Hi. " But more or less, once they've been completed they're not
to be redone. There are exceptions to that, e.g. , if you're talking over the
phone and it seems like the other party has been cut off for the moment, you
may go "Hello?" Or if they say "Wait a minute I've got to do something"
and then come back, they may say "Hello, " though they don't have to. In
any event, the positioning of things like greetings is restrictable, and the same
goes for things like closings, which are also restricted.
With that sort of a preface, can we construct a distribution rule, not for this
or that pair type, but for adjacency pairs as a class? A first thing is, we're
interested in a distribution rule for adjacency pair first pair parts, i.e. , the first
greeting, the question, whatever. We only need that, because the distribution
rule for adjacency pair second pair parts is simply that they go immediately
after a first pair part. So we have to find where a first pair part can go. Notice
that we're not going to be saying that every first pair part can go in any of
those positions. We want that some first pair part can go in any such position.
So, for example, "Hello" would be ruled out for some of the places where
adjacency pair first pair parts can go, e.g. , it wouldn't go after a story preface
(unless the preface was designed to to elicit it, e.g. , "You know what Dr
Green finally said to me this morning?" "Hello?" "Yeah!"). So we want a
rule for first pair parts that doesn't have to allow for every first pair part, but
for some first pair part. We're trying to catch all of the places that a first pair
part can go.
The rule that seems to obtain is extremely neat: An adjacency pair first pair
part can go anywhere in conversation, except directly after a first pair part,
unless the second first pair part is the first pair part for an insertion sequence.
So: Anywhere . . . except . . . unless. If that's true, then there's an extraordi­
narily interesting sort of aspect to it, i.e. , the only thing that bounds the usage
of adjacency pair first pair parts is the use of adjacency pair first pair parts.
That obviously makes them as general as anything could possibly be for
conversation. It's as perfect a freedom-of-occurrence rule as you would
want - that also contains orderliness to it. That is, if it said that an adjacency
pair first pair part can go anywhere at all, then there would be a tremendous
 Lecture 2 535
undercutting of the orderliness of adjacency pairs themselves, because instead
of doing an adjacency pair second pair part following the first pair part, you
could always do a first pair part, and then you could have just a possible string
of adjacency pair first pair parts. So if you're going to have as total a freedom
of occurrence as you can, with the orderliness that the adjacency pair
organization has, you've got to have a restriction.
And even with the restriction, the 'anywhere' is much more general than
one might suppose. 'Anywhere' would initially sound like 'on any utterance
completion. ' But that's not true. Adjacency pair first pair parts can go before
utterance completions. So, for example, if a party is having trouble in the
course of an utterance, i.e. , can't find some words, then other parties can
attempt a completion of the utterance by guessing the words that he's looking
for. And the indication that one is guessing thereby makes a question of it,
i.e. , an adjacency pair first pair part, to which the other responds "Yeah" or
"No. " So we can have an adjacency pair stuck into an utterance, begun before
an utterance is completed. Or, for example, last time I talked about the
building of long utterances, where speakers characteristically provide places
where they use, quotes, question intonation to provide a spot for another
person to talk in the course of that utterance, doing an "Uh huh," giving us
a little adjacency pair in the middle of somebody's utterance. And from those,
one can begin to consider that there might be lots of places within the course
of an utterance in which adjacency pairs perfectly well go. The 'anywhere' is,
then, larger than it might seem to be - where, were it merely 'after any
utterance completion' it would still be extraordinarily general.
Let me just give what looks like a possible exception to the 'unless'
proposal: repeated questions. These might seem to be first pair parts that do
follow first pair parts which are not, as the rule provides, insertion sequences:
Someone asks, "What did you do?" and then, after a bit, repeats, "What did
you do?" We note that repeated questions do not follow a first pair part, they
follow the pause after a first pair part. So they aren't an exception. The rule
doesn't have to be amended to say 'Adjacency pair first pair parts can go
anywhere except after a first pair part, unless either an insertion sequence or
a repeated question. '
We now have a quite different sort of proposal as to the scope of possible
presence of adjacency pairs than that which I developed last time. They can
go anywhere in conversation, and that 'anywhere' does not have to be
characterized in terms of other types of organization of conversation. They can
go after utterances, in utterances, at the beginnings of conversation, in the
middle of stories, anywhere, by reference to the distribution rule. Only that
they can't go after first pair parts unless they are insertion sequence first pair
parts. (That version of the scope of presence suggests asking about lots of
types of organization, what scope of presence do they have? And I take it that
it would be extremely rare to find a thing bounded only by such a thing as
itself.)
Now, if adjacency pair first pair parts can go anywhere-with-the-restriction,
and if, as I earlier proposed, adjacency pair first pair parts can be used to select
536 Part VIII
next speakers, then we have something rather impressive that falls out. A
kind of reasonable question to ask about conversation is why do people who
are not talking, listen? The temptation is to begin to come up with particular
sorts of reasons, like, they listen because the other person is saying something
interesting, or they listen because the other person is a relative, or this or that
sort of reason. Now, the world is simply not built that way. For conversation
plainly, it could hardly be the case that the basis for people listening to others
talking is that they're interested. If one is doing something like a sociology of
conversation, what one wants to do is to see what the system itself provides
as bases, motives, or what have you, for doing something essential to the
system. And listening is essential if people are to talk in such a way as to keep
this system orderly. For example, talking in such a way as to have no gapjno
overlap between utterances.
So the question is, what, in the system, provides motives for people
listening? Let's suppose only that someone who is a party in a conversation is
willing to talk if they're selected to talk by somebody else. That's all we need
to suppose about a party for our purposes now. It may be that we can truly
suppose much more, but we may reasonably be able to suppose at least this,
such that if a party isn't willing to speak when he's been selected, then there
are ways of taking care of him. Now, if parties are willing to talk whenever
they've been selected by another, of course they'll have to listen to whatever
talk might select them, in order to find that they've been selected. And if
adjacency pair first pair parts can go anywhere, then it falls out that in order
to find that they've been selected, people have to listen to everything.
Given that turn-taking moves one utterance at a time, an utterance that
selects a next can select any next of the various people present and not
speaking. And since adjacency pair first pair parts can go anywhere, then any
given utterance can do that selection, i.e. , any next utterance might contain a
first pair part, or indeed, any current utterance might be turned into one. So,
for example, when one thinks about 'questions' as prototypical adjacency pair
first pair parts, one may think of them as the object that one wanted to build
from the first. And there are plenty of instances where that's a perfectly
reasonable way to think about them. For example, when one begins an
utterance with a 'Wh' word - 'where, ' 'when,' etc. - then it's obvious from
the beginning that the speaker is trying to build a question. There are,
however, ways of turning utterances that are not built as questions from the
first, into questions, by doing something at the end of them. So you can't
examine the first word of an utterance, see that it's not going to be a question,
and decide it's not going to select a next speaker, and since you don't want to
talk unless you're selected, you therefore don't have to listen to it. If the rule
were that one had to signal first pair parts right from the beginning, there
would then be an exception to having to listen to everything. But it's possible
to turn utterances into questions - i.e. , into things that select - at their end.
You can take pretty much any sentence and say, "Isn't that so, Joe?" And
things like "Isn't that so, Joe?" are indeed used by someone when they figure
that Joe hasn't been listening. The phenomenon, called 'tags' in linguistics -
 Lecture 2 537
"isn't it?," "aren't we?," etc , items that are appended to sentences, making
questions out of them - is a device that turns an utterance into a first pair
part, providing at its end that a next should deal with it.
Further, there are ancillary devices which provide that even where it's
indicated in an utterance from its beginning that it was addressed to one of the
present parties, nonetheless the others should have listened. Someone who
hasn't listened to "Hey Joe, what do you think about this?" by virtue of not
being Joe, may be 'caught, ' i.e. , Joe answers and then the one who asked Joe
now says "What do you think, Harry?" such that Harry should have been
listening to the question addressed to Joe.
Again, then, these things can go anywhere, and need not indicate their
presence from the beginning of an utterance but can occur right at the end,
so as long as one is willing to talk if one is selected, one may need to listen to
any utterance in the conversation. There is no place you can say, "Well, I can
rest now. " Furthermore, that holds when you have just talked, since there are
specific techniques for selecting the one who just talked as the one who talks
next, e.g . , at the end of your utterance someone can say "Why?" So, where
I started by saying that any non-speaker has to listen to the talk of others, it's
also true, bizarre as it may sound, that any speaker has to listen to his own talk
because somebody may take him up on it. The motivations for listening, then,
are built not only for non-speakers but for speakers as well.
From this consideration of the scope of presence of adjacency pairs, we have
a fully general motivation for people listening. Which is then to say that the
system for conversation does not leave it to whatever goodwill abounds in the
world, to make people responsible for listening, but that the distribution of
adjacency pairs serve as a fundamental mechanism for keeping people
attentive in conversation.
I'm now going to switch gears altogether and talk a bit about a small
fragment of data. For one thing, this will provide some idea of the sorts of
materials and the sorts of considerations that underlie what seem to be rather
sweeping generalizations.

Emma : Are you the oldest one in the class?

Bernice : Oh, by far.

This comes from a telephone conversation between two middle-aged women,

one of whom has gone back to college part time, and is telling the other about
a class she's taking. I'm going to pick at it and see what we might get out of
it.
If we start with the answer "Oh, by far, " then there are a series of obvious
alternative answers, many of which would be "Yes" and variants of
"Yes" - and one would consider this answer as a 'yes answer of a sort. ' We
could ask what sorts of differences are there between " Oh, by far" and "Yes,"
and see where that leads us. At least one obvious difference is that "Oh, by
far" says not merely "Yes, " but also, ' 'I'm sure that that's so, " where for just
' 'Yes,' ' under some versions of what the question could mean, there can be an
538 Part VIII
issue as to "How do you know?" Now, that is undercut when we start to
consider what the question means. That is to say, if one imagines that 'the
oldest one in the class' is a way of characterizing her position in the class from
a set of positions, of which 'the oldest one,' 'the second oldest, ' 'the third
oldest, ' 'one of the oldest ones,' 'the youngest one,' etc., are alternatives, then
there could be issues about "How do you know?" But 'the oldest one in the
class' is not a way of asking a position in the class like 'third oldest,' it's asking
about a position like "Are you the only cop in the class?, ' ' "Are you the only
Negro in the class?, ' ' "Are you the only woman in the class?, " i.e. , it's a
unique position. And for such a position, if one does not think it's true, then
one doesn't ask that question at all, i.e. , if the person is thought by you to be,
e.g. , the third oldest one in the class, not the oldest, then you might ask it for
third graders, but otherwise you don't ask it.
So that what seems like a kind of obvious semantics turns out to be wrong
for our language. It's one you hear around, and it says: Take "the oldest one
in the class" and find its meaning by considering the set of alternatives to it,
where the alternatives can easily be derived from it by just considering some
obvious way in which it is part of a set of positions having to do with
'oldness. ' That's wrong for our language in the sense that people who say to
someone "Are you the oldest one in the class?" don't say "Are you the third
oldest one in the class?" Now, alternatives are an obvious way to go about
locating what something is doing or what something means. But the question
of alternatives does not have an easy answer. It is, for any given thing, an
empirical issue and not simply a transparent semantic issue to be gotten by
lexical considerations. In saying what I figure to be the kinds of things that are
alternatives here, both in the question and in the answer, I'm saying
something that has to be discovered from a consideration of the way the world
works that produces these kinds of sequences. This obviously produces a
massively complex set of problems in analyzing things like a small question­
answer sequence. For each one of them, if we're going to use alternatives to
find out what it means, then we're going to have to go into a discovery of
what the alternatives are.
So, asking what in the world such a question as "Are you the oldest one
in the class?" is doing, we find that it is a realization of a device for locating
the possible uniqueness of a person; that being a feature of circumstances in
some situation. And there are other, altogether equivalent questions that are
realizations of the same thing, that look, in a fashion, nothing like it, e.g. ,
"Are you the only black executive at such-and-such insurance company?"
Where the sequences look very much alike, and look nothing like one that
goes: "Are you the oldest one in the class?" "No. ' ' "Are you the second oldest
one?" etc. This latter is, again, the sort of thing that you might ask an
eight-year-old. And that has to do with that ages for eight-year-olds are
altogether different objects than ages for adults, a thing that is more or less
formally noticed in our culture, in the sense that if you look at the way people
describe ages, then they describe them differently at different ages. For the
youngest, they use days, then weeks, then months, then years. And there are
 Lecture 2 539
times when any other measure is inappropriate; you don't say ' 'I'm 2 7 0
months old" and you don't say "He's a third of a year old. " Someone can be
six and a half years old, where people don't tend to be forty-three and a half
years old, nor do they tend to be a half a year old but are six months old. So
that there's a place where you might well say "Are you the second oldest one
in the class?" because ages are calibrated in such a way as to provide a
differentiation. There are, then, a range of materials that need to be brought
to bear on considerations about the domain of a thing like "the oldest one in
the class. " It can have to do with a unique position and it can have to do only
with that kids are more involved in very local age considerations than others
are.
As to the answer, "Oh, by far, " it says "The question you asked me is
correct. I am what you're supposing I am. " And by using "by far" one
indicates how one would know it, i.e. , looking around the class, without any
particular interest in finding out the ages, she could age herself relatively to
everyone else - which is after all not a thing that many in a class would do.
But there are some people who can do it just like that, by virtue of that it's
a 'by far. ' That is to say, 'by far' is glance-determinable. And if it's
glance-determinable, then that's how you could have known it. Whereas if
you say you're a month older than other people in the class, then there's a
question of how do you know? Did you ask everybody what their age was? So,
"by far" says 'a glance will tell, ' and she didn't have to have any particular
interest in the matter to know it. It's visible, like anything else in the room,
that she is older by far. And as she knows it, so does anybody else in the class
know it.
That the answer says how one knows what one is saying is a common
feature of answers. So we get things like "I used to think . . . but I just found
out . . . " or "I was just reading about that and . . . " or some other way of
showing how you know. For 'age, ' if you use "Oh, by far" then you've
provided how you would know, since if it's "by far" then it's glance­
determinable. It doesn't require a procedure used to locate everybody's
ages - though you could say "It's funny, I happened to look into the records
and it turns out I am the oldest. I wouldn't have thought so, but I am, "
which would also say that it doesn't matter for what is being asked about.
And once we begin to have that kind of context we also begin to have a real
interest in the question. It's not like Emma is doing a survey of the people she
talks to, to find out if whatever they happen to be doing they're the oldest one
doing it. But, in talking about the person's situation in a class, one of the
things relevant is whether they occupy some unique position; some position
which may, furthermore, isolate them from the rest. So that subsequent to
this may be "How do you get along with them?" - 'them' obviously not
appropriately being the people who are a week or a month less than you, but
who are now of a different generation than you. Where again, for any unique
position, if you get a "Yes" answer, you can go on to "How do you get on
with them?" the 'them' being all those others who are, not younger than you,
but are "by far" younger than you - or white, or male, or whatever.
5 40 Part VIII
This looks rather un-neat, in the sense that while a semantics that looked
as neat as adjacency pairs looks would involve things like 'the oldest one'
being part of a set of which the next item was 'the second oldest, ' 'the third
oldest, ' etc., it turns out that we're going to have to find the alternatives to
'the oldest' from places that are really very different; not 'age' at all, but
something else. But it's by reference to those things that the very use of the
question occurs. That is to say, when talking about a co-conversationalist's
life, being in a unique position in something is a distinct feature of a life. And
a first sort of thing that somebody wants to know when you tell them about
some situation you're in, for which a unique position is possible, is do you
have it? Then you're not talking about the class, but about the class as seen
by someone older than anyone else in it. And since the person who asked is
approximately the same age as the other, you're now talking to their possible
interest in the class: "Is it a kind of thing I could go to, too?" So that the
experience now being reported on, "Yes, I'm unique in the class, " can be
reported on by reference to whether people like us can go there, have chances
there, etc. , as compared to it's not a place for people like us. For one, then,
the asker, apart from any interest in the other's circumstances, can have the
talk go on by reference to her own possible interest in whether it's a possible
something for her.
Now that's a funny business. You might say, "Well why in the world
should it be something for her?" However, if one person is reporting on a
something that the other isn't doing, it's extremely difficult to make it not a
possible thing for the other. I leave aside situations in which as soon as
someone proPQ_ses something they say "You'd love it" without regard to who
the "you" that they're talking to is; that being one conventional appropriate
way to talk about whatever you're talking about. But pretty much an
enormous range of circumstances that are 'my own' in the first place are told
of to any particular person one is telling it to, by reference to whether it's
something the other should do or shouldn't do. And that turns on a rather
general feature of the organization of conversation, ' recipient design, ' i.e. , you
should, as much as possible, design whatever you're telling about, even if it's
the most intimate parts of your particular life, with an orientation to the other.
So they ask you about something that they ask about because you're involved
in it, and you answer it by reference to their possible involvement in it. Which
makes for a funny sort of scene, in the sense that they're being nice to you in
asking you more about this class that you're in that they couldn't care less
about, and then you spend your time telling them about how wonderful the
class would be for them - which may involve characterizing it in a way that
has nothing to do with how interesting it is to you.
That is to say, not uncommonly you characterize something in one
interaction, in a way that has nothing much to do with how you would
characterize it for somebody who is differently related to you. Consider, for
example, telling your parents about a movie you saw, that you're now telling
them they should see. How you describe it to them as compared to how you
describe it to a friend whom you're also telling to go see it, are quite different.
 Lecture 2 54 1
You tell your parents grounds for going to see it which are not your grounds
for having gone, or for telling your friends to go see it, etc. They having in the
first place asked you about it, not particularly because they're interested in
seeing it but because you did, so they'll ask you about it in order to show that
they're oriented to you, you now do the same in reverse. And nothing
happens.
 Lecture 3
A single instance of a phone-call
opening; Caller-Called, etc.
For a good part of this time I will stay involved in a particular piece of
material. I mentioned earlier that adjacency pairs are a class of classes, the
classes that are members of it being various of the pair sequences; for example,
the greeting exchange. Now, one of the things about its being a class of classes
is that the classes can also have developments and versions of the general
adjacency pair features. Which is to say that we haven't taken care of the
mechanisms involved in each type of adjacency pair when we characterize
them as adjacency pairs and give some characterization of what adjacency
pairs are. We want, then, to look at all sorts of little fragments and see if we
can learn things both about adjacency pairs and about particular ones, and
then see where learning something about them leads us. All of which comes
down to this utterly typical actual fragment, a phone conversation.

Lana : Hel!o: ,
Gene : I:s, Maggie there.
Lana : "hh Uh �ho is calling,
Gene : Uh this's Gene: .Novaki.
Now, there is a rule for telephone-call beginnings which may sound
awfully trivial but has turned out to have varieties of interesting theoretical
implications. And · that is, while there is not a general rule for face to face
interaction which says who speaks first (in some societies there is; e.g. , lower
status people among the Wolof always speak first in a two-party conversation)
there is a rule for telephone conversation which is 'Answerer speaks first. '
Now, that seems to be, like, how else could you have it? And we've had
people play with it, saying "Hello" right off, before the answerer gets a
chance to, and it's exceedingly disorienting. But the rule could be otherwise;
caller might have to speak first. That would obviously have some interest; you
could hang up on whoever you didn't want to speak to before you had given
any indication of your presence. But in any event, 'Answerer speaks first' is the
general rule for telephone conversation. And that's what happens here.
But now there's a funny thing. The response is not a "Hello. ' ' So we don't
have a greeting exchange. Now, what to do with that? There are ranges of
obvious ways we could go about it, which are conventional social science ways
to do things. So, for example, we all, after all, know that any rule fails
sometimes. So let's just count this as one of the variations in what is after all
5 42
 Lecture 3 543
some kind of distribution of conformities, and don't worry about it unless the
number gets too large. If the number stays rather small then we still have the
rule. If the number gets very large then there can be a question about the rule,
and we might not talk of it as a rule bur as something like an option.
Alternatively, we could go into the deviations, not as a sheerly statistical thing,
bur in terms of that some of the non-appearances may specifically be
violations; where there may be a rule which says if it doesn't occur it's a
violation. And then one could look into the mechanisms involved in
preventing that violation. Or, quite another sort of thing that has become
reasonably fashionable is to see what the gains are of doing a violation - not
focussing on the mechanisms that prevent it, but the gains of doing it. And
there are obviously varieties of gains to doing a violation; for one, simple
things like, among the best ways to insult somebody is, when they say
"Hello" don't say "Hello" back. And looking at violations in terms of how
they're dealt with and the gains of doing them could lead somewhere, in that
it would be looking into particular cases.
Now, one of the strategies that we've adopted involves using some of these
occurrences as possible indications of more complicated rule systems. I'm not
suggesting that that's a peculiar approach, because lots of people would try to
do a similar task: Start out with the simplest rule system and then elaborate
it as seems legitimate and necessary - 'legitimate' in the sense that you're not
merely trying to save the initial rule.
So, having noticed no "Hello, " a question one asks is, are there places
where that happens? It's not "What is he doing with this?" but, can I find out
where there are places - hopefully in the first instance places that have an
apparent similarity to this one - where that's a kind of regular happening? If
I can find such places, then maybe I can see that there's some rule for them.
If you look at the beginnings of telephone conversations, it turns our that this
"Hello" -absence-given-a-"Hello" -presence is not at all odd. We can then
look for a way to characterize it, to see if we can find terms which locate it as
having a sort of generality.
Now, the first "Hello" is done by answerer, so it's caller who didn't
produce the second "Hello. " Which is to say that for telephone conversations
having this event, "Hello" not followed by another "Hello, " it will be caller
who doesn't do it. That's a very big jump in terms of locating the possibility
of application. We then can look to places where caller doesn't do it, and see
if there is something involved in it. And a place where caller doesn't do it is
where it later turns out that the person who was the answerer is not the person
the caller called. Caller is calling some called, and the answerer is not the
called. That raises a possible exception to the 'return a greeting with a
greeting' rule in the case of telephone conversations. Caller need not do a
greeting return if answerer is not equivalent to called.
Just constructing a rule like that, ad hoc, is not a happy event. You don't
like to have rules hanging around which have no reason for existing in the
structure of conversation. If you only had a rule involving caller, called and
answerer, it would seem for sure you're making it up, whatever anybody says.
5 44 Part Vlll
So, having found that there's a possible rule especially relating caller and
answerer-not-called, you're led to see if there are other such rules. If there are,
then this rule we just introduced may tum out to be one instance of a class of
rules regulating telephone conversations in particular.
We already have a rule which says answerer speaks first. Now we begin to
get a sense of answerer being a status in the enterprise of talking on the phone,
where there will be a series of terms that apply to people in a way that has
them as categories and not merely the person they are, somebody with a name.
By responding to the phone they put themselves into a position in the world,
of which such a position is answerer. A question is, who are answerers? Well,
you would say anybody who answers the phone. It's not that kind of thing
because, for one, there are people who could pick up the phone and answer
it, who don't. They're standing there, the phone rings, they just let it ring.
And also, of the set of potential answerers, not all of them go and answer the
phone. So that the achieved answerer comes out of some operation, and the
question is, can we characterize the operation and get a non-merely descriptive
statement - i.e. , not merely 'someone who answers the phone' - about what
an answerer is? Forgetting about professional establishments for the moment,
it may be something like this: Any, and only, possible calleds answer the phone.
Which would immediately take care of why somebody who is in somebody
else's home or office can have the phone ring and not answer it. They are not
a possible called.
If we have that possible calleds answer the phone, then we have at least a
beginning account of "Hello. " The "Hello" could be how a possible called
talks to those who may well tum out to have been calling them. Then it was
a greeting. So by virtue of your being a possible called you produce the
greeting. Notice in that regard, an interesting thing. If a non-possible called
answers the phone, as of course they physically can, then they don't say
"Hello. " They say things like "This is the Jones residence. " Butlers do the
same, and butlers are of course non-possible calleds, only answerers. And
secretaries can also do that - now getting into professional establishments. So,
while the lady who answers the phone at Magnin's or some such place may
perfectly well answer the phone a hundred times a day, each of the times she
knows she's not a called, she's just an answerer, that now having become a
position in the world. So the answerer who says "Hello" is perhaps exhibiting
their status as a possible called.
However, this possible called may not be the intended called for this caller.
What, then, is to happen? Obviously, among the things that can happen is
that the caller gets into some talk with the answerer-not-called, quotes, before
getting to the called. And one has that status of a not-called-but-talked-to in
a conversation, the size of which is distinctly variable and which involves
orientations to a relationship that supposedly exists outside of this conversa­
tion. Though it's interesting that it can be a relationship that exists in no other
way than through conversations like this. So that if you call an office twice a
day for 1 1 years you may well eventually be getting into intimate conversa­
tion of sorts with the person who answers the phone, they having developed
 Lecture 3 545
this more-than-answerer relationship with you. And that's interesting because
it says that the answerer status turns out to be a developmentally removable
one. So that, having started in some situation as an answerer, over time one
can become something which is different, and in some obvious ways better,
than that, which is not-called-but-talked-to. Where the basis for that
happening is somebody making it an occasion of I'm calling so-and-so, and
finally I get to talk to his wife, mother, etc., ' 'I've heard so much about you . "
That is, you can make an insen o f talk t o the answerer-possible-called. (And
let me say as passing advice, among the cheapest ways of getting yourself
known to be really really swell is to talk to answerers.) In any event, that
answerer can go from answerer to not-called-but-talked-to is of some
interest because if you're not treated as that, then you're an answerer in a
structural position in a hierarchy, and you can treat that as being not well
treated.
Let me just note that not-called-but-talked-to persons have that preserved
in the conversation. It isn't treated as though they are the real called, or insofar
as one is talking to them and may talk to someone else later, one is not
differentiating among calleds - as one might not differentiate among calleds
when, e.g. , one calls home to talk to whoever answers the phone and whoever
else is there. Then there may be no single called. But if there is a called, then,
though other people get talked to, and at length, doesn't make them the or
a called. And one of the things involved in that is when persons before the
called get off the phone - the called being the one who will, among other
things, carry the conversation to its dose - then the others don't say
"Goodbye. " There's no exchange of goodbyes in what has been in some
fashion a conversation between caller and promoted answerer, though an
exchange of goodbyes is more or less an obliged end to a conversation
otherwise.
Funher, there are a series of obligations in the answerer position. You
cannot, for example, as a possible called pick up the phone, you say "Hello, "
they say "Is Mary there?" you say "This isn't Mary" and hang up, and Mary's
sitting next to you. The obligations taken on by persons who take an
answering position vary, depending to some extent on what caller demands;
callers often demanding very elaborate things from answerers - to whom they
have no relationship otherwise in the world. It's not simply that answerers
have an obligation not to hang up, such that they can just yell into the room
"Mary, it's for you! " They may have to take messages, they may have to go
look for people, they may have to call back, they may even end up
substituting for the called, e.g. , if somebody is being called to pick somebody
up, if they're not here, why don't you do it. And this answerer position with
its obligations is the minimal answerer position. It turns out it's become the
minimal answerer position by vinue of the possible transform onto it of
not-called-but-talked-to. That means that when somebody chooses to treat
you as just an answerer, then they're picking the lowest thing they can pick
for you. And people do specifically get angry on particular occasions when
someone who should have reason to not treat them as an answerer treats
546 Part VIII
them as an answerer, not even saying "Hello" but asking to speak to
called.
Now there is a choice involved in not responding to the offered "Hello"
with at least a "Hello. " And what's involved is that persons have learned to
do something kind of neat, which is to use just their hearing to decide who
they're talking to - or at least to decide that they're not talking to the one
they called. So that when you pick up the phone and say "Hello, " one of the
things that's given away with it is your voice that can be inspected to see
whether you're the one they want to talk to. You might well imagine its being
done with a tune, and lots of people do it with their name. But it's perfectly
okay in our world to do it with "Hello. " Various cultures that use telephones
think that's ridiculous, in that it makes such work for the caller of having to
figure out who it is that said "Hello, " whereas if all potential calleds answered
with their name, that wouldn't be a task.
And notice that if an answerer-not-possible-called speaks and doesn't do
"Jones residence" but does "Hello, " then that one may get "Who is this?"
where the caller figures that he can take any "Hello" and see who it is, for the
place he's calling. So one of the reasons you don't say "Hello" if you're not
a possible called is so as not to give the caller something that they have got
to work with to try to figure out who this is. If you say "Hello" they'll figure
that you're someone whose voice they can use to figure out who it is, or who
it's not. And the reason they do that is that there are some not-called persons
whom they are obliged to go through talk with, and one of the things they
want to find out is, is this one of them even if it's not their called? And the
"Hello" is an announcement that I'm a possible called; ignore me at your
peril, and recognize me from my voice.
Now, in our materials he listens to the voice and finds it's not the one he
wants, whom he then asks for. That he asks for her can reveal that he knows
the other one isn't the one he called. But there are ways of putting in this
question which retain that this person may well be the called. So, for example,
if you use a title plus last name rather than a first name, that locates that you
may not know the person and thereby may not know whether the person who
answered is that person. It can even be done with first names, e.g. , "Is there
a Jerry there?" or your can stumble over the first name in such a way as to
indicate that you don't know them. Now, the issue of whether the caller
knows the one they're calling doesn't merely make for the possibility that the
person who answered is going to turn out to be the called, but can have
another import. That is to say, part of the use of showing that you know the
one you're calling is to establish your rights to call. And the use of a first name
is at least a generic way of doing that.
So, having listened to the "Hello" and found that this person who
answered isn't the called, he then makes the request for the called, using
called's first name. Now notice that we get a nice insertion sequence done:

Gene : I:s, Maggie there.

Lana : 'hh Uh �ho is calling,
 Lecture 3 547
Gene : Uh this's Gene: . Novaki.
(0. 3)
Lana : Uh iust a mom'nt,
That is to say, while answerers can get ignored, they themselves have positions
from which they can operate to get caller to do various things for them. They
control, for now, access to the called. And that gives them some rights relative
to caller.
I want to look at the "Uh"s that precede the utterances. "Uh" occurs in
millions of places in conversation. We know some things about it. We know,
for example, why it occurs at the beginning of an utterance. A characteristic
form of an utterance turns out to be "Uh," pause, sentence. Why is the "Uh"
there? It's there in order to permit the pause to be after you started talking,
rather than before. There being now a difference between a silence in the
conversation and the pause in somebody's talk. So if you're going to pause
you do "Uh" first, capturing that pause inside your talk. And in doing
that, you show that you are indeed taking the floor. If that's what "Uh"
does, then it can be informative about such a thing as that a person who
hasn't yet spoken knows that they're going to speak. So, for example, if
you've been asked a question, until you start to talk there could be an issue
of whether you see you've been asked a question. One can't suppose the
silence indicates that you're definitely working out the answer. When you've
been selected to do an answer you first off show you know you've been
selected, and a way in which you declare your recognition that the floor is
yours is by doing ' 'Uh. ' '
One place, then, where one would expect "Uh" to occur a lot is at the
beginning of second pair parts; those being the places where one has been
selected to do things, and has the floor by virtue of having been selected to
talk next, the problem being, are you taking the floor, do you know you have
the floor. We would want, then, to do an investigation as to whether "Uh"
occurs before answers and things like that with some interesting frequency.
Now, there is real support for such an argument when one specifies the thing
a little bit more sharply, i.e. , where one can show that there are alternative ­
not answers, but alternative types of answers, that can go in a slot. So, for
example, we have this slightly puzzling answer to the question "Who is
calling?," i.e. , "Uh this is Gene Novaki. " That can hardly mean that the
reason he's hesitating is he doesn't know what his name is. If, however, we're
proposing that persons are put in a position to do a selection for some sorts
of things, there being alternatives, they can then produce the hesitation
when they're looking to determine which of the alternatives they are going
to pick.
So there are alternatives. In this situation, which name he should use,
where which name is used has relevance to a variety of things. For one, it's the
name that the answerer will give to the called, and on the basis of which the
called is then to make a decision whether to come to the phone or not. It can
also be via the name that answerer will see that they do or don't know the
548 Part VIII
caller. Not uncommonly we get, "Hello. " "Is Maggie there?" "Who is
calling?" "This is Gene. " " Hi Gene. " The name now permitting answerer to
say "I recognize you, " apart from now getting Maggie and saying "It's
Gene. " And for names of callers not known to answerer, I think the name
gets called into the room with a question intonation on it: "It's Gene?" which
says, "Do you know a Gene? There's a Gene calling you. I don't know who
it is. " So, from the name, it's possible that answerer will recognize the person.
And if answerer recognizes the person, then answerer may convey to called
that they recognize the person.
So at least, among other things, in the environment of adjacency pairs
things like "Uh" - the 'hesitation marks' - may have an interesting lawful­
ness. And in telephone calls in particular, "Uh" before a pause may be much
more important, to indicate that one is still on the line. If you don't do an
"Uh" in a long pause, the other party is liable to say "Hello?"
In a way, we're studying something like this: Here's an object introduced
into the world 7 5 years ago. And it's a technical thing which has a variety of
aspects to it. It works only with voices, and because of economic consider­
ations people share it, so that there are not yet things where you can call up
a particular person and get them, or get nothing. Now what happens is, like
any other natural object, a culture secretes itself onto it in its well-shaped
ways. It turns this technical apparatus which allows for conversation, into
something in which the ways that conversation works are more or less brought
to bear. So, there evolves from the introduction of the telephone, a collection
of rules about its use which operate in terms of phone-specific identities; caller,
called, answerer, and then varieties of such things as that answerer can over
time get developed into something with its own social structure involved in
it. And here's this initial segment of a conversation, in which all that's
happening, so to speak, is that a party is using this line which somebody has
now answered, to get to somebody else. That's imaginably a merely media
operation. But it has been turned into something eventful in all the lives,
with more or less elaborate long range, short range, social considerations
involved.
What we're studying, then, is making the phone a reasonable part of the
house. Of the set of complaints I had, the phone gives me a new one, i.e. , "If
your mother doesn't stop forcing me to go through those conversations with
her I'll never call you up again" or "If that guy ignores me again I'm going
to hang up on him," with attendant attitudes about the person and their
group, and all the rest of those things. We can read the world out of the
phone conversation as well as we can read it out of anything else we're doing.
That's a funny kind of thing, in which each new object becomes the occasion
for seeing again what we can see anywhere; seeing people's nastinesses or
goodnesses and all the rest, when they do this initially technical job of talking
over the phone. This technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with
the rest of our world. And that's a thing that's routinely being done, and it's
the source for the failures of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced
some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.
 Lecture 3 549
Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has
whatever organization it already has.

{A woman in the class has been raising her hand for a while.]
HS : Are you asking a question, or are you bidding, or what?
Q: Well, I was just wondering if we're ever going to get around to
topics of conversation.
HS : That's an amazing question. I wouldn't know what you're- What
do you have in mind?
Q: I just think that we should get some content. I feel very frustrated
about it.
HS : Oh. What do you mean by some content?
Q: Pardon me?
HS : What would be some content?
Q: I don't know. I expected at least that you're going to analyze
conversations, or have something a little more interesting.
HS : I guess I figure I've been analyzing conversations.
Q: Well we haven't got past that adjacency pair parts yet.
HS : Oh yeah. We're not going to get past it.
Q: Ever?
HS : Not in this course, no. It's a rather fundamental part of conversa­
tion.
Q: Well then let's get to the conversation.
HS : Often you can do that kind of thing and figure that it will work.
But as weird as it may be, there's an area called the Analysis of
Conversation. It's done in various places around the world, and I
invented it. So if I tell you that what we're doing is studying
conversation, then there's no place to turn, as compared to
experimental psychology where you can say "I want to know what
the mind is like" and then you can choose to study humanistic
psychology or something like that. There is no other way that
conversation is being studied systematically except my way. And
this is what defines, in social science now, what 'talking about
conversation' would mean. Now surely there are other ways to talk
about conversation. But in social science there isn't. And people
take it that they have to learn from listening to the sorts of things
I say, what it could possibly mean to talk about a particular
conversation, how a conversation works, or how the details of
conversation work. Nobody has ever heard a characterization in
that detail, with that abstractness, of a fragment like that. It's just
never been done. It's been done here for the first time.
Now, you can treat that as of no consequence. But over the next
couple of years there will be dozens or hundreds of people around
the world who will have examined this as the most elaborate
current instance of a study of a greeting. That's just an unfortunate
fact. I mean because academics in many times and places are put
5 50 Part VIII
into the position of, "Well, when are we going to get around to the
topic the syllabus says we're going to talk about? After all, there's
more to quantum physics than you propose. " But where I end is
where knowledge ends on these things. So that makes the choices
clear.

Okay. I began the lecture this time by trying to come up with an account
for the non-occurrence of a second greeting. In dealing with that, it was
eventually proposed that the initial greeting occurs as one thing that can occur
in that answerer's first position utterance; alternative now to things like
"]. Magnin's, " "Dr Smith's office, " etc. And in non-professional settings by
and large, it's from among the possible calleds that answerers are selected;
answerer being now a merely potential resting state, where you've made
preparations for turning out to have been the called right off when you say
"Hello. " Answerers can become calleds, or they can become non-calleds-but­
talked-to, or they can remain answerers, in the sense of not being talked to
themselves, and also having what turn out to be obligations incumbent on
being an answerer-not-called; obligations like getting the called or taking a
message for the called. So it's this possible-called answerer who does the
"Hello, " and who is treated as just an answerer by this caller.
Now, in attempting to handle a non-occurrence of the second greeting, we
will of course have provided for the ordinary situation of "Hello" "Hello, "
where the possible-called answerer does a "Hello" and gets a "Hello, " it
turning out that they are the called. And the second "Hello" is done in a
recognitional way by the caller, to indicate that from your "Hello" I
recognized you. That's not just what it does. It does "From your hello I
recognize you, and you are the called. " Because after all, here, from her
"Hello" he may well have recognized her and recognized her as not the called,
but he doesn't then do the exhibit of recognition that we hear in a second
"Hello," though there may well be just such a recognition present in the
doing of "Is Maggie there? "
Let me say something about the recognitional "Hello. " It would seem like
a telephone-specific thing. As we know, people play recognition games over
the phone. They say "Do you know who this is?" and they do things in
conversation beginnings other than give their names, intending that the other
find who they are. Now there's this phenomenon of the voice-recognitional
"Hello" that says "I recognize who it is. " And it's not the thing we often
think of in that way, e.g. , the seeing someone across the street recognitional
"Hello! " My current suspicion is that the way you do voice recognition over
the phone with your "Hello" is to do that "Hello" that your respondant
recognizes as the "Hello" you give them. So you show them you know who
they are by giving them the "Hello" you give them. And the recognitional
' ' Hello' ' s that people give others are not the same as the recognitional
"Hello" they give you. For some of them, if it turned out it was, you would
feel fairly leery, e.g. , if your girlfriend turned out to give all the guys who
called her that "Hello. "
 Lecture 3 551
Now, typically if a recognitional "Hello" of the sort I've been character­
izing has been done by caller, then called comes back with one too. So there's
a place where you get more than a pair of "Hello"s, you get three of them:
( 1 ) answerer's "Hello, " (2) caller's recognitional "Hello," (3) called's
recognitional re-"Hello. " So now we've moved from one "Hello" to two
"Hello"s to three "Hello"s; the three-"Hello" situation being characterizable
in this fairly abstract way; an initial answerer recognized as the called who
now recognizes the caller. And again, answerer as not merely whoever picks
up the phone, but the person who has decided to answer by virtue of being
a possible called; having, as answerer, obligations, and being treatable by
caller in various ways.
In this case, however, we're back to a one-"Hello" sequence, and answerer
has been put in the least happy position. Having done the picking up of the
phone, they have been turned into someone at the mercy of the treatment that
the caller will give them: What kind of jobs are they going to impose? Are
they even going to talk to them? A lot of family world is implicated in the way
those little things come out, an enormous amount of conflict turning on being
always the answerer and never the called, and battles over who is to pick up
the phone. It has become a possible environment of conflict given the sheer
fact that more than one person may be available when a phone rings, more than
one of whom may be a possible called and insofar as they're possible calleds
they're eligible answerers, where, insofar as they figure they may tum out to be
just an answerer, they don't want to be the one who answers.
One set of things I'm not going to get into is some simple ecological rules
for who answers the phone. For example, it may be that the person nearest the
phone answers it, except if the person nearest is lying down and the person
farther away is standing up. There would be a whole bunch of rules
organizing those things, which were also conflictable. My interest now is not
what the rules are, but to bring out kind of dearly the way in which this new
toy we've found has been made at home with us, so that one could have
conceivably sat down and considered what would happen to people, given the
phone, and instead of focussing in science fiction kinds of ways on the way it
will change our life with instant communication across great distances and
rapid dispersal of news, it would be seen as intruding into a household which
has no lack of sources of conflict, another systematic source of conflict that,
e.g., you can engender any time you want just by calling up your friends. If
you want to make trouble in their house, call them up at dinner time. Now,
that's an utterly derivable consequence of the introduction of the telephone
into a culture like this one which will exploit such formal possibilities. And
presumably you could say if it didn't exploit it, then that would be a really
important sign of something, since, given the organization of our world, if
something is a formally derivable place of conflict, it will be a place of conflict.
This is an option that persons can take up, and in each family it's taken up
as though they discovered it.
Now, the answerer, having been turned into that, does have a series of
small options. One is, they can treat themselves as the agent of a called, e.g.,
552 Part VIII
asking "Who is calling?" where the called may be perfectly well wishing that
they didn't behave as their agent. For one, it gives answerer the name, to do
with what they might; to use it in later talk, to ask what that one wanted, to
keep a roll of who's calling, etc. So, while answerer is apparently getting the
name in the service of called, answerer is also getting the name for themselves.
And a consequence of that is, you don't call some people in some places, being
concerned to avoid those who might answer that phone knowing that you call
that person.
There are issues about answerer asking for the name. For one, if caller can
bring off how well he knows called, answerer may not be in a position to ask
for the name. Or, e.g. , caller might refuse to give the name but give
something else, ' 'This is a friend of his. ' ' And often callers refuse to give a
name if called isn't there, which then raises nice strategic things that go at this
place, elaborating it. They have to do with, e.g. , that answerer does or does
not say whether called is there before getting caller's name. Answerer can take
your name, it appearing that they will then get called for you but then tell you
that called is not there. And callers, when asked their name, will refuse to give
it and do things like " Is he there?" Where, then, we're getting a rather nice
series of insertion sequences: A: " Hello . " B: " Is Fred there?" A: "Who is
calling?" B: "Is he there?" A: "Yes . " B: "This is Joe Henderson. " A: "Just
a moment. ' '
I haven't at all talked to what is, in its fashion, one of the main topics of
a consideration of these three evolved identities, caller, answerer, called,
having to do with caller and called. Where, for caller and called there is a
world of things involved which implicate themselves very nicely in the
structure of conversation, having to do with who should have been the caller
and who should have been the called. In an exchange system which some
people figure operates, if we are in a caller-called relationship as a relationship
in the world and not just for this conversation, then we should alternate calls.
So, if you are a called of a given caller, you might well attempt to indicate that
while it turns out that they're the caller, you should have been the caller and
they shouldn't count this as one of their calls to you. There are ranges of ways
that people attempt to deal with such a matter, e.g. , A answers the phone
with "Hello, " B does a "Hello, " and then A says "My God I was just trying
to get you!" or ' 'I 've been trying to call you all day. Where have you been!"
thereby attempting to transform the overt fact that the caller was the caller in
this call into that the called was really the caller. I've seen people jockey rather
extendedly on that, attempting to arrive at that it doesn't matter for the rest
of this conversation who was caller or called - though it does matter
irretrievably in the sense that there are caller's ways to get off the phone and
called's ways to get off the phone. Calleds are 'forced' off the phone: ' 'I 've got
to go do something, ' ' callers 'offer' to get off the phone: ' 'I'm holding up your
line, " though called is holding up caller's line too. That callers ' offer' to get
off and calleds 'have to' get off suggests that it is caller's business to get off the
phone first, calleds only doing it in extremis. But there is a place at the
beginning of the call for attempts to modify in some way the sheer technical
 Lecture 3 553
fact that one was a caller and the other was a called, in the light of the
structures that have been built up surrrounding those identities.
Let me just mention an altogether different sort of thing. We can talk of it
as the aiming of emotions. So, for example, caller can in effect begin his talk
to called as he is talking to answerer; i.e. , by being brusque and angry, or
friendly, etc. , in the way he proceeds to ask for called, caller can reveal his
attitudes relative to called, not relative to answerer. So answerer 'overhears'
the mood of caller rather than feeling themselves to be the recipient of that
mood. Unless, of course, caller directs remarks specifically to answerer. A way
to think about it is that by selecting a party and addressing remarks to them,
one can aim an emotion at them so that to whom the utterance goes, locates
to whom the emotion goes. And you can pick people our as the recipients of
your feelings in such ways that various overhearers to it hear an emotion, but
not an emotion to them. And it's a very generic sort of question: How do
people go about aiming emotions which are, after all, exhibited on them as
an appearance or hearable in their voice? So, for example, having said
something affeaionate, not everybody around would have felt affectioned.
And they don't go through the physiological, etc. , responses that the recipient
does, though they can feel in the presence of an emotion. And it's reasonable
to think of things like first pair parts as ways to aim an emotion at somebody.
Where, obviously, among the most typical is the use of "Hello" to do an
emotion at the person you're talking to. That is, in the caller's "Hello. " The
called's "Hello, " if it exhibits an emotion, exhibits an emotion to the world.
It's a mood they're in, and it can be a request to anybody who is calling to,
e.g. , talk to me and right now; I'm feeling awful. So that it's a flair sent up
as compared to an aimed emotion.
 Lecture 4
The relating power of adjacency;
Next position
I'm going to return to some fairly abstract considerations about adjacency
pairs. I proposed this immense scope to the use of adjacency pairs, and left
dangling the issue of why they are so massively used. This time I'll talk to one
part of what would be an elaborate argument as to why they are so massively
used. The argument in a figurative nutshell is something like this: The
adjacency relationship between utterances is the most powerful device for relating
utterances. This is particularly so, given the sort of turn-taking system - i.e. ,
ways of getting a chance to talk - that obtains for the conversational system
we're talking about, i.e. , one that operates one utterance at a time. Where, for
example, there are turn-taking systems that don't use that device, like
debates, which have a pre-specified ordering of talkers. In any event, given a
turn-taking system that operates one utterance at a time and thereby in part
makes who speaks next after a given utterance generically problematic, and
given that the adjacency relationship is, as we'll eventually develop, the most
powerful one for relating any two utterances, I'll argue that adjacency pairs
constitute the institutionalized, i.e., formal, means for exploiting the relating
power of adjacency.
That is to say, there is a natural relationship between any two utterances
that happen to be adjacent, and that relationship provides for the possibility,
but does not require, that those two utterances are related to each other, and
is a particularly powerful means for establishing that relationship. The
provision for systematic use of that relating power is done with adjacency
pairs. So, in brief, the adjacency pairs are a formal means of exploiting the
relating power of adjacency as a relationship between utterances; a relation­
ship that is at least problematic by virtue of the tum-taking system, leaving
it open who will happen to speak next and, as well, what they will do;
whether they will deal with a directly prior utterance, whether they will deal
with some prior utterance, whether they will not deal with any prior
utterance.
It will take a lot of work to develop that argument, and this time I'll focus
on one particular aspect of it; that being something I'll talk of as the unique
features of ' next position' in conversation. I'll be talking about 'next position'
with no further specification. It's not 'next position' after anything except
after some utterance. In a fashion, it can be argued eventually that three terms
for characterizing utterances seem core to much of the ways, and problems, of
the workings of local order in conversation. A lot of this will sound awfully

5 54
 Lecture 4 555
banal but it's far from that, so you'll have to jolt yourself - if I don't jolt you
- into thinking that it' s not, after all, something anyone could have said; it's
not that it's nothing; it's not that it has no consequences. The three terms are:
Last, current, and next utterance. The terms obviously refer to ways of
looking at an utterance and not to utterances, since when 'next' happens it's
'current, ' and 'last' is prior to 'current; ' and for 'current, ' what's 'next' will
have 'current' as 'last' . So, 'current' is an utterance, and 'last' and 'next' are,
on the one hand sometimes possibilities, and at other times potentials for
classifying an utterance.
We first need to establish a sense for next position as a way of characterizing
some possible utterance. Obviously if we chose, we could use a class of which
'next' is one member, to simply, empirically characterize utterances. Where
'next' would be one of a set including 'second next,' 'third next,' 'fourth
next,' etc. At any point in conversation we could mark a line for 'current' and
then begin a list of 'next,' 'second next,' 'third next,' etc. But I propose that
we're not thinking of such a list when we talk about 'next. ' 'Next' is
something else. It is what we would call an analytic object. And it's quite
different than any of the proposed others, 'second next, ' 'third next,' 'fourth
next. ' How it comes to be a different object will in part tum on a list of
features that we can say obtain for 'next' which doesn't obtain for the
others.
Now, in patt I'm saying that next position is one way of characterizing
some possible utterance. And if we're saying that, then we need means for
establishing that it's in fact used, and its use is relevant. Where, if it's the ' ' one
way, ' ' then it might be one way among others; one that is sometimes used or
not used. What makes it in fact used? What's our source for saying that next
position is oriented to by participants? The tum-taking system makes next
position an object. It operates one utterance at a time and provides means for
selecting a next speaker, i.e. , someone who speaks in next position. If you had
a tum-taking system which pre-selected all speakers, then, while to be sure
there would be a next position for any utterance, there would just as well be
a 'third next, ' 'fourth next,' etc. This system locates a relevant place, that
being 'next. '
In an altogether intuitive way, let me show some things that follow from
there being a next position, and a next position which admits only one
utterance. Let's just suppose, on the one hand, that there are some sorts of
constraints on what can go in a next position to any given utterance, and on
the other hand, that more than one sort of thing can go in that next position
- supposing those properties without specifying the next positions. To take an
obvious case, if somebody asks a question, then varieties of answers can go
there: "Yes," "No, " etc. We can more or less see that in many, if not all
places, some things that one could say in a conversation can go 'now' and
other things can't, but more than one sort of thing can go 'now. ' In that case,
the various persons in the conversation, each of whom might have a thing to
put into the conversation someplace, might have a thing to put into the
conversation 'now. ' But if only one utterance can go there, then what follows
556 Part VIII
is that there can be sorts of competition for next position. And indeed there's
a fact, which we all know, that people sometimes compete to talk at a given
place. And sometimes even if they don't compete, more than one would like
to talk at a given place. The question is, why should competition ever emerge
in conversation for a particular position?
If next positions were undifferentiated, i.e. , if anything could go in any
position, then if you had something to say it wouldn't matter where you said
it, and therefore you needn't worry about trying to get it in 'now' as compared
to waiting until later on. It's an imaginable thing that there would be no next
position for any utterance; that any set of utterances that followed it anywhere
might well be equally talking to it. But that doesn't obtain. If you want to
talk to something that's just been said, then you know you have to talk to it
'now' or you may not get a chance to talk to it. So, from this very simple kind
of beginning about constructing a notion 'next position, ' we can go on to get
sources for the existence of something we know about, i.e. , competition in
talk, which turns out to be competition to talk at particular places, and which
turns on the non-admitability of more than one thing at a given place, where,
given a next position, only one utterance can go there.
Of course next position, with the exception of first move in a conversation,
is generically present, i.e. , there's always a next position until the conversation
ends. And while there's always a next position, it's always a next position for
a different utterance. So that, if for each current utterance next position admits
something but not everything, then as the utterances change, what's
admittable changes. Such that, having, e.g. , lost a competition to put in
something 'last, ' one is not automatically in a position to put it in 'now, '
because that one will have changed what's admittable as 'next' after it. So, as
an obvious example, if someone asks a question without selecting a speaker,
then next position is the position to answer it. If you wanted to answer it but
somebody else answered it, next position after their talk is not for an answer
to that question, or not for the answer you intended to give. You might be
able to do transforms on what you initially intended. For example, the
question is "What time is it?" and "It's two twenty five" comes up as an
answer. You knew it was 2 : 2 5 , and you would have said "It's two twenty
five. " You might still go with that, but you won't do it as you would have
at first; you'll do it with "Yeah, it's two twenty five" or "It is two twenty
five, ' ' some way of indicating that you're now positioning it after a first
answer. So even when you try to do the same thing you could have done in
that last next position, you do it in a new way.
At this point I'm grossly proposing that the notion 'next position' is made
relevant throughout conversation by reference to tum-taking's making next
speaker a problematic event. That's preserved throughout a conversation so
that there's always a next position that has at least that problematic aspect to
it. Layered onto that is something I've only presented in an altogether allusive
way, i.e. , that given any utterance classified in any way, it admits more than
one thing which can be done next, but provides that not anything can be done
next. And as we fix in on types of utterances we'll get some of the sorts of
 Lecture 4 557
things they admit and some of the sorts of things they don't admit. But I
wanted to just take a seemingly simple idea, 'next position, ' and begin to derive
some consequences from it, and to tum what otherwise looks like a no-problem
phenomenon, i.e. , people competing for a tum, into one that needs to be
explained, and to suggest one sort of way we would go about explaining it -
where we couldn't explain in if all positions were equivalent.
Now let's get to the issue of relating utterances to each other. First I want
to propose something simple enough, and simple enough to see, and that is,
any utterance can be related to any prior utterance. There are techniques for
relating any utterance to any prior utterance. And that does not mean 'prior'
in terms of this conversation, but 'prior' whenever. Consider that in a given
utterance one may quote another utterance. So you can say, "Several years ago
you said if I ever felt the need for a dollar I should come to you. Well, here
I am. " Or you can say, "A minute ago you said . . . " or you can say, "In a
conversation with my friend a couple of weeks ago, he told me such and such,
and now I think this and that about it. ' ' So that, by means of introducing an
utterance into your utterance, you can relate a current utterance to any prior
utterance. Now, if that were the only way that utterances could be related, we
can see that the course of a conversation in which utterances were being related
to each other in multiples, would expand in some elaborate way very quickly.
A person says "Hello" to you, and your concern is to indicate that when you
say "Hello" you're saying it in response to their first "Hello, " so you say
"Since you said hello, I say hello. " And you can begin to see how that would
build up so that an nth utterance in a conversation which intended to relate
to the set of prior ones would consist of the size of the prior ones plus itself.
But utterances don't expand that way, so obviously there must be means
whereby utterances are related to each other through other techniques than
quoting. What are the sorts of techniques for doing that?
There is a large range of what we call sequential techniques, involving on
the one hand, use of positions, and the use of various sorts of eligible objectS
and markers of position. Now, beginnings of utterances are a characteristic
place for putting in sequential positioning information about that utterance.
I typically use the following instance. An utterance begins with "I still say
though that. . . " In this case it happened to be, "I still say though that if you
take a big fancy car out on the road and you're hotrodding around, you're
bound to get caught and you're bound to get shafted. " This is a statement
which is perfectly well sayable without "I still say though that. " I propose
that "I still say though" incorporates a variety of ways of positioning the
utterance. And by 'positioning' it I mean locating the utterances it deals with.
In this case, working it out kind of simply, "I still say though" proposes that
on what I'm talking to, I talked to it before. Recall what I said before. And
not only did I talk before, but after I talked someone else talked, and they
disagreed with what I said. And now, in the light of their disagreement with
what I previously said, I am reaffirming my initial position. So it's marking
a structure in which there are at least rwo prior utterances; my earlier remark
and somebody's disagreement with it. And it's not just locating rwo prior
558 Part VIII
utterances, i.e. , it's not merely that I said something and somebody else said
something, but it locates facets of those utterances, i.e. , that I took a position
and somebody disagreed.
From that brief sort of consideration one can begin to see that there is a
rather elaborate collection of devices for positioning an utterance as subse­
quent to others, and thereby locating, furthermore, what you're doing in a
given utterance. That is to say, the positioning is relevant to the activity of a
given utterance. In this case, a way you can do 'being stubborn' is not simply
to reaffirm your position but to reaffirm it while taking cognizance of the fact
that others have talked since you've talked, and have differed with you. So the
charaaer of this utterance as 'stubborn' turns on its positioning techniques,
not merely its occurring as third in a sequence. In other words, the utterance
positions itself. Now that's important, because it differentiates between the
utterance simply having a position in this conversation, e.g. , 2 3rd utterance,
and that any given utterance can make its position, i.e. , locate those sorts of
things relevant to its understanding, and relevant to what its doing.
We've said two sorts of things. One is that any utterance can be related to
any other. And secondly, there are ways that an utterance can use sequential
techniques to position itself relative to some others. This positioning work can
be done by some collection of words used at the beginning of an utterance,
but other things can be used as well. Possibly surprizingly, intonation can be
used to position an utterance, in perhaps somewhat more interesting ways
than we might suppose. It's kind of obvious that intonation can be used to
position an utterance as specifically next to a last; as, e.g., to begin an
utterance with a drawn-out, doubting "Well" involves that doubt being a
doubt about what was last proposed. But you can use intonation to position
an utterance relative to other than last utterance. So you can do a thing like
' ' I went to the movies , ' ' where the contrast stress on ' 'I ' ' provides for locating
some prior utterance, not necessarily the last, which this one by reference to its
contrast stress intends to be in contrast to. So you could have such a sequence
as:

A: What did you do last night?

B: I stayed home.
A: Been working too hard?
B: Yeah.
C: ! went to the movies.

Plainly, " I went to the movies" will be heard by reference to its specific
contrast to the two-utterances-earlier "I stayed home. "
We sense about intonation that while it can serve as a sequential technique
to position an utterance relative to another that is not directly last, nonetheless
it cannot serve to position itself relative to anything, wherever prior. It's
probably fair to say that the scope of operation of intonation for locating prior
utterances is rather short. So, using the lingo I used last time about 'aiming
an emotion' at someone, using a direaed utterance as the vehicle that will
 Lecture 4 5 59
locate who you're atmmg the emotion at, so intonation can be a way of
aiming something like doubt or agreement or whatever, at some other
utterance, with the specification that it may only be able to operate in fairly
local ways.
There is, then, a range of techniques for relating one utterance to another,
and we've seen some of them. Now, it may be that there is only one generic
place where you need not include information as to which utterance you're
intending to relate an utterance to, and that is if you are in next position to an
utterance. Which is to say that for adjacently placed utterances, where a next
intends to relate to a last, no other means than positioning is necessary in order
to locate which utterance you're intending to deal with. No other means being
used, then you're recognizably intending to deal with the last one. "Yes" after
a question is "Yes" to that question. Were you to use that position to, e.g . ,
answer some other question, you would have t o make i t your business to
indicate both that you're not answering the last and that you're answering
some prior - and which prior, e.g. , "Before I answer this question I want to
answer the question he asked me. Yeah, I took it. "
It's now being proposed that next position is special, in that next position
can be used to relate an utterance to a particular utterance, the last, without
any other means of locating that utterance being employed. For no other class
is that so. Second next, fourth next, etc., none of them can be used in that
way. That's the claim. If it is so, then that would be an initial way of locating
the special status of next position.
Now, one thing I want to propose with respect to the issue of possibly
related utterances is that there are a large class of possibly related utterances
for some unspecified utterance, such that if any of them are to be done they
should be done in next position; where, if they're not done in next position,
then presumably the option to do them has been waived. There is formal
evidence for this situation obtaining when we consider that there is a class of
utterances that go after any utterance, which specifically locate the last as the
one they're talking to, i.e. , the one-word questions - why, how, what, where,
when - and various minor amplifications of them. For them to be used, they
should go right after the utterance they deal with. Now, all of those are first
pair parts, and they can go after things without regard to whether those things
are first pair parts or not, i.e. , they can be done as beginnings of insertion
sequences. But for them to go, they have to be put in next position. You can
of course inquire about some utterance that went much earlier, but the form,
'one word questions' goes in next position. To ask "Why?" about an earlier
utterance, some other form will have to be used. There is another class that
goes in next position, which we call 'appendor questions. ' Things like "And
why not?" Questions which do not consist of whole sentences, which typically
consist of some sort of phrase, not uncharacteristically a prepositional phrase,
and that's the complete utterance: "To where?" "Until when?" " Or?" All of
those position themselves as 'next' to a last, and are to be appreciated by
reference to 'last' specifically. We're beginning, then, to have classes of objects
which specifically go in next position without any specification of what it is
560 Part VIII
that went in last position. And those are isolatable without regard to any
consideration of positions at all, i.e. , they're available upon inspection. You
can look at a transcript of a conversation and find them.
Now, I said if such things haven't gone they can be treated as foregone. By
that I mean that conversation operates with a local cleansing of itself, and the
non-occurrence of one of those remedial questions (what, why, etc.) serves as
evidence for the non-need to cleanse our current state. That is to say, unless
you indicate that what I said was, e.g. , unclear, or that you didn't hear it ­
which is to be done with some set of terms and right after I said it - then it's
to be treated as though what I said was heard, and was clear. It would be
altogether strange for converstion - as compared to, say, a lecture - to have
the talk procede until, say, ten minutes before closing, at which point the
parties pause and now engage in telling each other what they didn't
understand of what the others said. That's to be done right then. And in that
it's to be done then, talk about the system as locally self-cleansing is formally
based. Obviously there are alternative options. Obviously the system we're
talking about doesn't use them. Obviously, given a one-utterance-at-a-time
system in which each current utterance is setting out options for the next, the
use of the local self-cleansing mechanism is terribly neat.
 Lecture 5
A single instance of a Q-A pair;
Topical versus pair organization;
Disaster talk
This time, in alternation to some rather abstract consideration of a topic, I'll
be talking about a very particular fragment. Though what I'll say about it will
be in some ways abstract enough for anyone's taste. This is from a telephone
call.

Maggie : Bu: :t uh how've you bee�n how's Vi�,

Gene : We)l fi:ne, fijjne,
Maggie : Howdjuh survive the qua�ke? en the: fi:res 'n th' floods 'n
everything.
Gene : Oh we had 'em 1!:ll,

I'm interested in the third utterance, "How did you survive the quake and
the fires and the floods and everything" and its response, "Oh we had them
all. "
I'm going to give a preface, and the preface will kind of set up the
discussion. And since there are several ways to go about doing what I'm going
to do, this preface may be taken as one optional preface. Now, let me make
a remark about that as a proposal. Discussions are commonly academically
characterized by a preface, and as any professional knows, prefaces are
typically produced when the work itself has been done. So there might well
be a series of optional prefaces. While the general rule is that prefaces are
suggestions of one way you might read something, since the thing isn't
derived from the preface but the preface is added, you can choose to treat it
somewhat independently of the preface that's offered.
So, then, a preface to the discussion. I've mentioned varieties of types of
organization and proposed that adjacency pairs were used in various types of
organization. One of the sorts of interests raised by talk like that can be
developed in the following way. Imagine a surface of some sort, and we are
now proceeding to characterize that surface in terms of conversational
sequential types of things. Since the things we're talking about are serial it's
imagineable that for lots of them they are in some ways serially linked on the
surface - this follows this, this goes after this position, etc. , etc. - rather than
focussing on another aspect of things, which is the way that different types of
organizations may be layered onto each other. So the surface is thick and not

561
562 Part Vlll
just serial. Which is to say that a given object might tum out to be put
together in terms of several types of organization; in part by means of
adjacency pairs and in part in some other type of organizational terms, like
overall structural terms or topical organizational terms. And one wants to
establish the way in which a series of different types of organizations operate
in a given fragment, i.e. , in a given, quotes place, on the surface.
So one sort of thing that I engage in doing is to take a particular fragment
apart in terms of a collection of different types of organization that may
operate, in detail, in it. Where the question is, in part, how to bring that kind
of a consideration off in a possibly integrated way, i.e. , to also show the
relationships between the types of organization in the particular object. I
want, then, to inhibit a consideration of actual objects in terms of single types
of organization, i.e. , saying of something that it's a 'question, ' and then saying
that it's adjacency-pair orderly in a variety of ways, and that's that, as though
one is finished with it. The question of what sorts of things, even for the
sequential organization of conversation, can be pulled out of a piece of talk
needs to be open, and having found it orderly in one way doesn't mean that
you've done all there is to make it operate in the ways that we can, perhaps,
make it operate.
So that's at least one kind of line on it. Another kind of line is located
initially a little bit more empirically, but also connects with some academic
matters. There's a transparent commonness to the list members, quake, fire,
flood. They are a set of names of events for which a common class such as
'disasters' can be said to be, not only what they have in common, but perhaps
what provides for the use of each of them in the company of the others. So
that there's a sense in which we could use materials like this in terms of
semantic considerations, i.e. , to get at common meanings, relations between
meanings, etc. , where lists are perhaps sort of ideal natural objects for getting
at some sorts of commonness of meanings. Now I want to take a different
tack on that, and introduce into the semantic considerations, some sequential
functions. Where we have, then, those two sorts of interests, both of which
have didactic aspects to them, i.e. , considerations in terms of semantics, and
the analysis of a single utterance by characterizing it in terms of some
particular type of organization.
Focussing on "How did you survive the quake? and the fires and the floods
and everything, ' ' we already know that if it's an adjacency pair first pair it can
go, in effect, anywhere. But that doesn't tell us why it is done more or less at
the beginning of the conversation. We might possibly examine it in terms of
overall structural considerations, since such considerations may govern what
goes or does not go at the beginning or end of conversation. Where the early
parts of conversations are very heavily composed of series of pairs, and putting
it into a pair form may be a way of finding a spot for it there.
Now, using semantic considerations, there's a kind of transparent way that
overall structural considerations can be seen to operate so as to make this
question askable right at the beginning of a conversation. And that is
something like this: It's a class of disasters, and it's noticeable that talk about
 Lecture 5 563
disasters goes at the beginning of conversations. Now, this would involve that
one could just take types of topics and distribute them across a conversation,
and see about some that they go in particular places, like at the beginning.
But that doesn't really work, because you have to intrude a series of other
things about disasters. We don't have talk about disasters at the beginning of
conversations except under certain sorts of constraints; one of those constraints
being that the talk about the disasters can be introduced via something like
"How did you survive" plus the disaster. Which is to say that it may not be
'disasters' but disasters with the specification that they happened to or might
have happened to the person you're asking about them, that can be asked of
at the beginning. And that little specification may turn out to wag the
disasters.
There may be a class of things which are now to be called 'things that could
have happened to your co-participant' which, by virtue of that, should be
asked of at the beginning of a conversation. And those are now perhaps to be
assimilated to a structurally positioned object in conversation, "How have you
been?, " which goes directly after the greeting segment. Then, what connects
the meaning-class ' disasters' as a way of assimilating the three items - quake,
fire, flood - to its placing in the conversation, is via whatever can be put in
as possible objects for filling out "How have you been?, " where things like
"How have you been?" have a real place in conversation. Collecting things
that way, you might collect a variety of items that do not have obvious
commonness to 'disasters' as an isolated class.
And now we get into one of the possibly funny ways that the conversational
world operates. There's this thing in the world, ' disasters. ' Except in rather
restricted senses 'disasters' is not directly a topic in conversation. It can be
made into a topic in conversation through various of the means that things
can be made topical in conversation. How do you make something topical?
One way is to turn it into a 'something for us. ' You can treat it as the most
general content rule for conversation that people will talk overwhelmingly,
not so much about things that happened to them, but about things insofar as
they happened to them. Talking about whatever, it comes home to us. Which
is to say, there are a variety of things happening in the world, like disasters.
Their happening doesn't make them introduceable into a conversation. What
has to be done is to turn them into something for us.
At least an initial way of turning an event into something for us is to see
if I have some way of turning it into something for you, and asking you about
it. In this case, the disasters happened in an area where I know you are; where,
however, I know of them, not by virtue of the fact that I know of them for
you, but I just know of them in the first place. And now, coming to talk with
you, the question is, is there some way to introduce them? The technique is
to connect you and the disasters. All I have to do in that case is a rather weak
thing, i.e. , the earthquake, fire, and floods all being public, anybody in Los
Angeles might have been asked about these things. On the other hand it is not
altogether weak, in that not anybody anywhere else could be asked - though
one can manage it so that the disasters, being 'news,' are not wasted from
564 Part VIII
conversation in varieties of other places. So, e.g. , my mother's friend could ask
her "How did Harvey survive the earthquake?, " making it a topic in their
conversation in New York via my mother's interest in me, and the friend's
interest in my mother which involves an interest in the things that involve my
mother. So the earthquake comes up in a form which is not incidentally linked
to "How did you survive . . . " And insofar as it's going to use the "How did
you survive . . . ' ' then its position in the structure of a single conversation may
be located. That is to say, it may be that in that form, you're not to position
it just anywhere, but you should put it up front, i.e. , as a substitute for, or as
a subsequent to and specification of, "How have you been?"
Now I want to get into the functions of putting this question up front. We
need to consider some quite separate sorts of matters which involve a
phenomenon we call ' orientation to co-participant, ' which is pervasive in
conversation. It is pervasive in that one of its major operating maxims is 'design
your talk to another with an orientation to what you know they know. ' And that
maxim has special functions at the beginnings of conversation. There, it's
occupied with a particular job, which is re-finding each other. In order to have
my mind oriented to what I know you know throughout the course of a
conversation so as to tell you things about what's happened to me that you
don't know, and not things you know, I have to find who you are, in the sense
of what sorts of things I already told you. So I locate right off as soon as
possible, and use, when the last time we talked was. That will then throw off a
whole bunch of things I have to tell you, i.e. , the things that have happened
since. Notice that you're talking to lots of different people. For each of them, at
the point you meet, you're able to tell them the things that have happened
since you last met. They are obviously not the same set of things for the set of
people you encounter over a day, or a week. How do you find which things to
tell which person? At least one of the things you use is when you last talked.
That opens up a group of things and doses off others which you will of course
have told them, since the last time you met you operated in the same way.
Now, I'd like to suggest about the list 'quake, fire, floods' that it's not
merely a list of things that are public disasters which have happened in Los
Angeles recently, but it also serves a clock function. What controls the size of
the list is not 'recent disasters' but 'the disasters that have happened since we
last talked. ' The time spread of the list - each of these things having
happened at a different time over, say, six months - is one way that she
attends immediately and marks her attention to 'the last time we talked. '
Those three objects being one way to propose this as the period of time what's
happened to you is being asked about - 'you' being an anybody who lived in
Los Angeles and would have that available as a way of characterizing that
six-month period. So there's a dock function to the list, relative to 'the last
time we talked. ' To be able to use public disasters as such an object and not
have to affiliate quite other things involving rather more particular sources of
information, like "How did the operation go?" when I know the last time we
talked you were about to have an operation, or "How did the promotion go?"
when the last time we talked you were about to come up for promotion, etc. ,
 Lecture 5 565
which i s another class o f things that can g o at such a spot, may tum on the
way in which for some time period public disasters are available as calendrical,
e.g. , "It's been quite a winter" which can be characterized in terms of some
consistent set of things rather than a variety of packages of things.
It's being proposed that the list items come from an orientation to
co-participant. For this particular co-participant, given the position of this
conversation in the calendar relative to a last conversation between these
people, one can use the disaster possibility under a specification of "How have
you been?" and thereby get an early question. And if you're going to use a list,
you can get the items from the review of when you last talked. While the use
of the list has a virtue in exhibiting an orientation to what might have
happened to you since we last talked, there is also separately a question of why
they are put into a single list question. There are two types of organization
that we have to be concerned with. One is the organization of topics and the
other is the organization of pairs. Insofar as she uses her utterance to get this
possible talkable on the table, what that does is to say "I want you to talk to
this possible topic or set of topics in your next utterance. " So that makes a
very current place for it. But insofar as you do that with a question, i.e. , the
first part of a pair, you also allow for the possibility that the pair will be the
size of it. This thing which may be rather extendedly talkable about, if
introduced as a pair part, may tum out to have been merely a pair. And he
could, e.g. , dose the thing off by answering it in such a way as to have his
answer serve as all the talk we're going to have about this, as compared to that
we talk about it for a long time having begun with a pair. So, in using a pair
format there's the possibility that although there are things to be talked
about, we're not going to talk about them now, or much. As, for example,
to the question "How have you been?" people can say things like "Fine, " and
that's not just an answer, but an answer that says ' 'I'm not going to talk about
that now. " The shortness of the answer is not only that in this utterance I'm
not going to say anything more than that, but that I don't want to talk about
it now. There are, then, differential signals for saying, as an answerer, " Let's
talk some more about it" or not.
Now essentially we're proposing that a question that contains a list can be
the questioner's way of saying " Let's talk some more about this. " And one of
the ways it does that is to give a series of options to the co-participant, saying
in effect, I'm giving you a bunch of what you and I know to be story sources;
surely there's something out of this set of things that you can talk about more
or less elaborately; tell me anything that you care to, under that range of
possibilities. " And not uncommonly, people will take up a tale about what
happened to them in the quake or the fire or the flood, and they feel free to
go on rather at length instead of trying to package their response into a single
sentence. They have, however, an option to use features of the list to produce
a summary answer, e.g. , "We came out alright. "
So we can look to the answer-options given the question, and then to the
character of the answer in response to the question, in terms of whether it is
an answer long, or more than an answer long. We can then play that back into
566 Part VIII
the design of the question to see whether the question at all prefers something
an answer long or more than an answer long. And if it can be said to prefer
a response which is more than an answer long, then we might say it's
something like a 'topic opener. '
We're now getting into attempts to make longer sequences than pairs. It
may be that one way of opening topics is specifically through the use of
questions that are built such as to invite responses which are more than an
answer long, but which admit at least answer-long responses. So you're not
violating the adjacency pair status when you refuse to take up the topical
possibilities by doing merely an answer-long response. That is to say, at the
order of topical organization people can offer topical openers and people can
reject them, and that's different than people asking questions and people not
answering them. You don't own the course of topical operation, but you can
own next position and what's to be done in it.
And now we get into something fairly complicated, having to do with the
possible serial and possible non-serial relationship between overall structural
organization and the structure of topical talk, as they now can converge on the
use of an adjacency pair. One way to think of it is that conversational
beginnings end when topic talk begins. That is to say, a series of beginning
components are gone through pairwise, then there may be a break, and then
some topic talk. Just as at the end of a conversation some topic comes to an
end and then people will exchange "So"s or "Okay"s and go into closing. But
the thing by no means always partitions out that neatly. Instead of beginnings
coming to an end and topic talk starting up, it can be via some development
out of some beginning materials that one gets into a first topic. And that can
involve, e.g. , that something that gets asked about in the beginning cannot be
treated with a merely summary answer. If, for example, I had something
terrific happen to me, then when you say "How have you been?" I shouldn't
just say "Fine," but I should move straight into topic talk, introducing the
thing which we will right now go on about at length. And that's roughly the
difference between a pair and topic talk. Once we get into some item it will
have its own life and won't be closed by reference to pair organization.
It's a general feature for topical organization in conversation that the best
way to move from topic to topic is not by a topic close followed by a topic
beginning, but by what we call a stepwise move. Such a move involves
connecting what we've just been talking about to what we're now talking
about, though they are different. I link up whatever I'm now introducing as
a new topic to what we've just been talking about. Now, this stepwise thing
is a really serious feature of topical organization, and it's my rough suspicion
that the difference between what's thought to be a good conversation and
what's thought to be a lousy conversation can be characterized that way, i.e. ,
a lousy conversation is marked by the occurrence of a large number of specific
new topic starts as compared to such a conversation in which, so far as
anybody knows we've never had to start a new topic, though we're far from
wherever we began and haven't talked on just a single topic, it flowed. Under
that possibility, one can see that there might be a preference for not bringing
 Lecture 5 567
the beginning to an end and now starting topic talk, but using aspects of the
beginning to get directly into topic talk by blowing up one of the pairs that
go at the beginning. So, e.g. , to "How have you been?" instead of producing
a short answer that says let's continue this pair alternation, "How have you
been?" "Fine, how have you been?" "Fine, " something like "How have you
been?" "Really really rotten, you can't imagine what's happening" says
we're going to talk about this right now, i.e. , we're into topic talk right
now.
Now, there are some problems with using the beginning in that fashion to
explode into topic talk. And that has to do with that certain parts of the
beginnings are distinctly to be exchanged. "How have you been"s are to be
exchanged. If on the first response to "How have you been?" we get
movement into topical talk, one consequence of that is that the return "How
have you been?" is left dangling. It not going where it normally and properly
does go, right after the last pair, it has got to find some new place to go. But
given that topics can move stepwise, the development of the first response to
"How have you been?" can lead to other things, and now maybe there's not
ever a natural place for the return "How have you been?" And that can be
evidenced in the way in which, when that sequence blows, the return "How
have you been?" is not uncharacteristically stuck in somewhere later on into
the conversation with "By the way, how have you been? " which remembers
that this thing is still dangling. Now, there are virtues to having that thing
hanging around, because then at some point where there's no natural topic
shift but an apparent topic close, that's where it can be stuck in and now get
things going again. So in some way a usable thing is held in reserve.
Essentially we're saying that the "How have you been?" sequence can blow
up into more than a pair. It can blow up unanticipated by the asker, i.e. , the
asker can just say "How have you been?" which may well say that they're
only doing the thing they should do at the beginning, say "Fine" and ask
them how they've been, etc. Or the asker can invite that we right now go to
some first topic. And if you know some things about somebody that you
should show deference to, maybe you should begin the conversation, not with
"How have you been?" but with the "How did it go?" version, e.g. , "How
is your foot healing?" "Is your grandmother better?" etc., such things being
used when you know things that are independently topics and which also
locate in part, right at the beginning, what was pressing the last time we
talked; matters that fit under "How have you been?" but might not be
elicited by it. /

We have, then, a place where overall structure and topical talk cohere. And
when they do, they blow up out of a pair. A possibly longer sequence that
coheres in various ways can be offered by the speaker of the first pair part or
can be begun by the second pair part speaker. And for this, pair organization
is, so to speak, only incidentally involved. It does not describe how the topical
stuff operates.
Now, there are indices of topical organization which are simply formal
objects for it. So, for example, a thing like "Anyway" is a sheer topic marker
568 Part Vlll
saying that the utterance it begins is on topic with what was being talked
about - not immediately prior to this utterance but before that, and this
utterance is going back to what was being talked about. You can think of it
as a right-hand parenthesis which says 'on topic, but not on topic to last, but
to last-but-one. ' So there are topically structured things, and they are different
than pairs. They have to do with larger sequences in just the way that
"Anyway" is moving across more than two utterances, where pair organiza­
tion is two utterance organization. Now, more than two utterance organiza­
tion can be layered onto pairs, as pairs position themselves in terms of, say,
overall structural organization. So, for example, there are pairs that go, say,
second in overall structural terms: "How have you been?" following "Hello
- Hello, ' ' that spot being the spot for such an object. And that can then have
to do with where topic potential is in a conversation, and how topic potential
is turned into particular types of topic sequences.
One of the things that everybody learns, and some people figure they don't
know how to do, is to be able to take the eventfulnesses of their lives and the
possible eventfulnesses of other lives, and make them into talk. People know
how to see that the quake is something to remember because they'll be able
to talk about it, where there are lots of things you wouldn't keep in mind for
a next conversation. And they know that these things have to be made into
talk. In our world you can't just say "Earthquake" and get the other person
to start talking about it. You form it up for this conversation. Though plainly
if forming it up for this conversation can be done in such a banal way as
"How did you survive the quake?" then you can do it for lots of
conversations. But one learns how to turn the world's events into talk­
aboutables, and to know where to put them in a conversation.
Now, for her to pick "the earthquake, the fires and the floods" is topically
strong without regard to whether he rejects the topic or not, by virtue of that
it's a topic for her too. She was in it too, and she can have things to say about
it whether he does nor not. But if he takes up the topic, we get something
happening in which we can see how conversation works at its best, so to
speak. And that is this thing I mentioned earlier, turning it into something for
us, where what is done first is to turn it into something for you. "Tell me about
how you suffered through the earthquake, " and then he'll describe some set
of things, e.g. , "Well, it broke some windows and knocked the dishes off the
shelves, " etc. And those constitute one way of reporting what happened. Now
when she will come to tell about it she will report it in a different way. She
will report about it as 'for us. ' And the way she does that is to introduce, not
what happened to her, but what happened to her comparatively to what
happened to him, e.g., "The exact same thing happened to me, " or "Nothing
like that happened to me, ' ' or ' 'What happened to you is nothing compared
to what happened to me, " i.e. , she will describe hers as a variant of his, or as
different from his, etc. And now they're into making this experience
something in their lives together, in some fashion.
So, the second speakers for these exchanges typically design their talk in
'comparative' terms, though plainly the events didn't happen comparatively.
 Lecture 5 569
But this quake that happened is first of all being turned into an event in his
life, though after all it was very incidentally an event in his life; only by virtue
of the fact that she's talking about it is it of interest as an event in his life. But
once having been turned into an event in his life, once he'll give that, then it's
available for being turned into an event in our life, which is where interaction
in talk happens. Once we get to there, we can do things other than exchange
news, we can do new things together.
Now, if you can't in the first place get into topical organization, you're in
one typical sort of bind that people can be in, i.e. , there are lots of people who
engage in possible conversations that never become conversations by virtue of
they can never get out of the beginnings, they just exchange those pairs. And
it's of some interest that that's the way some relationships obtain; that one
does, in effect, conversation beginnings and nothing more. Whole classes of
types of relationships in social structural terms, employersjemployees, etc.,
are characterized by admitting beginnings and no more; specifically not
admitting transforms of beginnings into first topics.
At least a gross lesson guide is that a possible fairly routine way to begin
to examine a fragment involves that having found it to be, e.g., adjacency pair
orderly, one might proceed to work further on it by considering what else it
is. Not only in terms of things independent of adjacency pairs, but what else
is it that has to do with adjacency pairs by virtue of their involvement with
other types of organization. So one could begin to collect the possible types of
organization and see whether they have anything to do with putting the parts
of the thing together. And - although you'd want to be cautious about this
you could pull it apart so as to see whether parts of it can be characterized in
terms of separate types of organization, as "How did you survive . . . " can be
partially isolated as a thing which can assimilate whatever it's going to
preface, to the early on "How have you been?" type object. Where, then,
overall structural considerations can be used to move the quake to the front
of the conversation, though, not turning it into a "How did you survive . . . "
it may not be allowed to go up front. Put in the up front position, it can be
a way of closing the beginning, operating as a possible topic opener by
making a first topic out of this if the other is prepared to do more than an
answer-long response to it. So there's now a use of it to make a first topic
which interfaces with overall structural aspects, for which, again, its pair
status is relevant.
And with regard to the issue of semantics, the use of a list rums out to be
a rt;levant way to proceed, such that to propose as an answer to where the list
comes from that it comes from the fact that all these things are commonly
'disasters, ' is hardly to catch the way in which the list members come to be
said. Whereas one mapping of what semantics looks like involves classes of
classes of terms - 'quake, fire and flood' being assimilated to 'disasters, ' and
'disasters' being hierarchically ranked with other things and contrasting with,
e.g., 'good news' , our business is to now collect some of these classes in
sequential position terms, having to do with when they happen in conversa­
tion, to see if that might order them in some interesting way.
 (6) Lecture
Laughing together; Expressions of
sorrow and joy
Properly conducted, the course should be done like a math course in the sense
of having work all the time. So there will be continual assignments from now
on. There are two or three ways I would recommend proceeding. The first is
to attempt to see, for something you notice, where such things go in terms of,
for example, the overall structure of the organization of conversation. So, you
ought to say that a something goes in the beginning or at the close, or it
doesn't go in any of those places - where it's much weaker to say where
something doesn't go. You can also consider whatever it is that you've noticed
in other types of terms, such as where does it go within a topic. In other
words, you might not be able to say where the topic goes, but you might be
able to say that this thing goes at the beginnings of topics or at the close of
topics. Or you might now have, for the same thing, a way of layering the
characterization of it, e.g. , it goes at the close of such topics as go at the
beginning or close or whatever of a conversation. So, having found that a
conversational object goes in one place, you might not stop there.
I'm really heavily interested in trying to distributionalize things. That
doesn't mean that you have to do a statistical study of where something goes.
Proceed by locating it in some way as a sort of thing, e.g. , a 'question, ' a 'story
beginning, ' etc. Having located it in some way, you might be able to examine
the circumstances to come up with a version of those circumstances that tells
you this is the sort of place this thing goes. Don't stop there, however. Go on
to attempt to see if you can't establish it in some provable way. So, instead of
just counting the range of places something goes, you might locate a version
of the place and then see if you can come up with an account of why it goes
there; some explanation or proof.
Let me give some instances of different types of things than those we've
considered in the course so far, some of which are in the first instance
non-intuitive, but once I give the presentation you can easily see that I might
be right. Let me take a very simple instance. Suppose you notice that there's
a symbol on the transcript that there's laughter. Supposing it gets slightly
more refined and you notice that there's something that happens to be very
important, that you would not ordinarily bring yourself to notice, and that is
something you wouldn't call 'laughter' but that you should call ' laughing
Transcriber unknown. This lecture was not among those transcribed as they were delivered.
A transcript turned up among Sacks' materials after his death. It is designated lecture (6) in
parentheses because its actual position in the course is unknown.

5 70
 Lecture (6) 57 1
together. ' That is to say, both people are laughing at the same time. That's
special and interesting for conversation because there aren't many things that
people do in talk together. Laughter is one of the few things lawfully done
together. But not only is it lawfully done together; the thing about laughing
is that to do laughing right, it should be done together. That is to say, it's not
just that you're not committing a violation if you laugh when someone else is
laughing, but that in certain circumstances, if they laugh and you don't laugh,
then maybe you're committing a violation.
So we can notice a place where there's laughing, and then notice, e.g. , that
it's 'laughing together. ' Then we might ask, "Well, where does laughing go
in conversation?" Now, there's a very simple-minded, no-news answer to
that. Obviously, laughter goes after jokes. But I don't see any particular point
in saying that, though you might be able to say where jokes go, and if you
could say where jokes go then you might be able to drop that out and be able
to say where laughing goes, directly. But one thing that you can begin to catch
if you study a transcript - and particularly if you read it out loud - is that
laughing together is often characterizable as going after something; and what
it goes after is the various parties laughing separately. That is to say, we get
a long laugh together, and one of the things you can find is that there's been
an exchange of short laughs earlier: A says something and chuckles in the
middle or at the end of it. B doesn't join him. Then B makes an utterance in
which he chuckles a little. And that having been done, one may find that they
then produce talk and we then get a joint laugh. And that is a nice, new
characterization for where laughter goes: Laughing together goes after laughing
separately. Its interest is that one begins to see that there's a development of
a laugh; that it is pre-sequenced, and that there's a phenomenon in which a
sequence might be organized around getting a joint laugh. It may turn out
that when somebody does one of these things, they find the other doesn't take
it up. It may then get re-offered and eventually taken up, or not. And if it
isn't taken up, then it may drop. So that whether something is going
somewhere or not can turn on whether the laugh offerings are being accepted
or not. This is almost inspectable out of the transcript; you can almost see the
sequence right there, as compared to having to analyze out whole ranges of
things in a much more elaborate way. But it's a characterization of 'where a
something goes' in a novel way, but yet a sequential way.
Now, once you have that, you can begin to try to understand why it should
be so that we get these exchanges and then a joint laugh. Why should there
be such a sequence? Well, one thing we already noted was that the product
of such a sequence is the laughing together. And, laughing together being one
of the few things people can do together, it might well be that one of the ways
that they arrive at doing something together in their interaction, is by coming
to be able to do a laughing together. And if you're talking about face-to-face
interaction, a thing you want to consider is, there might be a series of other
things involved which commend laughing together as something people
might have as their project. For example, in the course of a laughing together
people have a color change; they can do a little bit of movement; they may
572 Part Vlll
be able to look at each other more extendedly, i.e. , they can do a range of
other things in the course of a laughing together.
This is one instance of examining a thing for where it goes; in this particular
case, what it goes after. Take another sort of thing that's somewhat related.
A thing you find in conversation and that can be viewed plainly if you're
reading a transcript, is expressions of the emotions 'sorrow' and 'joy' . Can I say
now of 'sorrow and joy' that it happens somewhere in conversations? That we
won't find that strong sorrow and strong joy are just distributed over the
course of the conversation but instead, there are real places for them to occur?
Where obviously, connections between, quotes, the expression of emotion,
and the organization of conversation would be of some interest. Well, where
do they go? If you look at conversations, a place pops out. It becomes an
interesting place because it's the same place for both sorrow and joy. If you're
going to have sorrow or joy in the conversation then it's very likely that it goes
very, very early on into the conversation. And it's altogether transparent why
that should be so. That is, if someone has some very large news that would
involve having sorrow or joy about it, then it's their business to call others up
while they still have the sorrow or joy. And it's not only their business to call
others up while they still have the sorrow or joy, but they should also tell it
to them right off. And furthermore, if you're called up and you have a sorrow
or joy to tell, then you should tell it right off.
That's simple enough. There are moderately interesting things involved,
however. Sorrow or joy both go in the same place. Is there any relative
ordering of them? That is to say, since sorrow and joy go in the same place,
can you then ask what is their relationship preferentially to each other?
Suppose one party has one and one party has the other; should they just try
to get them out, or should they try to see if, for example, the other has a
contrast one, so that before announcing joy I will try to check out whether you
have sorrow. If you have sorrow I won't announce joy; I'll let you announce
sorrow and hold off the joy or not tell it to you. That's a possible thing.
Okay, we locate sorrow and joy very early in the conversation relative to the
overall organization of conversation. If we then look at the sorrowjjoy
sequences, we find that the recipient of the news expresses an appropriate
emotion. Now, we find as well that while they express an appropriate
emotion, they do a series of other things first. The announcement is such that
you could imagine that they could say right off, "Oh I'm sorry, " or "Oh I'm
delighted. " It turns out they don't. When one gets into the local organization
of the sequences that involve sorrow or joy, one sees that sorrow and joy don't
come up front in those. Instead what happens is an announcement of some
big news and an expression of surprise by the recipient (though the expression
of surprise can be geared into the wonderfulness or the miserableness). Then
there's some more talk about it by the announcer, and then the expression of
the appropriate emotion.
Now, that turns out to be a cutting observation. And one of the things I
want to make you see is that there's no point to saying something is a
something unless it cuts through the material. Let me show you what I mean
 Lecture (6) 573
for a thing like this. Here is a phone call. Bernice happens to have wonderful
news and calls up Emma. It turns out, however, that Emma has terrible news.
Bernice doesn't put out her news, possibly by virtue of the way Emma puts
out hers right off. In any event, Emma puts out her bad news - she just had
an operation - to which Bernice responds with the characteristic surprise
statement; in this case, "Why?" And then there's a discussion of the
operation.

Emma : Hello
Bernice : Hello
Emma : Hi honey, how are II yuh.
Bernice : Fine, how'r you.
Emma : "hhhhhhhh Oh, I'm pretty goo: :d, I hadda liddle operation on
my toe this week, I hadtuh have- toenail taken off.
(0. 5 )
Bernice : Why: :hh
Emma : Oh, I have a fungus'n I had'n infection,
(0. 3 )
Emma : 'T's a II hell o f a-
Bernice : Oh: : : : : : Emma. Innat awful,
(0.7)
Bernice : Well what a shame. Didjeh haftuh go in the hospit'l?
Emma : No: : , I dist hadda local deal, en 1- id wadn'any fun, but I'm
better I wz, lying on the couch out'n front.
Bernice : Oh: : : I'm sorry Emma?

Focussing on the end, in some ways there's something strange here. The
last thing said is ' 'I'm better, " to which the reply is ' 'I'm sorry. " Now,
nobody hears that ' 'I'm sorry" as ' 'I'm sorry that you're better. " What it is
heard as is an ' 'I'm sorry" for the reported news. Now, in saying that this
expression of sympathy is an expression for the news, we're separating out
what looks like two pairs: 'News announcement - surprise' and then 'news
development - sympathy, ' where those things are disconnected; the surprise
is for the announcement and the sympathy is for the later business. And, e.g. ,
pairs of questions can be treated as separated in that way.
If, however, one is making a case for this being a sequence, then ' 'I'm
sorry" following ' T m better" is perhaps for something else, and one then
examines the relationship between the surprise thing and the expression of
sorrow or joy. Doing that, one begins, to see that the surprise thing is very
important. For one, it gives the other party a chance to fully develop what it
is that happened. Also, if the person doesn't put in the surprise but just the
emotion, then it may be heard as not really caring, i.e. , cutting off the story.
Though there are, we speculate, places where one doesn't put in surprise.
There might be news strong enough so that you don't put in at least some
sorts of surprise, e.g. , things like "Did he really?" For example, if a doctor
comes out of the operating room and says ' 'I'm sorry but your X died," then
5 74 Part VIII
the person doesn't ever say, as far as we can tell, "Did he really?" But, and
this may sound ridiculous, people do "Did he really?" for all kinds of
announcements. In any event, sorrow and joy are prefigured by the surprise
thing. In a way, then, the surprise thing can be treated as reserving rights to
future expression of emotion, saying, "I see that this is the thing that I will
express emotion about. Let me give you some more room to tell me about it.
Then you'll hear me give a wail . "
What I ' m suggesting is that there are all kinds o f things you can
distributionalize. And having distributionalized them, you can juice out some
interesting news from them. I would also try to do multiple distributional­
izings, i.e. , something comes at the beginning, but, relative to the beginning,
it comes subsequent to some other things. I would want then to see, well,
'subsequent to; ' is that a sequence? If so, then I have something else. Then I
have, e.g., that expressions of joy or sorrow go after expressions of surprise.
Now there are sometimes issues of things that appear to be the same, going
at two different places. It may be that there are two or twelve or eighry
different types of places it goes. It may also be that these different places are
locatable and similar. And then another possibility is simply that they're, in
a fashion, different objects. Let me take one and talk briefly about it. An
event, ' invitation, ' has a plain, simple enough, obvious enough place. It goes,
e.g. , early on into a conversation, particularly when the caller is calling to
make the invitation, that being the one legitimate business of that conversa­
tion. Also, since it affects the character of the call, i.e. , since invitations precede
arrangements and renegotiations and all that sort of stuff, there are various
reasons why invitations go early.
But invitations also tum up elsewhere. If you look at those invitations that
don't go early, one of the things they involve is that they're what we call
' interactionally generated' invitations. That is to say, there are invitations
which generate an interaction, i.e. , you call somebody up to invite them to
something, and on the other hand there are invitations which are generated
out of the interaction itself. At some point in it, somebody comes to say
"Why don't we get together?, " "Why don't you come on over?, " things like
that. Now, if you look at the conversation, one begins to find that there are
ways in which the interactionally generated invitations can be positioned. So,
e.g . , if I call you up and offer you a job, whether you take it or not it might
well be that you will then come up with "We ought to get together, " "You
ought to come over for dinner some time, " or something like that, i.e. , people
calling up someone to do something nice for them will often have a response
to that be some sort of invitation. One can then find a variety of kinds of talk
that lead to invitations getting produced.
Now, when you look at those sorts of invitations you can then find that
they are indeed different, in that they get dealt with quite differently. And
there are very simple, dear instances; things like, if somebody calls you up and
invites you to dinner for Friday night, then you say "Yes," "No," ' 'I'd love
to, " whatever. If, however, in the course of the conversation the invitation
seems to be produced out of the course of the conversation, then, not
 Lecture (6) 575
uncharacteristically the recipient doesn't say "Yes" or "No, " but counters it
with another invitation: "No, you come over here," "No, we'll go out to
dinner together. " So an interactionally generated invitation seems to get a
jockeying over whether that invitation will produce the particular event it
seemed to invite one to. But that doesn't obtain for the other sort. One can
then see, not only that an interactionally generated invitation is a kind of
different thing, but one can also begin to see it as the use of an invitation to
do something that is itself sequentially appropriate, i.e. , at a place where
somebody has received a something nice done by somebody else, then there
are a variety of nice things for them to do in return, of which an invitation
may be one among a set of alternatives including, e.g . , doing the same sort of
thing for them ('returning the favor'), being really appreciative, etc.
But of course if something goes in lots of places, you might well try to
figure that it's not 22 different things, but that it's one or two or three things
- though again, you would have to work out the ways in which what you
propose is so. In any event, I'm suggesting that a strategy you should try to
use is to examine things in terms of various senses of where something goes.
And try to pile up the senses of where it goes, even if you have to modify the
characterization of it in order to do that. For example, you might say that
"Hello" delivered in one way is a 'first pair part' and then characterize its
distribution, and then re-characterize it as a 'greeting' and re-characterize its
distribution, i.e. , as a first pair part it provides for a second pair part; as a
greeting it goes at the beginning of the conversation. And you can do that for
lots of types of questions or other things.
A second sort of thing you might do: Utterances variously take what I'll
call 'positioning load. ' By that I mean that they can take various extended­
nesses of positioning themselves, e.g., "Anyway" at the beginning of an
utterance positions the utterance as on topic with what was being talked about
just before the talk now being done. It is a right-hand parenthesis which
proposes we now skip back to something in an on-topic fashion. Now, one
can look at the various ways that an utterance can be put together to position
itself, i.e. , one can look at what kinds of loads what sorts of utterances can
take. So, for example, one might think that "Hello" can't take much of a
positioning load; that at the beginning of a conversation you can't do much
more with "Hello" than do a greeting. But that's not quite true because you
can do things such as, "Why hello . " Which does things like, "I haven't heard
from you in a long time," thereby positioning this conversation relative to
others that we've had, and locating a distance between them. I don't know
how much one can build up around "Hello, " but one might take various
types of utterances and see how much positioning load they can take which
will more or less finely locate where they are.
 References

Albert, E. 1 964: Rhetoric, logic, and poetics in Burundi: culture patterning of speech and behavior.
American Anthropologist, 66, part 2, (6), 3 3- 54.
Davis, A. , Gardner, B. B. , and Gardner, M. R. 1 94 1 : Deep South: a social anthropological study of
caste and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1 940: The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fromm-Reichmann, F. 1960: Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Gill, M. and Rappaport, D. 1 9 6 7 : A case of amnesia and its bearing on the theory of memory. Gill,
M. (ed . ) David Rappaport: Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books, 1 1 3- 1 9 .
Goodenough, W . 1 9 5 1 : Property, Kin, and Community o n Truk. Yale University publications in
anthropology, no. 46. New Haven, Conn . : Yale University Press.
Hopkins, G. M. 1 9 3 7 : The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. House, H. (ed . ) .
London and New York: Oxford University Press.
Irvine, ]. 1974: Strategies of srarus manipulation in the Wolof greeting. Baumann, R. and Sherzer,
]. (eds) Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Isaacs, S. 1 9 4 5 : Intellectual Growth in Young Children . London: G. Routledge and Sons.
Kneale, ]. and Kneale, M. 1 964: The Development of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Maurel, M. 1 9 5 8 : An Ordinary Camp. New York: Simon & Schuster. Translated by Margaret S.
Summers.
Nabokov, V. 1944 : Nikolai Gogo/. Norfolk, Conn. : New Directions Books.
Old Testament, King James Version. Genesis: 1 9 : 1 4 .
Pittinger, R. E . , Hockett, C. F., and Danehy, ]. ]. 1 9 6 0 : The First Five Minutes. New York: Paul
Martineau.
Post, E. 1 9 5 5 : Etiquette. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.
Rappaport, D. (see Gill M. and Rappaport, D. , above).
Ross, A. (ed . ) 1 969: What Are U?. London: Deutsch.
Sarraute, N. 1 969: Between Life and Death. New York: G. Braziller.
Schegloff, E. A. 1 9 7 2 : Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place. Sudnow, D. N. (ed . )
Studies in Socia/ Interaction. New York: Free Press, 7 5 - 1 1 9 .
Schneider, D. 1 96 8 : American Kinship: a cultural account. Englewood Oiffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall .
Turner, R. 1 9 7 2 : Some formal properties of therapy talk. Sudnow, D.N. (ed . ) Studies in Social
Interaction. New York: Free Press, 367-96.
Weber, M. 1 9 5 8 : Politics as a vocation. Garth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (eds) Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 7 7- 1 2 8 .
Weber, M. 1 9 6 3 : The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.
Yates, F. 1 966: The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.

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© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
 Index

absence 3 5-6, 6 2 , 6 7 , 267-8, 3 1 5 , 364, collaborative utterances 5 7-60, 7 1 , 82-3

368 collections of data - reference to 5 , 6, 1 1 , 1 3 ,
academia 5 , 1 7 , 1 1 2 , 1 8 7 , 2 8 2 , 3 3 5 - 7 , 4 1 9 , 1 4 , 1 9-20, 2 5 , 5 9 , 1 3 8 , 1 4 3 , 1 68-9,
5 0 7 , 549- 5 0 , 5 6 1 1 7 5-6, 208, 2 3 0 , 292, 422-3, 429, 4 3 0 ,
accounts, explanations, etc. 94- 5 , 1 9 5 , 48 1 , 5 1 2 , 5 3 0 , 5 4 3 , 5 4 7
2 63-6, 5 3 0 commitment 1 86-7 , 2 59 , 3 80 , 420, 4 5 7
adjacency, adjacency pairs 4 3 , 4 7 , 6 2 , comparison 7 7 , 5 68-9
1 89-90, 5 2 1 - 3 2 , 5 3 3- 7 , 5 54-60 complaints 4 5 - 5 5 , 94- 7 , 1 5 0- 1 , 296-8,
advice see 'warnings, etc. ' 3 1 3- 1 4 , 3 1 6, 4 3 3 , 502-3
aggregate data see collections completion 3 3-4, 3 9-40, 4 3 , 44, 5 7-8, 59,
agreement 3 0 , 1 99 , 2 5 2 , 2 5 6 60, 1 09 , 1 44-6, 182, 1 9 1 , 2 2 4 , 2 2 8 ,
Albert, Ethel 3 8 286-7, 4 3 0 , 4 3 8 , 5 2 7
alternatives 7 3 , 98-9, 1 1 4- 1 5 , 1 1 7 , 1 2 3 , compliments 98- 1 0 3 , 2 72 - 3 , 2 7 8 , 296
1 3 3-6, 1 8 3 , 1 9 5 , 309, 3 7 8 , 404- 5 , 407, contrast 1 7 1 - 2 , 3 1 5- 1 6 , 5 58
447-8, 4 5 5-6, 5 00-2 , 538, 5 4 7 correction see repair
ambiguity 3 7 3-4, 43 1 - 5 , 489-90 correctnessjrtuth 74, 80, 1 1 5- 1 6 , 2 2 2 ,
announcements 8 7-9 1 2 3 4-6, 3 1 6- 1 7 , 3 84-90, 443 , 447
anonymous interaction 95-6, 1 9 1 , 194- 5 , couples-talk 4 3 7-4 3 , 502-3, 5 06-7
1 9 7 , 2 2 1 , 248, 280- 1 , 5 1 0- 1 1
answers see questions & answers description 1 47-9, 1 5 0- 1 , l SD- 1 , 2 1 5-2 1 ,
appearance 79-80 2 3 1 - 2 , 2 34-6, 2 3 6 , 5 40- 1
argument 49, 344-7, 4 3 3 directedness of an utterance 9 1 , 9 3 , 99- 1 0 2 ,
Aristotle 1 5 3-4, 4 7 9 1 9 1 - 2 , 2 76-8 1 , 5 5 3
assembling activities 1 69 dreams 5 1 2 - 1 8
assessments 3 84-90
eating together 203-4, 3 1 8-3 1
believing, etc. 3 09- 1 0 , 462 , 479, 48 1 , entitlement 243-8
5 1 6- 1 7 error 143, 307, 429, 4 3 0 , 49 1
biblical materials & issues 5 1 , 2 2 0 etiquette 6 1 , 64, 208, 3 8 0, 408
Brown, Helen Gurley 1 3 1 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 7 5
explanations see accounts, etc.
categories & classes 5 2 , 7 8 , 99, 1 0 1 -2 , 1 0 3 , 'ex-relationals' 462-3
1 04- 1 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 2 0- 1 , 1 8 2 , 1 94-7 , 2 5 0 , face-to-face interaction 6 5 -6, 9 1 , 1 3 0- 1 ,
296-8, 3 60-6 , 4 0 5 - 7 , 482 , 4 9 0 , 5 1 0, 1 6 7 , 1 9 3 , 394- 5 , 5 7 1 -2
538, 542- 5 3 , 544, 569 fitted talk 1 1 2- 1 3
ceremonials 3 70-2 , 3 74 foreshortened/expanded sequences 1 5 9-69
Chessman, Caryl 2 4 5 formulation 46, 7 3 -4, 1 2 6-9 , 1 3 3 - 5 , 1 8 1 ,
children 489-90, 490-2 2 1 8- 1 9 , 293 -4, 309, 3 67-9, 3 7 1 3 7 4 ,
claiming vs demonsrtating 2 5 2 , 260, 4 3 6 404- 5 , 4 1 3 , 463-4, 5 07-9
closings 8 8 , 3 6 3-6 , 402- 3 , 5 5 2 freedom of occurrence 2 9 3 , 48 5 , 5 3 4- 5
coincidence 2 3 8-40 , 478-9 Freud, Sigmund 2 1 7

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks

577
© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6
5 78 Index
gamesjplay 1 0 5 - 7 , 1 1 0 , 1 1 2 , 1 6 1 , 5 5 0 knowledge 244- 5 , 466-9
getting something done without 'doing' it
7 3-4, 1 76-8 , 1 80- 1 , 2 72-4, 284, 4 1 3 , laughter 1 3 1 , 2 0 7 , 2 74-6, 280, 2 84-8 ,
455 3 9 5 , 486, 5 70-2
Goffman, Erving 5 2 5 layjprofessional 4 , 8, 1 5 , 1 8 , 2 1 7 , 2 6 7 ,
Gogo!, Nikolai 2 3 8-9 2 69-7 1 , 348
Goodenough, Ward 1 89 lies 3 8 0 , 394
gossip 5 2-3 , 1 3 2 lists 13, 65, 3 1 6 , 404, 475, 5 0Q-2 , 5 6 2 ,
grretings 3 5-6, 1 5 8-69, 1 88-99, 544 565
groups 6 5 , 7 8 , 7 8-9, 1 2 1-3 literature 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 , 2 3 8-9, 404-6
localizing the world 1 3- 1 5 , 2 8 , 92-3,
happenstance vs. systematic 3-4, 2 5 , 292, 1 34-5 , 2 1 5-2 1 , 243-8, 2 5 8-9 , 296-8,
305, 377 404 467-8, 483-4, 5 48-9, 5 5 1 , 5 6 3 , 5 68-9
hell as a mnemonic, 399
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 2 1 7 Maurel, Micheline 2 1 8
measurement 1 8 3 , 2 3 5-6
identification (see also categories & classes) 7 3 , memory 4-8 , 2 1-4, 2 7-8, 2 5 7-60, 299,
1 2 6-9, 20 1-2, 3 2 7-30, 404- 5 , 444- 5 2 , 2 5 6, 399, 400- 1 , 462-3 , 5 1 2 - 1 4
466, 482 , 490, 542- 5 3 methodological remarks (see also work talk)
ideology 1 8 7 2 0- 1 , 2 3 , 2 7 , 3 7 , 3 8 , 5 4- 5 , 6 5 , 8 2 ,
iruoms 5 8 , 3 96-7 , 42 1 9 1 - 3 , 1 1 0- 1 1 , 1 2 5 , 1 7 1 -2 , 2 2 2 - 3 , 240,
images 1 3 8 , 1 69 , 240, 2 8 2 , 3 1 3 , 4 2 8 , 469, 2 5 0-3 , 309, 3 1 6- 1 7 , 3 5 8-9, 3 6 1-2,
493 , 5 48-9, 5 5 3 3 6 5-6, 422-3, 5 3 6 , 5 3 8 , 5 54-5 , 5 6 1 ,
imitation 1 1 1- 1 2 5 6 1 -2 , 5 7 2 ; o n absences 3 5-6; o n detail
importance, interestingness 5 7 , 6 2 , 1 3 3-4, 2 6 , 4 3 0 , 4 3 1 ; on the machinery, 1 69; on
2 04, 2 1 5 , 226, 247-8, 3 2 5 , 420, 467, making trouble 20, 5 4 2 ; on single vs
5 4 2 , 5 54-5 , 5 62-3 multiple cases 1 5 7-8, 1 68-9, 542-3,
indexical expressions 1 5 3-4, 1 8 2 , 29 1 , 5 70 , 5 74; on working with materials 5 ,
3 7 3-4, 3 9 1 , 404-5 , 44 5-6 5 8 , 74, 1 5 7-8, 1 68-9 , 2 0 8 , 2 6 7-8,
indirect actions see getting something done 2 69-7 1 , 29 1-2, 3 2 5 , 3 8 4 , 3 8 5 , 3 89-90,
without "doing" it 4 1 9 , 42 1 , 5 3 8 , 5 4 3 , 5 6 2 , 5 7 2
inference 4 5 7 minoriry groups 1 1 8-2 3 , 1 8 0- 1 , 1 8 5-7,
information: packaging & transmission 1 98-9, 2 82-4, 4 5 9; dara 5 3 8 , 5 3 9
69-7 1 , 1 76-8, 1 8D- 1 , 466-9, 4 8 5 -6, moves 1 59 , 1 62
489-90, 492-4
institutional use of ordinary devices 3 80 Nabokov, Vladimir 2 3 8
insults 2 76-80 , 3 74-5 names 6 1 -2 , 63-4, 68-9, 1 1 5 , 1 1 7- 1 8 ,
interruption see rum-taking 1 46-9, 160, 1 6 1 , 1 6 2 , 2 0 3 , 204,
intimacy 5 0 , 1 6 2 , 1 96 , 204, 248, 3 1 1 , 3 7 7-80
405-6, 5 1 1 , 544 news 1 1 - 1 6, 1 72-3 , 2 3 0- 1 , 2 3 8 , 5 63-4,
intonation 22, 160, 162, 203, 5 26 , 5 5 8-9 5 7 2-4
introductions 69-7 1 normal, standard, routine, normative, etc. 5 0 ,
invitations 2 1 0- 1 1 , 367-8, 5 2 8-9, 5 7 1 , 6 7 , 1 59 , 1 70 , 2 3 0 , 2 3 5 , 4 1 9 , 4 5 5 , 4 5 7 ,
575 476
Isaacs, Susan 1 1 2 norms 2 1

James, William 2 8 obligations see rights & obligations

jokes 1 3 1 , 2 0 5-6, 470-88 observabiliry (see also recognizabiliry) 4, 1 7 4,
1 8 5-7, 194- 5 , 2 1 5-2 1 , 5 3 9
Kneale, John and Mary 1 5 3 offers and re-offers 3 1 8-3 1
 Index
pacing 2 7-8, 1 66, 1 6 8 , 2 5 7 , 2 5 9 , 2 66-7 ,
3 4 1 , 346-7 , 4 1 0- 1 1 , 42 8-9
pairing off 1 2 7 , 1 2 8 , 1 2 9-3 3
pairs 1 89-90, 5 2 1-3 7 , 5 6 5
paraphrasing 1 1 2- 1 3
pause see silence, pause
philosophy 5
phoney 79-80
placement, positioning 47, 87-9 1 , 1 88-9,
199, 247-8, 2 5 4, 2 7 3-4, 3 2 0 , 3 5 2-3 ,
3 5 7-8, 3 64, 3 8 3-4, 403 , 422-3, 42 5 ,
42 7 , 4 5 5 , 4 7 3 , 5 3 0, 5 3 8 , 5 3 9-40,
5 5 4-60, 5 5 7-8, 567-8, 5 72 -4, 5 74-5 ,
575
Plato 1 5 4
"poetics" of ordinary talk 264, 2 6 5 , 29 1 - 3 ,
3 0 5 -9, 3 1 4- 1 5 , 3 2 1 - 5 , 34 1-4,
3 96-40 1 , 420-8, 4 3 1 -6, 5 0 5
poetry 2 1 6, 2 1 7
Post, Emily 69
practical mysticism 1 47-8
preference 96-7 , 1 3 3 , 144, 1 47-9, 2 0 7 ,
2 2 3-4, 3 67-8, 3 74, 409, 4 1 3 , 4 1 4- 1 5 ,
444- 5 2 , 4 5 6 , 496, 5 2 4 , 5 6 5-6, 5 66-7 ,
572
pre-sequences 5 29
preservable features of an interaction for use
in another 49, 1 6 5 , 2 8 3 , 4 5 8-6 5 , 466-9
private calendars 1 6 7 , 5 64-5
pronouns see indexical expressions
proverb 422-4, 426-30
psychiatric issues, materials, etc. 2 8 , 1 0 5-6,
1 3 5-6, 2 1 7 , 2 5 9-60, 3 1 2 , 3 7 6-409,
426, 5 1 4
puns see "poetics"
questions and answers 2 5 , 47, 1 2 4- 5 ,
1 7 6-8 , 282-4, 380-3, 4 2 7 , 5 3 0 , 5 3 5 ,
5 3 7-9, 5 47-8, 5 5 9 , 5 6 1 -9; answers re
project of questions 4 1 2- 1 5 ; Q-q-a-A
3 44-6, 5 2 8 , 5 2 9
Rappaport, David 2 8
reason for a call 8 8 , 163 -6, 1 69-7 1 , 2 1 0 ,
440
recasting a prior action 286-7
recipient design 7, 229-3 0, 2 74-6, 3 8 5-90,
404- 5 , 4 3 8-43 , 44 5 - 5 0 , 4 5 3-7, 474- 5 ,
479-8 1 , 540- 1 , 5 64
recognizabiliry (see also observabiliry) 1 8 - 1 9 ,
5 79
2 5 , 3 9-40, 2 2 3 , 2 2 7 , 2 3 0 , 2 3 4-6,
249- 5 0 , 2 5 7 , 3 84-90
recurrence (see collections)
reference 1 4 , 502-3
relevance 7, 1 90- 1 , 1 9 3 , 2 2 2 , 2 2 3 , 2 2 7 ,
2 76-8 1 , 3 6 1 , 3 6 3 -4, 3 6 9 , 422-3,
460- 1 , 5 5 5
repair 1 1 5 , 1 2 0- 1 , 146, 1 8 3 , 429, 447-8,
470-2 , 5 2 5 , 5 5 9-60
repeats 62, 1 4 1-4, 2 5 3 , 4 1 3 , 486, 5 3 5
requests 9 , 2 2 5 , 229-30, 409
rights & obligations 5 0-2 , 67, 9 1 , 108, 1 34 ,
1 6 1 , 2 2 0 , 407, 4 9 6 , 5 4 5
Ross, A. 6 2
rules, et a!. 29, 49- 5 5 , 6 1 , 1 9 3 , 2 3 1 , 246,
286-8, 3 1 5 - 1 6, 3 3 9, 362-3, 4 1 3 ,
444- 5 2 , 48 1 -2, 490-2 , 5 3 3 - 5 , 5 4 2 ,
5 4 3 , 5 6 3 ; recipient-design rules 1 4 7 ,
3 68-9, 438-8 3 , 44 5 - 5 0 , 5 6 4 ;
tum-taking rules 2 7-8, 4 4 , 2 2 3-4, 496,
527
sampling 6 3 , 1 69
Sapir, Edward 5 1 3
Sarraute, Nathalie 2 1 5
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 200, 5 2 8
Schneider, David 462
sentences 40, 57, 60, 1 44-6, 1 8 2 , 224, 430,
5 2 6- 7 , 5 2 9- 3 0
sequence 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 3 , 46, 4 7 - 9 , 64- 5 , 94,
1 00- 1 , 1 0 5- 7 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 4- 1 8 , 1 5 1 -2,
1 5 9-69, 200- 1 0 , 2 5 3 , 3 1 8-3 1 , 3 44-6,
3 5 4-8 , 472-7, 5 2 1 - 3 2 ; sequence of
interpretation 1 34- 5 , 2 7 7
sequencing 5 , 22-3 , 1 2 4- 5 , 1 8 1 -2, 1 9 2 ,
2 3 1-2 , 2 5 4, 292-3 , 3 0 5 - 7 , 4 1 4- 1 5 ,
5 5 7-8, 5 67-8
setting 96
signals 65, 1 44- 5 , 1 8 2 , 2 2 5 , 2 9 5 , 5 2 7 ,
5 2 9 , 5 3 6, 5 64
silence, pause 1 4 5 , 496-8, 5 3 5 , 547
Simmel, George 7 8 , 1 3 2
simpliciry, complexiry 5 2 1 , 5 2 8
slots 5 4 7
socialization 3 3 1 , 490-2
social sciences 5, 2 3 , 26, 2 7 , 30, 36, 5 0- 1 ,
1 3 2- 3 , 1 3 7 , 1 3 9, 206, 2 1 9, 240, 292,
3 1 5 , 3 5 9 , 3 6 5 -6, 3 74, 3 7 9 , 4 1 9, 430,
43 1 , 495 , 500, 536, 542-3 , 5 48-9, 562,
569
5 80
statistics 60, 2 1 6 , 2 2 1 , 5 42-3
status 1 9 8-9, 3 62-3 , 542
stories, storytelling 3-16, 1 8-2 1 , 1 7 8-80,
2 1 5- 1 6 , 2 1 8, 2 2 1 , 2 29-4 1 , 242-8,
2 66-8 , 2 7 1-2, 2 84-8, 2 94-6, 3 1 1- 1 3 ,
42 1 -2 , 42 5 , 44 1 , 4 5 3-7, 4 5 8-6 5 ,
466-9, 472-7, 483-6, 5 0 5 - 7 , 509- 1 1 ,
5 1 2- 1 3 , 5 3 0- 1 ; second stories 3-8, 2 1-6,
249-5 9, 2 6 1-3 , 304- 5 ; story prefaces
1 0- 1 1 , 2 2 2-8
student questions 2 6-3 1 , 1 3 1-2, 309,
3 2 4- 5 , 338, 44 5 , 5 1 6- 1 7 , 549-50
subjectivity-objectivity 483
subversion 382, 4 1 2
suicide 3 76-83 , 392-3
symbols 93-4
telephone as new institution 1 6 1-2, 1 9 8 ,
5 48-9, 5 5 1
tellabiliry 1 2 - 1 3 , 1 6 , 1 70-3 , 2 3 3 , 464,
493-4
thankables 1 76-7 , 208, 406-7 , 408-9 ,
5 74-5
thinking 1 66-8 , 1 74, 1 8 1-2, 1 9 3 , 194- 5 ,
2 1 6 , 2 1 9 , 2 2 0 , 2 3 7 , 2 38-40, 2 5 7 , 2 5 9 ,
3 4 1 , 3 46-7 , 404- 5 , 42 8 , 429, 5 1 2- 1 4,
5 64
tickers 1 9 5 , 3 64- 5 , 5 3 1
topic 1 9-20, 2 2 , 2 3 , 7 5-9, 80-2 , 88-90,
9 1 -3 , 1 5 9 , 1 7 8-9, 203-5 , 2 5 4- 5 ,
298-302 , 3 43-4, 348- 5 3 , 3 5 5-6,
432-5 , 444, 5 3 1 , 5 6 1-9, 5 6 3 ,
5 65-6
Index
transformation 1 3 7-9, 200- 1 , 466, 48 1 ,
5 5 2 , 5 5 6 , 5 69
troubles 194- 5 , 2 4 5-6, 2 5 8-9 , 3 76-9 5 ,
402-8, 499-5 1 1 , 5 4 � 5 5 1
Turner, Roy 1 0 5
tum-taking 3 2-43 , 1 8 2 , 2 2 3-8, 3 4 5 -6,
3 49-5 3 , 3 5 7-8, 3 63-4, 4 1 0- 1 2 , 495-8,
5 2 3-8, 5 3 6-7 , 5 54-60; interruption
24-5, 44- 5 5 , 9 1 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 2 , 2 86-7 , 320,
525
eying 349-5 1 , 3 5 6-7
" uh" 4 1 0, 496-8, 5 4 7-8, 548
"uh huh" et al. 8-9 , 1 0 , 1 84 , 2 60, 388,
3 8 9 , 4 1 0- 1 2 , 42� 526
understanding 8-9, 3 0- 1 , 5 8 , 1 1 2 - 1 3 ,
1 40-2 , 1 83-4, 2 1 3 , 2 3 2 , 2 5 2- 3 , 260,
422-3 , 42 5-30, 472-7 , 4 7 8 , 480- 1 ,
485-6 , 5 00-2
utterances 3 9-40, 4 3 , 5 9 , 60, 6 2 , 1 09 , 1 9 1 ,
2 2 3 -5 , 2 50, 495-8, 5 2 5-6
verbs 1 5 0- 3 , 1 74 , 1 8 1-2
violations 46-5 5 , 2 1 9 , 482 , 490-2 , 5 2 5 ,
5 4 3 , 566
warnings, challenges, etc. 1 1 5- 1 9 , 3 30- 1
Weber, Max 5 1
Woolf, Virginia 404
wordsearches 5 8 , 429, 5 3 5
work remarks 3 , 1 7 - 1 8 , 2 8-9, 6 1 , 208,
2 1 5 , 3 2 5 , 3 3 5-9; on getting started 3,
26-7, 139, 5 1 2 ; on odd occurrences 59;
on seeing 8 , 2 3 4