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Using completion to formulate a statement collectively
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Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 525-542
Using completion to formulate a statement collectively F61ix D f a z , C h a r l e s A n t a k i * , A l a n F. C o l l i n s Department of Psychology. Lancaster University, Lancaster LAI 4YF, UK
Received November 1994, revised version August 1995 Abstract We describe how participants in an interaction use completions of each others' talk to bind themselves to a collective formulation of a matter in hand. In a corpus of problem-oriented discussions among groups of two or three people, we find speakers using sequences of completable utterance - putative completion - ratification to put their formulations of a problem-solution on a joint footing (a participant status that adds 'collective author' to Levinson's catalogue of producer footings). We describe the use of the completion sequence, and show how there are variations in its ratification stage (including explicit acceptance, repeating and reshaping).
1. Introduction In this paper we want to weave together two separate, but well established, strands of conversational phenomena - completions and formulations - to show how they produce an utterance attributable to certain status of speaker: a joint speaker, or collective. The general case for seeing speakers treating themselves as a collective is suggested by Sacks (especially his comments about affiliation in interactions; e.g. Sacks Fall 1964 Lecture 12, in Sacks, 1992: 101ft.) and has been developed by Lerner (especially in Lerner, 1993). Our particular aim in this paper will be to follow up and sharpen a part of Sacks' and Lerner's analysis. Specifically, we want to show how ensemble work can be done by participants completing each others' utterances to produce a formulation (in the sense established by Heritage and Watson, 1979, 1980) which puts the participants in the exchange - at least temporarily - on an explicitly collective footing. To give some background to the argument we shall be making, we shall first say something about formulation and footing, then introduce our data and briefly sketch the sequential model of completable utterance - putative completion - uptake into which formulation and footing fit. Then, in the latter half of the paper, we shall go * Corresponding author. Address for correspondence: Department of Social Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. 0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)00060-7
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through examples of the variations we come across in a data set particularly likely to throw up formulative completions. To start us off, we shall look at the same passage of talk three ways to illustrate each of the three things we are claiming are operative in the talk: the completion of one person's turn by another; the reading of what is completed as a formulation of some aspect of the interactional matters in hand; and the treatment by the participants of the completed formulation as being done on a collective footing. 1.1. Completions
This is the extract we shall be looking at to illustrate completion and then formulation. The source of these data is described on p. 531, and notation conventions are listed in the Appendix to this paper. (1) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2 B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (...) Let us start off by focussing on the completion that is offered at turn 2 (in a moment, we shall turn to the formulation involved). Speaker B offers multiple parties are to blame as a completion for A ' s utterance at the point where A reaches ... what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort (and we understand perhaps, ' o f ) . This collaborative event, identified by Sacks (in his 1960s lectures, starting with Fall Lecture 3, 1965) has been further analyzed under the headings of 'collaborative sentence construction' (Lerner, 1987, 1991), 'cognitive completion' (Leudar and Antaki, 1988) 'collaborative completion' (Rae, 1990), and 'joint construction of turns' (Coates, 1994). Lerner, who has done most intensive work on completion, sees it as a matter of 'compound turn--constructional units', composed of two elements, where a first element projects a space for the second one. This conversational structure provides the possibility for a second speaker to intervene by the end of the first part of the unit (the completable), contributing with the projected second part (the completer): (2) (taken from Lerner, 1991) Rich: if you bring it intuh them Carol: ih don't cost yuh nothing Carol's utterance makes sense in itself as a sentence, but it completes a conversational structure established by Rich's 'if'. ' I f X / t h e n Y' structures are one of the possible compound turn-constructional units that can be produced sequentially by several speakers (Lerner, 1987, 1991). We agree with Lerner that such compound constructions are sites for completions, but we think that one can broaden the hori-
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zon, and see completions elsewhere. To identify a completion as being collective formulation, our argument will run, we shall have to inspect not just its internal construction (as a compound structure, or an expansion, for example) but also the way ~t is ratified in its uptake by the original speaker. The prevailing reading of completion in the work of Rae (1990) and Lerner (1987, 1991) is that B just finishes off what A would have said, but we shall see that there is more to it than that. We are making here a special case of a general argument we make elsewhere (Antaki et al., 1996), where we try to set out the case for thinking of completions as being set into a three-part structure, in which the second part proposes a completion of the third part, and the third part ratifies it as being given in the appropriate footing.
1.2. Formulation Now let us turn to formulation, the second of the strands that we shall be tying together. Here we follow the conversation analytic approach developed from SchegÁÙff's (1972) fleshing-out of Sacks' observation that the most mundane descriptions of events and places are motivated, and consequential: they matter to the interaction and to how it develops. Heritage and Watson (1979, 1980) push the story on by a close inspection of the ways in which speakers manage the offer of summarising the gist or force of the matter in hand. A formulation is some bid for a statement of what is at hand in the previous stretch of talk, and invites acceptance; non-acceptance is marked by markers of dispreference. For example: (3) (Heritage and Watson, 1979: 130) (Young caller speaking to counsellor of 'home troubles' about employment) Co ... when do you take your O levels? Ca I take them in June In June Co Ca Yeah Co--) Yes so you know you will get the job the results and you could get a job Ca--) (Well look) you see, it's not just that gets me down, it - it you know, because my mum's she's she's a bit In the first arrowed line, the Counsellor (Co) offers a formulation (Yes so you know you will get the job ...). In the next line, the Caller (Ca) marks her response to the counsellor's formulation - as it happens, it is dispreferred (well look), signalling a disagreement (it's not just that gets me down) and offering an alternative (you know, because my mum's ...). If we go back to our starting example, we can see that the same sequence applies: if we treat A and B's material together, we might say that multiple parties are to blame is treated as a formulation of what it is that captures the required formulation - the what shall we say. Note, though, that in the Heritage and Watson example, the counsellor offers the formulation, and it is reacted to as being on the counsellor's own footing; there is no implication that the counsellor is speaking for the caller or for both of them jointly, as is the case we are concerned with in this paper. Let us move on to that now.
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1.3. Completing a formulation Our claim is that a formulation like the one above can come to be made jointly when one speaker's utterance is completed by another and the whole is appropriately ratified. To get to that full claim we set off from Sacks's comments about completion (in Spring 1966, Lecture 7; 1992: 320ff., and more confidently Fall 1967, Lecture 4; 1992: 649ff.). He observes that it is common in everyday conversation for one speaker to complete another speaker's utterance, and for the original speaker to ratify the completion, as in this example: (4) (Sacks, 1992: 321) Roger: Kids don't drive long ... by the time they're eighteen they're back walk(hh)ing hehh through circumsta(hh)nces hehhehh Ther.: beyond their control. Roger: ehhehh Yes hehhehh Part of Sacks's analysis about such a completion is that "one obvious thing that such a production might be seen to do ... is showing the new guy that this is a group" (ibid.: 321); that is to say, that it accomplishes the work of setting up the speakers as a collective of some sort. Lerner (1993) takes the analysis on to say about such completions that "speakers can demonstrate their co-participation .,. by joining in the production of an ongoing action. For example ... through anticipatory completion ... of that participant's not-yet-completed utterance" (1993: 221). So completion might by itself be a means of making an ensemble or collective bearable. Our contribution to the story is this. We think that there is one specially powerful use of the completion sequence that Sacks and Lerner are talking about, a use particularly fitted for the job of making the speakers cohere as an ensemble: that is when participants use completion to converge on a certain understanding o f - a formulation of - the matter in hand. Formulations are specially significant for ensembles because (if accepted) they determine the expectable parameters of subsequent local business; they make a certain range of further objects hearable, as Sacks would say, and put others off limits.
2. The footing on which a joint completion is produced: The collective author What we have proposed so far then, is that in the kind of completion we see in passages like (1) above, the resulting completed utterance (in that case, we'll say that sort of multiple parties are to blame) is a formulation of the ensemble's business. There is one more aspect of that completed utterance that needs to be said, and it is an important one: the participants' understanding of the footing on which it is given and accepted. The notion of footing starts (but does not stop) with G o f f m a n ' s (1981) observation that one's utterances in an interaction can issue from a number of roles, or
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footings - in G o f f m a n ' s original account, the role of animator of what one is saying, as its author, or as its principal. This looks like a good lens through which to look at the ' e n s e m b l e ' footings that concern us here. But one must be careful in applying G o f f m a n ' s insights to the actual give-and-take of language exchange. As Schegloff (1988) observes, Goffman does not always back up his interpretation of what is at stake in an interaction by appeal to participants' own orientations, and this has led to suspicion among at least some conversation analysts that, as Watson puts it, "the Goffman/ethnomethodology-conversation analysis pairing is ... composed of approaches that are.. quite distinct and indeed irreconcilable" (Watson, 1992: 2). The problem is, fundamentally, an epistemological one: how does one ground some claim like 'A is speaking for herself' (or, for us, 'as part of an e n s e m b l e ? ' ) ? For Watson, G o f f m a n ' s grounds are in metaphor and analogy, and however penetrating and seductive these might be at (something like) a literary level, they are and this is the damagingly inevitable error - at one remove from what actually goes on. To assert on metaphorical grounds something like 'A is speaking for herself' is to cast what A is doing under an umbrella whose width may suit the analyst but not necessarily A, or her audience. What then, to do? The answer that ethnomethodologists like Watson endorse is to search for the kind of evidence which is not metaphorical - evidence which is there in the way that interactants themselves, through talk and other interactional business, orient to each others' utterances. That is, to move off the shaky ground of metaphor, where there is (always) an argument to be picked about the range of application of even the aptest and most insightful analogy, and on to the firm ground of talk which is, in Watson's phrase, "centrally involved in establishing the accountable features of settings, in constituting settings" (ibid.: 6). That is the path we shall be following in our treatment of footing. We start by picking a firm spot in Levinson's (1988) unmetaphoric reading o f - and interactional evidence for - the notion of footing. The core idea to keep in mind here is that we can look to participants' own orientations to each other as evidence that they are speaking as authors, messengers, spokespeople and so on; that is, that we shall find in and around a turn at talk visible and hearable evidence that the candidate utterance is indeed being offered, and accepted as, 'A speaking for herself' (and so on). Levinson's linguistic pass on footing is to think of people orienting to different grounds for speaking, or to each others' 'producer roles'. In his list those roles (always volatile; there is no implication that they are fixed) turn out to be: author, spokesperson, the relayer of a message, its deviser, its sponsor, the person who 'ghost-writes' it, or the person on whose behalf it is 'ghost-written'. Note, though and this is a big thing for us - that Levinson's list is rather individualised. There seems to be no place in his scheme for the person's utterance to be designed for reception as being on a j o i n t footing with at least one other person. And yet this does seem to be a real possibility, and is patently visible in a range of interactional devices analysed by Sacks (1992, passim) and specifically in Lerner (1993). To give an example from Sacks, consider this exchange with the highly suggestive ' w e ' :
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(5) (Sacks, Spring 1966, Lecture 7; ibid.: 321) Ken: We were in an automobile discussion As it stands, this would seem to need no more than the usual apparatus of deixis for its handling. But note how it is immediately taken up: (6) (ibid.) Ken: We were in an automobile discussion Roger: discussing the psychological motives for ( ): h h h h h h h h AI: drag racing on the street As Sacks says, such sequences of utterances " d o together what is among the most prototypical things that a single person would d o " (ibid.: 321). Or, to put it in Levinson's terms, the utterances succeeding the first one make manifest that each is to be understood as part of the same unit, issuing from the same source a collective one, not an individual author in each separate case. To make the point with an illustration from our own corpus, we might return to the example we saw above: (7) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2---~B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (...) It is difficult to set B ' s offer and A ' s uptake into L e v i n s o n ' s scheme without a certain amount of squeezing. What we mean is this: the best that L e v i n s o n ' s scheme might provide for is to try reading B as being treated as a s p o k e s p e r s o n , but a spokesperson, by definition, is not treated by the audience as having the same motivation for speaking as the author. Authors (by L e v i n s o n ' s definition) are treated as speaking for themselves; spokespersons are treated as speaking for others. Just as in Sacks' case of Ken, R o g e r and A1, though, the uptake here in turn 3 suggests very strongly that the participants treat the utterance in turn 2 as having not the motivation of its physical speaker, but rather the joint motivation of both speakers together, with ((writing)) forming its physical manifestation. This motivation produces the utterance 'multiple parties are to b l a m e ' as a recorded joint j u d g e m e n t - as ' w h a t we'll say'. So we are proposing, in this paper, to add collective author to L e v i n s o n ' s list of participant statuses, and we shall try to show how it is useful in understanding what happens when formulations are offered in completions.
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3. The uptake of a completion We should note that Lerner's and R a e ' s accounts of completions we saw above might suggest that the completion is given as what the first speaker was just about to say, "and not as a guess inviting acceptance or rejection" (Lerner, 1987). But this seems to us to deny the original speaker the otherwise universally available opportunity to evaluate a previous utterance (here, the putative completion) one way or another. We prefer to say that the case that Rae and Lerner persuasively describe is the default case in which non-intervention implies assent; but it is always open to A to disconfirm whether or not that was the proper formulation of the joint position. The third part of a sequence where that might happen is normally a means by which "a first speaker can determine the sense that a second made of his or her utterance" (Heritage and Atkinson, 1984). This move by the original speaker becomes more relevant when the second speaker is relying on the original utterance more than normally, as happens in completion sequences (that is to say, relying on the previous utterance to make a syntactically complete unit when joined with what he or she is saying). Completions "are systematically taken as c a n d i d a t e continuations" of the completable (Lerner, 1987; our italics), and this can mean that the speaker who produced the completable in turn 1 will consider themselves to be implicitly other-selected to come back in turn 3 with an evaluation of the completion. We will refer to these third turns generally as the uptake or, as Rae (1990) does, the ratification, of the completion (we prefer this to Lerner's term 'receipt' simply because that sounds a little less active). The uptake involves an explicit recognition of the event of completion, displaying an orientation to the content of the completion as such, and to the footing on which the completion was made.
4. Introducing the data Previous work we have done on completions in naturally-occurring conversations (Antaki et al., 1996) showed us that certain sorts of interaction were more prone to throw up the phenomena we are looking for - specifically, in the London-Lurid corpus we used then, interactions where the matter in hand were things like a selection interview decision, a discussion over a route-map and so on. Not needing now to show that formulating completions do happen, we wanted a data set that was likely to include a reasonable amount of this kind of ensemble work, so we arranged some discussion groups in which people were very likely to orient the talk towards reaching a c o m m o n decision. Groups of two or three participants (mostly students) were given a brief story extracted from a newspaper, describing a social drama (the specific issues probably d o n ' t matter, but for the record they were typical news stories about abortion, domestic violence and drug abuse), and were asked to 'reach agreement on ethical questions regarding the case', the agreed j u d g e m e n t to be written down on a
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standard response sheet. They were left in a room and their conversation was recorded. It is at the later stages of discussions (when participants are getting close to actually writing down a formulation of what they agree on the issues) that collective formulations can be identified more often. It is importrant to stress, though that our interest is not whether or not participants produced collective formulations (by the very design of the study, they are expected to do that), but on how conversational completion is deployed as a device for it. The set-up is of course contrived, but the way the participants go about doing the interactional work the set-up requires is up to them: We have to pay for the contrivance, though, in other ways: we shall see that there will be some occasions on which a case can be made for treating the ensemble talk as being oriented not only to the local participants but to the recording researcher as well. However, as long as we are aware of this extra audience, it need not damage the analysis of what is happening on stage.
5. Collective f o r m u l a t i o n s : H o w are they made possible? We scrutinised all the occasions of completion in the fifteen transcripts (there were, in this corpus, 74 instances). Many of the instances could be read as being performed on the footing of A or B as ordinary speaker, or 'ratified author' in Goffman and Levinson's terms (Levinson, 1988). Because our argument is about collective formulation, we will concentrate on these, leaving aside completions performed in individual voices. A collectivity can be constituted in conversational completion in which the 'speaking subject' is actually several different individuals. In the empirical work we report here, this very often happened towards the end of the discussion exercise, when the collective agreed solution was being written down for the sake of the (physically absent, but socially present) researcher. Aspects of the former context are crucial for the speakers to align in the production of the collective statement. For the analyst, various aspects of the former and latter context are informative evidence that the completion sequence is formulating a collective position. To help with the discussion of the data, it was convenient to break up the examples into manageable chunks on some analytically defensible grounds. Given our account of completion as being a three-part sequence of completable utterance completion - ratification, predictable variation in the last step (ratification) suggested itself as a reasonable grid for a catalogue. Accordingly, the examples of formulation may be classified according to the fate suffered by the offered completion. We saw in our data that, crudely speaking, B's offer can attract, in the ratification phase, acceptance; repeating; reshaping; and non-ratification. We will deal with each of these in turn. There are, of course, many other ways to divide up the data for the sake of presentation; but this one, motivated by the analysis of completions as We are grateful to Gene Lerner for extending to the first author the facility of the computer programme Workbench to facilitate transcription, storage and processing of the material.
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being variously disposed of by the participants, does at least have the recommendation of being coherent with the paper's general rationale. 5.1. C o m p l e t i o n s a c c e p t e d on a collective f o o t i n g
The most typical ratification of completion offered as a formulation on a collective footing was that it be accepted by the original speaker. In the following extract, B at the arrowed line offers a completion of a collective self-evaluation initiated by A: (8) [Drugs 1] B: anyway yeah 1 A : so let me yeah so I me well the the range of our discussion here shows 2--> B: shows (0.2) the: (0.3) enormity of the problem of [-how to 3 A: Lyeah B: come back to [-the A: Lyeah yeah so but what [-do you think? can we? B: Ldo you think? A: can we could we tie an end of it can we? B: yeah sure we should do we should do The first thing to note is that A's sea-change of pronominal reference from first person singular to first-person plural pronoun in 'so let me yeah so I me well the the range of our discussions' explicitly repairs in favour of collective authorship and entitles B to participate in the evaluation, bringing it into line with the state of affairs in Sacks' prototypical example discussed above. The second thing to note is that what is shared between A and B is a f o r m u l a t i o n - the clue is the design of A ' s utterance as oriented towards summarising what is the case with the introductory so and the eventual: 'the range of our discussions s h o w s ...' (emphases added). B latches onto this formulatory aspect of A ' s sentence by repeating the significantly formulative s h o w s , and then provides the rest of the formulation in the object of the sentence. A ratifies in such a way that B's offer is itself latched onto, developing the assessment into a proposition (again for collective action) to 'tie an end of it', which is accepted. The fact that the B sentence was not completed, is not oriented to as relevant by the participants. At the stage at which A marks his acceptance of B, it is already clear for both of them that there are issues of complexity in their discussion, and that was what needed saying. A has projected a comment about complexity in 'the range of our discussion', and B's contribution reformulates it ('the enormity of the problem'). In the following excerpt (9), B arrives with help when A ' s account stalls, and the result is a collective account: (9) [Drugs 3] 1 A : mh yeah that's definitely linked isn't it? petty theft because he was into petty theft but she was uh (0.8) started to sell stuff to raise money for well
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2--+ B: for [-the drug addiction yeah 3 A: Ifor the that's right (0.7) A: she was part of it then wasn't she? B: mh The beginning of 1 orients to B's former proposition to consider petty theft. A, in 1, can be heard to be searching for something to stand as a motive for a story character's raising money, and B provides a candidate. The assertion ends up as being treated as shared by both speakers. Note though, that here the sense of what is being completed is perhaps less obviously a formulation as such. B offers a completion of something which, at the clausal level, seems to be a fairly blank statement. The reading of it as a formulation is slightly masked by the fact that it is part of a clause embedded in the body of A ' s utterance, which can be heard to be a formulation in the sense that it is designed to orient to explicate a description of part of the scene ('petty theft because he was into petty theft ...'), which extends into its own qualification ('but she started to sell stuff to raise money for well'). In that sense it is a formulation of what is to be made of previous conversational material to do with 'petty theft' as a description of the matter under discussion. One of the most interesting features of joint formulation is that it constructs both the joint position it formulates and the collective which is speaking. Several speakers act as a single identity with a single voice: (10) [Dom. viol. 4] 1 A: for not taking many uh (0.8) probably they obviously don't take the the threat uh seriously do they? (3.3) but that y'know disregards the case (2.0) what they heard at court 2--> B: was his account but why didn't they ask for her account? 3 A: that's what I mean was she at court? we don't know (5.5) As Lemer (1991) shows, here as in many other occasions for completion, the topic of turn 1 projects the content of the completion. The statement 'what they heard at court was his account' and the subsequent question are performed in the singular voice of the (plural) person concerned with 'her account'. 'That's what I mean' could not be more explicit as a confirmation, and 'we don't know' ties up the sequence with an explicit reference to the participants as a collective. As we mentioned above, the jointness of the formulation is very clear in the parts of the transcripts in which the participants are engaged in writing down their collective solution to the problem. It is perhaps more normative for participants to express a common point here, after some stretch of talk hearable as 'discussion' has been gone through, and when a decision is seen as very likely. The following extract, which we have already used twice as an exemplary illustration, serves again to show how joint formulations can take the form of completion sequences in this kind of situation:
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(11) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2-+ B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (0.4) B: trying to be God or something and decide whether he should live or not (1.1) A: ((writing)) okay because she tried to be (2.3) God: (0.5) and By the end of his long turn in l, A invites B to participate by asking a question and starting to answer it as a collective that comprises both speakers. B offers a 'multiple parties' formulation, which A accepts with enthusiasm. He starts to write down the answer, and in doing so proposes a version which separates out the 'parties' involved (say the m o t h e r ...). Given this, 'for' in 3 is clearly initiating a formulation of the reason why 'the mother' is to blame. At this point, B offers an answer, which A accepts and repeats. In the next case it was basically the initial reference to giving the solution ('what shall we say'), together with the activity of writing, that invited a joint account. Sometimes, as here, there is no explicit allusion to giving the final solution, but the participants' talk shows that that is what they are doing. The silence at the beginning of the next sequence follows the completion of a successful argument that produced agreement: (12) [Ab. 31 (6.7) 1 A: ((writing:)) law should be changed (2) to (2) maximum (2.2) eighteen weeks (1.9) brackets (0.4) twenty-four weeks (2.2) on medical grounds (8.5) need this clause (3.5) 2-+ B: for amniocen Ftesis 3 A: Lyeah as amniocentesis ((writing:)) cannot be performed (3.8) before (0.8) twenty weeks (3.7) you want to add any more? (1.7) C: Fmh:: I don't know B: Ln I think that that will do ((B and C laugh)) Because of the very design of the laboratory environment in which these discussions took place, with the premium it placed on reaching a judgement for the sake of the 'experimenter', the m o m e n t of writing implies agreement. What was not implied in the design was performing this agreement through the sequential collaborative formulation of the final solution. In this case, B is helping to formulate and reminding others of what has already been discussed. After accepting the completer, A modifies it in his own way to make it fit the written text.
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5.2. Repeats and collective footing Our analysis of completion sequences tends to find that repeats in the third part work as (that is, are treated by participants as) active acceptances. The outcome of a sequence in which a completion proposed on a collective footing is repeated is therefore not very different from what we described in the above subsection. Further on in the execution of the task, as the stretch of 'discussion' talk affords greater saliency to a 'decision', a collective formulation is more clearly hearable as constituting agreement, and a ratification with repeat will consolidate it, as in the example below: (13) [Drugs 1] 1 A: so we're saying so you're right now more family ties and bonds be encouraged where (0.6) parents be encouraged not only to meet (0.3) the physical material needs of children but also to have (0.7) 2--> B : quality time 3 A: quality time qual it's a good that's a good phrase isn't it? quality time yeah (0.2) yeah (0.6) I mean (0.2) well I mean it takes us into another (0.1) problem with the whole thing that often parents themselves are drug addicts or have been drug addicts and they have The repeat here is 'quality time' and the sequence reproduces the pattern we have already shown above: the completion sequence is prefaced by an explicit reference to a collective formulation in progress ( ' w e ' r e saying') and to agreement ( ' y o u ' r e right') achieved before. This reference to a former context of collective action is crucial in the constitution (or maintenance) of joint formulation. The preface is followed by the projection of a two-part response to the problem ('not only/but also'), and the completer pauses at the beginning of the second part. This pause is taken as an opportunity for intervention by B: but note that the intervention is playing a crucial role in the design of the formulation, and it is taken up as new for the main speaker, as well as being evaluated as 'a good phrase'. 5.3. Reshaping and modifying collective formulations So far w e ' v e seen the offered completion being taken up by an outright acceptance, and by a repeat which functions as an acceptance. But it can also undergo some kind of reshaping. Through this process, participants change details of the formulated object in each subsequent reformulation, as here: (14) [Ab. 1] C: a piled mass 1 A: well no I say when you call a baby (0.2) sort of 2--> B: ababy 3 A: a a human (0.3)
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C: they're getting premature birth early and early and early that they can have survived (0.2) This excerpt occurs within an argument between C on one side, and A and B teaming up on the other side, in which A and B argue for the possibility of determining when a foetus can be regarded as human, and C discards that possibility. In this context, the completion sequence strives for the formulation of the difference between two different entities along time. B ' s 'a baby' is suggesting that at a certain point in time a foetus is a baby. A modifies that into 'a human', to mark the difference from his former 'a baby'. In other words, what A would formulate as 'at a certain point a baby can be called a human', B would formulate as 'at a certain point a baby can be called a p r o p e r baby'. These two are alternative formulations of the difference defended by A and B. C shows no problem in understanding the difference, but disagrees with it just after it is formulated. We see a greater degree of active agreement in the following excerpt, where the three participants in a discussion are formulating their position against abortion: (15) [Ab. 5] A: but I mean a baby shouldn't have to die [-just because B: kexactly A: somebody did a rape (O.6) B: [-and I don't think 1 A : Land I also think I mean I know cases well not personally (0.3) but like mothers who have been raped and they have the baby= C: =mh= 2--+ B : =and [-loved it 3 A: "Land loved that baby so much (0.2) Fcause of the C: kyeah (0.3) A: because of the ( ) /
/
'And loved it' comes at the right place for the third part of a list (Jefferson, 1991), a third part that has been foreseen and facilitated by C ' s backchannel ' m h ' . The three-part list initiated in 1 is organized in two initial parts introducing a story (mothers are raped/they have the baby) and an upshot that completes the story with a happy ending (they love the baby). C facilitates the telling with backchannelling ( ' m h ' , 'yeah'). B participates actively in it with completion at the upshot of the story. Is what A then says an uptake? That is debatable; one might object that too little is heard of B ' s completion for A ' s utterance to count as an appreciation of it. But two things do lean us the other way: one, that A changes their verb from dramatic present and they have the baby to be consistent with B ' s tense in the completion and loved it. The other thing is that A ' s modification comes after the overlap has been cleared and B ' s it is past; A ' s the baby is bearable as a correction of it. If we go
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along with this reading, then, A's uptake of the completion modifies its form, but only to clarify its meaning, so what B mentioned as 'it' becomes 'that baby' in A. Whether the uptake is modifying the formulation offered in the completion or clarifying part of it, when a completion is offered as a collective voice a subsequent modification works to constitute and specify agreement through a process of re-formulation. 5.4. Unratified completions and collective footings
Lack of ratification is an exception to the rule of completion sequences being composed by three parts. It can, we think, be explained with reference to the sequential context and to the speakers' orientation to the formulation done in the completion. The straightforward way of thinking about these cases would be that they are treated by the participants as uncontroversial, or, putting it in terms of preference order, as cases in which to draw attention to it by ratification would be in the circumstances more costly than explicitly to ratify it. In some cases, the formulation may come as so obvious that confirming it would be redundant: (16) [Drugs 4] A: uhm (1.6) I suppose it is it was his choice (0.1) ! suppose to take it or not Fwasn't it? B: Lmh (6.3) 1 A: it was his choice to (1.0) take (0.5) 2---) B: the drug uhm (0.7) uhm (0.9) then it was his mum cause I mean she could have given him much [-more than that 3 A: Lmh B: couldn't she? F( ) A: Lyeah (5.0) B: his mother (13.4) In l, A is simply repeating what she just said. B completes when A shows difficulty in the formulation. As in the earlier case (above, section 5.3) B ' s intervention is providing security to A by showing active agreement. Notice that A has an opportunity to orient to the completion at B ' s hesitations and pauses, but she does not bother to. A confirmation of B ' s formulation would have been the third orientation to the same issue in a short sequence, and it is simply not considered necessary. Thus, B takes up the floor and develops the topic, but in this case without interrupting A. (B's 'uhm [pause] uhm' is a suffix that seems to relieve the original speaker from ratification). The purpose is shared, and A concedes B's turn with two backchannel continuers. What this illustrates is that the completion is not always the most relevant thing for the speakers. In the immediate sequential context, other elements may be ori-
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ented to, letting the completion 'pass by' unacknowledged. When a completion is offered on a collective footing, the risk of 'conversational waste' plays a role; the risk of confirming too much what no longer needs confirmation (see, in this regard, Heritage and Atkinson (1984) on redundancy and conversational economy). Also, these cases show how the content of sentential completion may not be made relevant by participants, for the sake of keeping attention to other issues more at stake in the current context.
6. Some quantitative information For a sense of the frequency of appearance of the phenomena w e ' v e been looking at in this paper, we might note the crude distribution of the 42 cases of completion (out of 71 completion sequences from our 15 transcripts 2) where we saw some involvement of collective formulation. If we set them out in terms of the forms the uptake can take in the third part, we see that 19 were ratified by an acceptance; 6 were repeated; 7 were reshaped; and 10 were not ratified at all. A note of caution is in order, of course. We find these numbers interesting only insofar as they give the roughest of impressions of the extent to which completions are treated in different ways. We take Schegloff's numerator-denominator argument (Schegloff, 1993) against making conclusions on the basis of simple counting - that we have uncertain grounds of knowing that we have counted the 'same thing', and no means of knowing how many we should have expected. Nevertheless, a simple count does give a hint, if nothing else, of the extent to which patterns of completion sequences differ, and how this variety is distributed (just as a count gives analysts a handle on other phenomena; see, for example, Jefferson's use of counts (Jefferson, 1989) in her analysis of pause-lengths). It does not show the minute details of action and understanding that can only be realized by a close examination of the specific sequences, as in the analysis in the body of the paper. But it does suggest a few things. First of all, the occurrence of completions offered as collective is - in this rather artificial 'laboratory' context - notably more frequent than completions offered on the individual looting of A or B. This brings collective formulation to the forefront, and evidences the use of completion as a device for it. The participants in the laboratory might well be considered to be a collective not only in the sense of their joint decisions, but also vis-?~-vis a third party: the 'experimenter' in whose framework they have had to engage. Rather than considering these sequences as instances where individuals perform agreement mutually, our analysis stressed collective agency: As Coates (1994) puts it, "it is not the individual voices which count but the j o i n t contribution" (her italics). Now introducing the absent listener at this late point in the proceedings is to promise a whole range of analyses which we can't sustain. The very least that we can do, though, is to refer back to Levinson's analysis of footing and recall that he had a catalogue for audience statuses just as he did for producers. 2 For a detailed analysis of the whole sample of completion sequences involved in this study, see D/az (1994).
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If we were to start an account of the experimenter's role in all this, then the status of "targetted overhearer" (Levinson, 1988: 170ft.) suggests a good starting place. But, as we say, that kind of reference is a start and no more. With regard to the level of receipt, the count suggests, as would be expected, that there was a high frequency of acceptance; and a considerable number of completion events which are not ratified. The latter would not be expected in the light of relevant literature treating completion as a three-part sequence. Inspecting the events of non-ratification, we found a variety of turn-taking and attentional markers, where the most notable fact is that agreement is taken for granted, and making it explicit would be therefore redundant. The recurrent patterns of acceptance, repetition and modification play similar roles: constituting agreement by means of sequences of reformulation or straightforward confirmation of the former turn. Modification at the level of receipt of a sentential completion was found by Lerner (1987) to be a form of disagreement. This different conclusion may be due to the situational characteristics of our data, in which joint formulation is one of the purposes of the interaction, and to the characteristics of our reading, in which difference does not by itself constitute disagreement. But all these are just tentative readings on the basis of crude counting, and are meant to be no more than suggestive lines for further work.
7. Concluding comments Sacks (in his 1960s lectures, 1992) and Lerner (1993) gave us a start in observing that (as Lerner puts it) "persons are not always treated only as separate individuals" (ibid.: 213). We used this as a platform for going on to say that non-individual treatment was achieved by the deployment of two conversational devices - completion of another's words, and the offering of a f o r m u l a t i o n of some state of affairs. We set up a series of interactions where formulations were likely to happen, and then inspected the resulting transcripts to see how interactants did it. As we said before, it was not news that people in these situations did reach agreed formulations, since that was the task they were set; what was of interest was h o w they did so, and specifically how they did so using completions. The kind of completed formulation the data threw up were exchanges where the speakers combined to produce this kind of passage: 1
A:
((writing:)) law should be changed (2) to (2) maximum (2.2) eighteen
2---> B: 3 A:
weeks (1.9) brackets (0.4) twenty-four weeks (2.2) on medical grounds (8.5) need this clause (3.5) for amniocen [-tesis Lyeah as amniocentesis ((writing:))
The completed utterance is one which is set up and treated by the participants as a formulation of their joint position on the topic at hand - the deciding of 'what to
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say'. Once we had a corpus of those 'what we say' passages, we went through one way of cataloguing the different cases, showing the variety of ways in which the completing utterance was offered and taken up, and how the process of consequential orientation to the completion constituted and reshaped the talk. Using third-part ratification is, of course, only one way of cataloguing what was going on, but it was coherent with our rationale o f seeing completions as being done in a three-part sequence, and it did show up interesting things when the collective formulation was explicitly accepted, repeated and reshaped, and when it was not explicitly ratified. In sum, then, the two contributions of this paper to the debate have been, on the one hand, to have made a case for adding 'collective author' to Levinson's (1988) list of participant statuses available to speakers - and, moreover, we have done so not by invoking the kind of metaphorical insight that Goffman uses, but, rather, the firmer grounds of participants' own orientations. The other contribution is to have analyzed the variety of forms - principally in its uptake - that the co-ordinated production of collective formulations can take. We have seen that the production of collective formulations through conversational completion is not only possible, but also flexible in its third part. Using completions to do collective formulation is a process in which participants jointly and dynamically regulate the production of their positions to conjure up (temporarily, at least) a collective presence. It is an effective, and perhaps we might also say efficient, means of doing the ensemble work that interactions sometimes produce.
Appendix: Transcription conventions (after Jefferson) [
A pair of open square brackets indicates the onset of simultaneous speech. Only the onset is marked, implying that syllables are roughly as long in both utterances. An 'equals' sign at the end of an utterance by a speaker and another at the beginning of the next utterance by another speaker indicate that both utterances are latched. Numbers between brackets indicate pauses in seconds. (0.7) A colon indicates that the sound preceding it is lengthened. 9 In general, intonation is not codified. An interrogation mark at the end of an utterance indicates notably rising intonation in questions. () Empty spaces between parentheses indicate speech that was too unclear to be transcribed; the amount of space roughly corresponds to the number of syllables uttered, with reference to the surrounding transcribed speech. ((writes)) Our own comments about aspects of the situational context, non-verbal activity, and modality of expression are written between double brackets. ___> An arrow indicates the utterance which will be the focus of analysis or comment. (...) Three dots between parentheses at the beginning or the end of an excerpt indicate, respectively, earlier or later speech by the same speaker not used in this extract.
References Antaki, C., F. Dfaz and A.F. Collins, 1996. Keeping your footing: Completion in three-part sequences. Journal of Pragmatics 25(2): 151-171.
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Coates, J., 1994. No gaps, lots of overlap. In: D. Graddol, J. Maybin and B. Stierer, eds., Researching language literacy in social context. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dfaz, F., 1994. Collective formulation in problem-oriented talk. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England. Goffman, E., 1981. Forms of talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heritage, J.C. and J.M. Atkinson, 1984. Introduction. In: J.M. Atkinson and J.C. Heritage, eds., Structures of social action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heritage, J. and R. Watson, 1979. Formulations as conversational objects. In: G. Psathas, ed., Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington. Heritage, J.C. and D.R. Watson, 1980. Aspects of the properties of formulations in natural conversations. Semiotica 30(3/4): 245-262. Jefferson, G., 1989. Preliminary notes on a possible metric which provides for a 'standard maximum' silences of approximately one second in conversation. In: D. Roger and P. Bull, eds., Conversation: An interdisciplinary perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Jefferson, G., 1991. List construction as a task and resource. In: G. Psathas and R. Frankel, eds., Interactional competence. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Lemer, G.H., 1987. Collaborative turn sequences: Sentence construction and social action. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine. Lerner, G.H., 1991. On the syntax of sentences-in-progress. Language in Society 20: 441-458. Lerner, G.H., 1993. Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined particpation in conversation. Text 13: 213-245. Leudar, I. and C. Antaki, 1988. Completion and dynamics in explanation-seeking. In: C. Antaki, ed., Analyzing everyday explanation. London: Sage. Levinson, S., 1988. Putting linguistics on a proper footing. In: Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rae, J., 1990. Collaborative completions in advisory exchanges. Poster presented at the International Pragmatics Conference, July, Barcelona. Sacks, H., 1992. Lectures on conversation. Ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. Schegloff, E.A., 1972. Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In: D. Sudnow, ed., Studies in social interaction. New York: Free Press. Schegloff, E.A., 1988. Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In: P. Drew and A. Wootton, eds., Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order. Oxford: Polity Press. Schegloff, E.A., 1993. Reflections on quantification in the study of conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26:99-131. Watson, R., 1992. The understanding of language use in everyday life: Is there a common ground? In: G. Watson and R.M. Seller, eds., Text in context: Contributions to ethnomethodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
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Using completion to formulate a statement collectively F61ix D f a z , C h a r l e s A n t a k i * , A l a n F. C o l l i n s Department of Psychology. Lancaster University, Lancaster LAI 4YF, UK
Received November 1994, revised version August 1995 Abstract We describe how participants in an interaction use completions of each others' talk to bind themselves to a collective formulation of a matter in hand. In a corpus of problem-oriented discussions among groups of two or three people, we find speakers using sequences of completable utterance - putative completion - ratification to put their formulations of a problem-solution on a joint footing (a participant status that adds 'collective author' to Levinson's catalogue of producer footings). We describe the use of the completion sequence, and show how there are variations in its ratification stage (including explicit acceptance, repeating and reshaping).
1. Introduction In this paper we want to weave together two separate, but well established, strands of conversational phenomena - completions and formulations - to show how they produce an utterance attributable to certain status of speaker: a joint speaker, or collective. The general case for seeing speakers treating themselves as a collective is suggested by Sacks (especially his comments about affiliation in interactions; e.g. Sacks Fall 1964 Lecture 12, in Sacks, 1992: 101ft.) and has been developed by Lerner (especially in Lerner, 1993). Our particular aim in this paper will be to follow up and sharpen a part of Sacks' and Lerner's analysis. Specifically, we want to show how ensemble work can be done by participants completing each others' utterances to produce a formulation (in the sense established by Heritage and Watson, 1979, 1980) which puts the participants in the exchange - at least temporarily - on an explicitly collective footing. To give some background to the argument we shall be making, we shall first say something about formulation and footing, then introduce our data and briefly sketch the sequential model of completable utterance - putative completion - uptake into which formulation and footing fit. Then, in the latter half of the paper, we shall go * Corresponding author. Address for correspondence: Department of Social Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. 0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)00060-7
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through examples of the variations we come across in a data set particularly likely to throw up formulative completions. To start us off, we shall look at the same passage of talk three ways to illustrate each of the three things we are claiming are operative in the talk: the completion of one person's turn by another; the reading of what is completed as a formulation of some aspect of the interactional matters in hand; and the treatment by the participants of the completed formulation as being done on a collective footing. 1.1. Completions
This is the extract we shall be looking at to illustrate completion and then formulation. The source of these data is described on p. 531, and notation conventions are listed in the Appendix to this paper. (1) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2 B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (...) Let us start off by focussing on the completion that is offered at turn 2 (in a moment, we shall turn to the formulation involved). Speaker B offers multiple parties are to blame as a completion for A ' s utterance at the point where A reaches ... what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort (and we understand perhaps, ' o f ) . This collaborative event, identified by Sacks (in his 1960s lectures, starting with Fall Lecture 3, 1965) has been further analyzed under the headings of 'collaborative sentence construction' (Lerner, 1987, 1991), 'cognitive completion' (Leudar and Antaki, 1988) 'collaborative completion' (Rae, 1990), and 'joint construction of turns' (Coates, 1994). Lerner, who has done most intensive work on completion, sees it as a matter of 'compound turn--constructional units', composed of two elements, where a first element projects a space for the second one. This conversational structure provides the possibility for a second speaker to intervene by the end of the first part of the unit (the completable), contributing with the projected second part (the completer): (2) (taken from Lerner, 1991) Rich: if you bring it intuh them Carol: ih don't cost yuh nothing Carol's utterance makes sense in itself as a sentence, but it completes a conversational structure established by Rich's 'if'. ' I f X / t h e n Y' structures are one of the possible compound turn-constructional units that can be produced sequentially by several speakers (Lerner, 1987, 1991). We agree with Lerner that such compound constructions are sites for completions, but we think that one can broaden the hori-
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zon, and see completions elsewhere. To identify a completion as being collective formulation, our argument will run, we shall have to inspect not just its internal construction (as a compound structure, or an expansion, for example) but also the way ~t is ratified in its uptake by the original speaker. The prevailing reading of completion in the work of Rae (1990) and Lerner (1987, 1991) is that B just finishes off what A would have said, but we shall see that there is more to it than that. We are making here a special case of a general argument we make elsewhere (Antaki et al., 1996), where we try to set out the case for thinking of completions as being set into a three-part structure, in which the second part proposes a completion of the third part, and the third part ratifies it as being given in the appropriate footing.
1.2. Formulation Now let us turn to formulation, the second of the strands that we shall be tying together. Here we follow the conversation analytic approach developed from SchegÁÙff's (1972) fleshing-out of Sacks' observation that the most mundane descriptions of events and places are motivated, and consequential: they matter to the interaction and to how it develops. Heritage and Watson (1979, 1980) push the story on by a close inspection of the ways in which speakers manage the offer of summarising the gist or force of the matter in hand. A formulation is some bid for a statement of what is at hand in the previous stretch of talk, and invites acceptance; non-acceptance is marked by markers of dispreference. For example: (3) (Heritage and Watson, 1979: 130) (Young caller speaking to counsellor of 'home troubles' about employment) Co ... when do you take your O levels? Ca I take them in June In June Co Ca Yeah Co--) Yes so you know you will get the job the results and you could get a job Ca--) (Well look) you see, it's not just that gets me down, it - it you know, because my mum's she's she's a bit In the first arrowed line, the Counsellor (Co) offers a formulation (Yes so you know you will get the job ...). In the next line, the Caller (Ca) marks her response to the counsellor's formulation - as it happens, it is dispreferred (well look), signalling a disagreement (it's not just that gets me down) and offering an alternative (you know, because my mum's ...). If we go back to our starting example, we can see that the same sequence applies: if we treat A and B's material together, we might say that multiple parties are to blame is treated as a formulation of what it is that captures the required formulation - the what shall we say. Note, though, that in the Heritage and Watson example, the counsellor offers the formulation, and it is reacted to as being on the counsellor's own footing; there is no implication that the counsellor is speaking for the caller or for both of them jointly, as is the case we are concerned with in this paper. Let us move on to that now.
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1.3. Completing a formulation Our claim is that a formulation like the one above can come to be made jointly when one speaker's utterance is completed by another and the whole is appropriately ratified. To get to that full claim we set off from Sacks's comments about completion (in Spring 1966, Lecture 7; 1992: 320ff., and more confidently Fall 1967, Lecture 4; 1992: 649ff.). He observes that it is common in everyday conversation for one speaker to complete another speaker's utterance, and for the original speaker to ratify the completion, as in this example: (4) (Sacks, 1992: 321) Roger: Kids don't drive long ... by the time they're eighteen they're back walk(hh)ing hehh through circumsta(hh)nces hehhehh Ther.: beyond their control. Roger: ehhehh Yes hehhehh Part of Sacks's analysis about such a completion is that "one obvious thing that such a production might be seen to do ... is showing the new guy that this is a group" (ibid.: 321); that is to say, that it accomplishes the work of setting up the speakers as a collective of some sort. Lerner (1993) takes the analysis on to say about such completions that "speakers can demonstrate their co-participation .,. by joining in the production of an ongoing action. For example ... through anticipatory completion ... of that participant's not-yet-completed utterance" (1993: 221). So completion might by itself be a means of making an ensemble or collective bearable. Our contribution to the story is this. We think that there is one specially powerful use of the completion sequence that Sacks and Lerner are talking about, a use particularly fitted for the job of making the speakers cohere as an ensemble: that is when participants use completion to converge on a certain understanding o f - a formulation of - the matter in hand. Formulations are specially significant for ensembles because (if accepted) they determine the expectable parameters of subsequent local business; they make a certain range of further objects hearable, as Sacks would say, and put others off limits.
2. The footing on which a joint completion is produced: The collective author What we have proposed so far then, is that in the kind of completion we see in passages like (1) above, the resulting completed utterance (in that case, we'll say that sort of multiple parties are to blame) is a formulation of the ensemble's business. There is one more aspect of that completed utterance that needs to be said, and it is an important one: the participants' understanding of the footing on which it is given and accepted. The notion of footing starts (but does not stop) with G o f f m a n ' s (1981) observation that one's utterances in an interaction can issue from a number of roles, or
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footings - in G o f f m a n ' s original account, the role of animator of what one is saying, as its author, or as its principal. This looks like a good lens through which to look at the ' e n s e m b l e ' footings that concern us here. But one must be careful in applying G o f f m a n ' s insights to the actual give-and-take of language exchange. As Schegloff (1988) observes, Goffman does not always back up his interpretation of what is at stake in an interaction by appeal to participants' own orientations, and this has led to suspicion among at least some conversation analysts that, as Watson puts it, "the Goffman/ethnomethodology-conversation analysis pairing is ... composed of approaches that are.. quite distinct and indeed irreconcilable" (Watson, 1992: 2). The problem is, fundamentally, an epistemological one: how does one ground some claim like 'A is speaking for herself' (or, for us, 'as part of an e n s e m b l e ? ' ) ? For Watson, G o f f m a n ' s grounds are in metaphor and analogy, and however penetrating and seductive these might be at (something like) a literary level, they are and this is the damagingly inevitable error - at one remove from what actually goes on. To assert on metaphorical grounds something like 'A is speaking for herself' is to cast what A is doing under an umbrella whose width may suit the analyst but not necessarily A, or her audience. What then, to do? The answer that ethnomethodologists like Watson endorse is to search for the kind of evidence which is not metaphorical - evidence which is there in the way that interactants themselves, through talk and other interactional business, orient to each others' utterances. That is, to move off the shaky ground of metaphor, where there is (always) an argument to be picked about the range of application of even the aptest and most insightful analogy, and on to the firm ground of talk which is, in Watson's phrase, "centrally involved in establishing the accountable features of settings, in constituting settings" (ibid.: 6). That is the path we shall be following in our treatment of footing. We start by picking a firm spot in Levinson's (1988) unmetaphoric reading o f - and interactional evidence for - the notion of footing. The core idea to keep in mind here is that we can look to participants' own orientations to each other as evidence that they are speaking as authors, messengers, spokespeople and so on; that is, that we shall find in and around a turn at talk visible and hearable evidence that the candidate utterance is indeed being offered, and accepted as, 'A speaking for herself' (and so on). Levinson's linguistic pass on footing is to think of people orienting to different grounds for speaking, or to each others' 'producer roles'. In his list those roles (always volatile; there is no implication that they are fixed) turn out to be: author, spokesperson, the relayer of a message, its deviser, its sponsor, the person who 'ghost-writes' it, or the person on whose behalf it is 'ghost-written'. Note, though and this is a big thing for us - that Levinson's list is rather individualised. There seems to be no place in his scheme for the person's utterance to be designed for reception as being on a j o i n t footing with at least one other person. And yet this does seem to be a real possibility, and is patently visible in a range of interactional devices analysed by Sacks (1992, passim) and specifically in Lerner (1993). To give an example from Sacks, consider this exchange with the highly suggestive ' w e ' :
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(5) (Sacks, Spring 1966, Lecture 7; ibid.: 321) Ken: We were in an automobile discussion As it stands, this would seem to need no more than the usual apparatus of deixis for its handling. But note how it is immediately taken up: (6) (ibid.) Ken: We were in an automobile discussion Roger: discussing the psychological motives for ( ): h h h h h h h h AI: drag racing on the street As Sacks says, such sequences of utterances " d o together what is among the most prototypical things that a single person would d o " (ibid.: 321). Or, to put it in Levinson's terms, the utterances succeeding the first one make manifest that each is to be understood as part of the same unit, issuing from the same source a collective one, not an individual author in each separate case. To make the point with an illustration from our own corpus, we might return to the example we saw above: (7) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2---~B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (...) It is difficult to set B ' s offer and A ' s uptake into L e v i n s o n ' s scheme without a certain amount of squeezing. What we mean is this: the best that L e v i n s o n ' s scheme might provide for is to try reading B as being treated as a s p o k e s p e r s o n , but a spokesperson, by definition, is not treated by the audience as having the same motivation for speaking as the author. Authors (by L e v i n s o n ' s definition) are treated as speaking for themselves; spokespersons are treated as speaking for others. Just as in Sacks' case of Ken, R o g e r and A1, though, the uptake here in turn 3 suggests very strongly that the participants treat the utterance in turn 2 as having not the motivation of its physical speaker, but rather the joint motivation of both speakers together, with ((writing)) forming its physical manifestation. This motivation produces the utterance 'multiple parties are to b l a m e ' as a recorded joint j u d g e m e n t - as ' w h a t we'll say'. So we are proposing, in this paper, to add collective author to L e v i n s o n ' s list of participant statuses, and we shall try to show how it is useful in understanding what happens when formulations are offered in completions.
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3. The uptake of a completion We should note that Lerner's and R a e ' s accounts of completions we saw above might suggest that the completion is given as what the first speaker was just about to say, "and not as a guess inviting acceptance or rejection" (Lerner, 1987). But this seems to us to deny the original speaker the otherwise universally available opportunity to evaluate a previous utterance (here, the putative completion) one way or another. We prefer to say that the case that Rae and Lerner persuasively describe is the default case in which non-intervention implies assent; but it is always open to A to disconfirm whether or not that was the proper formulation of the joint position. The third part of a sequence where that might happen is normally a means by which "a first speaker can determine the sense that a second made of his or her utterance" (Heritage and Atkinson, 1984). This move by the original speaker becomes more relevant when the second speaker is relying on the original utterance more than normally, as happens in completion sequences (that is to say, relying on the previous utterance to make a syntactically complete unit when joined with what he or she is saying). Completions "are systematically taken as c a n d i d a t e continuations" of the completable (Lerner, 1987; our italics), and this can mean that the speaker who produced the completable in turn 1 will consider themselves to be implicitly other-selected to come back in turn 3 with an evaluation of the completion. We will refer to these third turns generally as the uptake or, as Rae (1990) does, the ratification, of the completion (we prefer this to Lerner's term 'receipt' simply because that sounds a little less active). The uptake involves an explicit recognition of the event of completion, displaying an orientation to the content of the completion as such, and to the footing on which the completion was made.
4. Introducing the data Previous work we have done on completions in naturally-occurring conversations (Antaki et al., 1996) showed us that certain sorts of interaction were more prone to throw up the phenomena we are looking for - specifically, in the London-Lurid corpus we used then, interactions where the matter in hand were things like a selection interview decision, a discussion over a route-map and so on. Not needing now to show that formulating completions do happen, we wanted a data set that was likely to include a reasonable amount of this kind of ensemble work, so we arranged some discussion groups in which people were very likely to orient the talk towards reaching a c o m m o n decision. Groups of two or three participants (mostly students) were given a brief story extracted from a newspaper, describing a social drama (the specific issues probably d o n ' t matter, but for the record they were typical news stories about abortion, domestic violence and drug abuse), and were asked to 'reach agreement on ethical questions regarding the case', the agreed j u d g e m e n t to be written down on a
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standard response sheet. They were left in a room and their conversation was recorded. It is at the later stages of discussions (when participants are getting close to actually writing down a formulation of what they agree on the issues) that collective formulations can be identified more often. It is importrant to stress, though that our interest is not whether or not participants produced collective formulations (by the very design of the study, they are expected to do that), but on how conversational completion is deployed as a device for it. The set-up is of course contrived, but the way the participants go about doing the interactional work the set-up requires is up to them: We have to pay for the contrivance, though, in other ways: we shall see that there will be some occasions on which a case can be made for treating the ensemble talk as being oriented not only to the local participants but to the recording researcher as well. However, as long as we are aware of this extra audience, it need not damage the analysis of what is happening on stage.
5. Collective f o r m u l a t i o n s : H o w are they made possible? We scrutinised all the occasions of completion in the fifteen transcripts (there were, in this corpus, 74 instances). Many of the instances could be read as being performed on the footing of A or B as ordinary speaker, or 'ratified author' in Goffman and Levinson's terms (Levinson, 1988). Because our argument is about collective formulation, we will concentrate on these, leaving aside completions performed in individual voices. A collectivity can be constituted in conversational completion in which the 'speaking subject' is actually several different individuals. In the empirical work we report here, this very often happened towards the end of the discussion exercise, when the collective agreed solution was being written down for the sake of the (physically absent, but socially present) researcher. Aspects of the former context are crucial for the speakers to align in the production of the collective statement. For the analyst, various aspects of the former and latter context are informative evidence that the completion sequence is formulating a collective position. To help with the discussion of the data, it was convenient to break up the examples into manageable chunks on some analytically defensible grounds. Given our account of completion as being a three-part sequence of completable utterance completion - ratification, predictable variation in the last step (ratification) suggested itself as a reasonable grid for a catalogue. Accordingly, the examples of formulation may be classified according to the fate suffered by the offered completion. We saw in our data that, crudely speaking, B's offer can attract, in the ratification phase, acceptance; repeating; reshaping; and non-ratification. We will deal with each of these in turn. There are, of course, many other ways to divide up the data for the sake of presentation; but this one, motivated by the analysis of completions as We are grateful to Gene Lerner for extending to the first author the facility of the computer programme Workbench to facilitate transcription, storage and processing of the material.
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being variously disposed of by the participants, does at least have the recommendation of being coherent with the paper's general rationale. 5.1. C o m p l e t i o n s a c c e p t e d on a collective f o o t i n g
The most typical ratification of completion offered as a formulation on a collective footing was that it be accepted by the original speaker. In the following extract, B at the arrowed line offers a completion of a collective self-evaluation initiated by A: (8) [Drugs 1] B: anyway yeah 1 A : so let me yeah so I me well the the range of our discussion here shows 2--> B: shows (0.2) the: (0.3) enormity of the problem of [-how to 3 A: Lyeah B: come back to [-the A: Lyeah yeah so but what [-do you think? can we? B: Ldo you think? A: can we could we tie an end of it can we? B: yeah sure we should do we should do The first thing to note is that A's sea-change of pronominal reference from first person singular to first-person plural pronoun in 'so let me yeah so I me well the the range of our discussions' explicitly repairs in favour of collective authorship and entitles B to participate in the evaluation, bringing it into line with the state of affairs in Sacks' prototypical example discussed above. The second thing to note is that what is shared between A and B is a f o r m u l a t i o n - the clue is the design of A ' s utterance as oriented towards summarising what is the case with the introductory so and the eventual: 'the range of our discussions s h o w s ...' (emphases added). B latches onto this formulatory aspect of A ' s sentence by repeating the significantly formulative s h o w s , and then provides the rest of the formulation in the object of the sentence. A ratifies in such a way that B's offer is itself latched onto, developing the assessment into a proposition (again for collective action) to 'tie an end of it', which is accepted. The fact that the B sentence was not completed, is not oriented to as relevant by the participants. At the stage at which A marks his acceptance of B, it is already clear for both of them that there are issues of complexity in their discussion, and that was what needed saying. A has projected a comment about complexity in 'the range of our discussion', and B's contribution reformulates it ('the enormity of the problem'). In the following excerpt (9), B arrives with help when A ' s account stalls, and the result is a collective account: (9) [Drugs 3] 1 A : mh yeah that's definitely linked isn't it? petty theft because he was into petty theft but she was uh (0.8) started to sell stuff to raise money for well
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2--+ B: for [-the drug addiction yeah 3 A: Ifor the that's right (0.7) A: she was part of it then wasn't she? B: mh The beginning of 1 orients to B's former proposition to consider petty theft. A, in 1, can be heard to be searching for something to stand as a motive for a story character's raising money, and B provides a candidate. The assertion ends up as being treated as shared by both speakers. Note though, that here the sense of what is being completed is perhaps less obviously a formulation as such. B offers a completion of something which, at the clausal level, seems to be a fairly blank statement. The reading of it as a formulation is slightly masked by the fact that it is part of a clause embedded in the body of A ' s utterance, which can be heard to be a formulation in the sense that it is designed to orient to explicate a description of part of the scene ('petty theft because he was into petty theft ...'), which extends into its own qualification ('but she started to sell stuff to raise money for well'). In that sense it is a formulation of what is to be made of previous conversational material to do with 'petty theft' as a description of the matter under discussion. One of the most interesting features of joint formulation is that it constructs both the joint position it formulates and the collective which is speaking. Several speakers act as a single identity with a single voice: (10) [Dom. viol. 4] 1 A: for not taking many uh (0.8) probably they obviously don't take the the threat uh seriously do they? (3.3) but that y'know disregards the case (2.0) what they heard at court 2--> B: was his account but why didn't they ask for her account? 3 A: that's what I mean was she at court? we don't know (5.5) As Lemer (1991) shows, here as in many other occasions for completion, the topic of turn 1 projects the content of the completion. The statement 'what they heard at court was his account' and the subsequent question are performed in the singular voice of the (plural) person concerned with 'her account'. 'That's what I mean' could not be more explicit as a confirmation, and 'we don't know' ties up the sequence with an explicit reference to the participants as a collective. As we mentioned above, the jointness of the formulation is very clear in the parts of the transcripts in which the participants are engaged in writing down their collective solution to the problem. It is perhaps more normative for participants to express a common point here, after some stretch of talk hearable as 'discussion' has been gone through, and when a decision is seen as very likely. The following extract, which we have already used twice as an exemplary illustration, serves again to show how joint formulations can take the form of completion sequences in this kind of situation:
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(11) [Drugs 3] 1 A: but (0.5) I mean the way (1) why we don't know why she decided that his life was over (0.9) and (0.3) the fact that she used (0.1) heroin sort of (1.7) I mean that sort of seems a bit sick to me ((B laughs)) (0.2) I don't know just that was just my reaction when I read it (1.1) so: (0.7) what shall we say we'll say that (1.3) this this sort 2-+ B: multiple parties are to blame 3 A: multiple parties (1.7) that's a good one (4) multiple ((writing)) parties (3.8) well say the mother (3.5) for (0.4) B: trying to be God or something and decide whether he should live or not (1.1) A: ((writing)) okay because she tried to be (2.3) God: (0.5) and By the end of his long turn in l, A invites B to participate by asking a question and starting to answer it as a collective that comprises both speakers. B offers a 'multiple parties' formulation, which A accepts with enthusiasm. He starts to write down the answer, and in doing so proposes a version which separates out the 'parties' involved (say the m o t h e r ...). Given this, 'for' in 3 is clearly initiating a formulation of the reason why 'the mother' is to blame. At this point, B offers an answer, which A accepts and repeats. In the next case it was basically the initial reference to giving the solution ('what shall we say'), together with the activity of writing, that invited a joint account. Sometimes, as here, there is no explicit allusion to giving the final solution, but the participants' talk shows that that is what they are doing. The silence at the beginning of the next sequence follows the completion of a successful argument that produced agreement: (12) [Ab. 31 (6.7) 1 A: ((writing:)) law should be changed (2) to (2) maximum (2.2) eighteen weeks (1.9) brackets (0.4) twenty-four weeks (2.2) on medical grounds (8.5) need this clause (3.5) 2-+ B: for amniocen Ftesis 3 A: Lyeah as amniocentesis ((writing:)) cannot be performed (3.8) before (0.8) twenty weeks (3.7) you want to add any more? (1.7) C: Fmh:: I don't know B: Ln I think that that will do ((B and C laugh)) Because of the very design of the laboratory environment in which these discussions took place, with the premium it placed on reaching a judgement for the sake of the 'experimenter', the m o m e n t of writing implies agreement. What was not implied in the design was performing this agreement through the sequential collaborative formulation of the final solution. In this case, B is helping to formulate and reminding others of what has already been discussed. After accepting the completer, A modifies it in his own way to make it fit the written text.
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5.2. Repeats and collective footing Our analysis of completion sequences tends to find that repeats in the third part work as (that is, are treated by participants as) active acceptances. The outcome of a sequence in which a completion proposed on a collective footing is repeated is therefore not very different from what we described in the above subsection. Further on in the execution of the task, as the stretch of 'discussion' talk affords greater saliency to a 'decision', a collective formulation is more clearly hearable as constituting agreement, and a ratification with repeat will consolidate it, as in the example below: (13) [Drugs 1] 1 A: so we're saying so you're right now more family ties and bonds be encouraged where (0.6) parents be encouraged not only to meet (0.3) the physical material needs of children but also to have (0.7) 2--> B : quality time 3 A: quality time qual it's a good that's a good phrase isn't it? quality time yeah (0.2) yeah (0.6) I mean (0.2) well I mean it takes us into another (0.1) problem with the whole thing that often parents themselves are drug addicts or have been drug addicts and they have The repeat here is 'quality time' and the sequence reproduces the pattern we have already shown above: the completion sequence is prefaced by an explicit reference to a collective formulation in progress ( ' w e ' r e saying') and to agreement ( ' y o u ' r e right') achieved before. This reference to a former context of collective action is crucial in the constitution (or maintenance) of joint formulation. The preface is followed by the projection of a two-part response to the problem ('not only/but also'), and the completer pauses at the beginning of the second part. This pause is taken as an opportunity for intervention by B: but note that the intervention is playing a crucial role in the design of the formulation, and it is taken up as new for the main speaker, as well as being evaluated as 'a good phrase'. 5.3. Reshaping and modifying collective formulations So far w e ' v e seen the offered completion being taken up by an outright acceptance, and by a repeat which functions as an acceptance. But it can also undergo some kind of reshaping. Through this process, participants change details of the formulated object in each subsequent reformulation, as here: (14) [Ab. 1] C: a piled mass 1 A: well no I say when you call a baby (0.2) sort of 2--> B: ababy 3 A: a a human (0.3)
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C: they're getting premature birth early and early and early that they can have survived (0.2) This excerpt occurs within an argument between C on one side, and A and B teaming up on the other side, in which A and B argue for the possibility of determining when a foetus can be regarded as human, and C discards that possibility. In this context, the completion sequence strives for the formulation of the difference between two different entities along time. B ' s 'a baby' is suggesting that at a certain point in time a foetus is a baby. A modifies that into 'a human', to mark the difference from his former 'a baby'. In other words, what A would formulate as 'at a certain point a baby can be called a human', B would formulate as 'at a certain point a baby can be called a p r o p e r baby'. These two are alternative formulations of the difference defended by A and B. C shows no problem in understanding the difference, but disagrees with it just after it is formulated. We see a greater degree of active agreement in the following excerpt, where the three participants in a discussion are formulating their position against abortion: (15) [Ab. 5] A: but I mean a baby shouldn't have to die [-just because B: kexactly A: somebody did a rape (O.6) B: [-and I don't think 1 A : Land I also think I mean I know cases well not personally (0.3) but like mothers who have been raped and they have the baby= C: =mh= 2--+ B : =and [-loved it 3 A: "Land loved that baby so much (0.2) Fcause of the C: kyeah (0.3) A: because of the ( ) /
/
'And loved it' comes at the right place for the third part of a list (Jefferson, 1991), a third part that has been foreseen and facilitated by C ' s backchannel ' m h ' . The three-part list initiated in 1 is organized in two initial parts introducing a story (mothers are raped/they have the baby) and an upshot that completes the story with a happy ending (they love the baby). C facilitates the telling with backchannelling ( ' m h ' , 'yeah'). B participates actively in it with completion at the upshot of the story. Is what A then says an uptake? That is debatable; one might object that too little is heard of B ' s completion for A ' s utterance to count as an appreciation of it. But two things do lean us the other way: one, that A changes their verb from dramatic present and they have the baby to be consistent with B ' s tense in the completion and loved it. The other thing is that A ' s modification comes after the overlap has been cleared and B ' s it is past; A ' s the baby is bearable as a correction of it. If we go
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along with this reading, then, A's uptake of the completion modifies its form, but only to clarify its meaning, so what B mentioned as 'it' becomes 'that baby' in A. Whether the uptake is modifying the formulation offered in the completion or clarifying part of it, when a completion is offered as a collective voice a subsequent modification works to constitute and specify agreement through a process of re-formulation. 5.4. Unratified completions and collective footings
Lack of ratification is an exception to the rule of completion sequences being composed by three parts. It can, we think, be explained with reference to the sequential context and to the speakers' orientation to the formulation done in the completion. The straightforward way of thinking about these cases would be that they are treated by the participants as uncontroversial, or, putting it in terms of preference order, as cases in which to draw attention to it by ratification would be in the circumstances more costly than explicitly to ratify it. In some cases, the formulation may come as so obvious that confirming it would be redundant: (16) [Drugs 4] A: uhm (1.6) I suppose it is it was his choice (0.1) ! suppose to take it or not Fwasn't it? B: Lmh (6.3) 1 A: it was his choice to (1.0) take (0.5) 2---) B: the drug uhm (0.7) uhm (0.9) then it was his mum cause I mean she could have given him much [-more than that 3 A: Lmh B: couldn't she? F( ) A: Lyeah (5.0) B: his mother (13.4) In l, A is simply repeating what she just said. B completes when A shows difficulty in the formulation. As in the earlier case (above, section 5.3) B ' s intervention is providing security to A by showing active agreement. Notice that A has an opportunity to orient to the completion at B ' s hesitations and pauses, but she does not bother to. A confirmation of B ' s formulation would have been the third orientation to the same issue in a short sequence, and it is simply not considered necessary. Thus, B takes up the floor and develops the topic, but in this case without interrupting A. (B's 'uhm [pause] uhm' is a suffix that seems to relieve the original speaker from ratification). The purpose is shared, and A concedes B's turn with two backchannel continuers. What this illustrates is that the completion is not always the most relevant thing for the speakers. In the immediate sequential context, other elements may be ori-
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ented to, letting the completion 'pass by' unacknowledged. When a completion is offered on a collective footing, the risk of 'conversational waste' plays a role; the risk of confirming too much what no longer needs confirmation (see, in this regard, Heritage and Atkinson (1984) on redundancy and conversational economy). Also, these cases show how the content of sentential completion may not be made relevant by participants, for the sake of keeping attention to other issues more at stake in the current context.
6. Some quantitative information For a sense of the frequency of appearance of the phenomena w e ' v e been looking at in this paper, we might note the crude distribution of the 42 cases of completion (out of 71 completion sequences from our 15 transcripts 2) where we saw some involvement of collective formulation. If we set them out in terms of the forms the uptake can take in the third part, we see that 19 were ratified by an acceptance; 6 were repeated; 7 were reshaped; and 10 were not ratified at all. A note of caution is in order, of course. We find these numbers interesting only insofar as they give the roughest of impressions of the extent to which completions are treated in different ways. We take Schegloff's numerator-denominator argument (Schegloff, 1993) against making conclusions on the basis of simple counting - that we have uncertain grounds of knowing that we have counted the 'same thing', and no means of knowing how many we should have expected. Nevertheless, a simple count does give a hint, if nothing else, of the extent to which patterns of completion sequences differ, and how this variety is distributed (just as a count gives analysts a handle on other phenomena; see, for example, Jefferson's use of counts (Jefferson, 1989) in her analysis of pause-lengths). It does not show the minute details of action and understanding that can only be realized by a close examination of the specific sequences, as in the analysis in the body of the paper. But it does suggest a few things. First of all, the occurrence of completions offered as collective is - in this rather artificial 'laboratory' context - notably more frequent than completions offered on the individual looting of A or B. This brings collective formulation to the forefront, and evidences the use of completion as a device for it. The participants in the laboratory might well be considered to be a collective not only in the sense of their joint decisions, but also vis-?~-vis a third party: the 'experimenter' in whose framework they have had to engage. Rather than considering these sequences as instances where individuals perform agreement mutually, our analysis stressed collective agency: As Coates (1994) puts it, "it is not the individual voices which count but the j o i n t contribution" (her italics). Now introducing the absent listener at this late point in the proceedings is to promise a whole range of analyses which we can't sustain. The very least that we can do, though, is to refer back to Levinson's analysis of footing and recall that he had a catalogue for audience statuses just as he did for producers. 2 For a detailed analysis of the whole sample of completion sequences involved in this study, see D/az (1994).
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If we were to start an account of the experimenter's role in all this, then the status of "targetted overhearer" (Levinson, 1988: 170ft.) suggests a good starting place. But, as we say, that kind of reference is a start and no more. With regard to the level of receipt, the count suggests, as would be expected, that there was a high frequency of acceptance; and a considerable number of completion events which are not ratified. The latter would not be expected in the light of relevant literature treating completion as a three-part sequence. Inspecting the events of non-ratification, we found a variety of turn-taking and attentional markers, where the most notable fact is that agreement is taken for granted, and making it explicit would be therefore redundant. The recurrent patterns of acceptance, repetition and modification play similar roles: constituting agreement by means of sequences of reformulation or straightforward confirmation of the former turn. Modification at the level of receipt of a sentential completion was found by Lerner (1987) to be a form of disagreement. This different conclusion may be due to the situational characteristics of our data, in which joint formulation is one of the purposes of the interaction, and to the characteristics of our reading, in which difference does not by itself constitute disagreement. But all these are just tentative readings on the basis of crude counting, and are meant to be no more than suggestive lines for further work.
7. Concluding comments Sacks (in his 1960s lectures, 1992) and Lerner (1993) gave us a start in observing that (as Lerner puts it) "persons are not always treated only as separate individuals" (ibid.: 213). We used this as a platform for going on to say that non-individual treatment was achieved by the deployment of two conversational devices - completion of another's words, and the offering of a f o r m u l a t i o n of some state of affairs. We set up a series of interactions where formulations were likely to happen, and then inspected the resulting transcripts to see how interactants did it. As we said before, it was not news that people in these situations did reach agreed formulations, since that was the task they were set; what was of interest was h o w they did so, and specifically how they did so using completions. The kind of completed formulation the data threw up were exchanges where the speakers combined to produce this kind of passage: 1
A:
((writing:)) law should be changed (2) to (2) maximum (2.2) eighteen
2---> B: 3 A:
weeks (1.9) brackets (0.4) twenty-four weeks (2.2) on medical grounds (8.5) need this clause (3.5) for amniocen [-tesis Lyeah as amniocentesis ((writing:))
The completed utterance is one which is set up and treated by the participants as a formulation of their joint position on the topic at hand - the deciding of 'what to
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say'. Once we had a corpus of those 'what we say' passages, we went through one way of cataloguing the different cases, showing the variety of ways in which the completing utterance was offered and taken up, and how the process of consequential orientation to the completion constituted and reshaped the talk. Using third-part ratification is, of course, only one way of cataloguing what was going on, but it was coherent with our rationale o f seeing completions as being done in a three-part sequence, and it did show up interesting things when the collective formulation was explicitly accepted, repeated and reshaped, and when it was not explicitly ratified. In sum, then, the two contributions of this paper to the debate have been, on the one hand, to have made a case for adding 'collective author' to Levinson's (1988) list of participant statuses available to speakers - and, moreover, we have done so not by invoking the kind of metaphorical insight that Goffman uses, but, rather, the firmer grounds of participants' own orientations. The other contribution is to have analyzed the variety of forms - principally in its uptake - that the co-ordinated production of collective formulations can take. We have seen that the production of collective formulations through conversational completion is not only possible, but also flexible in its third part. Using completions to do collective formulation is a process in which participants jointly and dynamically regulate the production of their positions to conjure up (temporarily, at least) a collective presence. It is an effective, and perhaps we might also say efficient, means of doing the ensemble work that interactions sometimes produce.
Appendix: Transcription conventions (after Jefferson) [
A pair of open square brackets indicates the onset of simultaneous speech. Only the onset is marked, implying that syllables are roughly as long in both utterances. An 'equals' sign at the end of an utterance by a speaker and another at the beginning of the next utterance by another speaker indicate that both utterances are latched. Numbers between brackets indicate pauses in seconds. (0.7) A colon indicates that the sound preceding it is lengthened. 9 In general, intonation is not codified. An interrogation mark at the end of an utterance indicates notably rising intonation in questions. () Empty spaces between parentheses indicate speech that was too unclear to be transcribed; the amount of space roughly corresponds to the number of syllables uttered, with reference to the surrounding transcribed speech. ((writes)) Our own comments about aspects of the situational context, non-verbal activity, and modality of expression are written between double brackets. ___> An arrow indicates the utterance which will be the focus of analysis or comment. (...) Three dots between parentheses at the beginning or the end of an excerpt indicate, respectively, earlier or later speech by the same speaker not used in this extract.
References Antaki, C., F. Dfaz and A.F. Collins, 1996. Keeping your footing: Completion in three-part sequences. Journal of Pragmatics 25(2): 151-171.
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