Worlds of Talk

The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Conversation

MARTIN J. MALONE

Polity Press

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Transcription Conventions

1  The Interaction Order and the Self

2  Pragmatic and Phenomenological Foundations of Interactionism

3  Pronouns, Interactional Roles, and the Construction of a Conversation

4  Gender and Talk: Ideology and Interaction

5  How to Do Things with Friends: Altercasting and Recipient Design

6  Small Disagreements: Character Contests and Working Consensus

7  Conclusions

Appendix: Data and Methods

Notes

References

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

From 1974 to 1995, 19,341 social science books and articles have had “self” in their titles or abstracts or as key words (Sociofile, 1/74–4/95). The self is also a topic of major interest to philosophers, theologians, and literary theorists, as well as to the general public. Grocery store checkout lines display magazines entitled Self; “self-help” books are among the fastest growing sections in bookstores; and “self-esteem,” “self-actualization,” and “self-consciousness” are treated as major social problems. Oddly enough, the interactional creation of selves in talk has as yet been little studied.

This book is about how we present our selves in talk. It examines conversations as joint productions requiring trust, dependency, and coordination. If we recognize that the self is an interactional accomplishment, then we must also recognize that it is produced by multiple partners cooperating in the production of a social event.

Interestingly, perhaps the most fruitful avenue of inquiry into the nature of the self is only beginning to be traveled extensively. Talk is the principal way for others to know “who” we are. We are always aware that what we say tells as much about who we are as it does about the topic we are discussing. While language has been studied for thousands of years, the study of conversation (actual spoken talk) is a relatively new topic, with a history of barely 30 years. The theory and methods whereby to construct an understanding of this issue are at hand. The time to understand how selves are created and transformed in everyday talk is now.

The study of self-presentation in conversation raises a number of theoretical questions. The most general questions are these:

How are selves communicated?

How does that communication affect the nature of interaction?

How do those effects on the interaction feed back to alter the modes of self-presentation?

More specifically, I would like to know:

1 What is the role of talk in constructing a self-presentation out of the resources available to an individual?

2 How are identities presented, negotiated, and changed in talk?

3 How is talk used as a strategic interactive resource (one which can accomplish desired goals) to tell others how we see the situation, who we are at the moment, and how we see them?

This study is about how individuals tell each other who they are and how this affects conversation. It is about selves in conversation. In fine-grained analyses of a few conversations, it looks at

1 how talk structures interaction,

2 how gender differences are displayed in identity presentation,

3 how individuals manipulate support, and

4 how conflicts affect self-presentations.

This book is designed to appeal to students and professionals in sociology (especially in ethnomethodology, qualitative methods, theory, symbolic interaction, and conversation analysis), social psychology, sociolinguistics, linguistic pragmatics, rhetoric, speech and communication, and any other areas concerned with language use in everyday life. It should also appeal to an educated audience interested in how conversations reveal who we are and how we deal with each other in everyday situations.

Chapter 1 discusses Goffman’s notion of the “interaction order” (1983b) as a separate domain of sociological study. It is in the interaction order that self-presentation takes place. Chapter 2 provides some philosophical foundations for the analytical portion of the book and attempts to show the connections between the symbolic interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches. Chapters 3–6 are analyses of conversation that attempt to show, as Labov and Fanshel say, “what gets done by what gets said” (1977, p. 71). Chapter 3 analyzes how pronouns are used to create interactional alignments. Chapter 4 enters the debate on gendered styles of talk. Chapter 5 examines how talkers line up support in conversation, and chapter 6 analyzes an instance of disagreement, its resolution and return to working consensus. The conclusions in chapter 7 return explicitly to the moral nature of interaction and attempt to provide an interactional account of how talk creates selves. An appendix provides information on the data employed here and the methods of collection and analysis.

The analytic portion of the book examines the fine details of how talk constitutes and is constituted by the interaction order and how in this order selves are created and maintained. It employs the insights of Erving Goffman, symbolic interactionism and conversation analysis to understand just what goes on when people come together. The goal is to provide an account of the self in interaction.

I owe thanks to a great many people whose ideas, criticism, encouragement, and support helped this project grow over many years. As a graduate student in anthropology at Southern Illinois University many years ago, I was first introduced to linguistics by Larry Grimes and Ed Cook. It was at a lecture by Dell Hymes at Southern Illinois University that I realized how fascinating and important the study of talk was. Though I did not meet him until many years later, it was his lecture that afternoon that changed the direction of my studies.

In 1979, I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, to begin graduate training for a second time, this time in sociolinguistics. It was there that I met and began to study with Allen Grimshaw, Bill Corsaro, Donna Eder, Bonnie Kendall, and Charles Bird. Their influence on my work and on shaping my perspectives on language goes beyond my ability to offer adequate thanks. I continue to come up with ideas I think are new, only later to realize that they are indebted to those excellent and caring teachers. Allen, Bill, and Donna have continued to read drafts and offer encouragement, and I still depend on their wisdom.

I owe perhaps the largest single intellectual debt to Allen Grimshaw, who, for the last 16 years, has continued to bully, cajole, criticize, challenge, and encourage me every step of the way. He serves as my model when I think about being a mentor to students. The Multiple Analysis Project that Allen directed and saw through to publication (Grimshaw, 1989, 1994) provided the data for my dissertation (1985) and has also provided much of the data for this book.

I would also like to thank Anthony Giddens, who, as a visiting scholar at Indiana in 1981, provided the beginnings of my reading of hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophers and my appreciation of their connections to American pragmatism and symbolic interaction.

In the ten years since graduate school, the help of colleagues, students, editors, and the anonymous readers we all depend on to get us into print has been vital for the development of this work. Within my own small college, I owe many thanks to my former chair and close friend, Chris Smith, and to the members of Mount Saint Mary’s Writing Center, Steve Newmann, Carmen Schmersahl, Sarah Sinopoli, and Byron Stay. I am especially grateful to a former member of the Writing Center, as well as a coauthor, Meg Tipper, with whom I collaborated on work discussed here.

In my ten years at Mount Saint Mary’s, I have had too many students to thank individually. But for special help on this project, especially with bibliographic and interlibrary loan work and with copying and all the other mundane tasks of preparing a manuscript, I owe particular thanks to our departmental assistants, Alison Gibbons and Jennifer Tinder. I cannot imagine two more helpful, cheerful, resourceful, and imaginative researchers and feel truly blessed to have had their help.

I would also like to thank our departmental secretary, Rosilee Litz, and the staff of the Hugh Phillips Library, especially Lisa Davis, who handled that necessity of small college libraries, inter-library loans.

Colleagues at a distance are also necessary for survival, and I am grateful for the help of a number of scholars over the years. Jack Spencer, Doug Maynard, and Dede Boden have provided ideas, critiques, and intellectual stimulation. For a long, informative phone call he may not even remember having, I am indebted to Richard Hilbert, who helped me put together a book proposal when I was struggling to get started. Finally I would like to thank Bob Sanders, who, as editor of Research on Language and Social Interaction, devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to helping move an essay from ungainly draft to polished article.

I must also thank Mount Saint Mary’s College for providing many President’s Pride Summer Research Grants and the support of a year-long sabbatical that have made this book possible. I am also grateful for the congenial working environment, our ongoing faculty book discussion groups, and the interdisciplinary delights of a small college.

I am especially grateful to John Thompson of Polity Press, who first accepted the proposal for this book and gave me the time and encouragement to finish it, and to Polity’s anonymous reader who provided me with a very careful reading and critique of the manuscript and excellent suggestions for revision.

Finally, as always, I am more grateful than I can say to my wife Jane, my son Brady, and my daughter Megan for all of our talk and for their years of patience with what seemed like a never ending project that took me out at nights and kept me away on weekends. It’s the talking we do in our families that teaches us what talk is really about and for. It’s in that talk that selves are first formed.

Versions of some of the material in this book appeared in “Small disagreements: character contests and working consensus in informal talk,” Symbolic Interaction, 17 (1994), pp. 107–27; and “How to do things with friends: altercasting and recipient design,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28 (1995), pp. 147–70.

Transcription Conventions

[ – overlapping talk and simultaneous turn beginnings

] – end of overlapping talk

( ) – unintelligible stretch of talk

(.) – each period indicates a pause of one tenth of a second

(3.0, etc.) – length of pause in seconds and tenths of seconds

CAPITALIZATION – stress, increased volume

:::: as in we::::ll – elongated utterance

= – no pause between utterances

? – rising inflection, not necessarily a question.

Lengthy blank spaces within turns occur when square brackets indicate alignments of overlapping talk.

{ } – author’s inserted comments

____ – underscoring is used to highlight a word being discussed, and does not indicate any characteristics of the talk.