Geoffrey Raymond

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we 'repair' and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute - anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology - this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

Research on interactions involving police officers foregrounds the importance of their communicative practices for fostering civilians' perceptions of police legitimacy. Building on this research, we describe a pattern of conduct that is a recurrent source of trouble in such encounters, which we call sequential standoffs. These standoffs emerge when two parties persistently pursue alternative courses of action, producing a stalemate in which neither progress in, nor exit from, either course of action appears viable. They are routinely resolved by officers (re)casting civilians' pursuit of one course of action as constituting resistance to the officers' proposed course of action, and thus as warranting officers' use of coercive violence to resolve the stalemate. In some cases, however, officers resolve standoffs cooperatively using sequentially accommodative methods. We consider how these findings advance approaches to communicative dilemmas in policing, and their broader significance for scholars of social interaction, and of the interactional organization of conflicts.

Analysts of human conduct have long sought to describe how people build and coordinate their actions with others (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage 1984b). As Heritage (1984b) noted, achieving a shared understanding of events and actions in such environments entails (and is ...

Connections between grammar and social organization are examined via one of the most pervasive practices of speaking used in talk-in-interaction: yes/no type inter-rogatives and the turns speakers build in response to them. This investigation is composed of two parts. The first analyzes ...

This report examines interactional troubles that find their source, not in talk, but in manual action. First, we introduce the intertwined character of two fundamental features of most, if not all emergent human conduct: The ongoing structural projection of an action-in-progress along with its continuing progressive realization. We then identify two sources of body- behavioral trouble that interfere with the action implication of emerging manual action, and result in remedial action by its recipient. Manual actors sometimes 1) foreshorten the “preparation phase” of emerging manual action, or 2) interrupt manual action before it comes to completion. Additionally, we demonstrate how misconstruing the action implication of emerging manual action can also result in body trouble that leads to recipient remediation, even when there is no reduction of its structural project- ability or interruption of its progressive realization. For each circumstance, we describe the adjusting actions that remediate such body troubles. [Occasionally, English is spoken.]

This paper examines how orthopaedic surgeons skilfully design treatment recommendations to display awareness of what individual patients are anticipating or seeking, and suggests limits to those efforts. It adds leverage to our parallel work by demonstrating that even when surgeons incorporate considerations of recipient design to 'fit' recommendations to patients' displayed orientations, an asymmetry between recommendations for vs. not for surgery remains: recommendations for surgery are generally proposed early, in relatively simple and unmitigated form, and as stand-alone options. In contrast, recommendations not for surgery tend to be significantly more complex: they are likely to be delayed, conveyed indirectly, mitigated and justified, and include other possible treatment options. These findings suggest a tension between surgeons' efforts to design recommendations for specific recipients and an overarching institutional bias favoring surgery. Surgeons' efforts to anticipate and respond to resistance to recommendations demonstrate a similar pattern: the methods used to counter patient resistance, and the sequential placement of those efforts, depends on whether the recommendation is for surgery or another treatment option. This work contributes to an understanding of treatment recommendations generally by showing how patients are co-implicated in their accomplishment: because surgeons incorporate considerations of recipient design in response to information provided explicitly or tacitly by patients, patients influence the rendering of recommendations from the beginning.

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled 'The Epistemics of Epistemics', contributing authors criticize Heritage's research on participants' orientations to, and management of, the distribution of (rights to) knowledge in conversation. These authors claim (a) that the analytic framework Heritage (and I) developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts' over the participants' point of view, and (b) rejects standard methods of conversation analysis (CA); (c) that (a) and (b) are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and (d) that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors' effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection (of occasions involving the pursuit of one party's 'suspicions' about another's alleged misdeeds) to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA's success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the 'something more' that each particular case can provide.

Using data from American emergency call centers this paper focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participant's effort to manage two forms of unit completion-sequence closing (as a method for " project " completion) and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe (1) a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and (2) the locations from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment-or make visible their failure to do so-regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are (or could have been) for another, i.e., their " identities. " For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved, matters. 2

This article draws on one citizen’s efforts to document daily life in his neighborhood. The authors describe the potential benefits of third-party video—videos that people who are not social scientists have recorded and preserved—to social science research. Excerpts from a collection of police-citizen interactions illustrate key points likely to confront researchers who use third-party video. The authors address two important

In this chapter I introduce the notion of ‘slots’ as a unit used in the composition of type-conforming responses to yes/no type interrogatives (or YNIs) in English. Specifically, I show that speakers can compose type-conforming responses by reference to two (internally organized) slots associated with the relevancies
set in motion by a YNI initiating action: a [response to the interrogative] and a [response to the action] the it conveys. Examining a collection of type-conforming responses I first show that ‘slots’ can be distinguished from
turn constructional units (or TCUs, Sacks et al. 1974) by establishing that variations in such responses cannot be reduced to this more familiar unit.
For example, in cases where talk past a yes or no is relevant type-conforming responses can be composed of materials drawn from (at least) two distinct TCU types (one for each slot) that are packaged within a single intonation contour; in other cases, speakers can devote two TCUs to manage the relevancies associated with a single slot. Second, I describe the basic features of an ‘unmarked’ [response to interrogative] and show that a dense array of alternative actions can be composed via speaker’s alterations to one or more of the material elements used to compose it. Through these observations I illustrate how speakers adapt the material resources use to compose their turns to the relevancies posed by the sequence of action to which they contribute. That is, by focusing on variations
in type-conforming responses I show how the complex obligations entailed in normatively organized social action are fulfilled in talk-in-interaction, and how the primary constituents of turn organization – grammar, prosody, and word selection – are manipulated and pressed into service on their behalf.

This article examines treatment recommendations in orthopedic surgery consultations and shows how surgery is treated as “omni-relevant” within this activity, providing a context within which the broad range of treatment recommendations proposed by surgeons is offered. Using conversation analysis to analyse audiotaped encounters between orthopedic surgeons and patients, we highlight how surgeons treat surgery as having a special, privileged status relative to other treatment options by (1) invoking surgery (whether or not it is actually being recommended) and (2) presenting surgery as the “last best resort” (in relation to which other treatment options are calibrated, described and considered). This privileged status surfaces in the design and delivery of recommendations as a clear asymmetry: Recommendations for surgery are proposed early, in relatively simple and unmitigated form. In contrast, recommen- dations not for surgery tend to be delayed and involve significantly more interactional work in their delivery. Possible implications of these findings, including how surgeons’ structuring of recommendations may shape patient expectations (whether for surgery or some alternative), and potentially influence the distribution of orthopedic surgery procedures arising from these consultations, are considered.