Commentary

What actions mean,

to whom, and when

Discourse Studies
14(4) 493498
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461445611433959
dis.sagepub.com

Charles Antaki

Loughborough University, UK

Abstract
In a critique of Conversation Analysis treatment of context, Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black
invite us to see that, when understanding some stretch of interaction, speakers retrospective
reports might be helpful. Two standard responses to Waring et al.s argument are that 1) peoples
personal accounts of contingent and fleeting moments of interaction are of a different order of
event from the actions they produce in situ, and are matters of analysis in their own right; and
that 2) CA does use context, insofar as any analyst works with scenes in a culturally familiar
landscape, bolstered (sometimes) by ethnographic accounts for help with local terminology or
institutional agendas.

Keywords
Conversation Analysis, interviews, methodology, retrospection

Conversation Analysis (CA) is wary of context for two reasons because it is boundless, and so too easy a recourse for just any interpretation; and, more positively, because
CA is committed to analyse what the people in the scene make visible to each other
that, after all, is how social life is lived out. Controversies continue, but for those who
practise CA themselves, the matter seems largely settled. Heritages memorable formulation that it is a speakers communicative action that is both context-shaping and contextrenewing (Heritage, 1984: 242) has passed into CA folk wisdom: conversation analysts
are happy to use the word context in the sense of things visible to the analyst or made
live by the people in the scene themselves. Otherwise, not.
Nevertheless the notion that invisible context must be important is so embedded in
the social sciences (and what Silverman, 1993 [2001]) memorably calls the romantic
end of qualitative analysis) that it insists on rematerializing into the debate. Waring et al.
Corresponding author:
Charles Antaki, Discourse and Rhetoric Group, School of Social, Political and Geographic Sciences,
Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK.
Email: c.antaki@lboro.ac.uk

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Discourse Studies 14(4)

(2012) have re-issued the challenge. Sympathetic to CA, they nevertheless find its evidential base wanting, and enter a plea for taking as context peoples retrospective
accounts of what they were up to. The authors helpfully bolster their theoretical claims
with four empirical examples of analysis of given episodes, allowing us to see the value
that the participants retrospections add.
In what follows I shall rehearse two standard objections: that Waring et al. are too
trusting of peoples retrospective accounts of what happened, and that there is in any case
a profound difference between individuals undemonstrated inner feelings, hopes and
intentions, even when accurately recalled, and the visible participants concerns which
are available for public consumption; and, furthermore, CA does indeed already use
informants testimony, but as a matter of ethnographic scene-setting where necessary, or
as a way of applying CA findings to vernacular interests. None of these objections is
new, so the reader will be taken in this article only on a tour over some familiar ground.

1. Retrospective reports: Useful and less useful things

people might tell you
Waring et al. want to find context in what they call properties of immediate interactional situations. Curiously, these turn out to be not strictly speaking properties of the
immediate situation at all, but what comes out in peoples later commentary on it, well
after the immediate situation has evaporated. So the properties of the immediate
situation a promising sense of context turn out to be peoples memories of what
they did some time ago.1
Such memories are well known to be unsatisfactory sources of evidence, for a number
of reasons.2 At least three substantial ones have been extensively aired in the literature,
and will come readily to the readers mind: people just arent very good at remembering
things in general, let alone fleeting states of mind; they rely on general theories about
why a given thing is done; and they may have reason consciously or unconsciously to
polish, confabulate or dissemble about the thing that happened on a specific occasion.
Waring et al. mention none of these problems.
Asking people for their memories and interpretations of what was happening in a
scene would, to the sceptical reader, seem to be the sorts of questions which at best
yielded answers on how the speaker, in the here and now, glosses, summarizes, represents and interprets some parts of what might or might not have happened, seen from
their own point of view and attending to their own interests. Such a questionanswer
exchange is, as Edwards and Potter (1992, esp. Chapter 4) observed 20 years ago,
Heritage (1984, esp. Chapter 6) nearly 30 years ago, and Garfinkel immemorially, not so
much an analytic aid, but rather the subject for more analysis in its own right.
Could a proper ethnographic interview help? Yes, certainly, and it does. There is a
legitimate and familiar ethnographers argument in favour of using informants not to
recall intentions and so on, but to explain terms and usages known only to members of a
particular clique or sub-culture. Such recognizably proper ethnographic interviews are
occasionally done by Conversation Analysts, especially when they engage with specialized groups or professions.3 Waring et al. themselves acknowledge the work of Anita
Pomerantz in her and her colleagues analysis of medical interactions, but they dont

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acknowledge that this is primarily a matter of getting practitioners to explicate what is

going on institutionally, not personally.
In her 2005 chapter, Pomerantz very carefully lays out the pros and cons of participants video-led commentaries. She wants inside information on the institutional problems that medical practitioners recurrently face. These problems might well be
unknown or unsuspected by the analyst: for example, the need for the doctor to avoid
saying something for which they might be sued later. Pomerantz (who we might take
here to represent a broad stream of like-minded CA researchers) does CA to identify a
practice (delicate broaching of a risky lifestyle choice, say) and explicate its workings
(the use of pre-questions, hedges, perspective-display sequences and so on); and then,
as a bonus, and as a matter of collaborating with people with different disciplinary
commitments, she asks a doctor why this might be a good thing in the circumstances.
The point to stress is that under her ethnographers hat, Pomerantz is asking about
in-principle, institutional whys, that is, recurrent policy matters independent of personal contingency, and available to all members of the competent group. That means
that she can take a doctors report to be valid and illuminating, without worrying about
its personal relevance or accuracy. We learn something about what objectives doctors
are working towards, what dangers lurk on either side, and why they set a course
through them one way rather than another. The navigation itself, though, is there for us
to analyse on tape and in the transcript.

2. Even supposing that speakers reports were accurate,

what would they be accurate about?
Waring et al. make a point of saying that CA doesnt address why questions. Thats not
quite right, and not how Silverman (1998) meant his reference to why questions to be
understood. After all, Sackss question why that now? is a familiar and much-invoked call
to arms: an instruction to look carefully at what interactionally (and visibly) occasions
a puzzling object. It generates plenty of CA answers to questions of the form why is this
action well- or ill-fitted here? or what makes this utterance come across as performing
such-and-such an action there?, or indeed what does it achieve interactionally to perform
here an action of this sort?. These are all questions whose answers will yield additions to
the sum of generalizable knowledge about the workings of (anyones) interaction. On the
other hand, it is true that CA concedes having nothing directly to say about why does X
invite Y to dinner? or why does the teacher want pupil A and not pupil B to answer her
question? and so on, where the answers, helpful as they might be to people with a stake in
the real-life episode, will be in terms of ungeneralizable individual motivations and so
unhelpful to the analyst looking for structures of action. Waring et al. want to claim that
what their informants tell them will, by answering such questions, rectify a blind spot in
CA. But there is no such blind spot. CA simply isnt looking in that direction.
Consider Waring et al.s Example 1. Recall that its a sequence in which Judy offers
Frank some advice about punctuation. The CA analysis shows that throughout the
sequence, both Judy and Frank orient to the event as one of advice giving and receiving
(Waring et al., 2012: 482). Fair enough, and one could drill down to explicate how it
comes across as doing it gently (with a pre-question, a my-side telling, and so forth, all

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there in the transcript). Judy is asked to listen to the tape, and she says that she was
worried about Franks lack of confidence.4 This means, according to Waring et al., that
[w]e have a situation, therefore, where the participants concern is broadly inferable but not
specifically displayed in the CA data and only comes to light in a subsequent interview. In this
case, then, the talk-extrinsic data serve to specify what is broadly inferable from the initial CA
analysis.

Not at all. There may be a confusion over concern here. What Waring et al. mean by
Judys concern over Franks confidence (even supposing that this was indeed what she
reported, and even supposing its a true account of what she felt four years ago) is not the
same as what CA typically means by the term participants concern. For CA participants concern just means what people seem to be up to, as they make evident to each
other, and therefore available for study later. The closest we might come, in CA, is in the
sense meant by Pomerantz in her use of video commentary. Pomerantz, as I noted above,
is after institutional (public, knowable, constitutive of the institution itself) concerns,
whereas Waring et al. are after personal concerns worries, intentions, objectives and so
on, knowable only to the individual themselves.
What Waring et al. may claim is broadly inferrable in fact just simply analysable,
or identifiable, with no broadly about it is Judys business of imparting advice in
just the way she does. We dont know her inner motivation, and dont need to, to spot that
its advice and to identify how shes designing it. CA has no deficit to make up, no blind
spot about Judys real reasons it just isnt in the business of looking for them, unless,
as the usual qualification goes, her motivation is made to matter by someone in the scene
(and even then its not her actual motivation that CA has any handle on, but what is made
of it by the participants).
Take what Waring et al. promote as the still more revealing case of their Example 4.
Recall that three people are talking about turning an adjective (here American) into a
noun (Americanization) or a gerund (Americanizing). One speaker, Nina, makes a
smile-voiced reference to Californication in line 8 below.
Extract copied from Waring et al. (2012), p. 486
03Nina:=Yeah Americanization. >Nobody even knows
04 ( [ )<
05T2:
[Americanization? Americanizing?
06 TI: Americanization, you ( )?=
07T2:=yeah.
08Nina:$C(h)alifornic(h)ation.$
09 T1: $hhh like CAliforniZAti(h)on.$ heh heh heh
10 or ne- I say (.) Im becoming (T2 name)
11 ni::zed. And shes like Im becoming
12 (T1 name) nized. ((continues))

Waring et al. ask Nina to comment on the tape. She reveals that when she said
Californication she meant it as a joke she meant to refer to (what she thought was) a

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well-known song. According to Waring et al., thats useful extra knowledge. But what
Waring et al. claim for this revelation does not seem to me to pull much analytic weight.
They want it to correct CAs reading of line 8 as playful, but no such correction is
necessary line 8s playfulness is signalled by the smile voice, the inserted laughter
particles and the hearably rude word. Whether Nina meant to refer to a song or to a film
is unnecessary to tell the people in the scene that the reference is a jocular one (and it
would be a jocular one even if there were in fact no referent at all if Nina was simply
making a new word up).
Waring et al. also play the tape to T1 and ask for her account, and discover that T1
recalls not having identified the song title. This is helpful, according to Waring et al.,
because it corrects the CA reading of lines 912. T1 has repeated Ninas word, but this
time with a syntactic variant (-ization instead of Ninas -ation). Analysis suggests
that the turn is ambiguous: we cant know whether T1 knowingly meant to move Nina
away from the rude word, or simply didnt register it as rude and was offering yet
further playful variants. Waring et al. say that T1s testimony now allows us to choose
between those two since T1 now reveals that she didnt recognize the song title at
the time, so she must then have been just playing along. But again this seems an
unnecessary step, indeed one that does damage to what happened at the time: in the
scene as it played out, T1s turn may well have been designed as, and come off as,
ambiguous as to the two actions possibly in play. Certainly, it would have been so for
Nina and anyone else present.
And that captures exactly why retrospections about hidden knowledge, even if they
might be accurate, are no help. What matters to the people in the scene is what they
can see and, perforce, have to deal with.

Concluding comment
Waring et al. make no play, in their argument, for a consideration of context in the sense
of what they call its broader social, political, and cultural situations (478). They cut
themselves off from some strong arguments (for which they send the reader elsewhere)
to the effect that a knowledge of pre-existing social structure, political situation and
power relations must be made explicitly to inform the analysis of any given episode of
social life. I dont mean that such arguments would have won the day and reinstalled
that sense of context as a necessary part of CAs armoury; only that Waring et al. have
ignored them, and so have some high-denomination cards missing from their hand. Or,
more profitably, they might have invoked as context the kinds of bodily movements
and physical affordances of the scene that are increasingly used in multi-modal CA
(everything from dance movements, e.g. Keevallik, 2010, through multi-site video
links, e.g. Licoppe and Dumoulin, 2010, to vehicle navigation instruments, e.g.
Haddington, 2010). The cards they do want to play personal memory and interpretation
will strike at least some readers as ones with a lower and more uncertain value.
Waring et al.s project to reintroduce context to CA by dint of remembered inner
beliefs and motivations, revealed by later interview, is, I fear, not going to find favour.
There is too uncertain a relation between reports and what happened, and in any case
CAs interests are in what is publicly transacted, not what is privately thought or felt.

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Nevertheless, the authors use of interviews does point us helpfully in the direction of
applied CA work which collaborates with informants. It can certainly be worthwhile to
make a bridge between how something is done in talk and what institutional interests it
might serve; but that bridge needs to be laid on firmer ethnographic foundations than
partial reports of what was going on in a vanished scene.
Notes
1. Four years earlier, in two of the cases that the authors report as examples.
2. Pomerantz (2005) has a thorough account of the history of concerns about the usefulness of
video stimulated commentary.
3. And would sometimes be welcome on a more domestic scale, to explain references between
intimates where mysteries might arise in talk about such things as taken-for-granted family
relationships, prior arrangements and so on, or whether a name in one part of the tape refers
to the same person as a nickname in another part, and like matters. But these, again, are not
questions of intentions and beliefs.
4. Actually, thats what Waring et al. gloss what Judy says; the quote they provide suggests a
rather different concern: As she said, Frank is very bright and should not use the writing
center as an excuse not to edit his papers. One could just as easily gloss this as Judy being
more concerned about him slacking, than suffering from low self-confidence.

References
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Haddington P (2010) Turn-taking for turntaking: Mobility, time, and action in the sequential
organization of junction negotiations in cars. Research on Language and Social Interaction
43:372400.
Heritage J (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Keevallik L (2010) Bodily quoting in dance correction. Research on Language and Social
Interaction 43:401426.
Licoppe P and Dumoulin L (2010) The curious case of an unspoken opening speech act: A
video-ethnography of the use of video communication in courtroom activities. Research on
Language and Social Interaction 43: 211231.
Pomerantz A (2005) Using participants video stimulated comments to complement analyses
of interactional practices. In: te Molder H and Potter J (eds) Conversation and Cognition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93113.
Silverman D (1993 [2001]) Interpreting Qualitative Data. Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and
Interaction, 2nd edn. London: SAGE.
Silverman D (1998) Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Waring HZ, Creider S, Tarpey T and Black R (2012) A search for specificity in understanding CA
and context. Discourse Studies 14(4): 477492.

Author biography
Charles Antaki is Professor of Language and Social Psychology at Loughborough
University. Among his publications is the edited collection Applied Conversation
Analysis (Palgrave). He is grateful to the Collegium of Advanced Studies, University of
Helsinki, for support while preparing this article.