Generic reference and social ontology in Vietnamese conversation

ABSTRACTGeneric expressions play a key role in the interactional articulation, social circulation, and temporal reproduction of ideology. Here I examine fragments from a conversation between four middle-class participants which took place at a café in Hanoi. After briefly describing the particular grammatico-textual patterns by which specific and generic references are accomplished in Vietnamese, I turn to consider two extended stretches of talk in which these people weave generic reference into the warp and weft of their interaction. I argue that generic reference is intimately tied to social ontology which consists, in part, of ideas about distinct and essentialized ‘kinds of persons’. Deployed in what appears, on the surface at least, as ordinary, mundane conversation, not only does such generic reference serve to position those referred to as ‘ontological other’ (Wynter 1987), it also constitutes an ‘act of alterity’ (Hastings & Manning 2004) by which the participants tacitly characterize themselves. (Reference, Vietnamese, social ontology, alterity, stereotype, essentialism)*

Story formulations in talk-in-interaction

This article contrasts ‘mainstream’ narrative analysis, and the study of researcher-elicited narrative accounts, with conversation analysis and the study of naturally occurring narratives-in-interaction. Our analysis extends previous conversation analytic and discursive psychological work on storytelling (i.e., how stories get embedded in sequences of talk; the actions storytelling does), by focusing on the location and function of speakers’ story formulations and orientations to narrative (e.g. “I think we should start at the beginning”, “You want the full story, or…?”, “there’s always two sides to every story”). Rather than treating such ‘meta-formulations’ as partial expressions of a general folk theory of narrative, we examine their action-orientation and the way they are shaped for the occasions of their production; how members’ commonsense notions of stories are displayed in the interactional contexts in which they are put to use. The argument is illustrated by a range of brief examples from mundane conversation, police interrogation, and neighbour dispute mediation.

A turn-taking system for British news interviews

ABSTRACTThe British news interview turn-taking system operates through a simple form of turn-type preallocation. This article shows that a large number of the systematic differences between the news interview and mundane conversation are a product of these constraints on the production of types of turns. It then explores the relationship of turn-type preallocation in news interviews to the background legal and institutional restrictions on British broadcast journalists. In so doing, it notes how the organisation of turn-taking in two other types of broadcast interview can differ from that in the news interview due to differences between the institutionalized footings that the interviewers are conventionally required to maintain within them. (Conversation analysis, mass communication, British speech, turn-taking systems, institutional talk)