Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims

Extreme Case Formulations specify a maximum case—for example, “all the time,” “everybody,” or “no one.” An important use of Extreme Case Formulations is to legitimize and/or strengthen a claimed attribute or offense. Participants use Extreme Case Formulations to strengthen their claims when selling, convincing, arguing, defending, justifying, accusing, and complaining. Another use of these formulations is to propose the validity of an assessment. In claiming that everyone has the same assessment of a referent, the speaker both depersonalizes the assessment and bolsters the validity of it. A third use of them is to claim that some conduct is normal and ordinary. This is done by proposing maximal frequency of the conduct. In saying “Everyone does it” or “People do it all the time,” speakers counter the status of the conduct as accountable by proposing that it is normal and ordinary.

Compliment Responses: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints

Giving a compliment involves offering a positive assessment of an attribute, action, or accomplishment for which the recipient is seen to be responsible. In responding to compliments, recipients are subject to multiple, conflicting constraints. Recipients may accept the compliment as a “gift” with a “thank you” and/or they may agree or disagree with the assessment. Quite regularly recipients do not simply accept compliments. Yet either agreeing or disagreeing with a prior compliment poses problems: If recipients agree, they are praising themselves, which is a sanctionable action. If recipients disagree, they fail to acknowledge the compliment as a gift and engender a disagreement sequence. Responses to compliments illustrate the complexities inherent in this sequential environment. The conflicting constraints and complexities as well as the various ways of responding to compliments are analyzed.

Telling My Side: “Limited Access” as a “Fishing” Device

“Telling my side” is a way of seeking information without going on record with an explicit request. The practice involves a speaker’s reporting recognizably limited access to, and knowledge of, a situation in which the recipient was an actor. A limited-access formulation may be likened to an outsider’s or observer’s version of a situation. This practice is used when there are negative sanctions for directly seeking the type of information being sought. Its success relies on participants’ orienting to a sequence of actions: the limited-access report sets up the relevance of the recipient’s providing information. The recipient needs to infer that the speaker seeks further information; furthermore, the recipient must be willing to provide it

Offering a Candidate Answer: An Information Seeking Strategy

Candidate answer queries (also referred to as polar or yes-no questions) are used massively in conversational interaction. Although such queries seem simple and straightforward, analysis reveals several kinds of complexities associated with these types of questions. Candidate answer queries carry claims about the speaker’s knowledge. They are understood as the speaker’s best guess and hence display the speaker’s knowledge about the matter at hand. They also have a moral dimension. Candidate answers may reference a normal, legitimate possibility versus an abnormal, illegitimate one. The moral status of the incorporated candidate answer may be read as reflecting the speaker’s attitude and sympathies about the matter at hand. Finally, by incorporating a candidate answer in a query, a questioner provides a model of what would satisfy the questioner’s purpose in asking.

Commentary

I would like to address why I named this type of question “candidate answer queries” instead of calling them polar questions or yes-no questions. The term “polar questions” originated in linguistics, and the questions were so named because they were thought to invite two possible responses: yes (affirmative) or no (negative), hence the poles. Similarly, the name “yes-no questions” directs our attention to the conditionally relevant next responses of confirming or disconfirming....

Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments

In providing assessments, speakers generally have expectations regarding the recipients’ access to the matters assessed. This paper describes how recipients who claim access to the assessed referent form their responding assessments. Features of responses in two sequential environments are examined: when neither party is responsible for the evaluated referent and when a prior speaker has offered a self-deprecation. The turn and sequence shapes used for agreeing and disagreeing in each of the sequential environments are different. A description of a preference organization that is oriented to in performing the actions is offered to account for the different turn and sequence shapes

Commentary

Let me highlight three sets of complexities associated with asking and telling activities that have emerged during this research project. One set of complexities involves the relationship between the rights and obligations associated with the participants’ roles and relationships and the ways the participants seek and provide information. The second set involves how a shared moral sense of the matter under discussion bears on whether and how they ask and report information about those matters. The third set concerns the relationships between the participants’ claims and assumptions about their own and each other’s knowledge and the ways they ask for and convey information....

Commentary

Unlike many of my other papers in which I analyzed the ways actions are performed, this paper was built around an identifiable formulation. While there is considerable appeal in collecting words, expressions, or formulations to see how they function and what actions they perform, there are, in my view, two significant problems in doing so. The first is that although there is surface similarity in the collection, the items may function very differently and should not be in one collection. Various instances put under the rubric of Extreme Case Formulations are integral parts of different actions. The second problem is related to the first. In studying interaction, we appreciate that fact that interactants perform specific actions, moment to moment, in the course of engaging in activities. When we consider the choices or selections that participants make, those choices generally are in terms of the various ways of performing, or not performing, a relevant action in that sequential environment. However, when we put together a collection of objects, such as Extreme Case Formulations, that service quite different actions and activities, we are focused away from the fact that the Extreme Case Formulations are but one way of working to accomplish the local action, with other ways as alternatives. Instead, papers that are built around a word or phrase or formulation usually are organized to reflect some number of ways that the term or expression or formulation is used....

Commentary

While I make interesting claims in this paper, it suffers from the problem that the instances represent not one phenomenon but a variety of phenomena. I was intrigued by several fragments of interaction in which participants reported their source or basis for their assertions, and I started collecting more instances of that. However, in making the collection, I neglected to take into account the sequential contexts in which speakers report their sources, and I shortchanged my analysis of the actions accomplished by reporting the source or basis. The result is that the paper has different sections describing various uses rather than being an entire paper dedicated to one phenomenon. In this commentary, I clarify the various sequential contexts in which participants report a source or basis for an assertion, sequential contexts that are essential for understanding their uses....

Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling “How I Know”

The way an assertion is formed bears on the nature of the claim for which the speaker is accountable. Speakers are accountable for different claims in saying “There are flies here” versus “I haven't noticed any flies here” versus “John said there are no flies here.” A feature of describing one’s basis is that smaller claims are made than in asserting an objective state of affairs. In describing what is directly experienced, speakers are strictly accountable for representing only their experiences while they imply that these experiences are more or less typical. In reporting what others have said, speakers are strictly accountable for citing accurately, not for the views cited. Several uses for giving a source or basis of an assertion are described. Reporting a source may be used to argue for the validity of a claim, back away from the validity of a claim, and/or remove oneself from authorship accountability. The credibility of the cited source is crucial for whether a claim is portrayed as more or less believable. Interactants report their sources during disputes, in situations of doubt, and when they perform sensitive actions.