2012 Articles

Negotiating Participant Status in Participation Frameworks

Boblett, Nancy Rolph

It is not always easy to find your place within a conversation. In this brief piece, I suggest that participant status (i.e., speaker and hearer roles) within a participation framework, is not always agreed upon by all members, but can be asserted, resisted, and otherwise negotiated. In an effort to address this, I will present an excerpt taken from videotaped recordings of naturally-occurring talk among three colleagues. The line-by-line analysis used in Conversation Analysis (CA) will allow a more nuanced look into what happens when a participant self-selects as speaker, and tries to either maintain or move into a central position in the participation framework. In addition to a line-by-line reading of interaction, CA allows us not only to highlight intonation and loudness of speech, but also to focus on pauses within a turn and gaps between turns. This helps clarify the various strategies that hearers may use to resist or block a move by a speaker.