Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(4), 395–431 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Aligning as a Team: Forms of Conjoined Participation in (Stepfamily) Interaction
Cynthia Gordon Department of Linguistics Georgetown University
Prior research (Falk, 1979; Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner, 1987, 1993) has suggested that individuals participate as teams in interaction by aligning supportively with one another and by sharing turns at talk or speaking on behalf of the team. In this article, I explore more closely how participants “do” team talk by analyzing excerpts from two audiotaped stepfamily mealtime interactions. In the analysis, I identify three forms of participation that teams enact in these data. Team members (a) share turns, (b) alternate turns parallel in function, and (c) situate their conversational contributions within a shared “knowledge schema” (Tannen & Wallat, 1993). In this article, I add to work on teams in interaction by illustrating how teams form and function moment by moment, by identifying previously unidentified forms of team participation, and by demonstrating in what ways extrainteractional characteristics of interlocutors can serve as a basis for creating particular alignments at particular moments in conversation. In the analysis, I also identify stepfamilies as an ideal site for examining shifting alignments in conversation and discuss how teams relate to negotiating relationships in this context.
Past work (Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner 1987, 1993) has suggested that individuals do not always function as separate individuals in conversation and instead act as an “interactional team.” A team is created in I thank Deborah Tannen for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this article and Don Zimmerman and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks. I am grateful to “Jim,” “Anna,” and “Emily” for allowing me to subject our family interactions to linguistic analysis. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Cynthia Gordon, 1011 Arlington Boulevard, #214, Arlington, VA 22209. E-mail:
[email protected]
396
Cynthia Gordon
conversation when two or more participants align supportively with one another and exhibit conjoined participation, which means that they continue, complete, or repair each other’s turns or speak on behalf of another team member, thereby making their association visible to co-interlocutors (Kangasharju, 1996, p. 292). In this article, I analyze transcripts of audio tape-recorded stepfamily mealtime conversation wherein teams continually form and re-form to examine how teams are constructed moment by moment in conversation and to identify how teams “do” conjoined participation. According to Tannen (2001), “family relations are a web of alliances drawn and redrawn by talk” (p. 31). In a stepfamily, this web is particularly intricate, and it is thus an ideal site for examining shifting alignments in interaction. The excerpts of conversation I analyzed were drawn from conversations among members of my own family that were tape-recorded over the course of one weekend. I identify and describe three forms of conjoined participation that two or more members forming a team perform in these data. I call these (a) shared turns (participants jointly share a turn at talk), (b) parallel turns (participants alternate turns parallel in function), and (c) schema-echo turns (participants draw from a shared “knowledge schema” [Tannen & Wallat, 1993] in constructing their own turns). I elaborate the specific interactional form and meaning of each of these types of conjoined participation in individual sections of the article. In the next section, I review some features of interaction that create supportive alignments identified in past research because supportive alignment is a characteristic of interactional teams, as noted by Kangasharju (1996), and I discuss how past work has defined conjoined participation. I then introduce the data for this article, which consist of two audio tape-recorded and transcribed excerpts from mealtime conversations involving my father, my father’s wife, my half sister, and myself. In the analysis that follows, I identify three interactional teams that form in the excerpts. For each of these teams, I discuss how the team is made relevant in interaction; highlight the features of interaction that create supportive alignments, specifically repetition of another’s utterance and supportive back channeling; and define and describe the form of participation the team enacts in the excerpt. I conclude by discussing the relationship between extrainteractional identities and team formation and by considering how teams work toward building and negotiating relationships in the stepfamily context in particular.
Aligning as a Team
397
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Supportive Alignments Goffman (1981) suggested that as participants frame events they also negotiate interpersonal relationships or “alignments” that make up those events (Tannen & Wallat, 1993, p. 60). According to Tannen and Wallat, a frame, or what they called an “interactive frame” is “a definition of what is going on, without which no utterance (or move or gesture) could be interpreted” (pp. 59–60). “Alignment,” in contrast, refers to relations between participants. Following Goffman (1981), Schiffrin (1993) described participant alignments as being “related to the way interactants position themselves relative to one another, for example, their relationships of power and solidarity, their affective stances, their footing” (p. 233). Schiffrin (1993) also suggested that alignments are “part of the broader notion of participant structure (or framework), i.e., the way that a speaker and hearer are related to their utterances and to one another” (p. 233). A particular type of alignment, or what might be referred to as “supportive alignment,” is characteristic of interactional teams. By “supportive alignment,” I mean an alignment in which one participant ratifies and supports another’s turns at talk and what he or she has to say, creating ties of cooperation, collaboration, and agreement. In other words, supportive alignments are those that mean one participant aligns with another, sending the metamessage (Bateson, 1972) “I support you, we agree.” A number of conversational features have been identified as constructing supportive alignments between speakers. These features, although not creating interactional teams in themselves, frequently cluster in the talk of participants forming an interactional team (Kangasharju, 1996). They can be seen as precursors of or accompaniments to the conjoined participation necessary to perform as a team. These conversational features include 1. Shared smiles and laughter (Ellis, 1997; Kangasharju, 1996; Pritchard, 1993). 2. Repetition of another’s words (Falk, 1979; Kangasharju, 1996; Pritchard, 1993; Tannen, 1989). 3. Supportive back channeling (Falk, 1979; Pritchard, 1993; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977).
398
Cynthia Gordon
4. Collaborative sentence building (Díaz, Antaki, & Collins, 1996; Falk, 1979; Ferrara, 1992; Kangasharju, 1996; Tannen, 1984; Sacks, 1992;). Teams Conversational features creating supportive alignments such as those mentioned in the previous section cluster in the talk of participants making up an “interactional team” (Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner, 1987, 1993) or a “conversational duet” (Falk, 1979). However, participants can also create supportive alignments by jointly constructing events in which they do not take the same “side.” For example, Schiffrin (1984) showed that in collaboratively constructing an argument by taking opposing sides, speakers in the Jewish American community she examined built solidarity. This is a type of supportive alignments that implies a different kind of “team talk.” The team talk considered in this analysis is team talk in the sense of Kangasharju (1996), meaning participants create a supportive alignment while also exhibiting conjoined participation. Past work has shown that conjoined participation occurs where participants complete conversational turns together or take a turn on behalf of another team member (Kangasharju, 1996, p. 292). As Falk (1979) remarked about the conversational duet One-to-one conversation consists of an exchange of “solo” performances. Each role is occupied by a single person. But in group conversations two (or more) persons may participate as though they were one, by talking to an audience in tandem for both (or sometimes one) of them about the same, with the same communicative goal. Those persons then are performing metaphorically not a “solo” but a “duet.” (p. 18)
The finding that when interlocutors speak on behalf of coparticipants particular alignments are created relates to Schiffrin’s (1993) identification of the conversational move of “speaking for another.” Examining sociolinguistic interview data, she showed that when one speaker takes a turn on another’s behalf, it can create supportive alignments (e.g., it can be perceived as “chipping in”), or it can create divisive alignments (e.g., the move can be interpreted as “butting in”). This emphasizes the importance of considering moves such as “speaking for another” as they are situated in the unfolding discourse: The conversational move is not necessarily “supportive.” In Schiffrin’s (1993) data, interlocutors self-selected to speak for another participant. This is one way conjoined participation and the forma-
Aligning as a Team
399
tion of teams become relevant in conversation. In addition, Lerner (1993) suggested that conjoined participation becomes relevant when someone in the interaction addresses corecipients as an association, when participants confer amongst themselves, or when a person speaks about other participants as an association. For example, Lerner (1993) remarked that when someone addresses a couple asking, “What did you guys do this weekend?,” conjoined participation between members of the couple becomes relevant. In Lerner’s (1993) data, participants often formed teams according to extrainteractional relationships (e.g., couples formed teams). Falk (1979) also suggested that preexisting relationships may motivate a duet or team, in part due to the high degree of camaraderie a duet entails. Lerner (1993) also suggested that participants can supportively align as a team when they share past experiences and thus have mutual knowledge of a joint set of experiences. Similarly, Goodwin (1986) found that interlocutors conversing at a Midwestern picnic supportively aligned according to their access to the discourse topic. In Goodwins’s data, the participants with competence in the discourse domain (car racing) participated on the main conversational floor and aligned with one another supportively, whereas the less knowledgeable or disengaged participants distanced themselves from these participants. Falk (1979) also noted that shared knowledge is relevant to the formation of teams. Lerner (1987) suggested that explaining and storytelling often lead to team formation, as knowing participants collaborate to coexplain or conarrate. Mandelbaum (1987) found that couples’ shared knowledge (based on shared prior experience) leads them to jointly tell stories. Thus competence or knowledge about the discourse topic may relate to the formation of teams. Kangasharju (1996) showed that teams can form according to shared opinions. In Kangasharju’s (1996) study, two participants in a Finnish institutional committee meeting marked by conflict formed a team because they shared an opinion about the topic of talk. By sharing turns and by speaking on behalf of the team to the others present, these two participants were able to push the limits of the participation framework of the meeting and put forth their shared opinion in extended sequences. Also particularly interesting about Kangasharju’s (1996) data is that members of the team did not exist as a collectivity outside the meeting: They were not, for example, friends or coworkers, nor did they have institutional position in common. However, their shared opinions serve as a basis for forming a team at a particular moment of the meeting.
400
Cynthia Gordon
Teams can form when associations are recognized by interlocutors, where extrainteractional relationships exist and become relevant, or when mutual knowledge becomes relevant in conversation. However, prior research has suggested that teams are more likely to form in certain types of interactions than others. Straehle (1993) suggested that teams form in teasing episodes between friends, whereas Falk (1979), Lerner (1993), and Kangasharju (1996, 2002) have all noted that teams frequently occur in conflict talk, although conflict is not necessary for teams to form. The analysis that follows builds on Kangasharju (1996) in particular, using her definition of an interactional team. In her words, “A team is characterized by the fact that the participants explicitly act as an association making this association visible to other participants” (p. 292). In this study, I add to prior work on teams by analyzing team formation and team functioning moment by moment and by illustrating how extrainteractional characteristics of interlocutors become relevant and serve as a basis for accomplishing particular alignments at particular conversational moments. Finally, in this analysis, I consider teams as interactionally unfolding in the context of the stepfamily, where teams have been viewed as enduring opposing alignments that inhibit open communication (e.g., by Ganong & Coleman, 1994; Nelson & Utesch, 1990). In the next section, I describe the particular stepfamily whose discourse is considered in the analysis that follows.
DATA The data for this analysis were drawn from audiotapes of conversations between members of my own family, which can be described as a stepfamily. In introducing the participants, I do not mean to imply that their extrainteractional relationships “cause” teams to form but that these relationships can (and do) serve as a basis for team formation at particular moments in conversation. Another way of thinking about this is that these relationships are made relevant and (re)created in the discourse at specific moments through conversational means. In their study of remarried family relationships, Ganong and Coleman (1994) identified five characteristics of stepfamilies that make relationships in stepfamilies different from those of first-marriage families: (a) stepfamilies are more complex, (b) children are often members of two households, (c) stepfamily members have different family histories, (d) parent–child bonds are older than spousal bonds, and (e) individual, marital,
Aligning as a Team
401
and family life cycles are more likely to be incongruent. To clarify what “stepfamily” means in reference to the participants in the examined interactions, the participants and their relationships to one another are listed following. *Jim,1 my father. *Anna, Jim’s wife, stepmother to Emily and Cynthia. *Myself (Cynthia, the author), 24 years old at the time of taping, Jim’s daughter from his first marriage, Anna’s stepdaughter, and Emily’s half sister. *Emily, 14 years old at the time of taping, Jim’s daughter from his second marriage, Anna’s stepdaughter, my half sister. Jim and Anna had been married for 7 months at the time of taping and lived in the metropolitan Chicago area. Emily was living with Anna and Jim every other week, spending the other weeks with her mother. I was a graduate student living in Washington, DC, and went to visit my father, Anna, and Emily one weekend specifically to gather data for a course I was taking on family discourse. I taped several mealtime interactions as well as conversations occurring in the car. At the time of taping, I had known Anna for approximately 1 year, and Emily had known her for several months longer. This stepfamily background information is relevant to the analysis of the teams that occur in the data for several reasons. First, Jim and I have access to discourse topics that surface in the interaction that Anna and Emily do not, specifically knowledge about my (maternal) grandparents, due to our longer shared history. This serves as a basis for our forming a team when the topic of my grandparents comes up in conversation (in Excerpt 1). Second, Jim and Anna both have parental roles vis-à-vis Emily who was 14 years old and lived with them at the time of taping. However, only Jim plays a parental role vis-à-vis me (age 24 at the time of taping and not living in their home). In one segment of Excerpt 2, Jim and Anna “parent” Emily as a team, and I participate minimally. Third, Jim, Anna, and I have a greater access to another topic that surfaces in Excerpt 2 (dating) than does Emily. Jim, Anna, and I align supportively as a team of “experts” here. These extrainteractional characteristics of the individuals making up the family whose discourse is analyzed here are important to interactional teams because they can be (but do not have to be) the basis for forming teams. Extrainteractional identities (e.g., stepparent and stepchild), personal traits such as age and current place of residence, and knowledge re-
402
Cynthia Gordon
lated to shared and unshared family histories relate to how the shifting alignments that characterize the stepfamily interactions in the analysis that follows are created. ANALYSIS The two conversational excerpts for this analysis of three interactional teams occur during mealtime conversations. Excerpt 1 was drawn from a dinner at home; Excerpt 2 was drawn from a lunch at a bagel shop. The three teams I identify show different ways of “doing conjoined participation” in interaction. These are (a) turn sharing, (b) parallel turns, and (c) schema-echo turns. Conjoined Participation as Turn Sharing The first example of an interactional team is a team that functions in a congruent way to Kangasharju (1996) and Falk (1979): The participants share conversational turns; that is to say, two interlocutors participate in a conversational slot instead of just one. In the following excerpt, occurring during the dinner conversation, Jim and I form an interactional team when a topic of talk for which we are both insiders surfaces (the life histories of my maternal grandparents, his ex-in-laws). Thus, following Falk (1979), my father and I have the mutual knowledge that presupposes the formation of an interactional team. The topic first appears in a joking frame created when I tell Anna, Emily, and Jim how my maternal grandmother went on a diet (Weight Watchers®), and my grandfather, not having my grandmother cooking fattening things for him, lost 15 lb. Emily steps outside the joking frame and asks if my grandfather was “skinny in the first place.” Then she remarks in lines 14 to 15, “I haven’t seen any of your family,” and Anna asks in lines 15 through 17, “Well how old are your grandparents. Probably.” The topic then turns into a serious discussion about my grandparents wherein the interactional team becomes relevant as my father and I confer (shown in the boxed portions of the excerpt) to answer Anna’s question. In this transcript and those that follow, each participant’s talk appears in one column.2 (Note that in the excerpt, “Sam” is Jim’s stepfather, with whom all the participants are familiar. “Gail” is my mother, whom Emily knows and Anna has
Aligning as a Team
403
never met). The entirety of the discussion about the lives of my grandparents, wherein the shared-turn form of participation occurs, appears as Excerpt 1 in the Appendix. Anna 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Jim
Cynthia
Yeah. ( ) (Well) how old are your grandparents. (Probably.)
CONFERRING
Emily I haven’t seen any of your family.
Mmmm, seventy five? Seventy-seven? Wow!
CONFERRING Are they that old? Maybe seventy five, yeah, seventy-five, seventy-seven.
That’s not that old. How old is your mom.
Drawing on Lerner (1993), one can see how the interactional team consisting of my father and me becomes relevant in the conversation: through conferring. Specifically, I confer with my father in answering the question Anna asks about how old my grandparents are. Note that Jim is the only participant (besides me) who might have access to my grandparents’ages. Through rising intonation in lines 18 to 19 (“Seventy-five? Seventy-seven?”), I open the relevance of our conjoined participation. Conferring continues in lines 22 through 25 where I again ask my father a question (“Are they that old?”) in trying to answer Anna’s question and he responds. Notice that he also exactly repeats my guesses (as shown in bold), and repetition is a conversational feature that can work toward creating a supportive interactional alignment. This initial instance of conferring invites conjoined participation, but it is not the only occurrence of conferring between my father and me in the excerpt. Other instances serve to reinforce the relevance of our participation as a team imparting information to Anna. The next instance occurs when Jim tells Anna how my grandparents met. In lines 76 through 79, Jim “checks the facts” with me. In the reproduction of the data following, the conferring again is boxed and labeled. Appearing in bold is supportive back channeling. Anna 70 71 72
Jim Well they were both in the Second WorldWorld War,
Cynthia
Emily I like that name, Jeff, Jeffrey.
404
Cynthia Gordon
Anna 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82
Jim
Cynthia
same as Sam. they worked onthey worked on uhI THINK that’s where theythat your grandparents met, was on a hospital ship there, yeah.
Emily
CONFERRING
Mhm, mhm.
Where? Hospital ship in the Pacific. Really!
Here Jim switches from referring to my grandparents as “they,” when addressing Anna, to “your grandparents,” addressing me and conferring with me. I then confirm what he has said with “Mhm, mhm,” which not only verifies his facts but also sends the metamessage, “I’m with you,” working to show supportive alignment. The final example of conferring occurs when Jim is telling Anna what my grandparents have on their property out in the country. Here he confers with me about how many apple trees my grandparents have. Anna 123 124 125 126 127
Jim
Cynthia
trees and some, a few apple trees, CONFERRING what, a dozen maybe apple trees.
Emily
Where do they live? Where in Michigan do they
In this example, Jim confers with me. Again, note that I am the only other participant who would know this information. Although in this example, I do not respond verbally to my father’s request for confirmation, his conferring nonetheless reaffirms the relevance of our conjoined participation and thus encourages the formation of an interactional team. Another way of understanding this would be that this conferring “opens the door” for conjoined participation. An interactional team entails not only conjoined participation but also a supportive alignment between interlocutors. Two linguistic features that have been identified as showing supportive alignment—repetition of the words of others and supportive back-channel signals—also appear in the talk of members of the team. As shown in the previous excerpts in bold type, repetition and supportive back channeling occur during conferring episodes. These features also occur between team
Aligning as a Team
405
members elsewhere in the excerpt, for example the following in which Emily guesses how old my mother is, I answer, and Jim supports my answer through echo: Anna 30 31 32 33
Jim
Cynthia
Emily How old is your mom. Dad’s age?
Yeah. Yeah.
Reciprocally, later in the conversation, I support Jim when he answers a question about my grandparents. In this example, my father tells Anna that my grandmother is from Buffalo, New York. Anna 88 89 90 91 92
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
she was from, Buffalo, Uhuh. New York? Yeah. Yep.
In the previous example, I use back channels of support as part of the developing interactional team. Supportive back channels also occur in the next excerpt in which Anna asks a question, I answer, and my father supports my answer. In this example, Anna is asking what my grandfather did for a living after World War II. Anna 98 99 100 101 102 103 104
Jim
Cynthia
All right so what did he do, is he a farmer? Wh- did he become a farmer or a-
Emily ()
No he worked for Chrysler, like his whole life. Yeah.
Here Jim uses “yeah” to ratify my answer, showing supportive alignment with me, the person with whom he forms the interactional team. Thus far, I have shown that conjoined participation becomes relevant when Jim and I confer and that repetition and back channels create a supportive interactional alignment that accompanies team talk. I now turn to
406
Cynthia Gordon
conjoined participation itself. Here, interlocutors together fill one conversational slot and share a turn at talk. First, simply in conferring about my grandparents’ages early in the excerpt, Jim and I work together to fill one conversational slot, the slot of “answer” that is brought about by Anna’s question in lines 15 through 17. I illustrate this by re-presenting these lines, this time boxing relevant conversational slots. Anna
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Jim
QUESTION (Well) how old are your grandparents. (Probably.)
Cynthia
Emily
of your family. ANSWER Mmmm, seventy five? Seventy-seven? Wow! Are they that old? Maybe seventy five, yeah, seventy-five, seventy-seven.
That’s not that old. How old is your mom.
The excerpt can be considered both conferring and turn sharing, as my father and I work together to fill the sequential slot opened by Anna’s question. It is not, however, the only example of turn sharing between members of this team. There is one particularly notable extended shared turn. This occurs in an “answer” slot that Jim and I share in lines 107 through 126. Supportive back channels and repetitions appear in bold type. Also, as with the preceding example, the conjoined participation occurs in response to a question posed by Anna (here she asks what my grandfather did after the war). Anna 98 99 100 101 102
Jim
Cynthia
All right so what did he do, is he a farmer? Wh- did he become a farmer or a-
103 104 105 Oh.
Emily (xx)
No he worked for Chrysler,
like his whole life. Yeah.
Aligning as a Team
Anna QUESTION 106 But they live on a farm. 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126
407
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
ANSWER (Well, ) It’s prettyit’s like uh, farmy. ten or twenty-acres, he has farmland, They have (…) he has a section some fruit trees and of farmland, peppers, yeah, and he doesand he has huge gardens and you know stuff like that. He has a tractor, nothing commercial, butbut it’s not, yeah, it’s not commercial. like a bunch of- yeah, had you know some apple trees and some, a few apple trees, what, a dozen maybe Where do they live? apple trees.
In this excerpt, Jim and I together answer the clarification question “but they live on a farm” posed by Anna, sharing a conversational slot and using linguistic devices evidencing a supportive alignment. In this shared conversational turn, Jim and I, as insiders to the discourse topic, jointly share information with an outsider to the topic (Anna) and in doing so form a team in interaction. This represents the first of three forms of participation interactional teams enact in these data: the sharing of turns. I now turn to two other forms of participation available to members of teams in interaction. These excerpts of conversation were drawn from Excerpt 2 (shown in its entirety in the Appendix). Conjoined Participation as Parallel Participation and Individual Turns In this section, I examine an interactional team consisting of Anna and Jim who enact the familial role of “parent” with Emily as the recipient of their talk. They participate as a team by alternating turns parallel in function independently; that is to say, where one team member speaks, it is on behalf of the entire team. They also repeat one another’s words to create a supportive alignment.
408
Cynthia Gordon
In this excerpt, the family is having lunch at a bagel shop. Jim and Anna are asking Emily whether she is going to ask Ben, a boy she knows from church, to her (all-girls) school’s homecoming. This is a topic that has been addressed numerous times before, as becomes obvious in the conversation. It is also worth noting that I am a relative outsider to this topic, which explains the nature of the questions I ask the other participants. Jim and Anna work toward presenting a unified parental front, thereby making an interactional team relevant. As with the team made up of my father and me, conjoined participation between Anna and Jim is initially made relevant by one of the practices identified by Lerner (1993): they confer amongst themselves. However, this conferring first manifests as something akin to “reproaching” as Anna discusses with Jim whether it is appropriate for Emily to ask a boy who in her view, Emily barely knows, to her homecoming dance. Anna 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
You’re gonna ask him to the dance? CONFERRING But- Emily doesn’t even know him Jim, she hasn’t even talked to him!
Jim
Cynthia
Because if you don’t ask him today, there’s no point.
Emily
(Yeah.) Who’s Ben.
Yes I have.
Anna addresses Jim in the boxed portion of the transcript as she confers with him in reference to his telling Emily that if she doesn’t ask the boy to the dance that day, there is no point (lines 11–12). This conferring is not exactly the same type of conferring my father and I exhibited in the formation of our team, as it is not within an answer slot, nor is it in another conversational slot wherein information is imparted to a participant outside the team. Instead, it is situated within a frame wherein Anna and Jim, as parental figures, work toward presenting a unified front about whether or not Emily should ask a boy she does not know very well to her homecoming dance. Note that Anna’s conferring with Jim represents an effort toward presenting a unified front in terms of how they evaluate Emily’s plans, and a subsequent realignment occurs, with Jim supporting Anna as they evaluate Emily’s (planned) actions and offer advice, as the following excerpts show. The enactment of the parenting frame occurring here correlates to Ochs and Taylor (1992) who noted that in their study of family narratives that “the lives of protagonists [most often children] are verbally laid out for
Aligning as a Team
409
the inspection of interlocutors” (p. 330). This means that in their data, the behaviors of children are inspected by parents (and in particular, fathers) when children report about events from their lives. Here Anna and Jim are eliciting information about and then evaluating Emily’s opinions and behaviors, thus establishing a parenting frame. Within this frame, Anna confers with Jim, the other parental figure, about the appropriateness of Emily asking this boy to her homecoming dance, implicitly making a judgement about Emily’s behavior and making sure Jim’s knowledge schema about teenage dating matches her own. Within this conferring (or reproaching), more evidence of the parental frame occurs. Although Anna is talking to Jim and addresses him by name, she talks about Emily, referring to Emily by name and the pronoun “she” when talking to Jim (lines 14–16, “But- Emily doesn’t even know him Jim, she hasn’t even talked to him!”). Anna’s referring to Emily with the pronoun “she” in her presence contributes to positioning her as a child. Straehle (1993) noted that speakers can refer to present individuals using the third-person singular pronoun “to accord ( … ) less-than-adult status” (p. 219). In the frame of “parenting,” Anna and Jim are a team of parents (father and stepmother) and Emily is the child. This team consisting of Jim and Anna endures between lines 21 and 39, shown following. Here, Jim and Anna alternately perform parallel conversational roles—the role of questioning Emily about how much she has talked to the boy she wants to ask to homecoming. The relevant conversational slots in the interaction, those of question (produced by Anna and Jim) and answer (provided by Emily), are marked in the excerpt, as is the supportive repetition used by team members. Anna
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
QUESTION 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
You haven’t talked to him? What have you show much have you talked to him. Altogether.
QUESTION You’ve talked to him a few times. What have you talked about. QUESTION Well, well that’s good. What’s up? What else! QUESTION Do you even say hi to
ANSWER A few times. ANSWER (Oh) what’s up. @ ANSWER @ ANSWER @He just looks at me.@
410
Cynthia Gordon
In this excerpt, Anna and Jim participate as a team by alternating the role of questioner in this parenting frame. Although they do not share conversational turns, their action is clearly coordinated; as Falk (1979) might have said, they are “talking to an audience in tandem,” and “with the same communicative goal” (p. 18), that of socializing Emily into their beliefs about teenage dating. When either Anna or Jim speaks in this frame, he or she is enacting the role of parent interacting with a child on behalf of the institution of “parental unit.” Note also the repetition of the key phrase “talked to him.” This same form of conjoined participation recreates this team later in the conversation. This time, Jim and Anna’s association is referred to just moments prior by Jim. In line 219, Jim uses we to refer to himself and Anna, bolded in the following excerpt. This reestablishes the relevance of conjoined participation, and the team again forms, this time lasting approximately from lines 229 to lines 234. In the excerpt following, Anna begins by asking Emily if she would talk to the boy at the homecoming dance even though she has never talked to him before. Reference to the association occurs in line 219, where Jim self-repairs from “I” to “we,” thus making a visible effort to present a unified front. Anna 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
I mean if you- would you talk to him then?
REFERRING TO ASSN.
But you- I justI just want to point out, but you didn’tyou haven’t talked to him so far, and I’ve beenwe’ve been encouraging you for some weeks.
Yes, I would. he’s cute! @ He’s (really )
Tonight! Tonight! I promise! I promise!
In this excerpt, conjoined participation is made relevant by reference to an association by one of the association members through the use of “we,” whereas in the first excerpt, it was made relevant by conferring (for realignment) between association members and by the invocation of a parenting frame. Thus participation as a team is made relevant multiple times in this conversation. In addition, Jim and Anna continually support one another throughout the interaction by using “yeah” and making supportive comments. In the following, in lines 107 and 109 to 110, Jim supports what Anna says to Emily in lines 105 to 106, “You wouldn’t go by yourself [to the dance], Melissa is going.”
Aligning as a Team Anna 100 101 102 103 104 105 You wouldn’t go by 106 yourself, Melissa is going. 107 108 109 110
411 Jim
Cynthia
I don’t know, maybe you should just go and have fun.
Emily (Well-)
I don’t want to go by myself. (Why would-) Yeah!
I mean I don’t want to go without a guy.
She’s not taking a date, right?
Most important in identifying the team consisting of Jim and Anna is the form of participation they enact. In contrast to the team my father and I formed, Anna and Jim’s team does not exhibit a great deal of supportive back channeling or repetition. For the second time, the team is created as interlocutors exhibit parallel participation in individual turns that serve the same “side” of the conversation. Just as earlier Anna and Jim alternately questioned Emily about how many times she has talked to the boy in question, in lines 229 through 234 in the following excerpt, Anna and Jim alternately suggest reasons why perhaps Emily should not ask this boy to her homecoming dance, that is to say, they conjointly challenging her in a parallel fashion. Anna
229 230 231 232 233 234 235
Jim
Cynthia
CHALLENGE How do you know he’s not a jerk. CHALLENGE You’ve never talked to him.
Emily
RESPONSE He doesn’t ACT like a jerk. RESPONSE He doesn’t LOOK like it.
CHALLENGE Maybe he has a girlfriend. That could be.
In this excerpt, Anna and Jim together perform one part of the conversation (challenging) and Emily performs the other (responding). Again, Anna and Jim alternate verbal performance of turns in this role. Note that my comment in line 235 (“That could be.”) on one hand is structurally parallel to Emily’s (it sequentially responds to a challenge), although in content, it matches my father’s suggestion that the boy may already have a girlfriend
412
Cynthia Gordon
and may not be available to go to the dance with Emily. I am neither explicitly joining Jim and Anna’s team nor siding with Emily in this frame. This section has highlighted the team made up of Anna and Jim, the parents in the interaction. Their form of conjoined participation can be described as the coordinated parallel use of alternating individual turns. By “parallel,” I mean their turns perform the same speech act (e.g., questioning, challenging) on the same “side” (the side of “parents”) of the conversation. This is different from the team of Jim and me, as we shared conversational turns and Jim and Anna do not. In the next section, I examine a third interactional team in the data, which exhibits a different form of participation from both of the previously discussed teams: The team includes a silent member who nonetheless is obviously part of the team. I call this type of conjoined participation schema-echo turn. Conjoined Participation as Schema Echo The final team I consider occurs between my father, Anna, and me in lines 129 through 157 of Excerpt 2. In this excerpt, Emily, interested in learning more about how first dates come to be and recognizing her father, stepmother, and older half sister as older and more experienced in dating, asks each of us in turn about our respective first dates, making our participation as a team of “experts” potentially relevant. Bolded in the excerpt are Emily’s questions, as well as repetition and supportive back channels between Jim, Anna, and me. Anna 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139
Jim
Cynthia
Emily How did you get your first date, did you talk to the guy? Did he ask you, did you ask him, what happened.
The first guy I went to homecoming with just asked me. I don’t know. In class, in school? I don’t know, this was a while ago. @@@@
And what about your firstI think he probably called me on the phone. Oh. @
Yeah, that’s- yeah that
Aligning as a Team
Anna 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157
413
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
sounds like a technique. What about your first girl @ first er date. @ I probably called her on the phone. But it was somebody I knew, I mean ( ) it was somebody I knew, we were both on like the cross-country team, absolutely yeah. and he was in band and I was in orchestra, so I already knew him. Right.
@ What about you?
What about your first guy. I knew him. You knew him? I talked to him.
In this excerpt, Emily’s intentions in asking her questions are clear: she will ask each one of us (me, Jim, and Anna) individually about our respective first-date experiences. However, despite the fact that Emily addresses us individually, her questions make relevant in the interaction our identity as insiders or experts to the topic, whereas she is a relative outsider or novice, and, as Falk (1979) remarked, mutual knowledge is a prerequisite to team formation. Thus, by framing us each in turn as knowledgeable about the world of dating by asking us questions, Emily also frames us collectively as experienced or knowledgeable. This may encourage the formation of an interactional team. Also marked in bold in the excerpt, Jim and I begin to verbally create a supportive alignment, with Jim repeating my utterance “I think he probably called me on the phone,” in the form of “I probably called her on the phone.” Throughout my turn at talk, my father provides repetition and supportive back channeling. Anna does not evidence that she is part of our developing team until perhaps line 155 when she utters “I knew him,” a repetition of “it was somebody I knew” (Cynthia, lines 145–146), “it was somebody I knew” (Jim, line 147) and “I already knew him” (Cynthia, line 152). Thus, from a surface analysis of the transcript that considers repetition and back channeling, it appears that Anna does not join our team until several conversational moments later. However, I suggest that Anna is a part of our team all along due to our endorsement of a knowledge schema she is known to have. I turn to this now. By schema-echo turns, I mean that participants draw from a knowledge schema known to be maintained by another copresent participant in
414
Cynthia Gordon
constructing their turns, thereby supportively aligning and conjointly participating with that person. In this case, Jim and I are supportively aligning and conjointly participating with Anna by modeling our turns of talk to fit into Anna’s knowledge schema about how teenage dating should work. The knowledge schema wherein teenagers should only go on dates with people they know fairly well “originates” from Anna, and Jim and I align supportively with it. In the transcript, Anna is very insistent that Emily talk to the boy she wants to ask to her homecoming dance before asking him. For example, at the beginning of the excerpt when Jim asks if Emily is going to ask this boy to the dance, Anna is the first participant to suggest that Emily cannot ask him because Emily does not know the boy and “hasn’t even talked to him” (lines 14–16): Anna 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
So Emily are you going towhat are you planning to do with Ben? What? Oh. I’m gonna ask him. Are ya? You’re gonna ask him to the dance?
Because if you don’t ask him today, there’s no point.
(Yeah.) Who’s Ben.
But- Emily doesn’t even know him Jim, she hasn’t even talked to him!
Anna is the first participant to bring up the idea that Emily should talk to Ben before asking him to the dance. After Anna introduces this idea, my father picks up on it, and he and Anna form the interactional team of “parents” discussed previously wherein they both ask Emily about what she has talked to the boy about and challenge her asking him. Other evidence Anna holds the knowledge schema that boys and girls should be friends before going out on dates appears in Anna’s reaction, in lines 118 to 119, to Emily saying that one of her friends is taking a “guy friend” to the homecoming dance. “She” in line 109 refers to Melissa, one of Emily’s friends. Anna 109 110 111
Jim She’s not taking a date, right?
You want to go with a guy.
Cynthia
Emily without a guy.
Aligning as a Team
415
Anna 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
Emily, Actually she said she might, I don’t know. She knows someone. like a good friend of hers that’s a guy? See so she TALKS TO boys, and thenYes I know. ((stubbornly))
In this excerpt, Anna reacts to Emily’s news that one of her friends is taking a boy she is friends with to the dance by using it as a behavioral model. Anna puts emphatic stress on “talks to” (line 118) in her comment. My father and I do not verbally react here. Rather, it is Anna who again invokes the schema wherein people going on dates should talk to each other before going out on a date. Finally, later in the excerpt, in concluding the topic of Emily’s homecoming dance, Anna gives her recommendation in lines 246 through 249 and in lines 281 to 282, shown following. In the intervening lines, Jim makes a suggestion he seems to see as congruent with Anna’s schema about how Emily can deal with the situation: He suggests she should talk to the boy at least once before asking him to the dance, perhaps at her youth group meeting that evening. The suggestion he makes, in lines 251 through 276, is very clearly modeled on the beliefs about dating that Anna earlier expressed, as he suggests that Emily should call the boy and talk to him prior to asking him to the dance. Additionally, Jim is continually conferring with Anna to check if his suggestion matches up to her schema. I have bolded the lines in which Jim explicitly confers with Anna about his suggestion in the excerpt. Anna 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
I think you should talk to him, even before you even think about asking him Emily. Okay! ((irritated)) Maybe you should do this, suppose you were to TALK to him tonight, and I don’t mean “hello how are you,” but I mean like corner him
416
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
Jim
256 257 258 259 CONFERRING 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274
and talk to him, and talk about things, and we’ve given enough topics, and then, like, then maybe calling? What do you think? Then she could call him, and ask if he wants to go?
275 276 277 278 CONFERRING 279 280 281 I think she needs to talk 282 to him. 283 284 285 286 287 288 289
and then a phone call, seems like a way to go.
290 ( ) 291 292 293 294
you keep saying that?@ @@@@@@
295 296
Cynthia
Emily
Nooooo no. When is this dance? Like two weeks?
Yeah. It’s getting pretty close. But I mean even if she called him one day later, that- I don’t know, it just seems like the sepa conversation, and then a small separation of time, and then a SECOND ph-
Two weeks from yesterday.
@@@@
O::h. Hm. What do you think about that.
(And) so sh-
@@ Why do you keep on saying that.
In her way AnnaAnna agrees with me, in her way, that’syeah, @yeah, why- why do
Well, that’s what Anna thinks!
@@ @@
Why do you keep thinking that! @@ Huh.
In this excerpt, it becomes clearer that the knowledge schema that teens should talk to one another before going out on dates originates in this excerpt from Anna. This is evidenced in the transcript by (a) Anna bringing
Aligning as a Team
417
up the schema first and repeatedly referring to it, (b) Jim checking with Anna to see how his suggestion for Emily matches up to her schema, and (c) Emily eventually asking Anna (not Jim and not me), somewhat annoyed, “why do you keep on saying that?” (lines 284–285), locating the source of the schema that involves Emily talking to the boy with Anna. Notice that in lines 286 through 288, Jim speaks for Anna trying to create a unified parental front based on shared opinions about how (or if) Emily should ask the boy to the homecoming dance. However, it seems that Anna does not endorse Jim’s idea that calling the boy once on the telephone is sufficient (note that she does not verbally respond, except to reiterate “I think she needs to talk to him”). I should note that from personal communication, I know that Anna believes that dating between young people should be based very much on friendship—that they should know one another fairly well before dating. At the time of taping, Anna was making an effort to teach Emily that teenage girls and boys can (and should) be friends. In contrast, Emily did not think this was necessary, and this was an ongoing topic of discussion and point of contention during Emily’s early teen years. In fact, earlier in the weekend another conversation was captured on tape about this same topic. In this conversation, Emily explicitly asked Jim and Anna how she should go about asking Ben to the dance, I asked how she knew Ben, and Jim said to Emily, “First you have to say hello to him,” remarking to me that Emily “doesn’t really know him.” Then Anna explained to me, “she hasn’t even talked to him,” and my father followed up by saying, “she doesn’t talk to him.” Hence this knowledge schema appears in at least one interaction prior to the interaction I examined here, evidencing that Jim and Anna both verbally endorse the idea that teenagers should know one another before going out on dates. This knowledge schema thus is repeated not only in the dinner conversation, where it seems to originate from Anna and is most insisted on by Anna, but also is repeated intertextually or across interactions. The echo of this “prior text” (Becker, 1982/1995a, 1984/1995b) in the dinner conversation works to create the supportive alignments between Jim, Anna, and me. We create a team whose members share (or claim to share) the same knowledge schema about teenage dating. Returning to the excerpt wherein Jim, Anna, and I form a team, I suggest that although on the surface the team may appear to be made up of just Jim and me based on the repetitions and supportive back channeling between us, in fact Anna is a member of the team as well. This is so because we are modeling our talk on the knowledge schema about how dating
418
Cynthia Gordon
should work that Anna is known to hold and thus are enacting a form of conjoined participation. In the excerpt re-presented following, Emily is asking each of us in turn about our dating experiences. In our answers, Jim and I are referencing our teaming with Anna through allusion to her schema. I re-present part of the excerpt here, bolding utterances that reference the schema Anna is known to hold. Anna 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153
Jim
( ) it was somebody I knew,
Cynthia
Emily
but it was somebody I knew, I mean we were both on like the cross-country team,
@ What about you?
absolutely yeah. and he was in band and I was in orchestra, so I already knew him. Right.
Here, we see that Anna’s voice surfacing in Jim’s and my conversational contribution because we reference the schema she insists on earlier in the conversation: that teenagers should know one another before going out on dates. In this way, an interactional team performs conjoined participation when a member of the team situates his or her conversational contribution within the readily apparent knowledge schema of a copresent participant with whom he or she is supportively aligned. This knowledge schema is made apparent first by Anna in this interaction, but it also surfaced in the words of Jim and Anna in a prior conversation and is thus repeated intratextually and intertextually.
DISCUSSION In this analysis, I identified three different ways interactional teams can “do” conjoined participation in conversation. Inadvertently, this study has highlighted Emily’s recurrent position as “teammate-less.” Although many interactions were captured on tape in which Emily is positioned as a child to the others’ position of “adults,” there were interactions recorded in which Emily was on a team. For example, in the interaction in which the topic of Ben first surfaced during the taping period (during the conversation in the car where Anna and Jim made their belief known that Emily needed
Aligning as a Team
419
to talk to him and get to know him before going to the dance), Emily and Jim formed a team in answering my questions about what girls who are shy do about finding a date for a dance at an all-girls school. Sharing turns, they jointly explained to me that many girls go to dances in groups rather than asking individual boys to attend. Anna remained silent during this portion of that conversation. Another example of Emily participating in team talk occurred at the end of the dinner conversation excerpt (Excerpt 2) in which Anna repeatedly says that Emily needs to “talk to” the boy before asking him to the dance, and Jim and Emily team up to take a teasing alignment toward Anna. Here, Emily asked Anna, “Why do you keep on saying that,” and Jim laughingly repeated, “Why do you keep on saying that,” and Jim and Emily simultaneously laughed. Although the teams I focused on for this analysis show Emily being treated as a marginalized participant, a spectator, or as a child without anyone on her “side,” she does participate in team talk elsewhere in the transcripts. Furthermore, one concept underlying this analysis but unstated thus far is the cooperation that goes on in interaction not only between members of an interactional team but also between all coparticipants. Thus even when an interactant was not participating on a team, he or she was a cooperative coparticipant. Participants in my data did not join teams they did not belong on, nor did teams address unexpected or inappropriate audiences. For example, neither Emily nor I tried to team up with Jim and Anna when they were operating in the “parenting frame,” nor did Emily and I team up and try to parent Anna or Jim. Both of these moves would have been inappropriate in the interaction and in the context of our stepfamily relationships (unless the tone was nonserious). Thus, the formation of the teams actually depended on the (unstated) cooperation of all the participants as well as shared understandings about how stepfamily relationships play out in interaction. In the literature about family communication, and stepfamily communication in particular, “teams” have at times been viewed in a negative light, as enduring opposing alliances that prevent open communication in family interaction (e.g., Ganong & Coleman, 1994; Nelson & Utesch, 1990). Under this view, Emily would perhaps be seen as a marginalized participant, and for example, a resurfacing team of father and oldest daughter might be seen as impinging on the husband and wife or father and youngest daughter relationship. However, in my data, interactional teams constantly shifted and although at times isolating participants, often worked to
420
Cynthia Gordon
accomplish “positive” things in terms of overall stepfamily relationship work. The team consisting of my father and me shared family history with Anna, the newest member of our family, thereby integrating her into the family. The team consisting of Jim and Anna was seeking to help Emily understand how the world of dating works (or should work, from their perspective) and evidenced their concerns about her dating (e.g., being rejected). The team consisting of Jim, Anna, and I also may have been trying to help socialize Emily into dating, but more obviously, it formed when, wanting to build rapport with Anna, I situated the content of my turns at talk within a knowledge schema I knew she approved of, as did my father. It is important to emphasize that although extrainteractional identities necessarily relate in some way to the creation of interactional teams, they do not “cause” teams to form. Instead, interlocutors made extrainteractional identities and relationships relevant at particular interactional moments to accomplish particular goals, such as “socializing Emily into dating” or “imparting information to Anna.” Thus, traits of participants such as age and shared knowledge gained from a shared biography served as a basis or resource for creating teams and shifting alignments moment by moment in interaction.
CONCLUSION In this analysis, I have shown three ways conjoined participation can be enacted by interactional teams in stepfamily conversation: as turn sharing; through what I call parallel turns, or participants alternating turns parallel in function; or by what I term schema echo, which refers to situating one’s talk within the knowledge schema of another participant. In this work, I have built on the work of Kangasharju (1996) and Falk (1979) who characterized interactional teams and conversational duets, respectively, in terms of supportive alignment and conjoined participation, with conjoined participation referring to shared turns or speaking on behalf of one’s self and another participant. I expanded the definition of “conjoined participation” to include, along with shared turns, parallel turns at talk, and schema-echo turns as forms of team participation. In addition, I argued why these forms of participation are consonant with the idea of interactional teams, showing how features creating supportive alignment—repetition and supportive back channeling—cluster when interactional teams
Aligning as a Team
421
developed. I have illustrated how these three forms of conjoined participation are different yet are all conducive to “team play.” In sum, in this analysis, I have worked toward elucidating what it mans to enact conjoined participation, create alignments, and build teams moment by moment in interaction. In doing so, I have identified stepfamily interaction as a site where interactional teams and shifting alignments are omnipresent. Stepfamily interaction is a discursive space wherein multiple family histories and life experiences, knowledge bases, and knowledge schemas come together, blend, and sometimes collide, providing interlocutors with constant opportunities to shift alignments and find commonalities (or differences) with other family members. In addition, I have shown in the analysis that in examining team formation, considering the participants as individuals with shared and unshared pasts, shared and unshared living arrangements, and shared and unshared knowledge and opinions is important because these extrainteractional characteristics often serve as the basis for team formation to accomplish particular interactional goals at particular moments.
NOTES 1 All participants, with the exception of the author, are identified using pseudonyms. 2 The transcripts in this analysis appear in column style: Each participant has his or her “own” column. Words appearing on the same line in different columns are overlapping. Carriage returns do not indicate prosodic or semantic chunking of discourse but occur as space limits require. Transcription conventions, adapted from Du Bois, SchuetzeCoburn, Paolino, and Cumming (1992) and Tannen (1984) are as follows: Punctuation marks represent prosodic features of utterances. , . ! ? .. — @ @word@
A comma refers to rising, continuing intonation. A period indicates final falling intonation. An exclamation point indicates final falling intonation with animated voice quality. A question mark indicates final rising intonation. Dots indicate short silence. A hyphen indicates a truncated word. A dash indicates a truncated intonation unit. An “@” sign indicates one “pulse” of laughter. A word surrounded by two “@” signs and underlined is infused with laughter.
422
Cynthia Gordon
Parenthesis indicate aspects of transcription. () Empty single parentheses indicate inaudible words. (word) Single parentheses enclose uncertain transcription. ((words)) Double parentheses enclose transcriber comments.
REFERENCES Bateson, G. (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In Steps to an ecology of mind (pp. 177–193). New York: Ballantine. Becker, A. L. (1995a). Beyond translation: Esthetics and language description. In Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology (pp. 297–315). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1982) Becker, A. L. (1995b). Biography of a sentence: A Burmese proverb. In Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology (pp. 185–210). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1984) Díaz, F., Antaki, C., & Collins, A. F. (1996). Using completion to formulate a statement collectively. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 525–542. Du Bois, J., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Paolino, D., & Cumming, S. (1992). Discourse transcription (Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 4). Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics. Ellis, Y. (1997). Laughing together: Laughter as a feature of affiliation in French conversation. French Language Studies, 7, 147–161. Falk, J. (1979). The duet as a conversational process. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Ferrara, K. (1992). The interactive achievement of a sentence: Joint productions in therapeutic discourse. Discourse Processes, 15, 207–228. Ganong, L. H., & Coleman, M. (1994). Remarried family relationships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, C. (1986). Audience diversity, participation and interpretation. Text, 6, 283–316. Kangasharju, H. (1996). Aligning as a team in multiparty conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 291–319. Kangasharju, H. (2002). Alignment in disagreement: Forming oppositional alliances in committee meetings. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1447–1471. Lerner, G. H. (1987). Collaborative turn sequences: Sentence construction and social action. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine. Lerner, G. H. (1993). Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text, 13, 213–245. Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35, 144–170. Nelson, T. S., & Utesch, W. E. (1990). Clinical assessment of structural family therapy constructs. Family Therapy, 17, 233–249. Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1992). Family narrative as political activity. Discourse & Society 3, 301–340.
Aligning as a Team
423
Pritchard, C. R. (1993). Supportive devices in language and paralanguage in the achievement of affiliation in troubles talk. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 16, 57–70. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361–382. Schiffrin, D. (1984). Jewish argument as sociability. Language in Society, 13, 311–335. Schiffrin, D. (1993). “Speaking for another” in sociolinguistic interviews: Alignments, identities, and frames. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 231–263). New York: Oxford University Press. Straehle, C. A. (1993). “Samuel? Yes, dear?” Teasing and conversational rapport. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 210–230). New York: Oxford University Press. Tannen, D. (1984). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, D. (2001). I only say this because I love you: How the way we talk can make or break family relationships throughout our lives. New York: Random House. Tannen, D., & Wallat, C. (1993). Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction: Examples from a medical examination/interview. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 57–76). New York: Oxford University Press.
APPENDIX Excerpt 1: Talking About Cynthia’s Grandparents Anna 1 2 3
Jim
Cynthia
Emily Oh but was he-
@@
Therefore, my grandpa @lost fifteen pounds! Because she stopped cooking for him.@
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (Well) how old are your 16 grandparents.
Oh but was heWas heBut was he skinny in the first place.
Um, not real skinny butOh. No. He wasn’t huge or anything either. He looks kind of small now. Like I’m taller than him. Yeah. ( )
I haven’t seen any of your family.
424
Cynthia Gordon Anna
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55
Jim
(Probably.)
Cynthia
Emily
Mmmm, seventy five? Seventy-seven? Wow! Are they that old? Maybe seventy five, yeah, seventy-five, seventy-seven.
That’s not that old. How old is your mom.
That doesn’t @seem very old to me!@ (Mhm.)
About Sam’s age, they’re about Sam’s age.
AndHow old is your mom. Dad’s age? Yeah.
Yeah. That means like, your grandma was . . twenty-four, whenUhhhhh.
@I don’t know!@ @@@ I’m not a math major!
about twenty-four or twenty-TWO.
What are you talking about. When- when um- when umGail was born. Yeah. Hm. Something like that. No one really knows how old my grandma is. She keeps it a secret. @@
56 57 Okay so the pumpkin’s 58 interesting. ((re: dinner dish)) 59 60 61 62 63 64 (Hm.) 65 66 67 68 69
@@@@ Let’s see now,
Oops! ((spilling food it seems))
Yeah. There was a lot of it. Yeah, that’s about right, she’d be in her late seventies probably. I’ve never met anybody in your family. Your other Aunt Debby, and @ Jeff. Yeah.
Aligning as a Team Anna 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 Where? 81 82 Really! 83 84 85 86 How romantic. 87 88 89 90 New York? 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 All right so what did he do, 99 is he a farmer? 100 Wh- did he become a farmer 101 or a102 103 104 105 Oh. 106 But they live on a farm. 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119
425 Jim
Cynthia
Well they were both in the Second WorldWorld War, same as Sam. They worked onthey worked on uhI THINK that’s where theythat your grandparents met, was on a hospital ship there, Mhm, yeah. mhm.
Emily I like that name, Jeff, Jeffrey.
Hospital ship in the Pacific. Yeah, she was an RN and he was a corpsman, Navy corpsman. @@@ She was from, Buffalo, Uhuh. Yeah. Yep. And he was from Port Huron, Michigan of course. @ @ @ Of course. Obviously, ()
No he worked for Chrysler, like his whole life. Yeah.
(Well, ) it’s like uh, ten or twenty-acres, he has farmland. He has a section of farmland, yeah, and he doesand he has huge gardens and you know stuff like that. He has a tractor, but it’s not,
It’s prettyfarmy. They have ( ) some fruit trees and peppers,
nothing commercial, but-
426
Cynthia Gordon Anna
Jim
120
Cynthia
yeah, it’s not commercial. Like a bunch of- yeah, had you know some apple trees and some, a few apple trees, what, a dozen maybe apple trees.
121 122 123 124 125 126 127
Where do they live? Where in Michigan do they live?
128 129 So this is out in the country. 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141
Emily
Some grapes, yeah. Well they built two uhWhere in Michiganacross the street now there’s two new houses, looks like it might be a development, Wow. or something. Huh? Where in Michigan do they live? Fort Gratiot? Oh.
Excerpt 2: Talking About Emily’s Homecoming Dance Anna 1 I can’t do it. ((eat a big bagel)) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 You’re gonna ask him 11 to the dance? 12 13 14 But- Emily doesn’t even 15 know him Jim, she hasn’t 16 even talked to him! 17 18
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
So Emily are you going towhat are you planning to do with Ben? What? Oh. I’m gonna ask him. Are ya? Because if you don’t ask him today, there’s no point.
(Yeah.) Who’s Ben.
Yes I have. Oh your friend (who’s at)
Aligning as a Team Anna 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
church- or your guy that you like at church. You haven’t talked to him? What have you show much have you talked to him. Altogether. A few times. You’ve talked to him a few times. What have you talked about.
(Oh,) what’s up. @ Well, well that’s good. What’s up? What else! @
Do you even say hi to him. @He just looks at me.@ I know- she doesn’t evenyou won’t even say hi to him. It’s like the same thing a Ted. ((another boy she likes))
39 Emily40 41 42 43 44 45 46 It’s- it’s a little bit dressier 47 than the mixer, so, 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
427
Is homecoming a big deal or? Mhm. I mean is it like a fancy(Mm.) Mmm it’s not tuxedo big deal is it? No.
(Yeah.) What’s that (mean that like), the boys wear suits orties I mean? Probably?
I don’t know if they wear ties. What do you think. Hm. I’m not sure. Hm. I’ll ask what people that go to Northville what- what did they wear yesterday, because they had their homecoming last night- er their homecoming last Saturday. Did Mandy go to homecoming? Last- last two- two, last week. Yeah, last week.
428
Cynthia Gordon Anna
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
69 70 ((lines 71–82, brief discussion of acne and facial soap elided)) 83
See if this thing is like some big deal and you don’t really know him, you might not want to bother asking him.
84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 Mhm. 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 You wouldn’t go by 106 yourself, Melissa is going. 107 108
If it’s not really a big deal then-
Well he will for example, I’m pretty sure he’ll have to get her a corsage, Mhm. so it’s THAT big a deal, I think.
I don’t know, maybe you should just go and have fun.
(Well-)
I don’t want to go by myself. (Why would-) Yeah!
109 She’s not taking a date, 110 right? 111 You want to go with a guy. 112 Emily, 113 114 115 116 117 118 See so she TALKS TO boys, 119 and then120 121 122 123 124
Yeah but I want to go with a guy, I want to go with a guy, it is a big deal to me, I want to go with a guy.
No, I mean I don’t want to go without a guy.
Actually she said she might, I don’t know. She knows someone. Like a good friend of hers that’s a guy?
I know. ((stubbornly))
How did you get your first date, did you talk to the
Aligning as a Team Anna
429 Jim
125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176
Cynthia
Emily guy? Did he ask you, did you ask him, what happened.
The first guy I went to homecoming with just asked me. I don’t know. In class, in school? I don’t know, this was a while ago. @@@@
And what about your firstI think he probably called me on the phone. Oh. @
Yeah, that’s- yeah that sounds like a technique. What about your first girl @ first er date. @ I probably called her on the phone. But it was somebody I knew, I mean ( ) it was somebody I knew, we were both on like the cross-country team, absolutely yeah. and he was in band and I was in orchestra, so I already knew him. Right.
@ What about you?
What about your first guy. I knew him. You knew him? I talked to him. Oh. Did he call you? No he asked me. Oh. In person. Oh cool. Where did you go for your first date? Like, to a movie? We always did things in GROUPS, Yeah. Oh. you know like with groups of people that you knew and, I read somewhere you can onlyyou should only group date until you’re like fifteen
430
Cynthia Gordon Anna
Jim
Cynthia
177 178 What? 179 180 181 182 183 Oh. 184 185 186 187 188 GROUP date. 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 206 207 208 Mhm. 209 210 211 I mean if you- would you 212 talk to him then? 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225
Emily or sixteen. I read somewhere in a magazine that you should only group date until you’re like fifteen or sixteen. But I don’t know.
You should not DATE until then? You should only GROUP date. Oh, group date. That sounds like a fair idea.
Well that’s what- that’s what we always did at homecoming, I mean we wouldn’t go outwe wouldn’t go by ourselves, we’d go with like,
Yeah. s- you know, your friend and then her date or whatever.
Oh.
It’d be boring, for one thing. Yeah? (Just stretching my leg.) Especially if you had @never talked to the person before!@ @ @@@@@
@@@@ It could be sort of STRESSFUL!
But you- I justI just want to point out, but you didn’tyou haven’t talked to him so far, and I’ve beenwe’ve been encouraging you for some weeks.
So I’m just, wait, Emily, I’m just curious to know
Yes, I would. He’s cute! @ He’s (really )
Tonight! Tonight! I promise! I promise! I’ll- I’ll call you tomorrow, I’ll call you tomorrow.
Aligning as a Team Anna 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250
431 Jim
Cynthia
Emily
why you would talk to himI’ll call you tomorrow with the whole story. How do you know he’s not a jerk. He doesn’t ACT like a jerk. You’ve never talked to him. He doesn’t LOOK like it. Maybe he has a girlfriend. That could be. Don’t be uhdon’tdon’t be uh, don’t be shocked or disappointed if he, if he declines, you know, becausebecause it’s- it’s an unusual situation.
(It’s kinda tough, only knowing him from church.)
(I won’t.)
I think you should talk to him, even before you even think about asking him Emily. Okay! ((irritated))
