Doing actions with identity categories: complaints and denials in neighbor disputes
- 1 January 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH in Text & Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies
- Vol. 29 (1), 75-97
- https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2009.004
Abstract
This paper examines the way making complaints about the neighbors and denying responsibility for disputes systematically bring into play categorizations of those involved. It draws on a corpus of British conversational materials including telephone calls to neighbor mediation centers and police interrogations of suspects. The analytic approach was conversation analytic: sequences of talk in which membership categories (e.g., “old man,” “kids”) and category-implicative descriptions (e.g., “she's eighty three,” “Mum's elderly”) appeared were analyzed for their sequential placement, design, and action orientation. Two sections of analysis examine the use of categories in (i) formulating and affiliating with complaints, and (ii) denying alleged complainables. The paper presents a challenge to those who argue that “identity” topics are not systematically “capturable” outside of research interviews or as regularly occurring phenomena of talk-in-interaction, by showing how the same categories and categorial descriptions crop up in the same conversational turns, accomplishing the same social action.This publication has 15 references indexed in Scilit:
- Categorization, Interaction, Policy, and DebateCritical Discourse Studies, 2007
- A tutorial on membership categorizationJournal of Pragmatics, 2007
- Facts, norms and dispositions: practical uses of the modal verbwouldin police interrogationsDiscourse Studies, 2006
- On ComplainabilitySocial Problems, 2005
- Moaning, whinging and laughing: the subjective side of complaintsDiscourse Studies, 2005
- Complaint Sequences Within Antagonistic ArgumentResearch on Language and Social Interaction, 2000
- Extreme Case Formulations: Softeners, Investment, and Doing NonliteralResearch on Language and Social Interaction, 2000
- Studying the organization in action: Membership categorization and interaction analysisHuman Studies, 1999
- Complainable Matters: The Use of Idiomatic Expressions in Making ComplaintsSocial Problems, 1988
- Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claimsHuman Studies, 1986