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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1039

Part of Session 115: Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

Membership Categorization in Repeated Direct Represented Speech: Combined Devices for Affective Display

Authors: Kasper, Gabriele
Submitted by: Kasper, Gabriele (University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States of America)

A sizable literature has examined stories – and in particular complaint stories –

as sites for affect display and described the resources and interactional practices through which story tellers and recipients collaboratively construct the moral character of the participants inside and outside of the story world (e.g., Drew, 1988; Drew & Walker, 2009; Edwards, 2005; Günthner, 1997; Selting, 2012). One powerful device that invokes affective attributions is to describe persons as incumbents of social categories and relate persons to others within a category set (Sacks, 1992; Hester & Eglin, 1997). As repositories of cultural knowledge, membership categories have normatively attached to them particular packages of actions, rights and obligations that generate expectations to social conduct and relations to incumbents of associated categories, such as members of a family. Because membership categorization is implicative of moral judgment by default, it is a ubiquitous device in emotion talk (Edwards, 1998).

Direct represented speech (DRS) – speech attributed to speakers speaking at an occasion other than the ongoing talk – has the capacity to simultaneously construct objectivity and subjectivity: objectivity, in that producing an utterance as another speaker’s voice lends the talk authenticity and factuality (Holt, 1996; Wooffitt, 1992); subjectivity, in that the selection of some bits of putatively quoted talk over others, and the manner of their representation through linguistic choices, prosody, and nonvocal action, convey the current speaker’s epistemic, affective, and evaluative stances on the represented utterance and the moral character of its alleged speaker (Clift & Holt, 2007).

As another pervasive practice in interaction, repetitions can accomplish a wide range of actions and stances (Johnston, 1994; Tannen, 2007). Among other things, self-repetition can generate a sense of intensity and other-repetition conveys a range of epistemic and affective recipient postures. Both types of repetition are a productive resource for constructing emotionality in talk.      

Membership categorization, direct represented speech, and repetition are independent organizations that do not co-occur in interaction with any great frequency. Yet on occasion they do. These intersections are the object of interest in this study. Specifically, the paper seeks answers to the following questions:

In what sequential contexts does emotion-implicative membership categorization in repeated DRS instances occur?

How do first and subsequent versions display and attribute affective stances and moral positions as local social accomplishments?

The data for this conversation-analytic study are a collection of 15 cases drawn from interactional story tellings in autobiographic interviews with multilingual immigrants to North America.