Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines the use of self-repairs in ascribing old-age categorisations to self and others in casual interactions among friends. Membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis are employed to analyse self-recorded, everyday conversations of a group of older Greek Cypriot women with a long interactional history. The interactional organisation of old-age labels, and specifically instances of self-repair of age categorisations, reveal that members orient to old-age categories as hierarchically positioned and inference-rich. Members make relevant a very intricate set of expectations of who can be categorised by whom, with what specific age category term and at which context, partly because other-categorisations can also implicate one’s self-categorisation as old. Sequential and categorisation analyses provide a powerful analytical toolkit for the investigation of participants’ local system of self- and other-ascription of explicit -but also implicit- age identities. It is shown that the combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis can be extended beyond the analysis of turn-generating categories and can be instrumental in analysing flexible, context-shaped and agentively managed category identifications that also have currency beyond the local interactional occasion.