Unpacking “Self”

Abstract

Goffman’s work on footing has paved the way to specifying the analytic concepts of speaker and hearer in social interaction. This article empirically examines participants’ moment-by-moment negotiated understandings of speakerhood in the context of conversational repair—sequences of talk dedicated to resolving problems of hearing, speaking, or understanding. I demonstrate that participation in repair sequences reflects interactants’ orientations to socially distributed rights to knowledge, or epistemics. Even though speakers are ordinarily entitled to speak on their own behalf and, thus, to repair their own talk, the application of this right is a contingent, negotiated, and sometimes contested matter. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine a large corpus of video-recorded English, Russian, and bilingual multiparty interactions, I show how asymmetries in participants’ experiences and expertise are drawn upon in the process of repair resolution, suggesting a respecification of the notion of “self” as it pertains to repair.