What actions mean, to whom, and when

Abstract

In a critique of Conversation Analysis’ treatment of context, Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black invite us to see that, when understanding some stretch of interaction, speakers’ retrospective reports might be helpful. Two standard responses to Waring et al.’s argument are that 1) people’s personal accounts of contingent and fleeting moments of interaction are of a different order of event from the actions they produce in situ, and are matters of analysis in their own right; and that 2) CA does use context, insofar as any analyst works with scenes in a culturally familiar landscape, bolstered (sometimes) by ethnographic accounts for help with local terminology or institutional agendas.