Acknowledging and legitimizing the embarrassment: Responding to embarrassment-telling

Abstract

Sharing embarrassing experiences is an ordinary and recurrent social phenomenon, and this article carries out a conversation analytic study on how embarrassment-telling is interactionally co-constructed in talk-in-interaction. It is found that embarrassment-telling is delivered as an incident that should not have happened happens by accident to the teller due to the embarrassment-teller’s unintended violation of a normative practice. In response, the co-interactant acknowledges the experience’s being embarrassing, while legitimizes the teller’s being embarrassed, thus making the response to embarrassment-telling a nuanced issue by maneuvering between affiliation and disaffiliation with the teller. Data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.