Defending Solidarity: Self-Repair on Behalf of Other-Attentiveness

• In Event: 279 - Regular Session. Conversation Analysis

Abstract

This chapter concerns the accountability of human conduct in interaction with reference to particular kinds of social actions—namely those that can be considered “solidarity enhancing” (Clayman 2002) because they are supportive or harmonious or potentially beneficial to their recipients, and, in conversation analytic terms, are preferred. The starting point is my study (Maynard 2013) about the use of I-mean Prefaced Utterances (IMPUs) to defend complaining types of social actions. The current paper shows a different but related use of these IMPUs. Whereas complaints are “dispreferred” social actions, in my collection of IMPUs, a small group turned up in the environment of praise, invitations, offers of help, and the like. Initially, this group seemed to disconfirm the otherwise tight relation between complaining and IMPUs. Further investigation shows that IMPUs, like those attached to complaints, have a defensive quality when accompanying invitations, offers, and such actions. They defend the actions they accompany by rendering them to be more other-attentive than their initial formulation and do so in a tacit manner. Where Schegloff (1992) describes repair generally as in defense of intersubjectivity, I-Mean Prefaced Utterances related to supportive social actions show how repair mechanisms also may be in defense of solidarity between or among social actors.

Author

• Douglas W. Maynard, University of Wisconsin