Erving Goffman - Forms of Talk

ERVING GOFFMAN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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Copyright 1981 by Erving Goffman All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Third paperback printing 1995

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Goffman, Erving.

Forms of talk.

( University of Pennsylvania publications in conduct and communication) Includes bibliographies and index.

1. Oral communication. I. Title. II. Series: Pennsylvania. University. University of Pennsylvania publications in conduct and communication. P95.G58 001.54'2 80-52806 ISBN 0-8112-7790-2 ISBN 0-8122-1112-x (pbk.)

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The five papers in this volume were written between 1974 and 1980, and are arranged in order of their completion. All deal with talk, and mainly the speaker's side of it. The first three were published as journal articles; they have been slightly revised. The last two are printed here for the first time. The three published papers are analytic and programmatic, leading to the very general statement in the third, the paper called "Footing." The two new papers could stand as substantive application of notions developed in the analytic ones. All the papers (least so the first) are written around the same frame-analytic themes, so the whole has something more than topical coherence. The whole also contains a very considerable amount of repetition. I state this last without much apology. The ideas purport to be general (in the sense of always applicable), and worth testing out. This is the warrant for repeated approaches from different angles and the eventual retracing of practically everything. Yet, of course, none of the concepts elaborated may have a future. So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact. This asking may be a lot, for the papers are proclamatory in style, as much distended by formulary optimism as most other endeavors in this field.

Everyone knows that when individuals in the presence of others respond to events, their glances, looks, and postural shifts carry all kinds of implication and meaning. When in these settings

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words are spoken, then tone of voice, manner of uptake, restarts, and the variously positioned pauses similarly qualify. As does manner of listening. Every adult is wonderfully accomplished in producing all of these effects, and wonderfully perceptive in catching their significance when performed by accessible others. Everywhere and constantly this gestural resource is employed, yet rarely itself is systematically examined. In retelling events-an activity which occupies much of our speaking time--we are forced to sketch in these shadings a little, rendering a few movements and tones into words to do so. In addition to this folk transcription, we can employ discourse theatrics, vivifying the replay with caricaturized reenactments. In both cases, we can rely on our audience to take the part for the whole and cooperatively catch our meaning. Thus, in talk about how individuals acted or will act, we can get by with a small repertoire of alludings and simulations. Fiction writers and stage performers extend these everyday capacities, carrying the ability to reinvoke beyond that possessed by the rest of us. But even here only sketching is found.

So it remains to microanalysts of interaction to lumber in where the self-respecting decline to tread. A question of pinning with our ten thumbs what ought to be secured with a needle.

With my own thumbs, in this volume I want to hold up three matters for consideration. First, the process of "ritualization"-if I may slightly recast the ethological version of that term. The movements, looks, and vocal sounds we make as an unintended by-product of speaking and listening never seem to remain innocent. Within the lifetime of each of us these acts in varying degrees acquire a specialized communicative role in the stream of our behavior, looked to and provided for in connection with the displaying of our alignment to current events. We look simply to see, see others looking, see we are seen looking, and soon become knowing and skilled in regard to the evidential uses made of the appearance of looking. We clear our throat, we pause to think, we turn attention to a next doing, and soon we specialize these acts, performing them with no felt contrivance right where others in our gestural community would also, and like them, we do so apart

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from the original instrumental reason for the act. Indeed, gestural conventions once established in a community can be acquired directly, the initial noncommunicative character of the practice (when there is such) serving merely as a guide in our acquiring gestural competency, ensuring that our learning how to be unthinkingly expressive won't be entirely rote. The purpose and functions of these displays cannot of course be caught by the term "expression," but only by closely examining the consequence each several gesture commonly has in samples of actual occurrences--with due consideration to the sorts of things that might be conveyed in the context had no such gesture been offered.

Second, "participation framework." When a word is spoken, all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it. The codification of these various positions and the normative specification of appropriate conduct within each provide an essential background for interaction analysis--whether (I presume) in our own society or any other.

Third, there is the obvious but insufficiently appreciated fact that words we speak are often not our own, at least our current "own." Who it is who can speak is restricted to the parties present (and often more restricted than that), and which one is now doing so is almost always perfectly clear. But although who speaks is situationally circumscribed, in whose name words are spoken is certainly not. Uttered words have utterers; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence. We can as handily quote another (directly or indirectly) as we can say something in our own name. (This embedding capacity is part of something more general: our linguistic ability to speak of events at any remove in time and space from the situated present.)