#epistemics

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

By: Geoffrey Raymond and Don Zimmerman

Published by: Research on Language and Social Interaction
Volume 40, Issue 1
Pages 33-61

LL Abstract:

In this article, Raymond and Zimmerman use a corpus of 40 calls to 911 about the same event - a fire on the Pacific coast - to examine how callers and call-takers negotiate rights and responsibilities in their talk and the ways these rights affect actions and trajectories of 911 calls. They identify problems in managing these calls that occur over time, showing how callers and call-takers cannot avoid the institutional constraints posed by the format of an emergency call. Suggesting that institutional resistance to change may stem from such routinized and embodied practices, the authors further consider the impact on emergency services due to shifting presuppositions in multiple calls produced during community-wide events.

LL Summary:

Raymond and Zimmerman begin by describing the emergency captured by their call corpus: a mountainside fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast that affected thousands of residents, allowing the researchers to track an ordered series of calls about the same event. They describe the questions driving their research, outlining their focus on the practices that organize calls and the ways that these practices embody an alignment of identities between a service seeker and service provider. Identifying a directionality to the information flow in emergency calls (where practices are designed to facilitate information into a dispatch center), they introduce three ways that these practices are altered over multiple calls: information flow is reversed, complication of the service seeker/provider relationship, and complication in the rights and responsibilities of that relationship. In the next section of the article, the authors review prior research on the organization and production of emergency calls, beginning with how calls generally have a monofocal character leading to brevity and order as callers are constrained to present service-appropriate matters. They describe the ways that callers are aligned to report problems and answer questions, while call-takers receive the report and ask questions, resulting in the a division of rights and responsibilities that provide the directionality of information they previously discuss. As deviations from the orientations, presuppositions, and activities have consequences for the emergency call, the authors note how the first two turns of a call set up the responsibilities for each party while positioning them to engage in a specific type of activity: reporting an event for the purpose of obtaining help for that problematic event. Using the first call about the fire, Raymond and Zimmerman show how the organization of 911 calls allow callers to use their first turn as a “slot” for presenting the trouble that led them to call (the “caller’s problem). Noting the compact opening and closing sequences of the first call, the authors illustrate the sequencing inherent in emergency calls that facilitates the orientations, presuppositions, and activities that enable callers to report emergencies. Next, Raymond and Zimmerman use examples from several calls to show how callers departed from the norms of an emergency call in reversing the directionality of the calls as the fire emergency progressed, demonstrating that both callers and call-takers maintained a tangential alignment with these norms despite these deviations. Here both call-takers and callers are shown modifying their practices in an effort to see if their call matches previously delivered information, resulting in modified service announcements and orientations to a caller’s right to report an emergency (e.g. when a caller’s first turn opens with a request for a call taker to confirm they already know about the fire, or a call taker provides “candidate locations” for the emergency). In addition to calls where reporting is sustained as the overall activity, the authors next examine calls where other projects are pursued, such as information or advice seeking calls. Here they show that callers orient to their limited rights as reporters yet presuppose that call takers know more about the event in question than the caller, reversing the activities in a typical emergency call. In calls seeking advice, the authors demonstrate that callers use location formulations to establish their proximity to the fire as a basis for pursuing information and advice. They conclude their analysis with two examples of calls where call takers struggled with requests for advice, as in these cases the call takers faced institutional limits on their own rights to provide information or advice (such as encouraging a caller to evacuate). The article ends with a discussion of how the calls systematically changed over time, from reporting the fire to seeking advice or information about the emergency, and the authors note that both the organization and distribution of rights and responsibilities in these calls changed as a result. Despite these changes, they underscore that callers and call takers attempted to preserve the ordinary structure of these calls, suggesting that institutional constraints make resistance to change problematic in such situations.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Feisty Shrimp Linguine:

While the authors of this article discuss different linguistic responses to a fiery situation, you will find yourself loving the fiery flavor of this linguine dish! The shrimp and red pepper of this recipe are a nice twist on the traditional seafood linguine approach, and the thick tomato sauce can be adjusted to your own heat preferences. Even though callers and call takers must deal with problems if an emergency steps outside the norm, you won’t face any problems putting this easy dinner idea together. Good Cooking!

MWV 7/13/18 

Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry

By: John Heritage

Published by: Language in Society
Volume 27
Pages 291–334

LL Abstract:

In this article, Heritage (1998) looks at the appearance of the discourse marker “oh” in a particular context - turn-initial position in responses to questions - and demonstrates how the use of “oh” generally suggests a change of state in the speaker. He shows how this oh-prefacing may mark a previous question as problematic or indicate that a speaker is reluctant to pursue a conversational topic. After exploring a wide range of examples where oh-prefaced turns are produced, the article concludes that while “oh” generally shows its producer has undergone a cognitive “change of state,” people rely on the contextual aspects of their utterances to determine the sense of this change.

LL Summary:

Heritage begins with several examples from conversations to show how “oh” generally shows or registers that its producer has undergone a change in state of knowledge or information. He then specifies the focus of this paper: oh-prefaced turns that are produced as the second pair in a sequence, aka those that are produced in response to a question. The author continues by characterizing “oh” as indicating that a question has occasioned a marked shift of attention, meaning it was unexpected or problematic in some way. In this section, Heritage discusses an interview with Princess Margaret and excerpts between students and teachers to conclude that one function of “oh” prefaced responses is to indicate that the question to which they respond is inapposite. In the next section, he expands on inapposite inquiries by distinguishing between cases where the question indexes something “already known” by participants because of prior talk or joint understandings, and cases where questions are poorly fitted to the sequential context they are produced in. The author looks at examples of women and men and finds a pattern of assertion -> query -> oh-prefaced reassertion that is produced when matters from prior talk are questioned. Looking at reported speech, Heritage shows how some oh-prefacing indicates that a question’s answer is self-evident from the physical or cultural/individual knowledge context, or that there is some element of the social environment that makes the question problematic. After using examples of the functions of oh-prefacing in troubles-telling, questions, and problematic questions, he notes that in some contexts, the exploitation of oh-prefacing as a method of emphatic response to questions has become quite common. In the following section, the article explores cases where oh-prefacing is used to project reluctance to talk about the topic raised by an inquiry. Heritage identifies three ways that this reluctance is shown in the data: oh-prefaced responses are minimal or unelaborated in the matter of the inquiry, producers of oh-prefaced responses unilaterally shift topic immediately after the response or shortly after, or these producers withhold on-topic talk (aka remain silent). In the final section of the article, Heritage examines responses to personal state inquiries like “How are you?” Building on Jefferson’s (1980) work on troubles talk, where she proposes that this troubles talk is marked by a general tension between attending the trouble or “business as usual,” the author shows that oh-prefacing can intensify the downgrading of downgraded responses (like “oh pretty good”). Finally, Heritage concludes by restating his argument that oh-prefacing uniformly conveys the sense that the prior question has occasioned a shift in attention to the matter of the question, so that its central use is implying the inappositeness of this question.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Lemon-Asparagus Linguine with Garlicky Panko:

While Heritage identifies multiple functions of oh-prefaced responses in his article, the recipe for this dish will leave you swooning over its simple steaming ingredients! Much as we use oh-prefaced responses to suggest a range of social cues, this dish has a range of flavors - asparagus, lemon, garlic, that suggest a crisp and zesty bite. Good cooking!

MWV 2/12/18

PS Apologies for the delays in posting, all! About to finish a qualifying review paper by March so going underground until that’s done- will post short updates until that’s over! Bon Appétit until then!