was, for example, a malicious act motivated by her dislike of K. It establishes that Angela has no vested interest in describing K in this way; therefore, it is
more likely to be heard as a report of an objective state of affairs. Imputations of stake can be resisted by displays of indifference to issues or
events which are sensitive matters for the participants. For example, Edwards 1995a discusses a case from a counselling session in which a couple are
in dispute about the cause of the problems in their relationship. The man believes his partner is overly flirtatious with other men; the woman claims
that she does not act inappropriately, and that his criticisms are the result of extreme jealousy. At one point the man describes an incident to illustrate his
partner’s inappropriate behaviour. In doing so he reports that ‘Connie had a short skirt on, I don’t know’ Edwards, 1995a: 333. Edwards argues that the
man is in a delicate position. The mere fact that he had monitored and mentioned the shortness of his partner’s skirt could be cited as evidence of
overbearing jealously, thus lending credence to his partner’s version of the problem. However, the inferential implications are managed by the inclusion
of the throwaway remark ‘I don’t know’. This marks his lack of concern for the matter: he thus portrays the comment about her clothes as simple ‘noticing’,
rather than ‘motivated scrutiny’ Edwards, 1995a: 334.
These inferential concerns are evident in the following section from Smith’s account.
5.2 From Smith, 1978: 29–30
… At that time Angela’s mother thought, well she misunderstood me. But later she noticed that K was unable to put on a tea pot cover correctly, she
would not reverse the position to make it fit in, but would simply keep slamming it down on the pot.
K’s inability to perform simple domestic tasks is presented as further evidence of her mental deterioration. But note how the mother came to be aware of K’s
difficulty: it was merely ‘noticed’. This portrays the mother’s indifference to K’s activity. An account which implied a systematic observation of K might sustain
an alternative interpretation: that the mother was aware of concerns about K’s mental health and was thus explicitly monitoring her behaviour. Such motivated
looking might suggest that the observer saw what she wanted or expected to see. ‘Noticing’, however, depicts the observer as ‘just happening’ to come upon a
pre-existing state of affairs. This formulation thus reinforces the underlying claim that K’s problems were objectively real, and not a matter of interpretation.
Sacks, membership categorisation devices and category entitlement
How do we refer to ourselves and other people? Consider other kinds of cate- gories we have available to us: we could refer to a person in terms of their
PERSUASION AND AUTHORITY 99
occupation, or their religious affiliation, or their nationality, or their gender, and so on. These kinds of categories are culturally available resources which
allow us to describe, identify or make reference to other people or to our- selves. And the interesting thing is that they are not exclusive. For example, it
is not hard to imagine a single individual who could be accurately described via a number of categories. For example, all the following correctly describe a
friend who – conveniently – happened to call me right at the time I was writing this section: male, father, liberal, atheist, brother, son, account director,
resident of York, graduate in sociology, friend, diver, Manchester United season ticket holder, Welsh – the list could go on. This means that when we
come to describe other people or ourselves, there is an issue of selection: why did we characterise our social identity, or the social identity of someone else,
in that particular way at that particular time?
The way in which categories are selected and their interactional implications was a feature of Sacks’ early work in CA. He showed that categories are not
neutral labels with which to describe ourselves and other people: they are what Sacks calls ‘inference rich’: we all have a stock of culturally available, tacit knowl-
edge about categories and their members. When we come to see a person as a member of a particular category, the normative expectations associated with
that category become available as an inferential resource by which we can interpret and anticipate the actions of this particular person. Categorisations of
people thus entail significant implications for the way in which their conduct and claims will be interpreted Sacks, 1979; 1984b; see also the references to
membership categorisation in the 1992 publication of Sacks’ lectures.
In his review, Potter focused on category entitlements: what sorts of tacit conventions about expertise, knowledge, attitudes and so on become inferen-
tially available when people are ascribed to particular categories, and how might these entitlements be exploited to produce factual or authoritative
accounts? We can illustrate this by examining some further data from Smith’s study. In this extract, Angela is describing one of the events which led her to
conclude that K had serious mental health problems.
5.3 From Smith, 1978: 29
… a mutual friend, Trudi who was majoring in English, had looked over one of her [K’s] essays, and told me afterward: She writes like a 12 year old –
I think there is something wrong with her.
Note that Trudi is characterised as ‘majoring in English’. When Trudi is reported as making a damaging assessment of K’s writing style, the reader is
thus assured of her relative expertise to form such a judgement. It is unlikely that this episode would be so convincing if Trudi’s authority had not been
established via this particular categorical identification. Moreover, it is not simply that K’s writing is weak, or less sophisticated than one might expect of
a university student: K is said to write like a
12 year old. When applied to an
100 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
adult at university, this categorisation invites the interpretation that she was extremely or pathologically immature.
Externalising devices
How can we use language to establish that something is ‘out there’, and that it has an independent objective existence? In his study of the ways in which
scientific texts present knowledge claims as factual, Woolgar 1980 made some observations about metaphors which depict the scientist on a journey of
discovery. For example, the following instance comes from the opening part of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
5.4 From Woolgar, 1980: 253
The trail which ultimately led to the first pulsar …
Woolgar argues that the objectivity of the pulsar is established through the description of a trail which leads ultimately to its discovery. This section offers a
metaphor for the process of scientific discovery: a trail. This metaphor and others which characterise the scientific process in a similar way, such as ‘the road
to truth’ and ‘the path of discovery’, suggest movement towards a goal or target. Woolgar argues that this feature of the speech warrants the readerhearer’s
understanding of the objective existence of the pulsar. He states:
We would suppose that an entity of our own creation might be fairly read- ily at hand at the time when it was first noticed as existing. But ‘the first
pulsar’ is to be understood as having a pre-existence, a quality of out-there-ness
which required that it be approached. Woolgar, 1980: 256; original italics
What kinds of descriptive practices are available to establish the objectivity or ‘out-there-ness’ Woolgar, 1980: 256 of the phenomenon being reported? We
will illustrate just one: reported speech. Reported speech has a variety of functions, and can work in various ways to
affirm a position or claim, or attest to the facticity of an experience Holt, 1996; Li, 1986; Mayes, 1990; Phillips, 1986. The following extract comes from a study
of tape-recorded accounts of paranormal experiences Wooffitt, 1992.The speaker uses reported speech to establish that the apparition of a malevolent entity was
not a figment of her imagination, but was an objective event in the world.
5.5 From Wooffitt, 1992: 163–4; speech marks added to identify
reported speech
tha:t night: 1.5 I don’t know what time it was: 1.3 my: husband . and I both woke up: 0.7 with the mo:st . dreadful 0.5 feeling of 1.7 hhh
PERSUASION AND AUTHORITY 101
°well° being nyrie smothered 0.3 but the powerful smell ·h and a blackness 0.3 that w’s that was 0.2 blacker than black I can’ describe it like
. anything else .·hh it was the most penetrating 0.3 type of blackness ·hh and there was this 1.7 what I assumed to be th- the shape of a man . in a
cloak 2 it was the most 0.3 formidable 1.2 sight 1 my husband said “my God what is it” . an’ I just said “now keep quiet and say the Lord’s
prayer”
Here the speaker invokes the urgency of the encounter by dealing with three features of the experience: the smell, the ‘blackness’ and the description of the
figure itself. Immediately after this elaborate and evocative descriptive work, she introduces her husband’s utterance ‘my God what is it’. This establishes
that he could see the figure, and also corroborates the description provided by the speaker. That is, the severity of the husband’s verbal reaction confirms that
the thing in the room, and the associated sensations, were as powerful and alarming as the speaker had reported. This confirms the speaker’s reliability as
an accurate reporter of the event. Of course the speaker could merely have reported ‘and my husband saw it too’. But the use of reported speech adds an
immediacy absent from such a neutral report, and this in turn works to estab- lish the event as a truly unusual and dramatic experience.
There are, then, several different ways language can be shaped to warrant the factuality or authority of our claims about the world: the management of cat-
egory entitlements, externalising devices and the ascription and negotiation of the relevance of stake or personal investment. These are not necessarily discrete
discursive practices, but offer flexible and interrelated resources.
Summary
• Both discourse analysis and rhetorical psychology are concerned to
explore the ways in which language can be shaped to warrant the factu- ality or authority of our claims about the world.
• The management of category entitlements, externalising devices, and the
ascription and negotiation of the relevance of stake or personal invest- ment are some of the kinds of discursive resources through which the
factuality of opinions or claims can be managed in everyday talk and in accounts of controversial or contested events.
From the rhetoric of authority to practices of being: some implications of a CA approach to factual discourse
Rhetorical psychology and the discourse analytic study of factual language have much in common, mainly a concern to highlight the dynamic nature of
everyday discourse as it is used persuasively. But discourse analysis offers a
102 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
