From JS:II: 219–20 discourse analysis a comparative and critical introduction by robin wooffitt

testimony to the senate committee investigating the ‘Watergate’ scandal explores the contextualised and pragmatic work embedded in memory formulations Edwards and Potter, 1992: 30–53. Their analysis was prompted by an earlier study by Ulric Neisser, a cogni- tive psychologist who had been trying to broaden the scope of psychological research on memory to take account of ecologically valid data, such as mem- ories of real events for example, Neisser, 1982; Neisser and Harsch, 1992; Neisser and Winograd, 1988. The publication of the transcripts of the senate hearings allowed Neisser to investigate the extent to which Dean’s recall, noted at the time for its extensiveness and apparent detail, was accurate. He claimed to have identified three kinds of memory functioning in Dean’s testi- mony: verbatim, gist and repisodic memory. Neisser argued that repisodic memory works to preserve the key themes of an event or discussion while allowing for errors. In short, it allowed Dean to be telling the truth while ostensibly getting things wrong Neisser, 1981. While welcoming Neisser’s attempt to move the study of memory beyond the laboratory, Edwards and Potter argued that his analysis was problematic because it confused accounting practices with memory processes. Aspects of the testimony which Neisser had seen as evidence of good recall, bad recall or a certain type of recall verbatim, gist, repisodic were ways of managing Dean’s accountability in a courtroom setting; they were methods for dealing with actual or implied attributions of guilt, and so on. So, for example, producing the gist of a prior event or conversation allows the speaker to perform delicate descrip- tive operations: they can preserve, delete or transform aspects of the prior talk to attend to current interactional purposes Heritage and Watson, 1979. Moreover, verbatim recall of prior conversation is a rhetorical strategy through which the speaker is able to manage the evidential value of their claims Goffman, 1981; Holt, 1996; Wooffitt, 1992. Thus what Neisser interpreted as expressions of the workings of memory were discursive practices oriented to inferential tasks generated in the context of official hearings to identify responsibility and blame for illegal activities see also Molotch and Boden, 1985. Dean was noted for his good memory: he drew attention to it at various points in the hearings, and on occasions was able to give detailed accounts of past events. Edwards and Potter 1992 select some illustrative examples from Neisser’s 1981 paper, which serve to show that Dean presented himself as … someone with a virtually direct perceptual access to the original events: ‘you know the way there are two chairs at the side of the President’s desk … on the left hand chair Mr. Haldeman was sitting’ [Neisser] 1981: 11; ‘I can very vividly recall the way he sort of rolled his chair back from the desk and leaned over to Mr. Haldeman and said “A million dollars is no problem” ’. 1981: 18, cited in Edwards and Potter, 1992: 42 However, Edwards and Potter argue that we must not take Dean’s pronounce- ments on his own memory abilities as literal or neutral statements as they are 118 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS