From Smith, 1978: 29–30 discourse analysis a comparative and critical introduction by robin wooffitt

more substantial and compelling account. This is due, at least in part, to the willingness of discourse analysts generally to embrace the findings from conversation analytic research and, to a lesser extent, its methodological stance. Thus whereas rhetorical psychology can offer a broad characterisation of the argumentative nature of everyday language, discourse analysis has tried to provide analytic claims grounded in the close description of the detail of specific discursive practices. Moreover, discourse analysts have attempted to identify particular devices, or clusters of practices, through which the authority of a claim can be established. Thus Potter has catalogued and analysed a range of devices through which we can manage ‘stake inoculation’: ensuring that a position or claim is not dismissed as a mere expression of personal interest Potter, 1996a: 125–32. This focus on devices reflects the way in which CA tried to identify recurrent and robust patterns in the organisation of inter- action. Perhaps more important, DA offers a more sophisticated understanding of the way language is used persuasively in everyday discourse. In rhetorical psychology, it is claimed that discourse is argumentative, and that argumenta- tive activity is, at some fundamental level, the expression of overarching ideo- logical tensions. This position suggests that we are ensnared in webs of ideologies which constrain and shape our actions. Even if we accept this argument – and we might be cautious about endorsing a view which is both highly speculative and overly deterministic – it offers only a narrow view of the kinds of concerns which inform how we use language. The discourse analytic position, however, takes more seriously the findings from CA that interaction is complex and varied. This is reflected in the broad range of interpersonal, inferential and interactional contingencies which have been explored in discourse analytic research on authoritative language. Finally, rhetorical psychology has a limited – and limiting – focus on argumentation and ideology; empirical research thus revolves around a circumscribed set of issues. But DA studies are unen- cumbered by narrow theoretical frameworks, and are thus better placed to explore the implications of empirical findings, wherever they may lead. It is the application of CA-informed discourse studies of factual language to which we now turn. Normalising: doing ‘being ordinary’ In one of his lectures, Sacks made some observations on the ways in which people make reports of extraordinary experiences, such as being witness to hijackings or shootings. He had observed that, even when reporting such unusual events, people do so in routine and predictable ways, as if to under- line their own normality published as Sacks, 1984b. Building on Sacks’ obser- vations, Jefferson 1984b examined a particular descriptive pattern which occurs in accounts of unusual events. Witnesses to these extraordinary events often employ a format identified as ‘At first I thought … but then I realized’. A well- known example is the way that witnesses to the shooting of J.F. Kennedy PERSUASION AND AUTHORITY 103 reported a loud bang, which they first thought to be a car backfiring, but which they then realised was gunfire. The following example comes from Sacks’ 1984b initial identification of the phenomenon, and comes from the report of a witness to an aeroplane hijacking. I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and I saw by the cabin, the stewardess standing facing the cabin, and a fellow standing with a gun in her back. And my first thought was he’s showing her the gun, and then I realized that couldn’t be, and then it turned out he was hi-jacking the plane. Sacks, 1984b: 419; emphasis added ‘First thought’ formulations are invariably incorrect, and so Jefferson was puzzled: why would people present incorrect assumptions about the events they have seen? Her analysis revealed that people use the ‘first thought’ part of the device to present, as their normal first assumption, an innocuous reading of the state of affairs on which they are reporting. Through their ‘first thought’ formulations they display that they did not immediately assume that anything untoward was happening. They saw the world as any normal person might see it. Through this device, the perspective of the person telling the story is con- structed so as to demonstrate their normality; in Sacks’ 1984b term, they are doing ‘being ordinary’: orienting to the world in a non-exceptional way. In the following sections we will explore the way in which Sacks’ observations on doing ’being ordinary’ have implications for research projects in a range of academic disciplines: parapsychology, cognitive psychology and psychiatry. Implications for parapsychology: the study of accounts of spontaneous experiences Parapsychology is the scientific investigation of the possibility that communication can occur between people without the use of the normal five senses. Although in part stimulated by anecdotal reports of precognition, ghosts and apparitions, telepathy and contact with spirits, it has modelled itself on the natural sciences. Thus the vast majority of parapsychological studies have been conducted in laboratories, involving thousands of experimental trials with undistinguished or ordinary subjects, the results of which are analysed using rigorous statistical techniques. The objective of these experi- ments was, first, to find evidence for psi, the mental facility which is taken to underpin various forms of ostensible parapsychological phenomena, such as mind-to-mind communication or the ability of the mind to influence the exter- nal physical environment. The second objective was to examine the physical and psychological factors that influenced the operation of psi Broughton, 1991; Edge et al, 1986; Irwin, 1999; Radin, 1997. Reports of spontaneous psychic experiences which happened to people in their everyday lives motivated the earliest serious investigation of paranormal phenomena Gurney et al, 1886. But as parapsychology developed as a laboratory-based discipline, the study of reports of spontaneous experiences 104 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS