Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
To cite this article: Cynthia Gordon (2003): Aligning as a Team: Forms of Conjoined
Participation in (Stepfamily) Interaction, Research on Language & Social Interaction,
36:4, 395-431
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3604_4
Cynthia Gordon
Department of Linguistics
Georgetown University
Prior research (Falk, 1979; Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner, 1987, 1993) has suggested
that individuals participate as teams in interaction by aligning supportively with one
another and by sharing turns at talk or speaking on behalf of the team. In this article, I
explore more closely how participants do team talk by analyzing excerpts from two
audiotaped stepfamily mealtime interactions. In the analysis, I identify three forms of
participation that teams enact in these data. Team members (a) share turns, (b) alternate turns parallel in function, and (c) situate their conversational contributions
within a shared knowledge schema (Tannen & Wallat, 1993). In this article, I add
to work on teams in interaction by illustrating how teams form and function moment
by moment, by identifying previously unidentified forms of team participation, and
by demonstrating in what ways extrainteractional characteristics of interlocutors can
serve as a basis for creating particular alignments at particular moments in conversation. In the analysis, I also identify stepfamilies as an ideal site for examining shifting
alignments in conversation and discuss how teams relate to negotiating relationships
in this context.
396
Cynthia Gordon
Aligning as a Team
397
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Supportive Alignments
Goffman (1981) suggested that as participants frame events they also
negotiate interpersonal relationships or alignments that make up those
events (Tannen & Wallat, 1993, p. 60). According to Tannen and Wallat, a
frame, or what they called an interactive frame is a definition of what is
going on, without which no utterance (or move or gesture) could be interpreted (pp. 5960). Alignment, in contrast, refers to relations between
participants. Following Goffman (1981), Schiffrin (1993) described participant alignments as being related to the way interactants position themselves relative to one another, for example, their relationships of power and
solidarity, their affective stances, their footing (p. 233). Schiffrin (1993)
also suggested that alignments are part of the broader notion of participant
structure (or framework), i.e., the way that a speaker and hearer are related
to their utterances and to one another (p. 233).
A particular type of alignment, or what might be referred to as supportive alignment, is characteristic of interactional teams. By supportive
alignment, I mean an alignment in which one participant ratifies and supports anothers turns at talk and what he or she has to say, creating ties of
cooperation, collaboration, and agreement. In other words, supportive
alignments are those that mean one participant aligns with another, sending
the metamessage (Bateson, 1972) I support you, we agree.
A number of conversational features have been identified as constructing supportive alignments between speakers. These features, although not
creating interactional teams in themselves, frequently cluster in the talk of
participants forming an interactional team (Kangasharju, 1996). They can
be seen as precursors of or accompaniments to the conjoined participation
necessary to perform as a team. These conversational features include
1. Shared smiles and laughter (Ellis, 1997; Kangasharju, 1996; Pritchard, 1993).
2. Repetition of anothers words (Falk, 1979; Kangasharju, 1996; Pritchard, 1993; Tannen, 1989).
3. Supportive back channeling (Falk, 1979; Pritchard, 1993;
Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977).
398
Cynthia Gordon
Teams
Conversational features creating supportive alignments such as those
mentioned in the previous section cluster in the talk of participants making
up an interactional team (Kangasharju, 1996; Lerner, 1987, 1993) or a
conversational duet (Falk, 1979). However, participants can also create
supportive alignments by jointly constructing events in which they do not
take the same side. For example, Schiffrin (1984) showed that in collaboratively constructing an argument by taking opposing sides, speakers in the
Jewish American community she examined built solidarity. This is a type of
supportive alignments that implies a different kind of team talk. The team
talk considered in this analysis is team talk in the sense of Kangasharju
(1996), meaning participants create a supportive alignment while also exhibiting conjoined participation. Past work has shown that conjoined participation occurs where participants complete conversational turns together or
take a turn on behalf of another team member (Kangasharju, 1996, p. 292).
As Falk (1979) remarked about the conversational duet
One-to-one conversation consists of an exchange of solo performances. Each role is
occupied by a single person. But in group conversations two (or more) persons may
participate as though they were one, by talking to an audience in tandem for both (or
sometimes one) of them about the same, with the same communicative goal. Those
persons then are performing metaphorically not a solo but a duet. (p. 18)
The finding that when interlocutors speak on behalf of coparticipants particular alignments are created relates to Schiffrins (1993) identification of the
conversational move of speaking for another. Examining sociolinguistic
interview data, she showed that when one speaker takes a turn on anothers
behalf, it can create supportive alignments (e.g., it can be perceived as chipping in), or it can create divisive alignments (e.g., the move can be interpreted as butting in). This emphasizes the importance of considering
moves such as speaking for another as they are situated in the unfolding
discourse: The conversational move is not necessarily supportive.
In Schiffrins (1993) data, interlocutors self-selected to speak for another participant. This is one way conjoined participation and the forma-
Aligning as a Team
399
400
Cynthia Gordon
DATA
The data for this analysis were drawn from audiotapes of conversations between members of my own family, which can be described as a
stepfamily. In introducing the participants, I do not mean to imply that their
extrainteractional relationships cause teams to form but that these relationships can (and do) serve as a basis for team formation at particular moments in conversation. Another way of thinking about this is that these relationships are made relevant and (re)created in the discourse at specific
moments through conversational means.
In their study of remarried family relationships, Ganong and Coleman
(1994) identified five characteristics of stepfamilies that make relationships in stepfamilies different from those of first-marriage families: (a)
stepfamilies are more complex, (b) children are often members of two
households, (c) stepfamily members have different family histories, (d) parentchild bonds are older than spousal bonds, and (e) individual, marital,
Aligning as a Team
401
and family life cycles are more likely to be incongruent. To clarify what
stepfamily means in reference to the participants in the examined interactions, the participants and their relationships to one another are listed
following.
*Jim,1 my father.
*Anna, Jims wife, stepmother to Emily and Cynthia.
*Myself (Cynthia, the author), 24 years old at the time of taping, Jims
daughter from his first marriage, Annas stepdaughter, and Emilys
half sister.
*Emily, 14 years old at the time of taping, Jims daughter from his second
marriage, Annas stepdaughter, my half sister.
Jim and Anna had been married for 7 months at the time of taping and
lived in the metropolitan Chicago area. Emily was living with Anna and Jim
every other week, spending the other weeks with her mother. I was a graduate
student living in Washington, DC, and went to visit my father, Anna, and Emily one weekend specifically to gather data for a course I was taking on family
discourse. I taped several mealtime interactions as well as conversations occurring in the car. At the time of taping, I had known Anna for approximately
1 year, and Emily had known her for several months longer.
This stepfamily background information is relevant to the analysis of
the teams that occur in the data for several reasons. First, Jim and I have access to discourse topics that surface in the interaction that Anna and Emily
do not, specifically knowledge about my (maternal) grandparents, due to
our longer shared history. This serves as a basis for our forming a team
when the topic of my grandparents comes up in conversation (in Excerpt
1). Second, Jim and Anna both have parental roles vis--vis Emily who was
14 years old and lived with them at the time of taping. However, only Jim
plays a parental role vis--vis me (age 24 at the time of taping and not living
in their home). In one segment of Excerpt 2, Jim and Anna parent Emily
as a team, and I participate minimally. Third, Jim, Anna, and I have a
greater access to another topic that surfaces in Excerpt 2 (dating) than does
Emily. Jim, Anna, and I align supportively as a team of experts here.
These extrainteractional characteristics of the individuals making up
the family whose discourse is analyzed here are important to interactional
teams because they can be (but do not have to be) the basis for forming
teams. Extrainteractional identities (e.g., stepparent and stepchild), personal traits such as age and current place of residence, and knowledge re-
402
Cynthia Gordon
lated to shared and unshared family histories relate to how the shifting
alignments that characterize the stepfamily interactions in the analysis that
follows are created.
ANALYSIS
The two conversational excerpts for this analysis of three interactional
teams occur during mealtime conversations. Excerpt 1 was drawn from a
dinner at home; Excerpt 2 was drawn from a lunch at a bagel shop. The
three teams I identify show different ways of doing conjoined participation in interaction. These are (a) turn sharing, (b) parallel turns, and (c)
schema-echo turns.
Conjoined Participation as Turn Sharing
The first example of an interactional team is a team that functions in a
congruent way to Kangasharju (1996) and Falk (1979): The participants
share conversational turns; that is to say, two interlocutors participate in a
conversational slot instead of just one.
In the following excerpt, occurring during the dinner conversation,
Jim and I form an interactional team when a topic of talk for which we
are both insiders surfaces (the life histories of my maternal grandparents,
his ex-in-laws). Thus, following Falk (1979), my father and I have the
mutual knowledge that presupposes the formation of an interactional
team.
The topic first appears in a joking frame created when I tell Anna,
Emily, and Jim how my maternal grandmother went on a diet (Weight
Watchers), and my grandfather, not having my grandmother cooking fattening things for him, lost 15 lb. Emily steps outside the joking frame and
asks if my grandfather was skinny in the first place. Then she remarks in
lines 14 to 15, I havent seen any of your family, and Anna asks in lines
15 through 17, Well how old are your grandparents. Probably. The topic
then turns into a serious discussion about my grandparents wherein the
interactional team becomes relevant as my father and I confer (shown in the
boxed portions of the excerpt) to answer Annas question. In this transcript
and those that follow, each participants talk appears in one column.2 (Note
that in the excerpt, Sam is Jims stepfather, with whom all the participants are familiar. Gail is my mother, whom Emily knows and Anna has
Aligning as a Team
403
never met). The entirety of the discussion about the lives of my grandparents, wherein the shared-turn form of participation occurs, appears as Excerpt 1 in the Appendix.
Anna
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Jim
Cynthia
Yeah. ( )
(Well) how old are your
grandparents.
(Probably.)
CONFERRING
Emily
I havent seen any
of your family.
Mmmm,
seventy five?
Seventy-seven?
Wow!
CONFERRING
Are they that old?
Maybe seventy five,
yeah, seventy-five,
seventy-seven.
Drawing on Lerner (1993), one can see how the interactional team consisting
of my father and me becomes relevant in the conversation: through conferring.
Specifically, I confer with my father in answering the question Anna asks
about how old my grandparents are. Note that Jim is the only participant (besides me) who might have access to my grandparentsages. Through rising intonation in lines 18 to 19 (Seventy-five? Seventy-seven?), I open the relevance of our conjoined participation. Conferring continues in lines 22 through
25 where I again ask my father a question (Are they that old?) in trying to answer Annas question and he responds. Notice that he also exactly repeats my
guesses (as shown in bold), and repetition is a conversational feature that can
work toward creating a supportive interactional alignment.
This initial instance of conferring invites conjoined participation, but it
is not the only occurrence of conferring between my father and me in the excerpt. Other instances serve to reinforce the relevance of our participation as
a team imparting information to Anna. The next instance occurs when Jim
tells Anna how my grandparents met. In lines 76 through 79, Jim checks the
facts with me. In the reproduction of the data following, the conferring
again is boxed and labeled. Appearing in bold is supportive back channeling.
Anna
70
71
72
Jim
Well they were both in the
Second WorldWorld War,
Cynthia
Emily
I like that name, Jeff,
Jeffrey.
404
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
Jim
Cynthia
same as Sam.
they worked onthey worked on uhI THINK thats where theythat your grandparents met,
was on a hospital ship there,
yeah.
Emily
CONFERRING
Mhm,
mhm.
Where?
Hospital ship in the Pacific.
Really!
Here Jim switches from referring to my grandparents as they, when addressing Anna, to your grandparents, addressing me and conferring with
me. I then confirm what he has said with Mhm, mhm, which not only verifies his facts but also sends the metamessage, Im with you, working to
show supportive alignment.
The final example of conferring occurs when Jim is telling Anna what
my grandparents have on their property out in the country. Here he confers
with me about how many apple trees my grandparents have.
Anna
123
124
125
126
127
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
In this example, Jim confers with me. Again, note that I am the only other participant who would know this information. Although in this example, I do not
respond verbally to my fathers request for confirmation, his conferring nonetheless reaffirms the relevance of our conjoined participation and thus encourages the formation of an interactional team. Another way of understanding this
would be that this conferring opens the door for conjoined participation.
An interactional team entails not only conjoined participation but
also a supportive alignment between interlocutors. Two linguistic features that have been identified as showing supportive alignmentrepetition of the words of others and supportive back-channel signalsalso appear in the talk of members of the team. As shown in the previous
excerpts in bold type, repetition and supportive back channeling occur
during conferring episodes. These features also occur between team
Aligning as a Team
405
Anna
30
31
32
33
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
How old is your mom.
Dads age?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
In the previous example, I use back channels of support as part of the developing interactional team.
Supportive back channels also occur in the next excerpt in which
Anna asks a question, I answer, and my father supports my answer. In
this example, Anna is asking what my grandfather did for a living after
World War II.
Anna
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
()
406
Cynthia Gordon
conjoined participation itself. Here, interlocutors together fill one conversational slot and share a turn at talk.
First, simply in conferring about my grandparentsages early in the excerpt, Jim and I work together to fill one conversational slot, the slot of answer that is brought about by Annas question in lines 15 through 17. I
illustrate this by re-presenting these lines, this time boxing relevant conversational slots.
Anna
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Jim
QUESTION
(Well) how old are your
grandparents.
(Probably.)
Cynthia
Emily
of your family.
ANSWER
Mmmm,
seventy five?
Seventy-seven?
Wow!
Are they that old?
Maybe seventy five,
yeah, seventy-five,
seventy-seven.
The excerpt can be considered both conferring and turn sharing, as my father and I work together to fill the sequential slot opened by Annas question. It is not, however, the only example of turn sharing between members
of this team.
There is one particularly notable extended shared turn. This occurs
in an answer slot that Jim and I share in lines 107 through 126. Supportive back channels and repetitions appear in bold type. Also, as with
the preceding example, the conjoined participation occurs in response to
a question posed by Anna (here she asks what my grandfather did after
the war).
Anna
98
99
100
101
102
Jim
Cynthia
103
104
105 Oh.
Emily
(xx)
Aligning as a Team
Anna
QUESTION
106 But they live on a farm.
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
407
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
ANSWER
(Well, )
Its prettyits like uh,
farmy.
ten or twenty-acres,
he has farmland,
They have ()
he has a section
some fruit trees and
of farmland,
peppers,
yeah,
and he doesand he has huge gardens
and you know stuff
like that.
He has a tractor,
nothing commercial, butbut its not,
yeah, its not commercial.
like a bunch of- yeah,
had you know some apple
trees and some, a few
apple trees,
what, a dozen maybe
Where do they live?
apple trees.
In this excerpt, Jim and I together answer the clarification question but they
live on a farm posed by Anna, sharing a conversational slot and using linguistic devices evidencing a supportive alignment. In this shared conversational
turn, Jim and I, as insiders to the discourse topic, jointly share information with
an outsider to the topic (Anna) and in doing so form a team in interaction.
This represents the first of three forms of participation interactional
teams enact in these data: the sharing of turns. I now turn to two other forms
of participation available to members of teams in interaction. These excerpts of conversation were drawn from Excerpt 2 (shown in its entirety in
the Appendix).
Conjoined Participation as Parallel Participation
and Individual Turns
In this section, I examine an interactional team consisting of Anna and Jim
who enact the familial role of parent with Emily as the recipient of their talk.
They participate as a team by alternating turns parallel in function independently; that is to say, where one team member speaks, it is on behalf of the entire
team. They also repeat one anothers words to create a supportive alignment.
408
Cynthia Gordon
In this excerpt, the family is having lunch at a bagel shop. Jim and
Anna are asking Emily whether she is going to ask Ben, a boy she knows
from church, to her (all-girls) schools homecoming. This is a topic that has
been addressed numerous times before, as becomes obvious in the conversation. It is also worth noting that I am a relative outsider to this topic,
which explains the nature of the questions I ask the other participants.
Jim and Anna work toward presenting a unified parental front, thereby
making an interactional team relevant. As with the team made up of my father
and me, conjoined participation between Anna and Jim is initially made relevant by one of the practices identified by Lerner (1993): they confer amongst
themselves. However, this conferring first manifests as something akin to reproaching as Anna discusses with Jim whether it is appropriate for Emily to
ask a boy who in her view, Emily barely knows, to her homecoming dance.
Anna
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
(Yeah.)
Whos Ben.
Yes I have.
Anna addresses Jim in the boxed portion of the transcript as she confers with
him in reference to his telling Emily that if she doesnt ask the boy to the
dance that day, there is no point (lines 1112). This conferring is not exactly
the same type of conferring my father and I exhibited in the formation of our
team, as it is not within an answer slot, nor is it in another conversational slot
wherein information is imparted to a participant outside the team. Instead, it
is situated within a frame wherein Anna and Jim, as parental figures, work toward presenting a unified front about whether or not Emily should ask a boy
she does not know very well to her homecoming dance. Note that Annas
conferring with Jim represents an effort toward presenting a unified front in
terms of how they evaluate Emilys plans, and a subsequent realignment occurs, with Jim supporting Anna as they evaluate Emilys (planned) actions
and offer advice, as the following excerpts show.
The enactment of the parenting frame occurring here correlates to
Ochs and Taylor (1992) who noted that in their study of family narratives
that the lives of protagonists [most often children] are verbally laid out for
Aligning as a Team
409
the inspection of interlocutors (p. 330). This means that in their data, the
behaviors of children are inspected by parents (and in particular, fathers)
when children report about events from their lives. Here Anna and Jim are
eliciting information about and then evaluating Emilys opinions and behaviors, thus establishing a parenting frame. Within this frame, Anna confers with Jim, the other parental figure, about the appropriateness of Emily
asking this boy to her homecoming dance, implicitly making a judgement
about Emilys behavior and making sure Jims knowledge schema about
teenage dating matches her own.
Within this conferring (or reproaching), more evidence of the parental
frame occurs. Although Anna is talking to Jim and addresses him by name,
she talks about Emily, referring to Emily by name and the pronoun she
when talking to Jim (lines 1416, But- Emily doesnt even know him Jim,
she hasnt even talked to him!). Annas referring to Emily with the pronoun she in her presence contributes to positioning her as a child.
Straehle (1993) noted that speakers can refer to present individuals using
the third-person singular pronoun to accord ( ) less-than-adult status
(p. 219). In the frame of parenting, Anna and Jim are a team of parents
(father and stepmother) and Emily is the child.
This team consisting of Jim and Anna endures between lines 21 and
39, shown following. Here, Jim and Anna alternately perform parallel conversational rolesthe role of questioning Emily about how much she has
talked to the boy she wants to ask to homecoming. The relevant conversational slots in the interaction, those of question (produced by Anna and
Jim) and answer (provided by Emily), are marked in the excerpt, as is the
supportive repetition used by team members.
Anna
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
QUESTION
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
QUESTION
Youve talked to him a few
times. What have you
talked about.
QUESTION
Well, well thats good.
Whats up? What else!
QUESTION
Do you even say hi to
ANSWER
A few times.
ANSWER
(Oh) whats up. @
ANSWER
@
ANSWER
@He just looks at me.@
410
Cynthia Gordon
In this excerpt, Anna and Jim participate as a team by alternating the role of
questioner in this parenting frame. Although they do not share conversational turns, their action is clearly coordinated; as Falk (1979) might have
said, they are talking to an audience in tandem, and with the same communicative goal (p. 18), that of socializing Emily into their beliefs about teenage dating. When either Anna or Jim speaks in this frame, he or she is enacting the role of parent interacting with a child on behalf of the institution of
parental unit. Note also the repetition of the key phrase talked to him.
This same form of conjoined participation recreates this team later in
the conversation. This time, Jim and Annas association is referred to just
moments prior by Jim. In line 219, Jim uses we to refer to himself and
Anna, bolded in the following excerpt. This reestablishes the relevance of
conjoined participation, and the team again forms, this time lasting approximately from lines 229 to lines 234. In the excerpt following, Anna begins
by asking Emily if she would talk to the boy at the homecoming dance even
though she has never talked to him before. Reference to the association occurs in line 219, where Jim self-repairs from I to we, thus making a visible effort to present a unified front.
Anna
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
REFERRING TO ASSN.
Tonight! Tonight!
I promise!
I promise!
In this excerpt, conjoined participation is made relevant by reference to an association by one of the association members through the use of we, whereas
in the first excerpt, it was made relevant by conferring (for realignment) between association members and by the invocation of a parenting frame. Thus
participation as a team is made relevant multiple times in this conversation.
In addition, Jim and Anna continually support one another throughout the
interaction by using yeah and making supportive comments. In the following, in lines 107 and 109 to 110, Jim supports what Anna says to Emily in lines
105 to 106, You wouldnt go by yourself [to the dance], Melissa is going.
Aligning as a Team
Anna
100
101
102
103
104
105 You wouldnt go by
106 yourself, Melissa is going.
107
108
109
110
411
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
(Well-)
I dont want to go by
myself.
(Why would-)
Yeah!
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
Jim
Cynthia
CHALLENGE
How do you know
hes not a jerk.
CHALLENGE
Youve never talked to him.
Emily
RESPONSE
He doesnt ACT like a jerk.
RESPONSE
He doesnt LOOK like it.
CHALLENGE
Maybe he has a girlfriend.
That could be.
In this excerpt, Anna and Jim together perform one part of the conversation
(challenging) and Emily performs the other (responding). Again, Anna and
Jim alternate verbal performance of turns in this role. Note that my comment in line 235 (That could be.) on one hand is structurally parallel to
Emilys (it sequentially responds to a challenge), although in content, it
matches my fathers suggestion that the boy may already have a girlfriend
412
Cynthia Gordon
and may not be available to go to the dance with Emily. I am neither explicitly joining Jim and Annas team nor siding with Emily in this frame.
This section has highlighted the team made up of Anna and Jim, the
parents in the interaction. Their form of conjoined participation can be described as the coordinated parallel use of alternating individual turns. By
parallel, I mean their turns perform the same speech act (e.g., questioning, challenging) on the same side (the side of parents) of the conversation. This is different from the team of Jim and me, as we shared conversational turns and Jim and Anna do not.
In the next section, I examine a third interactional team in the data,
which exhibits a different form of participation from both of the previously
discussed teams: The team includes a silent member who nonetheless is
obviously part of the team. I call this type of conjoined participation
schema-echo turn.
Conjoined Participation as Schema Echo
The final team I consider occurs between my father, Anna, and me in
lines 129 through 157 of Excerpt 2. In this excerpt, Emily, interested in
learning more about how first dates come to be and recognizing her father,
stepmother, and older half sister as older and more experienced in dating,
asks each of us in turn about our respective first dates, making our participation as a team of experts potentially relevant. Bolded in the excerpt are
Emilys questions, as well as repetition and supportive back channels between Jim, Anna, and me.
Anna
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
How did you get your first
date, did you talk to the
guy? Did he ask you,
did you ask him,
what happened.
Aligning as a Team
Anna
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
413
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
In this excerpt, Emilys intentions in asking her questions are clear: she will ask
each one of us (me, Jim, and Anna) individually about our respective first-date
experiences. However, despite the fact that Emily addresses us individually,
her questions make relevant in the interaction our identity as insiders or experts
to the topic, whereas she is a relative outsider or novice, and, as Falk (1979) remarked, mutual knowledge is a prerequisite to team formation. Thus, by framing us each in turn as knowledgeable about the world of dating by asking us
questions, Emily also frames us collectively as experienced or knowledgeable.
This may encourage the formation of an interactional team.
Also marked in bold in the excerpt, Jim and I begin to verbally create a
supportive alignment, with Jim repeating my utterance I think he probably
called me on the phone, in the form of I probably called her on the
phone. Throughout my turn at talk, my father provides repetition and supportive back channeling. Anna does not evidence that she is part of our developing team until perhaps line 155 when she utters I knew him, a repetition of it was somebody I knew (Cynthia, lines 145146), it was
somebody I knew (Jim, line 147) and I already knew him (Cynthia, line
152). Thus, from a surface analysis of the transcript that considers repetition and back channeling, it appears that Anna does not join our team until
several conversational moments later. However, I suggest that Anna is a
part of our team all along due to our endorsement of a knowledge schema
she is known to have. I turn to this now.
By schema-echo turns, I mean that participants draw from a knowledge schema known to be maintained by another copresent participant in
414
Cynthia Gordon
constructing their turns, thereby supportively aligning and conjointly participating with that person. In this case, Jim and I are supportively aligning
and conjointly participating with Anna by modeling our turns of talk to fit
into Annas knowledge schema about how teenage dating should work.
The knowledge schema wherein teenagers should only go on dates
with people they know fairly well originates from Anna, and Jim and I
align supportively with it. In the transcript, Anna is very insistent that Emily talk to the boy she wants to ask to her homecoming dance before asking
him. For example, at the beginning of the excerpt when Jim asks if Emily is
going to ask this boy to the dance, Anna is the first participant to suggest
that Emily cannot ask him because Emily does not know the boy and hasnt even talked to him (lines 1416):
Anna
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
(Yeah.)
Whos Ben.
Anna is the first participant to bring up the idea that Emily should talk to
Ben before asking him to the dance. After Anna introduces this idea, my father picks up on it, and he and Anna form the interactional team of parents discussed previously wherein they both ask Emily about what she has
talked to the boy about and challenge her asking him. Other evidence Anna
holds the knowledge schema that boys and girls should be friends before
going out on dates appears in Annas reaction, in lines 118 to 119, to Emily
saying that one of her friends is taking a guy friend to the homecoming
dance. She in line 109 refers to Melissa, one of Emilys friends.
Anna
109
110
111
Jim
Shes not taking a date,
right?
Cynthia
Emily
without a guy.
Aligning as a Team
415
Anna
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
Emily,
Actually she said she might,
I dont know.
She knows someone.
like a good friend of hers
thats a guy?
See so she TALKS TO
boys, and thenYes I know. ((stubbornly))
In this excerpt, Anna reacts to Emilys news that one of her friends is taking a
boy she is friends with to the dance by using it as a behavioral model. Anna
puts emphatic stress on talks to (line 118) in her comment. My father and I
do not verbally react here. Rather, it is Anna who again invokes the schema
wherein people going on dates should talk to each other before going out on a
date.
Finally, later in the excerpt, in concluding the topic of Emilys homecoming dance, Anna gives her recommendation in lines 246 through 249 and
in lines 281 to 282, shown following. In the intervening lines, Jim makes a
suggestion he seems to see as congruent with Annas schema about how Emily can deal with the situation: He suggests she should talk to the boy at least
once before asking him to the dance, perhaps at her youth group meeting that
evening. The suggestion he makes, in lines 251 through 276, is very clearly
modeled on the beliefs about dating that Anna earlier expressed, as he suggests that Emily should call the boy and talk to him prior to asking him to the
dance. Additionally, Jim is continually conferring with Anna to check if his
suggestion matches up to her schema. I have bolded the lines in which Jim explicitly confers with Anna about his suggestion in the excerpt.
Anna
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
416
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
Jim
256
257
258
259 CONFERRING
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278 CONFERRING
279
280
281 I think she needs to talk
282 to him.
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290 ( )
291
292
293
294
295
296
Cynthia
Emily
Nooooo no.
When is this dance?
Like two weeks?
Yeah.
Its getting pretty close.
But I mean even if she
called him one day later,
that- I dont know,
it just seems like the sepa conversation, and then a
small separation of time,
and then a SECOND ph-
@@@@
O::h.
Hm.
What do you think
about that.
(And) so sh-
@@
Why do you keep on
saying that.
@@
@@
In this excerpt, it becomes clearer that the knowledge schema that teens
should talk to one another before going out on dates originates in this excerpt from Anna. This is evidenced in the transcript by (a) Anna bringing
Aligning as a Team
417
up the schema first and repeatedly referring to it, (b) Jim checking with
Anna to see how his suggestion for Emily matches up to her schema, and
(c) Emily eventually asking Anna (not Jim and not me), somewhat annoyed, why do you keep on saying that? (lines 284285), locating the
source of the schema that involves Emily talking to the boy with Anna. Notice that in lines 286 through 288, Jim speaks for Anna trying to create a
unified parental front based on shared opinions about how (or if) Emily
should ask the boy to the homecoming dance. However, it seems that Anna
does not endorse Jims idea that calling the boy once on the telephone is
sufficient (note that she does not verbally respond, except to reiterate I
think she needs to talk to him).
I should note that from personal communication, I know that Anna believes that dating between young people should be based very much on
friendshipthat they should know one another fairly well before dating.
At the time of taping, Anna was making an effort to teach Emily that teenage girls and boys can (and should) be friends. In contrast, Emily did not
think this was necessary, and this was an ongoing topic of discussion and
point of contention during Emilys early teen years.
In fact, earlier in the weekend another conversation was captured on tape
about this same topic. In this conversation, Emily explicitly asked Jim and
Anna how she should go about asking Ben to the dance, I asked how she knew
Ben, and Jim said to Emily, First you have to say hello to him, remarking to
me that Emily doesnt really know him. Then Anna explained to me, she
hasnt even talked to him, and my father followed up by saying, she doesnt
talk to him. Hence this knowledge schema appears in at least one interaction
prior to the interaction I examined here, evidencing that Jim and Anna both
verbally endorse the idea that teenagers should know one another before going out on dates. This knowledge schema thus is repeated not only in the dinner conversation, where it seems to originate from Anna and is most insisted
on by Anna, but also is repeated intertextually or across interactions. The
echo of this prior text (Becker, 1982/1995a, 1984/1995b) in the dinner
conversation works to create the supportive alignments between Jim, Anna,
and me. We create a team whose members share (or claim to share) the same
knowledge schema about teenage dating.
Returning to the excerpt wherein Jim, Anna, and I form a team, I suggest that although on the surface the team may appear to be made up of just
Jim and me based on the repetitions and supportive back channeling between us, in fact Anna is a member of the team as well. This is so because
we are modeling our talk on the knowledge schema about how dating
418
Cynthia Gordon
should work that Anna is known to hold and thus are enacting a form of
conjoined participation. In the excerpt re-presented following, Emily is
asking each of us in turn about our dating experiences. In our answers, Jim
and I are referencing our teaming with Anna through allusion to her
schema. I re-present part of the excerpt here, bolding utterances that reference the schema Anna is known to hold.
Anna
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
absolutely yeah.
and he was in band and I
was in orchestra,
so I already knew him.
Right.
DISCUSSION
In this analysis, I identified three different ways interactional teams
can do conjoined participation in conversation. Inadvertently, this study
has highlighted Emilys recurrent position as teammate-less. Although
many interactions were captured on tape in which Emily is positioned as a
child to the others position of adults, there were interactions recorded in
which Emily was on a team. For example, in the interaction in which the
topic of Ben first surfaced during the taping period (during the conversation
in the car where Anna and Jim made their belief known that Emily needed
Aligning as a Team
419
to talk to him and get to know him before going to the dance), Emily and
Jim formed a team in answering my questions about what girls who are shy
do about finding a date for a dance at an all-girls school. Sharing turns, they
jointly explained to me that many girls go to dances in groups rather than
asking individual boys to attend. Anna remained silent during this portion
of that conversation.
Another example of Emily participating in team talk occurred at the
end of the dinner conversation excerpt (Excerpt 2) in which Anna repeatedly says that Emily needs to talk to the boy before asking him to the
dance, and Jim and Emily team up to take a teasing alignment toward Anna.
Here, Emily asked Anna, Why do you keep on saying that, and Jim
laughingly repeated, Why do you keep on saying that, and Jim and Emily
simultaneously laughed. Although the teams I focused on for this analysis
show Emily being treated as a marginalized participant, a spectator, or as a
child without anyone on her side, she does participate in team talk elsewhere in the transcripts.
Furthermore, one concept underlying this analysis but unstated thus
far is the cooperation that goes on in interaction not only between members
of an interactional team but also between all coparticipants. Thus even
when an interactant was not participating on a team, he or she was a cooperative coparticipant. Participants in my data did not join teams they did not
belong on, nor did teams address unexpected or inappropriate audiences.
For example, neither Emily nor I tried to team up with Jim and Anna when
they were operating in the parenting frame, nor did Emily and I team up
and try to parent Anna or Jim. Both of these moves would have been inappropriate in the interaction and in the context of our stepfamily relationships (unless the tone was nonserious). Thus, the formation of the teams actually depended on the (unstated) cooperation of all the participants as well
as shared understandings about how stepfamily relationships play out in
interaction.
In the literature about family communication, and stepfamily communication in particular, teams have at times been viewed in a negative
light, as enduring opposing alliances that prevent open communication in
family interaction (e.g., Ganong & Coleman, 1994; Nelson & Utesch,
1990). Under this view, Emily would perhaps be seen as a marginalized
participant, and for example, a resurfacing team of father and oldest daughter might be seen as impinging on the husband and wife or father and youngest daughter relationship. However, in my data, interactional teams constantly shifted and although at times isolating participants, often worked to
420
Cynthia Gordon
CONCLUSION
In this analysis, I have shown three ways conjoined participation can
be enacted by interactional teams in stepfamily conversation: as turn sharing; through what I call parallel turns, or participants alternating turns parallel in function; or by what I term schema echo, which refers to situating
ones talk within the knowledge schema of another participant. In this
work, I have built on the work of Kangasharju (1996) and Falk (1979) who
characterized interactional teams and conversational duets, respectively,
in terms of supportive alignment and conjoined participation, with conjoined participation referring to shared turns or speaking on behalf of ones
self and another participant. I expanded the definition of conjoined participation to include, along with shared turns, parallel turns at talk, and
schema-echo turns as forms of team participation. In addition, I argued
why these forms of participation are consonant with the idea of interactional teams, showing how features creating supportive alignmentrepetition and supportive back channelingcluster when interactional teams
Aligning as a Team
421
developed. I have illustrated how these three forms of conjoined participation are different yet are all conducive to team play.
In sum, in this analysis, I have worked toward elucidating what it mans
to enact conjoined participation, create alignments, and build teams moment by moment in interaction. In doing so, I have identified stepfamily interaction as a site where interactional teams and shifting alignments are
omnipresent. Stepfamily interaction is a discursive space wherein multiple
family histories and life experiences, knowledge bases, and knowledge
schemas come together, blend, and sometimes collide, providing interlocutors with constant opportunities to shift alignments and find commonalities
(or differences) with other family members. In addition, I have shown in
the analysis that in examining team formation, considering the participants
as individuals with shared and unshared pasts, shared and unshared living
arrangements, and shared and unshared knowledge and opinions is important because these extrainteractional characteristics often serve as the basis
for team formation to accomplish particular interactional goals at particular moments.
NOTES
1 All participants, with the exception of the author, are identified using pseudonyms.
2 The transcripts in this analysis appear in column style: Each participant has his or her
own column. Words appearing on the same line in different columns are overlapping.
Carriage returns do not indicate prosodic or semantic chunking of discourse but occur
as space limits require. Transcription conventions, adapted from Du Bois, SchuetzeCoburn, Paolino, and Cumming (1992) and Tannen (1984) are as follows:
Punctuation marks represent prosodic features of utterances.
,
.
!
?
..
@
@word@
422
Cynthia Gordon
REFERENCES
Bateson, G. (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In Steps to an ecology of mind (pp.
177193). New York: Ballantine.
Becker, A. L. (1995a). Beyond translation: Esthetics and language description. In Beyond
translation: Essays toward a modern philology (pp. 297315). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1982)
Becker, A. L. (1995b). Biography of a sentence: A Burmese proverb. In Beyond translation:
Essays toward a modern philology (pp. 185210). Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press. (Original work published 1984)
Daz, F., Antaki, C., & Collins, A. F. (1996). Using completion to formulate a statement collectively. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 525542.
Du Bois, J., Schuetze-Coburn, S., Paolino, D., & Cumming, S. (1992). Discourse transcription (Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 4). Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.
Ellis, Y. (1997). Laughing together: Laughter as a feature of affiliation in French conversation. French Language Studies, 7, 147161.
Falk, J. (1979). The duet as a conversational process. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
Ferrara, K. (1992). The interactive achievement of a sentence: Joint productions in therapeutic discourse. Discourse Processes, 15, 207228.
Ganong, L. H., & Coleman, M. (1994). Remarried family relationships. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, C. (1986). Audience diversity, participation and interpretation. Text, 6, 283316.
Kangasharju, H. (1996). Aligning as a team in multiparty conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 291319.
Kangasharju, H. (2002). Alignment in disagreement: Forming oppositional alliances in
committee meetings. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 14471471.
Lerner, G. H. (1987). Collaborative turn sequences: Sentence construction and social action. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine.
Lerner, G. H. (1993). Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text, 13, 213245.
Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35, 144170.
Nelson, T. S., & Utesch, W. E. (1990). Clinical assessment of structural family therapy constructs. Family Therapy, 17, 233249.
Ochs, E., & Taylor, C. (1992). Family narrative as political activity. Discourse & Society 3,
301340.
Aligning as a Team
423
Pritchard, C. R. (1993). Supportive devices in language and paralanguage in the achievement of affiliation in troubles talk. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 16,
5770.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Oxford, England:
Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the
organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361382.
Schiffrin, D. (1984). Jewish argument as sociability. Language in Society, 13, 311335.
Schiffrin, D. (1993). Speaking for another in sociolinguistic interviews: Alignments,
identities, and frames. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 231263). New
York: Oxford University Press.
Straehle, C. A. (1993). Samuel? Yes, dear? Teasing and conversational rapport. In D.
Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 210230). New York: Oxford University
Press.
Tannen, D. (1984). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex.
Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tannen, D. (2001). I only say this because I love you: How the way we talk can make or
break family relationships throughout our lives. New York: Random House.
Tannen, D., & Wallat, C. (1993). Interactive frames and knowledge schemas in interaction:
Examples from a medical examination/interview. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 5776). New York: Oxford University Press.
APPENDIX
Excerpt 1: Talking About Cynthias Grandparents
Anna
1
2
3
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
Oh but was he-
@@
Therefore, my grandpa
@lost fifteen pounds!
Because she stopped
cooking
for him.@
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15 (Well) how old are your
16 grandparents.
424
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
Jim
(Probably.)
Cynthia
Emily
Mmmm,
seventy five?
Seventy-seven?
Wow!
Are they that old?
Maybe seventy five,
yeah, seventy-five,
seventy-seven.
Yeah.
That means like,
your grandma was . .
twenty-four, whenUhhhhh.
@I dont know!@
@@@
Im not a
math major!
about twenty-four or
twenty-TWO.
56
57 Okay so the pumpkins
58 interesting. ((re: dinner
dish))
59
60
61
62
63
64 (Hm.)
65
66
67
68
69
@@@@
Lets see now,
Yeah.
There was a lot of it.
Yeah, thats about right,
shed be in her late
seventies probably.
Ive never met
anybody in your family.
Your other Aunt Debby,
and @ Jeff.
Yeah.
Aligning as a Team
Anna
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80 Where?
81
82 Really!
83
84
85
86 How romantic.
87
88
89
90 New York?
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98 All right so what did he do,
99 is he a farmer?
100 Wh- did he become a
farmer
101 or a102
103
104
105 Oh.
106 But they live on a farm.
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
425
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
I like that name, Jeff,
Jeffrey.
(Well, )
its like uh,
ten or twenty-acres,
he has farmland.
He has a section
of farmland,
yeah,
and he doesand he has huge gardens
and you know stuff
like that.
He has a tractor,
but its not,
Its prettyfarmy.
They have ( )
some fruit trees and
peppers,
426
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
Jim
120
121
122
Cynthia
123
124
125
126
127
128
129 So this is out in the
country.
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
Emily
Some grapes,
yeah.
Well they built two uhWhere in Michiganacross the street now
theres
two new houses, looks like
it might be a development,
Wow.
or something.
Huh?
Where in Michigan do they
live?
Fort Gratiot?
Oh.
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
(Yeah.)
Whos Ben.
Yes I have.
Oh your friend (whos at)
Aligning as a Team
Anna
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
39 Emily40
41
42
43
44
45
46 Its- its a little bit dressier
47 than the mixer, so,
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
427
Is homecoming a big
deal or?
Mhm.
I mean is it like a fancy(Mm.)
Mmm its not tuxedo big
deal is it? No.
(Yeah.)
Whats that (mean that
like),
the boys wear suits orties I mean? Probably?
428
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
69
70
((lines 7182, brief
discussion of acne and
facial soap elided))
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98 Mhm.
99
100
101
102
103
104
105 You wouldnt go by
106 yourself, Melissa is going.
107
108
(Well-)
I dont want to go by
myself.
(Why would-)
Yeah!
109
Shes not taking a date,
110
right?
111 You want to go with a guy.
112 Emily,
113
114
115
116
117
118 See so she TALKS TO
boys,
119 and then120
121
122
123
124
I know. ((stubbornly))
Aligning as a Team
Anna
429
Jim
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
Cynthia
Emily
guy? Did he ask you,
did you ask him,
what happened.
430
Cynthia Gordon
Anna
Jim
Cynthia
177
178 What?
179
180
181
182
183 Oh.
184
185
186
187
188 GROUP date.
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
206
207
208 Mhm.
209
210
211 I mean if you- would you
212 talk to him then?
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
Emily
or sixteen.
I read somewhere in a
magazine that you should
only group date until
youre
like fifteen or sixteen.
But I dont know.
Yeah.
s- you know, your friend
and then her date or
whatever.
Oh.
@@@@
It could be sort of
STRESSFUL!
So Im just, wait,
Emily,
Im just curious to know
Tonight! Tonight!
I promise!
I promise!
Ill- Ill call
you tomorrow,
Ill call you tomorrow.
Aligning as a Team
Anna
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
431
Jim
Cynthia
Emily
(I wont.)