2 - Footing, positioning, voice. Are we talking about the same things?

Summary

Introduction

In everyday conversation, participants continuously negotiate what is being said and done – how they are defining the situation and how they mean what they say. This social and conversational work conveys how participants frame interaction as they speak and are framed by others as well. This chapter discusses different framing processes in a telephone conversation between two brothers. It investigates the construction and performance of social and discursive identities in the delivery and reception of difficult news. While the brothers display alliance towards each other through their talk, tension is caused by the younger brother's responses. When the younger brother questions the validity of the older brother's report, a set of common premises needs to be established to avoid misunderstandings.

As a conceptual tool, frame analysis (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974, 1981; Tannen 1986, 1993a) is particularly suited for understanding how people construct meaning from moment to moment. Interactants jointly signal their definition of a situation through framing. That is, as people speak and act, they signal to each other what they believe they are doing (e.g. what activity they are performing or what speech act they are producing) and in what way they want their words and gestures to be understood. The intricate ways in which framing is accomplished in verbal interaction is captured through Goffman's (1981) notion of footing, or the alignment that speakers and hearers take toward each other and toward the content of their talk.