ABSTRACT
Conversation analytic studies have demonstrated decisively that an “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Heritage, 1984) provides for the recurrence and stability of understandings in talk-in-interaction. These studies describe interactants’ methods for accomplishing the routine and tacit tasks of displaying, ratifying, and updating intersubjective understandings (Heritage, 1984; Sacks, 1992a, 1992b; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). This architecture of intersubjectivity is a systematic by-product of turn organization:
[I]t obliges its participants to display to each other, in a turn’s talk, their understanding of other turn’s talk. More generally, a turn’s talk will be heard as directed to a prior turn’s talk, unless special techniques are used to locate some other talk to which it is directed. (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 728)
The outcomes of interpretive operations, performed upon the prior turn in the first position, are publicly displayed in the next turn position. The selection of some next action (e.g., an answer), for example, exhibits its speaker’s understanding that the prior turn was a corresponding first action (e.g., question). The prior speaker, in turn, inspects the adequacy of those displayed understandings and exhibits their (inadequacy in the third turn position. The products of these inspections may contribute to or briefly impede the continued sequential development and directionality of the talk.
