Organizing 'My Mind Is With You'

Every interaction between people who have spoken before is continued interaction, and we know from studies of everyday conversations that just as conversation participants have techniques to create coherence between turns in the same interaction (“tying techniques” ¹ ), they have techniques to create coherence between different interactions. A party may, for example, very early on in a phone conversation, refer to an earlier conversation by bringing up a previous topic with the question, “How’s your mother?” ² According to Sacks, this is a way to show “my mind is with you”, e.g., a way of saying that I know who you are and I know that the last time we talked your mother was sick.