ABSTRACT
Goffman seems to have almost stumbled across the notion of footing in the final substantive chapter of Frame Analysis (1974). There he writes that if a participant ‘muffs a task’, she can proceed as if nothing has happened or can issue ‘an excuse or apology’, thereby demanding that the others involved accept her ‘on a different footing’ (and he goes on to sketch some of the most important distinctions around which the later version of footing is constructed, e.g. animator and principal). This is one of the many senses of footing that Goffman went on to incorporate into his more focused consideration of the topic in 1979. Indeed, Goffman’s later notion of footing seems to draw together an almost bewildering range of quite different phenomena including what we today call, in addition to footing, stance, alignment, affiliation and others. The chapter begins by attempting to tease apart these various modes of participation and kinds of interactional effect that Goffman bundled under this heading. I then turn to consider what I take to be the core idea, captured in Goffman’s decomposition of speaker into the roles of animator, author and principal. Drawing upon, but also developing in new ways, Levinson’s suggestion that these role fractions might be grounded in a cross-linguistic study of particular recurrent speech activities and grammatical categories, I briefly sketch out their relevance for the practice of referential perspective shift in Vietnamese as well for the practice of illeism in English. Finally, I consider the important theoretical intervention of anthropologist Paul Kockelman, who has suggested that Goffman’s ideas about footing in speaking might be extended to all forms of human action and reworked as one key aspect of an account of human agency.
