Anita Pomerantz

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at University at Albany, State University of New York

“Telling my side” is a way of seeking information without going on record with an explicit request. The practice involves a speaker’s reporting recognizably limited access to, and knowledge of, a situation in which the recipient was an actor. A limited-access formulation may be likened to an outsider’s or observer’s version of a situation. This pra...

Giving a compliment involves offering a positive assessment of an attribute, action, or accomplishment for which the recipient is seen to be responsible. In responding to compliments, recipients are subject to multiple, conflicting constraints. Recipients may accept the compliment as a “gift” with a “thank you” and/or they may agree or disagree wit...

The work contains nine published conversation analytic articles by Anita Pomerantz on asking and telling practices. Each paper explicates complexities involved when people ask or tell something. Asking and telling practices are used to exchange information, share evaluative reactions, offer compliments, and make accusations. The ways in which parti...

Candidate answer queries (also referred to as polar or yes-no questions) are used massively in conversational interaction. Although such queries seem simple and straightforward, analysis reveals several kinds of complexities associated with these types of questions. Candidate answer queries carry claims about the speaker’s knowledge. They are under...

Extreme Case Formulations specify a maximum case—for example, “all the time,” “everybody,” or “no one.” An important use of Extreme Case Formulations is to legitimize and/or strengthen a claimed attribute or offense. Participants use Extreme Case Formulations to strengthen their claims when selling, convincing, arguing, defending, justifying, accus...

The way an assertion is formed bears on the nature of the claim for which the speaker is accountable. Speakers are accountable for different claims in saying “There are flies here” versus “I haven't noticed any flies here” versus “John said there are no flies here.” A feature of describing one’s basis is that smaller claims are made than in asserti...

In providing assessments, speakers generally have expectations regarding the recipients’ access to the matters assessed. This paper describes how recipients who claim access to the assessed referent form their responding assessments. Features of responses in two sequential environments are examined: when neither party is responsible for the evaluat...

The paper analyzes how recipients infer the purpose of a prior query. While such inferences are not directly observable, analyzing responses to queries sheds light on ways in which recipients likely understood them. The paper identifies three types of sequences in which recipients respond to the inferred purpose of the prior query. The sequence typ...

In this interview, Anita Pomerantz and Robert E. Sanders, professors emeriti at the University at Albany, SUNY’s department of communication, discuss their views on conducting language and social interaction (LSI) research. They share their understanding of the connection between LSI research and the discipline of communication, and explain what we...

This study examines naturally occurring instances of "bounded segments" of interaction. A bounded segment has a start point when interacting persons launch a task or activity, and a completion point when they reach closure. The importance of bounded segments from a dialogical perspective is that they account for the extensiveness of most interactio...

Dans cette entrevue, Anita Pomerantz et Robert E. Sanders, professeurs émérites au département de communication de la University at Albany-SUNY, discutent de leurs perspectives quant à la recherche sur le langage et l’interaction sociales. Ils partagent leur compréhension du rapport entre la recherche LSI et la discipline de la communication, et ex...

The analysis in this article considers how dispatchers in a 911 wireless call center direct callers’ orientations from one possible trajectory of action (e.g. moving to close) to keeping the caller engaged and prepared to speak with a second dispatcher. We describe how dispatchers deploy two distinct actions, a directing action and an informing act...

This study has a theoretical and an empirical part. In the theoretical part, we focus on an issue underlying studies of what language learners must learn to interact competently in L2. These studies do not consider what learners already know that we refer to as basic interactional competence (BIC), a putative universal that begins developing in pre...

This collection offers a multifaceted view of the life, research and impact of Emanuel A. Schegloff, the co-originator, with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, of Conversation Analysis (or CA), and its leading contemporary authority. The first section introduces Schegloff’s life and work, and, using a series of interviews with him, provides a concise...

In the context of reproductive and sexual health, African American women have higher incidence of disease and poorer outcomes on key indicators when compared with White women. In this study, we used discourse analysis to identify and examine the workings of two clusters of interpretive resources ("interpretative repertoires") associated with reprod...

A number of studies have shown how participants work to accomplish their goals in ways that minimize the possibility of acrimonious conflict. And yet acrimonious conflict does occur. This raises the issue of what circumstances and discursive moves engender acrimonious interactions and what circumstances and discursive moves avert them. We address t...

Introduction Overview of Existing Literature Weaknesses and Omissions in Existing Research Future Directions

In response to an article by Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black (2012), the author argues that the nature of the analytic aims of a research project determines whether or not participants' reported goals and motives are relevant and useful. Her position is that for traditional conversation analytic studies aimed at explicating culturally shared meth...

Background/significance: African American women suffer significant disparities in relation to reproductive health (HIV/AIDS, STIs, breast and cervical cancer). In smaller towns and cities, they encounter barriers in obtaining healthcare that are specific to their social environments: limited providers, transportation difficulties, and privacy conce...

Conversation analysis: An approach to the analysis of social interaction We humans spend a considerable portion of our lives interacting with one another. As social animals we coordinate our activities together, thereby constituting the familiar interactions and social institutions of everyday life. We walk to work with a friend, discussing the day...

IntroductionImportance of Studying Discussions About Health-Related TopicsQualitative Methods Case Study: Dynamics of Family DiscussionFindingsDiscussionReferences

In medical clinic visits, patients do more than convey information about their symptoms and problems so doctors can diagnose and treat them. Patients may also show how they have made sense of their health problems and may press doctors to interpret their problems in certain ways. Using conversation analysis, we analyse a practice patients use early...

A key reason for the shortage of transplantable organs and tissue in the United States is the degree of resistance among the public to donating organs and tissue after death. In this article, we explore a single barrier to donation: the concern that medical personnel might provide "less-than-optimal" care to intended donors. Using 2 qualitative met...

Introduction. Patients not only describe their symptoms during medical visits, they frequently present possible explanations for those symptoms (Gill, 1995, 1998; Raevaara, 1998, 2000; Stivers, 2002; Gill et al., 2004; Gill and Maynard, 2006). Although patients often display uncertainty about their candidate explanations (Gill, 1998), they typicall...

As conversation analysts, we analyze the sense-making practices that participants use to accomplish conversational actions, identities and roles. We study these practices by closely observing the details of the conduct of people in interaction as captured or rendered on videotape and/or audiotape recordings. For a number of reasons, many conversati...

When physicians take readings of health indices such as temperature or blood pressure, the practices that physicians and patients employ in discussing the readings both reflect and propose a set of expectations regarding the level of technical medical information the patients should acquire and understand. In this article we demonstrate how physici...

The interview is one of the most important sources of social scientific data yet there has been relatively little exploration of the way interviews are conducted and interpreted. By asking internationally respected scholars from a range of traditions in discourse studies including conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and sociolinguistics t...

It is futile to search for truly neutral questions. They don’t exist. Every question carries presuppositions, so every question establishes a perspective. So for each question we must ask: Is the perspective taken really the one from which we want the respondent to answer? If the answer is yes – if we can justify the perspective – then we can also...

This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empiric...

1. Research Problem The problem that I have been studying, how patients handle their lay diagnoses during medical consultations, is derived from two research traditions: normative research within the area of health communication and descriptive research in the area of Language and Social Interaction. I will provide a brief discussion of how this pr...

Research undertaken by members of the Language and Social Interaction Division of the ICA addresses diverse topics, often topics of interest to scholars in other divisions as well. But it is not the topics that particular studies address that distinguish and coalesce work in language and social interaction (LSI); it is what these studies contribute...

As part of training in an internal medicine ambulatory clinic, a supervising physician may see a patient who has already been seen by a trainee. The authors conducted qualitative analyses of videotapes of medical interactions and of the participants commentaries regarding the interactions. They found that physicians and trainees showed concerns reg...

L'auteur apporte des arguments pour defendre la validite et la possibilite de generalisation des methodes d'analyse conversationnelle, et precise quelles sont les revendications des analystes de conversations

Interactants use a variety of strategies to seek information from one another. One strategy involves incorporating a Candidate Answer in a query. In using this strategy, a speaker provides a model of the type of answer that would satisfy his/her purpose‐for‐asking. Supplying a model is useful when a speaker wants to guide, direct, or assist a respo...

This paper has described three uses of Extreme Case formulations (1) to assert the strongest case in anticipation of non-sympathetic hearings (2) to propose the cause of a phenomenon (3) to speak for the rightness (wrongness) of a practice. The interactants in the illustrations were engaged in several types of activities, among which were complain...

Bringing together thirteen original papers by leading American and British researchers, this volume reflects fresh developments in the increasingly influential field of conversation analysis. It begins by outlining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field and goes on to develop some of the main themes that have emerged from topic...

Bringing together thirteen original papers by leading American and British researchers, this volume reflects fresh developments in the increasingly influential field of conversation analysis. It begins by outlining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field and goes on to develop some of the main themes that have emerged from topic...

People routinely attend to their bases of knowledge or sources when there is doubt about what is true. The grounds that they attend include their direct experience and what others have said. When people describe their bases or sources during a dispute, they may be defending viewpoints, backing away from positions, or deciding which versions are cre...

A large proportion of compliment responses deviate from the model response of accepting compliments. A close examination of those responses reveals that while rejections are frequent, they are not performed as preferred seconds. While various sequential features suggest that determination, one indication is that most compliment responses lie somewh...