Karen Tracy

• University of Colorado Boulder

To understand one type of race trouble, this study examines a federal civil trial brought by a white employee suing her African American supervisor for creating a racially hostile work environment. After explaining race trouble and its connection to talk about racism, background is provided on civil trials and this particular trial. Events about wh...

In the United States the law espouses contrary principles about the relationship between identity categories, such as race and gender, and justice. On the one hand, a more representative judiciary is seen to be a way to ensure greater justice. On the other, the law is assumed to be “blind” to parties’ identities; race and gender of judges and litig...

This study analyzes judges’ preliminary jury instruction in nine US federal civil trials. Following an overview of past and current jury instructing practices, including the role of pattern instructions, I describe the trial materials and introduce genre analysis and grounded practical theory, the two theoretical-methodological frames I use to anal...

This study analyses an important but unstudied site of legal–lay communication: the website discourse of a small claims court. I describe six interactional problems that litigants in small claims court face that the official court metadiscourse, i.e., the court website, does not ably prepare participants for. Problems include: 1) addressees vary en...

This Epilogue discusses the papers in the Special Issue (JLSP 40th Anniversary) in terms of the broader field of language and social psychology. It reflects on the key terms (“language” and “social psychology”) in terms of how they intersect and the relative emphasis on each in work published in JLSP. We also present an argument for increasing the...

Grounded Practical Theory: Investigating Communication Problems provides readers with an introduction to grounded practical theory (GPT), a framework for doing research about the problems people encounter when they engage in particular communicative practices, techniques for managing those problems, and normative ideas for how to communicate wisely...

Much like in everyday life, politeness is key to the smooth running of relationships and interactions. Professional contexts, however, tend to be characterised by a plethora of behaviours that may be specific to that context. They include ‘polite’ behaviours, ‘impolite’ behaviours and behaviours that arguably fall somewhere between – or outside – s...

This chapter provides background on the informal justice movement in United States. It explains grounded practical theory and design theory, the communication frameworks that are used to analyze the informal justice practices. The chapter analyses the philosophical commitments of each practice, describes its interactional design, and illustrates ce...

This study analyzes judges’ decision announcements at the end of small claims hearings when the judge informs the parties who has won. Background on US small claims courts is provided, and the data and grounded practical theory, the analytic approach, are described. Then, we overview the small claims decision announcement genre, describe key areas...

In this article we identify discourse moves in small claims court that have the potential to affect procedural justice – the sense that a litigant has been treated fairly and respectfully. We focus on what judges do as they address three communicative challenges that are part of small claims court judging: (1) handling the potential for appeal, (2)...

Small-claims courts were created to help ordinary people settle “small” disputes quickly and cheaply and were designed to be relatively informal. A consequence of the justice system’s commitment to informality is that small-claims trials exhibit significant variation. After overviewing the different ways language/discourse styles and ideology have...

This chapter begins with a description of the six features of political exchanges that make facework and politeness demands different from those of ordinary conversation. Then, the chapter reviews what we have learned about (Im)politeness in parliamentary discourse and broadcast interviews with political figures, as well as a number of other less f...

This essay responds to Gee?s article in which he proposes that discourse analysis is an approach that can bridge frames. I begin by elaborating a difference in academic cultures among scholars who identify as discourse analysts. I argue that a cultural grounding is built into discourse analysis and study of communication more generally. The essay c...

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction is an invaluable reference work featuring contributions from leading global scholars, available both online and as a three-volume print set. It successfully brings into a single source explication of all relevant work that is developing internationally. The definitive international...

Indexicality is the function by which linguistic and nonlinguistic signs point to aspects of context. This concept encompasses all of the ways communicative acts are situated in relation to spatiotemporal, historical, discursive, social, interactional, and other contexts. Interactants draw on contextual parameters to create and interpret particular...

This special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research presents five studies, each using principles and methods of grounded practical theory (GPT) to investigate a topic in applied communication. GPT is a metatheoretical and methodological framework for developing empirically grounded, normative theoretical reconstructions of particula...

This study develops a context-grounded ideal about how citizens ought to communicate in legislative hearings about contentious issues. We begin with an overview of the dominant model of good citizen discourse, democratic deliberation, and argue why it is an inappropriate norm for public hearings in state legislative bodies. After overviewing ground...

This edited volume proposes key contributions addressing the connections between two important themes: dialogue and representation. These connections were approached or interpreted in three possible ways: 1. Dialogue as representation, 2. Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues, and 3. Representations of dialogue. The first interpr...

This study analyses the question-asking practices during oral argument of 50 judges in seven US state Supreme Courts as each court decided if its state marriage law was legal or if it violated its gay citizens' rights to marry a partner of their choice. Background on appellate court, oral argument and the seven cases is provided. The analysis provi...

Language and social interaction (LSI) refers to the area of communication research that studies how language, gesture, voice, and other features of talk and written texts shape meaning‐making. LSI includes a loosely bounded set of topics and intellectual commitments. In contrast to the domain‐of‐life approach (e.g., political, interpersonal, or org...

In Exploring Argumentative Contexts Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen bring together a broad variety of essays examining argumentation as it occurs in seven communicative domains: the political context, the historical context, the legal context, the academic context, the medical context, the media context, and the financial context. These essay...

This study analyzes public hearings about same-sex marriage to show how the contexts that are established for citizens' and legislators' talk make arguments about the issue being disputed. Situated within the traditions of argument studies and discourse analysis, the article explores different meanings of “context.” The study evidences how two sets...

"Reasonable hostility" is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm's usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable...

This study examines the relationship between person-referencing terms and attorney and judges’ stances during oral argument in three US state supreme courts as each considered whether its existing state law could restrict marriage to one man and one woman. After reviewing past work on stancetaking and person referencing, I provide background on app...

This study describes the facework system in effect during oral argument in US state supreme courts. Drawing on two cases that occurred in the Cali-fornia Supreme Court in which attorneys and justices explored the legality of California's marriage laws, the study argues that the facework system in operation during oral argument is one of minimal pol...

Discourse scholars, as this volume evidences, are fascinated by how identities are constructed through talk. Our fascination, no doubt, arises from the ephemeral, fragile quality of talk combined with the widespread tendency among both ordinary folk and many academics to treat talk as trivial, the underside of some other thing that is important. Ta...

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is committed to showing how talk and texts serve the interests of those with power in a society. From its initially European linguistic roots, CDA has become an influential international, interdisciplinary tradition. This chapter sketches CDA’s background including its theoretical roots and key scholars. Six areas...

Over a six-month time period a school board and its community discussed their district's strategic plan goals about diversity. This article analyzes that discussion within the practical theory frame articulated by Craig. Meeting talk and documents were analyzed to determine how the group's policy deliberation became an argument over what words to h...

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they ofte...

Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse s...

This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and criti...

An important but unstudied event in US legal institutions is when judges question plaintiff and defense attorneys about the issue that brings them to an appeals hearing before a state supreme court. In this article I analyze judges' questioning during the oral argument phase of the New York Court of Appeals' hearing of Hernandez v. Robles, a case c...

In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is "reasonable hostility". Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (L e., reasonable h...

Language and social interaction ( LSI ) refers to the area of communication research that studies how language, gesture, voice, and other features of talk and written texts shape meaning‐making. LSI includes a loosely bounded set of topics and intellectual commitments. In contrast to the domain‐of‐life approach (e.g., political, interpersonal, or o...

School districts are both big businesses and a form of local governance that is part of American democracy. When a crisis makes a district's democratic face relevant, the organization will experience a dilemma that does not occur in business-only organizations. This study examines the public meetings of a school board in the western United States a...

A high level of citizen involvement in civic life is presumed crucial to the well-being of democracy, but the actual discourse of citizen involvement has rarely been analyzed. This article analyzes citizen participation in the school board meetings of one US community that was in the midst of conflict. After providing background on education govern...

Essays in the The Prettier Doll focus on the same local controversy: in 2001,a third-grade girl in Colorado submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Ba...

This article analyzes two telephone calls from citizens to a 911 center in a large city in the Western United States in which call-takers became angry and attacked the face of the callers. After reviewing past theoretical conceptualizations of face and face attack, the authors analyze the calls using a facework lens. Through a close study of the di...

A corpus of transcribed, oral requests used in a previous study of compliance-gaining strategies (Tracy, Craig, Smith, & Spisak, 1984) is examined interpretively from the perspective of the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978). Findings include the following: (1) politeness strategies occur in great abundance and variety; (2) superstrateg...

Earlier research identified a conversational rule of relevance that states, “when a conversation is seen to possess an issue-event structure the preferred type of extension is a remark that continues the issue.” This study reports an experiment that investigates the generalizability of that earlier research and tests two conditions hypothesized to...

A research program on intellectual discussion in academic institutions is presented as a case that illustrates a method for constructing grounded practical communication theory. Within a practical discipline perspective, theory is conceived as a rational reconstruction of practices for the purpose of informing further practice and reflection. The t...

This study assesses the utility of a compliance-gaining approach for coding messages produced in a set of “request” situations experimentally varied by status and familiarity of the requestee and by size of the request. The results indicate that altruism, and, to a lesser extent, certain positive sanction and argument strategies, are used predomina...

Communication, Craig (1989, 1995a, 1995b; Craig & Tracy, 1995) argues, is and should be a practical discipline: a field whose scholarly work would be helpful in improving the communicative practices it studies. Following explication of Craig's notions of practical theory and communication as a practical discipline, this paper analyzes the interacti...

Les As. proposent une revue des etudes sur le role de l'interaction sociale dans la construction du sens du langage. Ils retracent l'historique de ce champ d'etudes et decrivent les traits caracteristiques des principales directions de recherche qui s'y sont developpees

In this article, we analyze the premeeting talk that occurred in 6 meetings of a nutrition company's weekly staff meetings. We begin by describing the business organization, the specific meeting, and the study's discourse and ethnographic materials. Then we introduce small talk, the theoretical frame that initially shaped our interest in premeeting...

Meetings are talk-saturated events in which people come together to tackle a variety of explicit goals and tacit concerns. They enable accomplishments of people’s most valued ideals (e.g., democracy, voice); at the same time, meetings are also practices that are the frequent objects of derision and complaint. The review synthesizes and critiques de...

Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an approach to discourse that is particularly communicative in thrust. AIDA describes the problems, conversational strategies, and ideals-in-use within existing communicative practices. It melds the analytic moves of discourse analysis—giving attention to the particulars of talk and text—with the goal...

Citizen calls to the police to report disputes they are having with close others often involve communicative trouble: shouting, convoluted accounts, and disparaging remarks are frequent. Simply put, calls about domestic disputes are common sites for interactional trouble between citizens and police call-takers. One reason for this, identified three...

Outside Waco, Texas, on 19 April 1993, a 51-day standoff between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and David Koresh and the Branch Davidians concluded with a devastating fire. Despite the fact that FBI negotiators talked on the telephone with Koresh or his main spokesman almost every day, the negotiators were unable to bring the standoff to...

When citizens call the police to report a problem with (or caused by) another, they need to not only characterize the problematic action/event, but they must position themselves in relation to the complained-about person. This conversational work of positioning self, and describing the other's actions, is delicate business when the complained-about...

This study of 911 call‐takers describes the different ways human feeling is understood, expressed and managed in the emotionally‐charged atmosphere of an emergency 911 communications center. After reviewing past work on emotion labor and organizational burnout, we describe the data, qualitative methods, and the role of call‐takers at Citywest Emerg...

If I can just, I wanted to just jump on one distinction, and that is the intrinsic-extrinsic in the context book by Duranti and Goodwin. I think, well that's a common distinction in conversation analysis. Cicourel uses a different distinction. And I think the language we use to describe the issue itself is one that reflects values. So for instance,...

ButtnyRichard, Social accountability in communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. Pp. xi, 187. - Volume 24 Issue 2 - Karen Tracy

Action-implicative discourse analysis is the name for a new type of discourse analysis, developed to be useful in the critique and cultivation of communicative practices in society. Developed within the metatheoretical framework of grounded practical theory, an extension and formalization of Craig's earlier ideas about communication as a practical...

This article examines how questioning practices in intellectual discussion do identity work. Drawing upon the discussion discourse of a Ph.D. department's weekly colloquium, as well as several other sources, three aspects of intellectual identity are identified that are routinely at stake for academic presenters in discussion periods: their knowled...

Intellectual discussion is a form of talk hailed as important but not much studied. After suggesting why it should be given scholarly attention, the paper reports on interviews conducted with graduate students and faculty who attended a weekly colloquium in an academic department. Drawing upon the interviews the first part of the paper provides an...

This article examines the ways in which academics (faculty and graduate students) go about claiming an nteractionally appropriate face during intellectual discussion. In particular, it examines discussion situations to see how participants enacted the institutional and intellectual identities that prior interviews had suggested were salient. Discou...

Without Abstract

CouplandNikolas, GilesHoward, & WiemannJohn M. (eds.), “Miscommunication” and problematic talk. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991. Pp. 374. - Volume 21 Issue 3 - Karen Tracy

Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communica...

face is a social phenomenon; it comes into being when one person comes into the presence of another; it is created through the communicative moves of interactants / whereas face references the socially situated identities people claim or attribute to others, facework references the communicative strategies that are the enactment, support, or challe...

The relationship between employee performance and communicative abilities was investigated in a field study of 128 claims adjusters from two insurance company offices. The study examines the relationships between communicator competence, listening ability, and frequency of task-related talk and employee performance with new technology. Comparisons...

Four research reports, each produced by authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, are analyzed to identify the similarities and differences in beliefs about the nature of discourse and how one acquires knowledge about it. The analysis focuses on three issues: (1) the way in which each study is justified as important; (b) the way methods are...

Discourse - TannenDeborah, Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1984. Pp. xix + 188. WardhaughRonald, How conversation works. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Pp. vii + 230. - Volume 15 Issue 3 - Karen Tracy