by Dr. Leon James (1972)
VOLUME ONE The Functional Analysis of the Verbal Community
CHAPTER 2 The Structure and Function of Transactional Idioms
Notes on Chapter 2 (9/72)
The Function and Structure of
Transactional Idioms
In what follows, we would like to discuss the notion "transactional idioms" from a fairly broad perspective, that is, in relation to the general problem of how conversational participants routinely handle transactional work. To begin with, we would like to establish the importance of looking at the problem of transactional work, in particular, to give justifying reasons why it is that we believe that conversational participants need to concern themselves with the matter of transactional work, as opposed to the notion that conversationalists "just interact"--without seeing it as "work" they have to accomplish, as might be the case, say, in a person's daily routine of 'driving to work' where such an accomplishment is not considered to be a special problem one needs to work out, but merely happens, given its routine status. At the end of our discussion on the work that conversational routines require, we shall come back to the general notion as to whether we want to look at all types of routine actions as constituting work, needing planning and rule-governed decisions, and then, having established that, we shall see how we can look upon conversational work as an instance of a whole category of routine things that need participants work.
To begin, then, with this business of conversational work, it will be sufficient, for the moment, to argue that a conversation belongs to a class of events that requires for their successful performance joint, coordinated work on the part of participants such that what one party does or says matters a great deaI in determining what another party will do next, and the ways in which it matters can be readily specified for a significant number of events that routinely occur in an ordinary conversation.
Take, for instance, the business of "Greetings" which, in our speech community, is a routine occurrence that participants transact at the beginning of every conversational encounter. It is clear that Greeting is a transaction that occurs at the beginning, which is to say that it is a specific conversational event that occurs before all other possible conversational events. It is also clear that the Greeting Transaction is composed of an exchange, that is, that a talking-turn event must take place in its execution. Now, there are all sorts of considerations to be kept in mind about this, such as, for instance, how the greeting exchange is accomplished as an exchange, that is, how does the second party know when it is required of him to take his talking-turn in the greeting exchange, whether he can take his talking-turn by saying something other than the routinized greeting idiom, or what is the import of the specific greeting idiom selected by the first party and how this selectional decision then restricts the various options that might be open for the second party.
We shall also be concerned with those conversational situations in which the greeting exchange routinely is absent, such as, for instance, a place of work where two parties may see each other several times a day and engage each other in a conversation without going through the greeting exchange. We will want to examine those situations specifically to determine whether there is a c1ass of events that serve the same function of opening a conversation, and whether they have additional properties they share with greetings, or in what way they are specifically different. As a for instance, we shall discuss such utterances as "Oh, you did change your mind about coffee" or "It looks like another busy day," which carry a double function load, that of beginning a greeting-less conversation, as well as relating this present conversation to the immediately preceding one. And we shall see how it is precisely this feature of relating the beginning of a conversation to a preceding one (Sacks, 1970, calls these "historicalizing technique") that makes this greeting-less conversational opener appropriate for serving its function as an opener, a specific fact that turns on a more general fact about conversations, namely that participants treat conversational encounters as one in a series of conversational episodes, and not as an isolated, independent event.
The notion of "transactional idioms" sets up the existence of a special class of conversational events somewhat in the same way that we distinguish syntactic objects like "function words" from "content words" (but, and, if, to, from, -ing, -'s, etc. vs. chair, eats, large, beautiful, etc.). Or, the class of utterances that structures discourse material like, "On the one hand..., on the other,...," "Nevertheless,....," "If..., then...,'' and so on. Considering the greeting transaction, we can readily identify utterance-pairs like "Hi; Hi," or Hello; Hi," or "Joe!; Harry!," etc., on to a small category of obligatory utterances as specified by the appropriate transactional register in force. In this connection, greeting exchanges form a class of transactional idioms that have a high degree of rigidity as to location, form, content, and function, as contrasted with, say, good-byes and question-answer exchanges which are treated in a less rigidified manner by conversationalists, both in form and in location, as evidenced by the fact that the second party can be observed to insert other conversational material between the occurrence of the first part of the "adjacent utterances" and the second part (e.g. "Well, see you later; Don't forget your promise! See you tonight."). In connection with transactional idioms that serve the function of a historicalizing technique, it is to be noted that the functionality of the utterance turns on the general fact that one of the things conversationalists routinely do is "to turn your mind to us," one form of which is to refer to the nature of the standing relationship between the parties involved such as the situation where the first talker begins a conversation in such a way as to indicate that he is aware of some piece of information about the second party, a piece of information which he would in fact possess only if he were an intimate (e.g. "How is your mother?"--indicating that he knows his mother had been ill, or "Has B.J. talked to you yet?"--indicating he knows that B.J. wanted to talk to him and what about).
Thus, it appears that some classes of transactional idioms have more or less a fixed form (like greeting exchanges) and it is their location that give them their specific function, while other classes of transactional idioms are relatively free in form, and it is the selection of particular content that assigns them their specific function (as in historicalizing openness).
The way in which transactional idioms are specifically used to do conversational work hinges on a general fact about conversations that has to do with what Sacks (1970) refers to as the "sequential implicativeness" of conversational utterances. That is, recognizing the fact that a conversation has a sequential structure, i.e. that what happens now is not independent of what happened earlier, and what happens now has restrictive effects on what will happen next, it is proper to inquire into the matter of how this sequentiality is brought off by participants, how it is that they can keep track so as not to lose the related stream of events in the conversation. And we would like to argue that the notion of sequential implicativeness of transactional idioms refers to one important technique whereby participants help each other to "keep track." To see how this works in detail, it will be necessary to refer to some further general facts about conversational encounters, those that have to do with the implications regarding claims participants lay upon each other as to the nature of their standing conversational relationship. Thus, for instance, if A wants to claim that he has a standing relationship with B that is intimate, then one of the implications of this claim is that he will be watching out for certain peculiar obligations that intimates are expected to adhere to, such as for instance, that if something should happen to A that is "news worthy," he has the obligation of informing B of this before someone else does (e.g. news of an engagement, death, pregnancy, illness, and so on). It turns out that these standing obligations provide a selective pool of topical content that a party can use for a number of purposes, one of which is to use it as a transactional idiom for beginning a greeting-less conversation (historicalizing technique) or for introducing topical material after a greeting exchange. Thus, it can be appreciated that part of the answer to the problem of how participants help each other to keep track turns on the use of transactional idioms that historicalize the on-going conversation by virtue of relating what's being said to the standing claim that exists between them, as developed over a more or less long sequence of prior conversational episodes.
We shall now take up in greater detail the matter of how transactional idioms accomplish the various functions that they have. We shall consider two very general problems in conversational work, the problem of "localizing" when doing routine reporting (such as time, physical location, and story sequence), and the problem of "storage setting" (e.g. story preface and transactional significance, the latter being viewed along a number of dimensions-register, standing claims, news worthiness, face work, and topical organization).
Given our peculiar orientation to time, it is of interest to see how certain specialized types of transactional idioms serve to localize a reported event in time. To put it in reverse terms, by looking at the specific work participants assign to transactional idioms of time localization, we can determine the peculiar orienration to time that is proper to a particular speech community. When you consider the class of time localizing idioms, it is immediately apparent that conversationalists are oriented to both the event's historical sequentiality as well as to the enclosed unit along this historical sequence. Such time prefacing titles as "Last Year at Marianbad" or "The Summer of 1942" or "Nineteenth Century American Literature'' delimit, within the historical sequence, chunks of time lapses that are in a different order of magnitude than is implied by "When I left the office yesterday afternoon, . . ." or "I'll do it first thing in the morning," which in turn is qualitatively different from such precise time references as "Departure time is at 9:15" or "I'll call you on Monday." The matter is not quite as straight forward as it appears since the specificity of the time reference is not entirely, or even mainly, contingent upon bow precisely the point in time (date, hour) has been identified. Thus, "I'll call you on Monday" is, in the physical time sense, not as precise as "When I left thc office yesterday afternoon" inasmuch as the former may encompass a time chunk of at least eight hours (say 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.), while the latter is only at least half as long, and ordinarily would stretch over a period within one or two hours. But in another sense, "I'll call you on Monday" provides greater specificity in time localization than "When I left the office yesterday afternoon, "a fact which turns on considerations of an independent sort, that have to do with "accountability," Thus, if A states that he'll call B on Monday, and now it is Tuesday and he hasn't called yet, he will be held accountable for breaking a promise (as evidenced by such facts as A calling on Tuesday morning and going into a justification right off as to why he hadn't called the day before). Whereas if A states that an event X occurred "When I left the office yesterday afternoon" the time chunk he refers to, though smaller in number of hours included, is yet sufficiently fluid and imprecise that he cannot be held accountable to a specific time such as "Five o'clock" or "Five twenty-five." So, for instance, should a subsequent event occur that requires a more specific time location for his departure from the office yesterday, such as a policeman asking him a question about a robbery that occurred at around that time, his testimony cannot be invalidated or questioned because it does not contain enough specificity as to the precise point in time within the unit referred to. This is not at all the case for "It happened on Monday" since "Monday" has the force of a specific time chunk relative to the class of time events it relates to ("It couldn't be on Monday since that's your day off").
The use of transactional idioms referring to physical location ("across from J.B.'s," "turn left after the third light," "on the tip of a needle" etc.) evidence on orientation on the part of conversationalists to place features whose intersecting dimensions are as specific as needs be, given the character of the reported event, but no more so. Thus, it is possible to say "I'll meet you on the corner of Randolph and Main" or even "I'll meet you on the South-East corner of Randolph and Main," but it would be distinctly odd to say "I'll meet you three feet to the North and five feet to the South of the traffic post located on the South Eastern corner of Randolph and Main." Consider, however, that this degree of specificity would be quite acceptable in another context, such as "The newspaper stand must be located within one foot of the curb on the East side and not more than ten feet from the curb on the North side on the North Eastern corner of Randolph and Main."
Localizing an event sequentially in a story by relating it to another event may turn on considerations that are independent of (though related to) the "actual" sequence of events in reality, if indeed such a sequence can be said to exist independently of the reporting account. We do not ordinarily say such things as "While I was working in my den last night, I reach for my cigarettes, I saw that the pack was empty, thought about it for a while, decided to drive to Times, drove to Times, bought a carton of Parliaments, drove back home, lit a cigarette, and went back to my writing"-- though the reason we do not do so has nothing to do with its lack of fidelity as to the sequence of events as they actually may have taken place. Instead, we might say, "While I was working in my den last night, I ran out of cigarettes and went to get some at Times last night after I noticed that I ran out of them while working in my den" and "Realizing that I ran out of cigarettes while working in my den last night, I decided to go down to Times to get some." It is clear that the sequentiality of the reported events is necessarily related in some sense to the logical sequence of real events, that is, such things as the going being located after the noticing or realizing, but neither the order of reporting (or mentioning) of the separate events, nor the selection of events themselves that are being mentioned, are directly dependent upon the order or the identity of the events as they must have occurred in real time, but instead, depend on considerations of a different sort that have to do with internal considerations appropriate to the organizational structure of the story itself, such as why it is that I am reporting the event in the first place, what transactional function it serves, which is another way of saying that the sequentiality of events reported in a story, and hence, the work assigned to various transactional idioms, turns on the constructed reality embodied in the story's organization rather than on the inherent sequence of events as they may have occurred.
Stage-setting can be viewed as a problem in localization of events, but it is a different sort of localizing problem than is involved in the matters discussed thus far. In what Sacks (1970) calls a "story preface" the talker is concerned with assigning a proper transactional significance to the reported event, specifically at the beginning of a story to be reported, and being motivated by a concern to establish in advance of the actual story to be told, the listener's relationship to or peculiar interest in it. Thus, one might say, "I saw George Simpson last night at Margie's party, you know, the man who got John's Job . . . whom we saw having lunch with Martha the other day . . . and smiled at you across the table . . .", which is an example of the talker's attempt to elicit a recognition response ("oh, yeah . . .") on the part of the listener, and is so designed as to indicate to her the relevance of the story to be told by referring to her relationship to him and doing so by mentioning a series of specific bits of information relevant to her relationship with the man, and continuing to refer to them until the listener shows that she has correctly understood the talker's intention in relating the story to be told. It will be noted that story prefacing constitutes an open-ended series of transactional idioms which requires an obligatory response of recognition on the part