Interaction at the Boundaries of a World Known in Common: Initiating Repair with “What Do You Mean?”

Abstract

A recurrent feature of Garfinkel’s famous breaching experiments in which student confederates were instructed to engage an unsuspecting subject in conversation and subsequently insist that they “clarify the sense of (their) commonplace remarks” is the student experimenter’s use, in attempting to realize such “insistence,” of a turn composed of “what do you mean” plus a repetition of some part of the prior talk. Garfinkel suggested that such utterances tended to provoke moral outrage. The analysis presented here aims to explicate just how such utterances work, how they intersect with assumptions about the distribution of knowledge between participants to interaction, and why they might elicit such strong reactions from those to whom they are directed. Data are in American and Canadian English.

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