Stokoe2009b

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Stokoe2009b
BibType ARTICLE
Key Stokoe2009b
Author(s) Elisabeth Stokoe
Title Doing actions with identity categories: complaints and denials in neighbor disputes
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, complaints, denials, neighbor disputes, conversation analysis, membership categorization, police interviews
Publisher
Year 2009
Language English
City
Month
Journal Text & Talk
Volume 29
Number 1
Pages 75–97
URL Link
DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2009.004
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This paper examines the way making complaints about the neighbors and denying responsibility for disputes systematically bring into play categorizations of those involved. It draws on a corpus of British conversational materials including telephone calls to neighbor mediation centers and police interrogations of suspects. The analytic approach was conversation analytic: sequences of talk in which membership categories (e.g., “old man,” “kids”) and category-implicative descriptions (e.g., “she's eighty three,” “Mum's elderly”) appeared were analyzed for their sequential placement, design, and action orientation. Two sections of analysis examine the use of categories in (i) formulating and affiliating with complaints, and (ii) denying alleged complainables. The paper presents a challenge to those who argue that “identity” topics are not systematically “capturable” outside of research interviews or as regularly occurring phenomena of talk-in-interaction, by showing how the same categories and categorial descriptions crop up in the same conversational turns, accomplishing the same social action.

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