Barnes2007a

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Barnes2007a
BibType ARTICLE
Key Barnes2007a
Author(s) Rebecca Barnes, Duncan Moss
Title Communicating a feeling: The social organization of “private thoughts”
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Conversation Analysis, Discursive Psychology, Footing, Prosody, Sequence organization, Private Thoughts
Publisher
Year 2007
Language
City
Month
Journal Discourse Studies
Volume 9
Number 2
Pages 123–148
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/1461445607075339
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article examines the design and situated employment of reported 'private thoughts' in both everyday and institutional interaction. By reported 'private thoughts' we mean the 'active voicing' (Wooffitt, 1992) of utterances characterized as 'private thought' done in the first place for the speaker-feeler, rather than the listener. Examples are drawn from a large UK collection of over 240 instances from domestic telephone calls, interview talk, therapy sessions, and patient—provider interactions. Instead of treating reported 'private thoughts' as neutral and transparent descriptions of the inner mind, we focus on their 'brought off' nature. Drawing on the cumulative resources of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, we focus on lexical and non-lexical features of their design and its similarity to direct reported speech. We go on to illustrate the flexibilities of positioning reporting 'private thoughts' affords, that is, how they can be done for the self as a 'one-off', as generalized or hypothetical and how they can be done for others. Our analyses draw attention to how 'private thoughts' might be considered as a speaker's resource for handling everyday rational accountability in reporting and explaining actions and events.

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