Delicate
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Delicate | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Luis Manuel Olguín (UCLA, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7019-2026) |
| To cite: | Olguín, Luis Manuel. (2025). Delicate. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ] |
In conversation-analytic research, the terms “delicate” and “delicacy” are commonly used in reference to actions, topics, or words that participants orient to as requiring a degree of caution to articulate or formulate. Delicates are habitually associated with socially or culturally sensitive matters and commonly analyzed as participants’ concerns with (im)propriety (e.g., Jefferson, Sacks & Schegloff 1987: 160; Lerner 2013: 95-6). However, as Schegloff (1980: 134) observes and discusses at length, a delicate does not need to be one in “some public or official culture” for participants to deploy methods for designing talk as a delicate (see also, Lerner 2013: 105). In other words, delicacy can be locally displayed for particular purposes and interactions (e.g., teasing, Schegloff 2013: 49-50).
Delicate matters are commonly alluded to or broached indirectly (Sacks 1992, II: 431-36, Jefferson 1980). This is usually the case with taboo or sensitive topics, like sex (e.g., Jackson 2016), death (e.g., Holt 1993; Lutfey & Maynard 1998), disease (e.g., Silverman & Peräkylä 1990), or “race talk” (e.g., Pomerantz & Zemel 2003), and discreet activities, like “troubles-telling” (e.g., Jefferson 1980, 1988) or gossip (e.g., Bergmann 1993). Prototypical delicate actions include complaints (e.g., Drew & Walker 2009), criticisms (e.g., Pillet-Shore 2016; Li 2021) and “fishing” for information (Pomerantz 1980), which might or might not be designed with dispreference markers. Characteristically, delicates exhibit delayed productions within the turn (e.g., Lerner 2013: 98-106), through sequence expansion (e.g., Schegloff 1980: 131-ff), or by postponing the delicate to later in the encounter (e.g., Weijts, Houtkoop & Mullen 1993: 299). Consider Schegloff’s (1980) description of “Can I ask you a question?” (and similar formulations) as a practice for projecting a delicate question. Extract (1) offers an example. At lines 14-5, the preliminary “°hh um I nee:d tuh ask you a questio:n?” delays Pam’s inquiry into Vicky’s availability to work the next day (lines 20-ff). In this particular case, delay in producing the question is also built in through the parenthetical proviso that follows the preliminary: “en you musn’t (0.7) uh take it personally or kill me.” (lines 17-8), which further foreshadows the delicacy of the matter being broached.
(1) (Schegloff 1980:132)
(...)
09 Pam: H’llo::,
10 Vicky: Hi:. Vicky.
11 (0.4)
12 Vicky: You ra:ng?
13 Pam: Oh hello there yes I di::d.
14 -> ˚hh um I nee:d tuh ask you a
15 -> questio:n?
16 (0.4)
17 en you musn’t (0.7) uh take
18 it personally or kill me.
19 (0.7)
20 Pam: I wan to kno:w, (0.7)
21 whether you: will(b) would
22 be free:, (.) to work o:n um
23 tomorrow night.
24 (0.4)
Delicate talk is designed with features like silence, hedges, lower volume, marked voice quality, accompanying laughter, and sometimes coupled with gestures such as an open hand placed near to one’s mouth. We see some of these features at various junctures of Pam’s protracted inquiry in the extract above (lines 14-24). Other features of delicate talk include indirect language (e.g., litotes and euphemisms, Bergmann 1992: 148-54; alternative references, Stivers 2007: 82; Yu & Wu 2015) and omissions or partial formulations (e.g., Weijts, Houtkoop & Mullen 1993: 305; Li 2021). Certain prosodic features, like sotto voce (Lerner 2013: 96), and non-verbal vocalizations, like clicks (Ogden 2020), have also been observed. Laughter is also a recurrent feature of delicate talk either as a way to obscure a delicate term (Jefferson 1985: 31) or as a device to downplay delicate actions or claims (e.g., Jefferson, Sacks & Schegloff 1987; Haakana 2008; Shaw, Hepburn & Potter 2013; inter alia).
There have been efforts to explicate certain forms of delicate talk relative to conversational principles. For instance, Levinson (2007) suggests the existence of “a preference for circumspection” in referring to persons in conversation (see also Blythe 2010: 462-5; Garde 2013: 10-2). Circumspection constrains the use of default reference forms, like names, given situational or cultural norms surrounding impropriety. Using data from the Rossel Islands, where cultural taboos forbid naming certain relatives and recently deceased persons, Levinson (2007) shows how speakers of Yélî Dnye manage circumspect references by starting low down on a scale that goes from less explicit referring expressions, like inflected predicates with pointing gestures in face-to-face interaction, to more explicit forms, like kin terms, with names used as a last resource to achieve recognition yet still prosodically marked as dispreferred. Although Levinson notes, in passim, that circumspection seems to operate less obviously in Western societies, his examples from English-speaking contexts suggest exploring circumspection when delicate talk is deployed to manage indiscretion (p.32) and deference (p.39).
Finally, it should be noted that, in the conversation-analytic tradition, the terms “delicate” and “delicacy” are also occasionally used to highlight the finely textured organization of interactional phenomena more generally. For example, in offering a methodological observation, Sacks (1992) notes: “...we're trying to find out things we don’t know about how delicately people use their language. Then, any possible extended delicacy is something to look into” (Vol. II, p. 292). In relation to delicates as described here, Sacks’ recommendation invites us to pay particular attention to occasions in which participants display apparent efforts in conducting an interaction with caution lest a possible breach of propriety might take place.
Additional Related Entries:
Cited References:
Bergmann, J. R. (1992). Veiled morality: Notes on discretion in psychiatry. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings (pp. 137–162). Cambridge University Press.
Bergmann, J. R. (1993). Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip. Aldine de Gruyter.
Blythe, J. (2010). Self-Association in Murriny Patha Talk-in-Interaction. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 30(4), 447–469.
Drew, P., & Walker, T. (2009). Going too far: Complaining, escalating and disaffiliation. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(12), 2400–2414.
Garde, M. (2013). Culture, Interaction and Person Reference in an Australian Language: An ethnography of Bininj Gunwok communication. John Benjamins.
Haakana, M. (2001). Laughter as a patient’s resource: Dealing with delicate aspects of medical interaction. Text, 21(1–2), 187–219.
Holt, E. (1993). The structure of death announcements: Looking on the bright side of death. Text, 13.
Jackson, C. (2016). ‘I sort of did stuff to him’: A case study of tellability and taboo in young people’s talk about sex. Narrative Inquiry, 26(1), 150–170.
Jefferson, G. (1980). On “Trouble-Premonitory” Response to Inquiry. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 153–185.
Jefferson, G. (1985). An exercise in the transcription and analysis of laughter. In T. A. Van Dijk (Ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis: Vol. 3 (pp. 25–34). Academic Press.
Jefferson, G. (1988). On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversation. Social Problems, 35(4), 418–441.
Jefferson, G., Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy. In Talk and Social Organisation. Multilingual Matters.
Lerner, G. H. (2013). On the place of hesitating in delicate formulations: A turn-constructional infrastructure for collaborative indiscretaion. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (pp. 95–134). Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. C. (2007). Optimizing person reference: Perspectives from usage on Rossel Island. In N.J. Enfield & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person Reference in Interaction. Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (pp. 29–72). Cambridge University Press.
Li, X. (2021). Multimodal practices for negative assessments as delicate matters: Incomplete syntax, facial expressions, and head movements. Open Linguistics, 7(1), 549–568.
Lutfey, K., & Maynard, D. W. (1998). Bad News in Oncology: How Physician and Patient Talk About Death and Dying Without Using Those Words. Social Psychology Quarterly, 61(4), 321–341.
Ogden, R. (2020). Audibly Not Saying Something with Clicks. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 53(1), 66–89.
Pillet-Shore, D. (2016). Criticizing another’s child: How teachers evaluate students during parent-teacher conferences. Language in Society, 45(1), 33–58.
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: “Limited access” as a “fishing” device. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 186–198.
Pomerantz, A., & Zemel, A. (2003). Perspectives and frameworks in interviewers’ queries. In H. Houtkoop-Steenstra, H. van den Berg, & M. Wetherell (Eds.), Analyzing Race Talk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Research Interview (pp. 215–231). Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. A. (1980). Preliminaries to preliminaries: “Can I ask you a question?”. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 104–152.
Schegloff, E. A. (2013). Ten operations in self-initiated, same turn repair. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (pp. 41–70). Cambridge University Press.
Shaw, C., Hepburn, A., & Potter, J. (2013). Having the last laugh: On post completion laughter particles. In Studies of Laughter in Interaction. Bloomsbury Academic.
Silverman, D., & Peräkylä, A. (1990). AIDS counselling: The interactional organisation of talk about “delicate” issues. Sociology of Health & Illness, 12(3), 293–318.
Stivers, T. (2007). Alternative recognitionals in person reference. In N. J. Enfield & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives (pp. 73–96). Cambridge University Press.
Weijts, W., Houtkoop, H., & Mullen, P. (1993). Talking delicacy: Speaking about sexuality during gynaecological consultations. Sociology of Health and Illness, 15(3), 295–314.
Yu, G., & Wu, Y. (2015). Managing Awkward, Sensitive, or Delicate Topics in (Chinese) Radio Medical Consultations. Discourse Processes, 52(3), 201–225.
Additional References:
