Opening

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Opening
Author(s):	Salla Kurhila (University of Helsinki, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0426-3660)
To cite:	Kurhila, Salla. (2023). Candidate understanding. 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:

The opening, or opening phase, of an encounter refers to the sequentially organized activity in and through which participants coordinate entry into jointly focused interaction.

In his seminal work on openings of ordinary landline telephone conversations in American English, Schegloff (1967, 1968, 1979, 1986) identified four “core opening sequences” (Schegloff 1986: 117) that participants routinely go through before reaching the “anchor position” of the interaction. These are organized as follows:

1. Summons-answer sequence
2. Identification/recognition sequence
3. Greeting sequence
4. ‘How-are-you’ sequence

(Schegloff 1986: 115)

00       ((ring))
01  R:   Hello,
02  C:   Hi. Susan?
03  R:   Ye:s,
04  C:   This’s Janet. Weinstein.
05  R:   Janet!
06  C:   hhehh Susan.
07  R:   How are you.
08  C:   I’m fine. How’re you.
09  R:   Fi:ne. Back from the wilds of C’lumbia.
10  C:   Yeah. hhnhheh
11  R:   Crazy.
12  C:   hheh heh heh. ‘hhh My mo:ther’s having a
13       coming out party fer me...

Subsequent CA research into call openings used Schegloff’s analysis as a point of departure (for cross-linguistic/-cultural research, see e.g. Hopper & Chen 1996; Lindström 1994; Luke & Pavlidou 2002).

A substantial body of work has demonstrated that institutional calls are characterized by differential sequential trajectories than those found in mundane calls. People have been shown to reflexively adapt the developmental course of openings in a range of institutional settings, such as in phone calls to emergency helplines (e.g., Cromdal, et al. 2012, Whalen & Zimmerman 1987; Zimmerman 1984) or radio phone-ins (e.g., Hutchby 1996).

A further set of studies has examined the methodical sequential organization of openings in other technologically-mediated forms of distant interaction (e.g., Arminen & Leinonen 2006; Licoppe 2017).

While visual conduct is not accessible to interactants in phone conversations, and tends to be reduced to “talking head” configurations (Licoppe & Morel 2012) in video calls, a fundamental, interactionally consequential difference between telephone openings and openings in unmediated face-to-face interaction lies in the co-availability of a wide range of multimodal resources (gaze, facial expressions, gestures, postural orientations, the moving body, and so forth). In environments of physical co-presence, co-located individuals have been shown to mobilize a variety of vocal/verbal, embodied and material resources in temporally adjusted ways when moving from “unfocused” to “focused” interaction (Goffman 1963; for early video-based research in this area, see Heath 1981; Kendon & Ferber 1973; for recent comprehensive overviews, see D’Antoni, et al. 2022; Pillet-Shore 2018; cf. pre-opening).

Some of the interactional jobs that get done in and through the opening phase of co-present interaction include:

• spatiotemporally organizing the coordinated entry into interaction (Fox & Heinemann 2020; Hausendorf & Mondada 2017; Mortensen & Hazel 2014; Sorjonen & Raevaara 2014);

• communicating (non)availability (Harjunpää, et al. 2018; Mondada 2022; Robinson 1998);

• establishing a joint focus of attention and stabilizing a common interactional space within a unified participation framework (Mondada 2009);

• displaying recognition and a positive affective stance toward the incipient encounter (D’Antoni & De Stefani 2022; De Stefani & Mondada 2018; Pillet-Shore 2012)

• negotiating the language-of-interaction (Mondada 2018; Raymond 2020).

Additional Related Entries:

• Social action
• B-event statement
• Declarative question

Cited References:

Antaki, C. (2012). Affiliative and disaffiliative candidate understandings. Discourse Studies 2012 14(5), 531–547

Dingemanse, M., Roberts, S.G., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Drew, P., Floyd, S., Gisladottir, R. S., Kendrick, K. H., Levinson, S. C., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., & Enfield, N. J. (2015). Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems. PLOS ONE 10(9): e0136100.

Drew, P. (1997). “Open”-class repair initiators in response to sequential sources of troubles in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 28, 69–101.

Hayashi, M., & Hayano, K. (2013). Proffering insertable elements: a study of other-initiated repair in Japanese. In Hayashi, M., Raymond, G., & Sidnell, J. (Eds.). (2013). Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (pp. 293–321). Cambridge University Press.

Kurhila, S. (2006). Second Language Interaction. John Benjamins.

Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action. American Journal of Sociology, 102(1), 161–216. 

Additional References: