Karen Tracy
Biographic Data
| ID | 649919 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Tracy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Tracy |
| SIGNATURE | TRACY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado Boulder |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6904-7427 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 489 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Race Trouble”: Competing Accounts in a Trial About Anti-White Racism
To understand one type of race trouble, this study examines a federal civil trial brought by a white employee suing her African American supervisor for creating a racially hostile work environment. After explaining race trouble and its connection to talk about racism, background is provided on civil trials and this particular trial. Events about which competing accounts were offered in the trial included assignment of office space, meeting conduc…
How US judges manage a dilemma narrating their careers
In the United States the law espouses contrary principles about the relationship between identity categories, such as race and gender, and justice. On the one hand, a more representative judiciary is seen to be a way to ensure greater justice. On the other, the law is assumed to be “blind” to parties’ identities; race and gender of judges and litigants doesn’t matter. These contrary principles create a dilemma when judges narrate their career. Th…
Pursuing and resisting argumentative projects in Q&A sequences during a trial
Preliminary jury instructing: A dilemmatic communication practice
This study analyzes judges’ preliminary jury instruction in nine US federal civil trials. Following an overview of past and current jury instructing practices, including the role of pattern instructions, I describe the trial materials and introduce genre analysis and grounded practical theory, the two theoretical-methodological frames I use to analyze judges’ instructing. Judges’ preliminary instructions are shown to include the basic units ident…
Delivering justice
This study analyses an important but unstudied site of legal–lay communication: the website discourse of a small claims court. I describe six interactional problems that litigants in small claims court face that the official court metadiscourse, i.e., the court website, does not ably prepare participants for. Problems include: 1) addressees vary enormously in assumed education levels, 2) facework challenges misidentify focal parties, 3) the speec…
International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction
Language—AND—Social Psychology: Epilogue
This Epilogue discusses the papers in the Special Issue ( JLSP 40th Anniversary) in terms of the broader field of language and social psychology. It reflects on the key terms (“language” and “social psychology”) in terms of how they intersect and the relative emphasis on each in work published in JLSP. We also present an argument for increasing the consideration of context in language and social psychology research, and we distinguish between a d…
The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction
Extreme case formulations (ECFs) are semantically extreme formulations that invoke the maximal or minimal properties of events or objects, such as “everyone,” “nobody,” “always,” “never,” “completely,” “nothing,” and so on. This entry reviews seminal work on ECFs, identifying their key features and interactional uses. These include their uses in defending against or countering challenges to the legitimacy of complaints, accusations, justification…
Judge discourse moves that enact and endanger procedural justice
In this article we identify discourse moves in small claims court that have the potential to affect procedural justice – the sense that a litigant has been treated fairly and respectfully. We focus on what judges do as they address three communicative challenges that are part of small claims court judging: (1) handling the potential for appeal, (2) keeping trials short while treating litigants fairly and (3) managing the paradox of informal justi…
How the Language Style of Small-Claims Court Judges Does Ideological Work
Small-claims courts were created to help ordinary people settle "small" disputes quickly and cheaply and were designed to be relatively informal. A consequence of the justice system's commitment to informality is that small-claims trials exhibit significant variation. After overviewing the different ways language/discourse styles and ideology have been conceptualized, we provide background on small-claims court and describe the data. The centerpi…
Discourse analysis: Bridging frameworks or cultivating practices
This essay responds to Gee’s article in which he proposes that discourse analysis is an approach that can bridge frames. I begin by elaborating a difference in academic cultures among scholars who identify as discourse analysts. I argue that a cultural grounding is built into discourse analysis and study of communication more generally. The essay concludes by offering the idea of cultivating practices as an alternative to the idea of bridging fra…
Everyday Talk, Second Edition: Building and Reflecting Identities
‘Tough questioning’ as enactment of ideology in judicial conduct: Marriage law appeals in seven US courts
This study analyses the question-asking practices during oral argument of 50 judges in seven US state Supreme Courts as each court decided if its state marriage law was legal or if it violated its gay citizens’ rights to marry a partner of their choice. Background on appellate court, oral argument and the seven cases is provided. The analysis provides a discursive portrait of questioning during oral argument and identifies two stance-cuing but ra…
Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship Recovering Old Connections, Envisioning New Ones
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is committed to showing how talk and texts serve the interests of those with power in a society. From its initially European linguistic roots, CDA has become an influential international, interdisciplinary tradition. This chapter sketches CDA’s background including its theoretical roots and key scholars. Six areas in current research are illustrated, along with a sampling of CDA work around the world. The focal c…
A facework system of minimal politeness: Oral argument in appellate court
This study describes the facework system in effect during oral argument in US state supreme courts. Drawing on two cases that occurred in the California Supreme Court in which attorneys and justices explored the legality of California's marriage laws, the study argues that the facework system in operation during oral argument is one of minimal politeness. That facework system, one that uses selected address forms, argument meta-language, case ref…
Studying interaction in order to cultivate communicative practices: Action-implicative discourse analysis
Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an ethnographically informed discourse-analytic approach that works to provide normative understandings of situated communicative practices that are action-implicative for social life. Extending the logic of grounded practical theory (Craig and Tracy 1995), AIDA develops reconstructed accounts of the communicative problems, interaction strategies, and normative ideals of a practice. We introduce AID…
Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction
Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree th…
Impoliteness in interaction - by Derek Bousfield
Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: An Introduction
This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, re…
How questioning constructs judge identities: Oral Argument About Same-Sex Marriage
An important but unstudied event in US legal institutions is when judges question plaintiff and defense attorneys about the issue that brings them to an appeals hearing before a state supreme court. In this article I analyze judges' questioning during the oral argument phase of the New York Court of Appeals' hearing of Hernandez v. Robles, a case concerning whether the state was violating same-sex couples' constitutional rights by denying them ac…
Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique…
The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy
This book examines political rhetoric at the grassroots level. Starting from a position that Democracy depends on details, or else remains a formal abstraction, editors Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce Gronbeck argue that a true understanding of the democratic body politic becomes most intelligible through a close study of its parts. An academic preference for grandiose, abstract political theory, the editors contend, undervalues and mas…
The Role (Or Not) for Numbers and Statistics in Qualitative Research: An Introduction
“Statistics in research” has been an emotional matter for me, a topic that cues a significant intellectual change that I went through about a decade after receiving my PhD. In the late 1970s and ea
Premeeting Talk: An Organizationally Crucial Form of Talk
In this article, we analyze the premeeting talk that occurred in 6 meetings of a nutrition company's weekly staff meetings. We begin by describing the business organization, the specific meeting, and the study's discourse and ethnographic materials. Then we introduce small talk, the theoretical frame that initially shaped our interest in premeeting talk, showing that premeeting talk is not merely a site for small talk. Premeeting talk includes wo…
Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline-Shifting Agenda
Karen Tracy, Kathleen Haspel; Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline-Shifting Agenda, Journal
The Discourse of Requests: Assessment of a Politeness Approach
A corpus of transcribed, oral requests used in a previous study of compliance-gaining strategies (Tracy, Craig, Smith, & Spisak, 1984) is examined interpretively from the perspective of the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978). Findings include the following: (1) politeness strategies occur in great abundance and variety; (2) superstrategies are mixed in varyingly skillful ways; (3) goals are accomplished through multifunctional discour…
Grounded Practical Theory: The Case of Intellectual Discussion
A research program on intellectual discussion in academic institutions is presented as a case that illustrates a method for constructing grounded practical communication theory. Within a practical discipline perspective, theory is conceived as a rational reconstruction of practices for the purpose of informing further practice and reflection. The theoretical reconstruction of communication practices can be undertaken at three interrelated levels …
Rudeness at 911 Reconceptualizing Face and Face Attack
This article analyzes two telephone calls from citizens to a 911 center in a large city in the Western United States in which call-takers became angry and attacked the face of the callers. After reviewing past theoretical conceptualizations of face and face attack, the authors analyze the calls using a facework lens. Through a close study of the discourse, the authors show the subtle and blatant ways in which vocal delivery, substance and type of…
Interactional Trouble in Emergency Service Requests: A Problem of Frames
(1997). Interactional Trouble in Emergency Service Requests: A Problem of Frames. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 315-343
The Discourse of Requests: Assessment of a Compliance-Gaining Approach
This study assesses the utility of a compliance-gaining approach for coding messages produced in a set of "request" situations experimentally varied by status and familiarity of the requestee and by size of the request. The results indicate that altruism, and, to a lesser extent, certain positive sanction and argument strategies, are used predominately in these situations. Strategy usage also varies significantly as a function of speaker (subject…
The effect of multiple goals on conversational relevance and topic shift
This study examines conversational relevance and topic extension in a situation where communicators are attempting both to be attentive to their partner and to introduce a new topic. Extending previous research that examined conversational relevance in "issue‐event"; structured conversations, the experiment tests a set of hypotheses about conversational extensions in a multiple‐goal situation. In contrast to prior research which found no evidence…
Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis
Action-implicative discourse analysis is the name for a new type of discourse analysis, developed to be useful in the critique and cultivation of communicative practices in society. Developed within the metatheoretical framework of grounded practical theory, an extension and formalization of Craig's earlier ideas about communication as a practical discipline, action-implicative discourse analysis seeks to characterize the communicative problems, …
The Issue-Event Distinction: A Rule of Conversation and Its Scope Condition
Earlier research identified a conversational rule of relevance that states, “when a conversation is seen to possess an issue-event structure the preferred type of extension is a remark that continues the issue.” This study reports an experiment that investigates the generalizability of that earlier research and tests two conditions hypothesized to limit application of the rule. The limiting conditions are posited on the basis of a cognitive princ…
Intellectual discussion in the academy as situated discourse
Intellectual discussion is a form of talk hailed as important but not much studied. After suggesting why it should be given scholarly attention, the paper reports on interviews conducted with graduate students and faculty who attended a weekly colloquium in an academic department. Drawing upon the interviews the first part of the paper provides an in‐depth examination of the multiple, often conflicting concerns, which arose as this academic group…
Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique…
Premeeting Talk: An Organizationally Crucial Form of Talk
In this article, we analyze the premeeting talk that occurred in 6 meetings of a nutrition company's weekly staff meetings. We begin by describing the business organization, the specific meeting, and the study's discourse and ethnographic materials. Then we introduce small talk, the theoretical frame that initially shaped our interest in premeeting talk, showing that premeeting talk is not merely a site for small talk. Premeeting talk includes wo…
Not to Change the Topic But: A Cognitive Approach to the Management of Conversation
A cognitive approach to the management of conversation is sketched and exemplified in a series of three studies of topic change strategies. The first study establishes that naive subjects can reliably identify topic changes in conversations. In the second study, the cognitive function of information integration serves as an organizing scheme for deriving a typology of topic change strategies and predictions about their relative competence. These …
Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: An Introduction
This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question(ing) have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, re…
Relational Positioning Strategies in Police Calls: A Dilemma
When citizens call the police to report a problem with (or caused by) another, they need to not only characterize the problematic action/event, but they must position themselves in relation to the complained-about person. This conversational work of positioning self, and describing the other's actions, is delicate business when the complained-about person is connected to the caller. Different constructions of the other and the problem affect whet…
Giving criticism: A multiple goals case study
(1990). Giving criticism: A multiple goals case study. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 24, No. 1-4, pp. 37-70
Diagnosing a school board's interactional trouble: Theorizing problem formulating
Communication, Craig (1989, 1995a, 1995b; Craig & Tracy, 1995) argues, is and should be a practical discipline: a field whose scholarly work would be helpful in improving the communicative practices it studies. Following explication of Craig's notions of practical theory and communication as a practical discipline, this paper analyzes the interactional trouble in one community's school board meetings. Drawing upon 3 theories relevant to this scho…
Analyzing Context: Framing the Discussion
Multiple Goals in Discourse: An Overview of Issues
Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communicative goal studies, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. In addition, we over…
The identity work of questioning in intellectual discussion
This article examines how questioning practices in intellectual discussion do identity work. Drawing upon the discussion discourse of a Ph.D. department's weekly colloquium, as well as several other sources, three aspects of intellectual identity are identified that are routinely at stake for academic presenters in discussion periods: their knowledgeability, originality, and level of intellectual sophistication. We identify and describe questioni…
Staying on topic: An explication of conversational relevance∗
This paper identifies the two most likely rules that conversants use to guide their conversational commenting as they attempt to stay on topic and make their remarks relevant. The local rule suggests that conversants should chain to the last part of their partner's utterance; the global rule suggests that conversants should extend the main idea in the partner's talk. Prior research supporting the global version of the relevancy rule is reviewed, …
A facework system of minimal politeness: Oral argument in appellate court
This study describes the facework system in effect during oral argument in US state supreme courts. Drawing on two cases that occurred in the California Supreme Court in which attorneys and justices explored the legality of California's marriage laws, the study argues that the facework system in operation during oral argument is one of minimal politeness. That facework system, one that uses selected address forms, argument meta-language, case ref…
It's an Interesting Article
(1993). It's an Interesting Article! Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 195-201
Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction
Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree th…
Bible Babble: Naming the Interactional Trouble at Waco
Outside Waco, Texas, on 19 April 1993, a 51-day standoff between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and David Koresh and the Branch Davidians concluded with a devastating fire. Despite the fact that FBI negotiators talked on the telephone with Koresh or his main spokesman almost every day, the negotiators were unable to bring the standoff to a peaceful end. A frustrating yet persistent aspect for the FBI negotiators was the Davidians' talk…
Research on Language and Social Interaction in 1999: An Introduction
Not to Change the Topic But: A Cognitive Approach to the Management of Conversation
A cognitive approach to the management of conversation is sketched and exemplified in a series of three studies of topic change strategies. The first study establishes that naive subjects can reliably identify topic changes in conversations. In the second study, the cognitive function of information integration serves as an organizing scheme for deriving a typology of topic change strategies and predictions about their relative competence. These …
On Getting the Point: Distinguishing “Issues” from “Events,” An Aspect of Conversational Coherence
(1981). On Getting the Point: Distinguishing “Issues” from “Events,” An Aspect of Conversational Coherence. Annals of the International Communication Association: Vol. 5, Communication Yearbook 5, pp. 279-301
The Issue-Event Distinction: A Rule of Conversation and Its Scope Condition
Earlier research identified a conversational rule of relevance that states, “when a conversation is seen to possess an issue-event structure the preferred type of extension is a remark that continues the issue.” This study reports an experiment that investigates the generalizability of that earlier research and tests two conditions hypothesized to limit application of the rule. The limiting conditions are posited on the basis of a cognitive princ…
The effect of multiple goals on conversational relevance and topic shift
This study examines conversational relevance and topic extension in a situation where communicators are attempting both to be attentive to their partner and to introduce a new topic. Extending previous research that examined conversational relevance in "issue‐event"; structured conversations, the experiment tests a set of hypotheses about conversational extensions in a multiple‐goal situation. In contrast to prior research which found no evidence…
Staying on topic: An explication of conversational relevance∗
This paper identifies the two most likely rules that conversants use to guide their conversational commenting as they attempt to stay on topic and make their remarks relevant. The local rule suggests that conversants should chain to the last part of their partner's utterance; the global rule suggests that conversants should extend the main idea in the partner's talk. Prior research supporting the global version of the relevancy rule is reviewed, …
The Discourse of Requests: Assessment of a Compliance-Gaining Approach
This study assesses the utility of a compliance-gaining approach for coding messages produced in a set of "request" situations experimentally varied by status and familiarity of the requestee and by size of the request. The results indicate that altruism, and, to a lesser extent, certain positive sanction and argument strategies, are used predominately in these situations. Strategy usage also varies significantly as a function of speaker (subject…
The Discourse of Requests: Assessment of a Politeness Approach
A corpus of transcribed, oral requests used in a previous study of compliance-gaining strategies (Tracy, Craig, Smith, & Spisak, 1984) is examined interpretively from the perspective of the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978). Findings include the following: (1) politeness strategies occur in great abundance and variety; (2) superstrategies are mixed in varyingly skillful ways; (3) goals are accomplished through multifunctional discour…
“Good” and “Bad” Criticism: A Descriptive Analysis
Karen Tracy, Donna Van Dusen, Susan Robinson; “Good” and “Bad” Criticism: A Descriptive Analysis, Journal of Communication, Volume 37, Issue 2, 1 June 1987
A discourse analysis of four discourse studies
Four research reports, each produced by authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, are analyzed to identify the similarities and differences in beliefs about the nature of discourse and how one acquires knowledge about it. The analysis focuses on three issues: (1) the way in which each study is justified as important; (b) the way methods are described and what, if any, methodological choices are made explicit; and (c) the function of citati…
Giving criticism: A multiple goals case study
(1990). Giving criticism: A multiple goals case study. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 24, No. 1-4, pp. 37-70
Multiple Goals in Discourse: An Overview of Issues
Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communicative goal studies, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. In addition, we over…
It's an Interesting Article
(1993). It's an Interesting Article! Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 195-201
Intellectual discussion in the academy as situated discourse
Intellectual discussion is a form of talk hailed as important but not much studied. After suggesting why it should be given scholarly attention, the paper reports on interviews conducted with graduate students and faculty who attended a weekly colloquium in an academic department. Drawing upon the interviews the first part of the paper provides an in‐depth examination of the multiple, often conflicting concerns, which arose as this academic group…
Identity Enactment in Intellectual Discussion
This article examines the ways in which academics (faculty and graduate students) go about claiming an nteractionally appropriate face during intellectual discussion. In particular, it examines discussion situations to see how participants enacted the institutional and intellectual identities that prior interviews had suggested were salient. Discourse analysis of the discussions suggests that different intellectual identities were established thr…
Talking About Ideas: Academics' Beliefs About Appropriate Communicative Practices
Boundary Drawing in Language and Social Interaction Study
The identity work of questioning in intellectual discussion
This article examines how questioning practices in intellectual discussion do identity work. Drawing upon the discussion discourse of a Ph.D. department's weekly colloquium, as well as several other sources, three aspects of intellectual identity are identified that are routinely at stake for academic presenters in discussion periods: their knowledgeability, originality, and level of intellectual sophistication. We identify and describe questioni…
Richard Buttny, Social accountability in communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. Pp. xi, 187
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Grounded Practical Theory: The Case of Intellectual Discussion
A research program on intellectual discussion in academic institutions is presented as a case that illustrates a method for constructing grounded practical communication theory. Within a practical discipline perspective, theory is conceived as a rational reconstruction of practices for the purpose of informing further practice and reflection. The theoretical reconstruction of communication practices can be undertaken at three interrelated levels …
Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis
Action-implicative discourse analysis is the name for a new type of discourse analysis, developed to be useful in the critique and cultivation of communicative practices in society. Developed within the metatheoretical framework of grounded practical theory, an extension and formalization of Craig's earlier ideas about communication as a practical discipline, action-implicative discourse analysis seeks to characterize the communicative problems, …
Interactional Trouble in Emergency Service Requests: A Problem of Frames
(1997). Interactional Trouble in Emergency Service Requests: A Problem of Frames. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 315-343
Editors' Foreword
Journal Article Editors’ Foreword Get access Karen Tracy, Karen Tracy 1University of Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Cindy Gallois Cindy Gallois 2University of Queensland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Human Communication Research, Volume 23, Issue 4, June 1997, Pages 451–452, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1997.tb00404.x Published: 17 March 2006
Analyzing Context: Framing the Discussion
Rudeness at 911 Reconceptualizing Face and Face Attack
This article analyzes two telephone calls from citizens to a 911 center in a large city in the Western United States in which call-takers became angry and attacked the face of the callers. After reviewing past theoretical conceptualizations of face and face attack, the authors analyze the calls using a facework lens. Through a close study of the discourse, the authors show the subtle and blatant ways in which vocal delivery, substance and type of…
Research on Language and Social Interaction in 1999: An Introduction
Sociology (42 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (37 works) · Psychology (36 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (28 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (21 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Epistemology (19 works)