La visite téléphonique

A corpus of telephone calls linking an ill person to his family is taken here to explore a specific use of the telephone, i.e. as a form of visiting. Visit-calls are examined from the point of view of the practices on which they are based and the framework of relationships between the participants. It is through ordinary social activity - the asking for news - and the state of relationships between them, that the callers improvise the visit and reaffirm a support relationship. Several types of difficulty arise, however. How, in the circumstances of telephone conversations, do the callers manage to reveal that their call is indeed a visit? How does the caller share the patient's « story » while simultaneously toning down the pessimistic nature of the news? An analysis of the sequence of conversations reveals the interactive work required by a visit. It also enables us to understand how the participants free themselves from the support relationship, momentarily, to recall it only at the end of the conversation

Cognitive psychology · Conversation · Conversation analysis · Pessimism · Point (geometry · Recall · Communication · French Language Learning Methods · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Psychology · Social Psychology