Shifting responsibility onto coparticipants
Disaffiliative accounts in request sequences
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5966073 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Chalfoun (0000-0001-9056-8908, UCLA Department of Sociology, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 64-81 |
| Publication date | 2025-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Discourse Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1461-4456 • E-ISSN: 1461-7080 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14614456241252950 |
| OpenAlex | W4399014137 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 60 |
Accounts-verbal explanations for conduct-are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing or challenging a coparticipant’s behavior. I find that speakers use these accounts to shift responsibility for the focal action by treating it as caused by or responsive to the targeted coparticipant’s (putative) misbehavior. This practice indicates that accounts can be used not only to expiate the speaker but also to police others’ behavior, although such moves are vulnerable to retaliation. Data are taken from video recordings of everyday interaction in American and British English
Business · Conversation · Conversation analysis · Linguistics · Child Abuse and Trauma · Communication · Computer Science · Homelessness and Social Issues · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Philosophy · Psychology
Structures of Social Action
The Handbook of Conversation Analysis
Interaction and the Development of Mind
Benefactors and beneficiaries
Preference
Sequence and solidarity
Studies in ethnomethodology
Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
Sequence Organization in Interaction
Wh-questions used as challenges
Epistemic trespassing and disagreement
Soliciting Accounts With Why-Interrogatives in Conversation
I.—A Plea for Excuses
Ethnicity without Groups
Modulating troubles affiliating in initial interactions
What does grammar tell us about action
To err is human but to persist is diabolical
Complaints About Transgressions and Misconduct
Complaint Sequences Within Antagonistic Argument
Deontic Authority in Interaction
Contingency and Action
Giving Reasons for Doing Something Now or at Some Other Time
Composite Social Actions
Turning the Tables
Invoking the Complainer’s Past Transgressions
Categorizing the Categorizer”
Finding "Face" in the Preference Structures of Talk-in-Interaction
Invoking Rules in Everyday Family Interactions
Bilateral and Unilateral Requests
The Terms of Agreement
The Epistemic Engine
Discourse as an Interactional Achievement III
Some uses of subject-side assessments
Delivering criticism through anecdotes in interaction
Directives
Reasons for requests
Moaning, whinging and laughing
Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation During Storytelling
Mundane Reasoning
Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment
Accounts
Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive
Accounting for proposals
Po-faced receipts of teases
Presequences and indirection
Telling people what to do (and, sometimes, why)
When suspects ask questions
Complaining in interaction
A preference for progressivity in interaction
Complainable Matters
Talking Your Self into It
Attributions of Responsibilty
Ambiguities in Action Ascription
Why populism
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |