Data session: 5th June, Johan Siebers: “You’re a good rower, honey”: Some methodological remarks on the relation between Conversation Analysis and Rhetoric
June 5 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm BST
DARG will run at 13:00-14:30 UK time as a hybrid discussion session:
Room SCH1:21 (Schofield Building Building, Loughborough)
Or on zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82657058417?pwd=b0NqMTFJK2ZxaGc2RFQ1VExmQUFPUT09.
Password: DARG.
Session details: In this session, I will not present data for collective discussion. Rather, I want to present some considerations about the nature of the data analysis CA engages in, specifically with respect to a redefined notion of rhetoric that I have been exploring on and off for the past few years (Siebers 2019). It seems to me that there is a level in language use that is at once conscious or reflective (we might call this “owned”) as well as marked by unconscious processes. Yet this level (for want of a better word) is where we, as communicators, project ourselves into the world and into the relations we have with others. Insofar as linguistics conceives of its object of study as impersonal, it blinds itself to this dimension of our lives in language. Perhaps we might say, with a phrase borrowed from Roy Harris, that we are not just language users but also language makers and that what Harris called the “lay perspective” is a constitutive aspect of language. The lived engagement with the language we speak and hear might be called rhetoric, which would mean that what has traditionally been given that name is merely a distorted fragment of what should have been rhetoric’s main topic. I am interested in presenting as clearly as I can this notion of rhetoric and then to explore if it is of any use to the goals of conversation analysis. For the title of my talk I have chosen a bit of conversation discussed by Anita Pomerantz (2021, p. 87), because it is a statement rich in the rhetoric I am trying to understand.
References:
Siebers, J. 2019. Philosophy as Rhetoric. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 289 (3), pp. 361-374
https://doi.org/10.3917/rip.289.0361
Pomerantz, A. 2021. Asking and Telling in Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.