"This book brings together nine of my papers on the topic of asking and telling. Each paper analyzes complexities that are involved when people ask or tell something to other people. For each of the nine papers, I wrote a short lead-in that precedes the paper and a commentary that follows it. The italicized lead-in identifies the research interests that drove the analysis. The commentary provides my current sense of the paper, including when relevant, a critique of it. As I had conducted some of the research, including the work on preference organization, nearly fifty years ago, I have had ample time to reflect on these papers. In the remainder of the introduction, I briefly describe the atmosphere during the early years of Conversation Analysis (CA), myapproach to the field, themes that occur across several of the papers, the order of the papers, and the central points of each paper"--
Anita Pomerantz is one of the pioneers of Conversation Analysis (CA), a field that has grown from a small and marginalized subfield into a significant, international, multidisciplinary field of inquiry. CA now enjoys widespread acceptance and appreciation, thanks in large part to Pomerantz's contributions.
Asking and Telling in Conversation collects Pomerantz's most influential articles across the span of her career, focusing on the complexities of asking and telling something to another person. The actions of asking and telling may seem straightforward, but speakers deal with a number of complexities when they ask and tell. Pomerantz's work focuses on the ways in which the performances of asking and telling are shaped by, and shape, the identities of the participants, the activities in which they are engaged, what was said and done prior to the actions in question, and the anticipated reactions to their talk and action. Each of the volume's nine chapters is framed by original pieces by Pomerantz which discuss the significance and contribution of the article to current studies in CA. In addition to the new introductions and closing commentary for each work, this book includes full introductory and concluding chapters that draw out the connections across the author's work. Pomerantz also shares her reflections on preference organization, which she first analyzed in her foundational research nearly fifty years ago.
Bringing together seminal works of CA with contemporary analysis in the field, this book sheds new light on important questions-and answers-in communication studies. A collection of work from a foremost scholar, Asking and Telling in Conversation is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Conversation Analysis.
