Asking and Telling in Conversation

The work contains nine published conversation analytic articles by Anita Pomerantz on asking and telling practices. Each paper explicates complexities involved when people ask or tell something. Asking and telling practices are used to exchange information, share evaluative reactions, offer compliments, and make accusations. The ways in which participants perform the actions reflect how they orient to those actions and to the matter asked about or reported. The timing of asking or telling within a sequence of actions and/or interactional project bears on how the talk and action are formed and understood. Implicit and explicit knowledge claims and expectations are foundational to asking and telling activities. Assumptions are associated with participants’ directly and indirectly seeking or providing information. Reporting or asking about praiseworthy or blameworthy matters implicates an attribution of responsibility. Moral orientations influence asking and telling activities. The conversation analytic papers included in this work range from Pomerantz’s earliest research on preference organization to her more recent work on asking and telling. For each article, there is a lead-in that identifies the research interests that drove the analysis and a commentary that provides her current sense of the analysis. The introductory and concluding chapters discuss the complexities of asking and telling in the light of the articles’ findings, and they illuminate the links the papers have to one another. Pomerantz shares her views about the program of conversation analytic research, a view that is reflected both in the studies and in her commentaries.