Crying Receipts
115
13 When we use the term mental state, we do not propose that such things are inner psychological objects. We treat mental states as interactional objects that participants are formulating or orienting to (see Edwards, 1997; Potter, 1998). The status of such things as inner is our business only insofar is it is treated as an issue by participants. 14 We are grateful to Derek Edwards for this latter observation. 15 There is a way of thinking of these receipts as empathic. As oh my gosh marks both news and surprise at something untoward and intonationally inflects this marking with sympathy, it could be argued that they are moves that display the CPO as reacting in something of the manner of the caller. In this sense, the turn could be empathic. This speculation would need further work to establish more clearly. 16 Many young callers have trouble with the standard advice to tell a responsible adult, perhaps because they figure that’s what they are already doing. 17 The CPO’s assessment plus tag also has features of an ER in that it assesses the source of the caller’s upset—the “difficult time” that her friend is having and includes epistemic markers—“obviously” and the tag itself. 18 Hepburn (2004) suggested that apologies are often attending to incomplete adjacency pairs rather than offering global apologies for emotional displays. Note that here the sorry follows the failure of the caller to respond to the first possibly complete element of the advice as well as the overlapping sobbing. As is standard, the CPO accepts the apology. 19 See, for example, line 5 in Extract 8 for a more clear cut example of a tag question in first position.
REFERENCES Beach, W. A., & Dixson, C. N. (2001). Revealing moments: Formulating understandings of adverse experiences in a health appraisal interview. Social Science and Medicine, 52, 25–44. Edwards, D. (1994). Script formulations: A study of event descriptions in conversation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 13, 211–247. Edwards, D. (1997). Discourse and cognition. London: Sage. Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (2005). Discursive psychology, mental states and descriptions. In H. te Molder & J. Potter (Eds.), Conversation and cognition (pp. 241–259). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Harris, J. (2005, July). How to do being a recipient of crying: Displays of orientation to crying episodes. Paper presented at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference, Riva del Garda, Italy. Hepburn, A. (2004). Crying: Notes on description, transcription and interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37, 251–290.