MOVILIZACIÓN LEGAL EN CORTES INTERNACIONALES

The organization of storytelling is of interest as a way to resolve problems of stuckness. What I have in mind are such situations when silence or overlaps show that the turn- taking understanding is temporarily unclear. In these moments, the participants need a way to get re-oriented. Three basic components of a story (preface, tying devices, and receipts) help to explain its collaborative nature. The preface initiates the introduction of a story with a teller and a recipient clearly identified. The first move could come from either participant. Linking the emerging story to previous and current talk in some shape or form coherently ties past, present, and future turns. Then there are the response receipts which lubricate the apparatus and keep turns moving smoothly. Getting unstuck, as a co-

managed endeavor, requires not only an initiative from one person, but also a related action as confirmation to continue from the other person. How a story starts could help participants clarify the organization of upcoming turns.

7.2.1 Prefaces

A story preface is the initiative taken to express interest in telling a story. These openings are often questions or requests delivered by the person who wants to tell a story. Sacks uses such examples as ‘You know what?’ or ‘Do you know something?’ (1992, vol. 1, p. 256). The receipt (e.g., ‘what’) which should come in the next turn indicates that the potential recipient is willing to minimize his or her turns in order for the other person to have the floor to tell the story. The prefaces are the events that happen before the main event, the preliminaries to ensure the story gets told. Sequentially speaking, the

participants confirm and approve that the next series of turns will be used to tell the story.

7.2.2 Tying devices

Often the story about to be told is linked in some way to something talked about in earlier turns. This creates some familiarity of the topic. According to Sacks (1992), the ‘tying’ of the current turn to a previous one can be accomplished very simply. For example, a pronoun linked to persons named in a prior turn. (The example from his lecture is presented below in transcript form.)

(1) Sacks (1992, vol. 1, p. 717)

B: John and Lisa went to the movies. A: What did they see?”

The second question is tied to the prior adjacency pair through ‘they’ connected with ‘John and Lisa’. Other examples from his lectures of simple ‘tying techniques’ include ‘anyway’, ‘that’, or ‘I still think’ all refer back to an earlier topic.

As we saw in the last chapter (6), topics can move much during the course of a talk. ‘Tying’ could also refer to linking the upcoming topic with previous topics mentioned. In this way, the tying of the previous topic or topics with the upcoming one not only

maintains a sense of continuity in the conversation as a whole, but also justifies the potential launching of a new story. In contrast, a sudden change would most likely be noted and held as accountable. According to Lerner (1992), when there is a sudden change, an apology is often given to account for it. The tying of topics allows the recipient to make connections in order to get an idea of the background of the story as well as how the story will develop. The ability of the recipient to follow the story is an essential ingredient in the conversational storytelling when it is viewed as an interactional process.

7.2.3 Receipts

The initial challenge for the participants is convey to each other that there is a story to be told. The teller needs to get the floor typically for more than one turn in order to tell the story. The recipient needs to express approval of the initiative in some way. Often, this is done through short and even minimal receipts which encourage the speaker to go on.

Receipts can display that the recipient is receiving new information as well as

encouraging the teller to go on. This demonstrates that participants are once again aligned to each other. Sacks (1992) in his lecture says, “One thing we can notice about stories is that we tend to get a sequence of things like ‘Mm hm’ and then something else, like ‘Oh isn’t that awful’” (vol. 2, p. 9). These are commonly occurring tokens which also appear in my data to keep the storytelling going.

The importance of receipts not only at the start, but also during the story in supporting the teller cannot be overestimated. As Polanyi (1989) puts it, “Should the recipients fail to produce sufficient tokens of comprehension, the storyteller may interrupt the forward progress of the story and ask for confirmation that the recipients are, indeed, listening and understanding” (p. 49). We can see the importance of comprehension receipts from another angle. Polanyi divides the story into three basic stages: entrance talk, tokens of comprehension, and exit talk. Without the tokens or receipts to mark progress, the story cannot move from its beginning to its end. Responses by the recipient to the teller provide signals that the story is being listened to and potentially understood. Receipts in the form of continuer tokens are the focus here. A more extended form of receipts, formulations, will be discussed in Chapter 9.