On a Conversational Environment for Equivocality

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an analysis that began with some relatively casual observations made on a corpus of citizen phone calls to a metropolitan police force. It was remarkably easy to see a subset of these calls as models of complaint giving. The calls were brief, to the point, and intelligible. Other calls appeared as rambling, packed with excessive detail, and unfocused. It was found that many of the second set of calls possessed another interesting property that could be noticed with no more esoteric resource than the layman's ear for conversational strategies. Without much difficulty, a version of the events could be derived from these calls that was not evidently the preferred version of the teller but made sense as an alternative. The chapter describes structural features of complaint deliveries that might underlie them. A methodological note in order is noticed in the complaints. The chapter describes the selection procedures governing categorical formulations, and it also discusses the issue of naming complained-againsts and the possible trouble it gives to the caller.