Interruption revisited: Affiliative vs. disaffiliative intervention

Abstract

Following the Sacks et al. (1974) model of conversation which defines simultaneity as violation, a number of researchers (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Murray and Covelli, 1988; Leet-Pellegrini, 1980) have quantitatively investigated the interrupting habits of women and men - which they have found to differ dramatically - solely in terms of distance from projected transition-relevance place. This paper re-defines simultaneity in terms of its function from the point of view of ‘face’/ ‘preference’, i.e. in light of its execution as affiliative or disaffiliative intervention, and relates it to gender. Within this frame which combines ethomethodological Conversation Analysis with the ‘face’-based strategy model (Brown and Levinson, 1987), affiliative intervention is instantiated as addressee-oriented face-saving strategies, preferred second pair parts of adjacency pairs, genuine repair, ratifying back-channel responses, initiation/development of affiliative topics and affiliative topic change/shift, etc. Disaffiliative intervention, i.e. interruption, on the other hand, consists in the antagonistic performance of all the above. On this basis, the two sexes, who otherwise display comparable outputs of simultaneous speech, emerge as having differing perceptions of intrusion into alter's space: for women it is overwhelmingly a tool of support, agreement, ratification, whereas men use it indiscriminately either in support for or dissent from current speaker/topic, although in either case they tend to direct it mainly towards their female interlocutors.