Geoffrey Raymond
Prompting Action: The stand-alone "so"
in ordinary conversation
I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara. My research interests include conversation analysis, the role of interaction in the organization of institutions, and qualitative research methods. “Prompting Action” is taken from one part of my research on how sequences of action come to encompass long stretches of talk, and the sorts of contingencies speakers routinely encounter in such sequences. In this paper I focus on how speaker use “so” (as a “stand-alone object”) to prompt a recipient’s acknowledgement of the multiple, overlapping organizations that a prior turn ostensibly has some relevance for. I am currently examining links between grammar and social organization (including links between the identities of co-interactants and the design of their actions in conversation), and the interactional organization of small-scale economic transactions. I’m also co-editing a book, with Darin Weinberg and Paul Drew, on the role of talk in sociological research.
