Emanuel A. Schegloff
On Dispensability
Repeating, in the basic sense of saying the same thing by using the same words, is as simple an operation as there is in talk-in-interaction. Repeating can be done by a different speaker than the "first sayer," and a variety of actions can be implemented by such repeating -- registering, questioning, mimicking, etc.; or it can be done by the first sayer. The "Dispensability" paper takes five distinct environments in which a speaker undertakes to say the same thing in the same words as they had said before, five settings in each of which the repeating is implementing a different action, to explore the departures from precise "using the same words" which appear to be compatible with "saying the same thing." Some of these are deletions of something that was part of the first saying; other are additions to what was said on the first saying. Many of these slight departures turn out to be related to the new sequential position in which the re-saying occurs, and its difference from the first saying. But the relationship of utterance composition to its position is not unidirectional or straightforward. Sometime the composition is changed to fit to a new position; sometimes the composition is left the same so as to re-claim the position the utterance had on its first saying. Here, as elsewhere, the relationship between talk and its context is reflexive.
Emanuel A. Schegloff is Professor of Sociology and Applied Linguistics at UCLA.
