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Keeping your footing: Conversational completion in three-

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ELSEVIER Journal of P~'agmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

Keeping your footing:

Conversational completion in three-part sequences *
Charles Antaki.. F61ix Dfaz, Alan F. Collins
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LAI 4YF, UK

Received November 1993; revised version September 1994

Abstract

In a rapprochement between two rather different domains of pragmatics, we apply Goff-

man's notion of 'footing' to what happens when one speaker completes another speaker's
utterance. Participants manage this in three-part sequences, in the third turn of which the orig-
inal speaker accepts or rejects not me:rely the propositional content of the putative comple-
tion, but also the footing on which the completion is uttered. The heart of the paper demon-
strates participants' orientation to footing in cases where the original utterance is on the
footing of 'author', 'relayer' and 'spokesperson' in Levinson's terminology. Then we show
details of how such completions are ratified (with agreement tokens, literal echos of the com-
pletion, or marks of appreciation) and rejected (by markers of dispreference and possibly by
zero-appreciation turns). We then turn our attention to some findings that emerge from the
analysis. These include: the role played by a suffix at the end of a completion; the limit to the
power of footing to overcome the preference organisation of corrections; and how (some)
completions manage to keep the floor.

1. Introduction

What is going on when one speaker completes what another speaker is saying?
The usual definition o f completion is, as L e m e r (1991) points out, sentential and
syntactic; that is, a second speaker's completing utterance is taken to be one which
is syntactically bound to the preceding utterance, thereby making up a sentence
which as a whole is produced by two speakers, and whose sense depends on its syn-
tactic relation with the preceding utterance. Syntactic binding m a y be achieved by a
number o f devices such as slot-filling, anaphora, conjunction, and so on.
But completion of utterances in conversation has also been studied, following
Sacks' suggestive treatment (Sacks.. 1992; e.g. 1965, Fall Lecture 1; 1968: Fall Lec-

The authors are grateful to Ivan Leudar for discussion and collaboration at an early stage, and to two
anonymous reviewers for helpful comment,,;.

0378-2166/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

SSDI 0378-2166(94)00081-6
 152 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

ture 5) as an issue of collaboration managed in an interactional sequence (for recent

work see, for example, Lerner, 1991, 1992, and Rae, 1990). Lerner (1987, 1991) has
shown that what people complete is better understood not so much as the bland 'rest
of the sentence', syntactically defined, but rather as the projectable structure of a
turn which has some kind of compound format. Hence completions come at points
like the 'then' clause of an 'if-then' pair, the opening words of a signalled quotation,
an item in a list, and so on. We agree with Lerner (1991) that the purely syntactical
reading of what happens in completions is too fiat, and that what is completed can
also be a projectable structure like a part of a list. But we think there is something
further going on. There is a thread which weaves through talk and which makes what
happens at the third point of the sequence - the point at which speaker A responds
to speaker B ' s putative completion - have dramatic effects on how the force of B's
utterance is understood.
Let us illustrate, in a pre-theoretical way, what we mean. In the following extract,
B produces, in utterance 2, what seems to be a collaborative specification (with
notable lack of success) of what A leaves hanging in utterance 1 :

I. S 2.8, p. 583, 513 j

1 A (but how) if it's no___!tgoing to happen how are you going t o . I mean the only
way .. albeit with a great lack of imagination the only way the British have
thought of so f a r . is o f . er sending their army to .. to (s) to erm. to attempt
to suppress these things .. [erm
2 b---~ [with notable lack of success

The completed joint utterance is now hearable as The only way the British have
thought of so far is of sending their army to atttempt to suppress these things, with
notable lack of success. If we stopped there we would seem to have a straightfor-
ward completion. But our claim in this paper is that it is up to the original speaker to
accept or reject the completing clause that B offers, and to accept or reject it on the
grounds of its authority. If we restart the tape again we see that the next line runs

3 A well I don't know that t h a t ' s , ac___St_uallyI don't know that that's true I mean
it's very difficult

In other words, we see at this point that B ' s putative completion has been rejected by
A ' s standard intiation-plus-correction marker: Well, I don't know that's actually true
.... This is not just a question of speaker A correcting a simple bad guess on B ' s part
(as we shall see in some detail later, such corrections look very different). It is a mat-
ter of something more profound. There is a so far unidentified thread going though
the three turns. What might that be?
Our story is that the thread is a question of the footing on which the participants
speak (Goffman, 1981; Levinson, 1988). So far, previous accounts of completions

This extract comes from the corpus introduced on p. 154. On the difference between uppercase and
lowercase markings for participants, see the Appendix to this article.
 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 153

treat the speakers as having only one kind of footing in the interaction, namely the
prototypical voice of the 'ordinary speaker' who speaks for him- or herself. But that
is only one among many voices with which a person can take part in a conversation.
Completions, as Levinson strongly hints (Levinson, 1988: 201-203) are sites where
possible inconsistencies in those footings are particularly exposed. In our starting
example, the orginal speaker shows that the putative completion is not one that
accords with the voice of the original utterance. Speaker A construes speaker B's
'completion' as an alien and unwelcome intrusion.
Completions, then, to be successfully accepted, must maintain the footing on
which the original utterance was made, and it is the original speaker, in the third turn
of the sequence, who makes that decision. That, we say, is the missing dimension in
previous work on completions. Footing runs through the three-part sequence of utter-
ances: it is established in the first, provisionally maintained in the completing sec-
ond, and ratified in the third.
To explain what we mean, and to introduce what we shall be doing in this paper,
we shall say more about footing in section 2. In section 3 we tell a basic story of how
one can spot acceptances and rejections of completions in three of Levinson's cata-
logue of participant statuses (author, relayer and spokesperson). In section 4 we go
into some of the technicalities of how those acceptances and rejections are signalled.
Those two sections do the main work we claim for the paper, establishing (we hope)
the application of footing to completion. Before the final discussion, we pick up in
section 5 some features of completions that warrant some attention: how (some)
completions keep the floor; what we might learn from zero-entries in the third turn,
how suffixes seem to make a difference to the uptake of the completion, and the
weakness of footing in the face of the preference-organisation of correction.

2. Footing and participant status

Goffman (1981) had noted that participants could have many authorities in a con-
versation: that of an author (that is to say, someone speaking for themselves); an
animator (someone motivating another to talk) or a principal, someone on whose
behalf the talk is being performed. As an illustration, take the personnel of the court-
room. The barrister is present, and speaking, and responsible for the form of what
s/he is saying, but doesn't have the motive for it. That is held by the 'principal' in
the case - the defendant, who may be present in the courtroom, but isn't speaking,
and who, although the ultimate benefactor of what is being said, is not responsible
for its form. Such roles are, according to Goffman, essential features of any interac-
tion, inside the courtroom or out.
We think that there is much to be gained from applying Goffman's insights to the
case of completion. Applying Goffman's insights to the actual give-and-take of lan-
guage exchange, though, is problematic. As Schegloff (1988) observes, Goffman's
own formulations of what is at s~:ake in an interaction can be overpowering, and
there is a general background suspicion among at least some conversation analists
that, as Watson puts it, "the Goffman/ethnomethodology-conversation analysis pair-
 154 c. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

ing is ... composed of approaches that are ... quite distinct and indeed irreconcilable"
(Watson, 1992: 2). Indeed Watson (ibid.: 16) reports work on footing by Zimmer-
man (1990) as being expressly offered as an alternative to, and not reconcilable with,
Goffman's style of analysis. To skirt this controversy over Goffman, we shall follow
Levinson's more strictly linguistic reading of the notion of footing.
Levinson (1988) systematises and expands Goffman's dramatis personae by sepa-
rating them into producers and recipients, and laying them on a number of dimen-
sions (4 for producers of talk and 4 for its recipients). In this paper we shall be look-
ing only at the producer roles. Talk 'producers' can: be present or absent, be
transmitting or not transmitting, and have or not have the motive for the message;
and they can be responsible, or not, for the form of the message, Levinson shows
that markers of such participant statuses are overt in various languages' grammatical
form; in terms used for speakers in English as in other languages; and in conversa-
tionalists' public efforts after signalling their exact role. Moreover, and this is the
crucial thing, one needs to know the participant status of an utterance before one can
gauge its meaning; or, rather, the participant status in which an utterance is uttered
is part of its meaning (and is so oriented to by participants). This last point is what
sparks our argument about completions presented in this paper.
The promise of footing or participant status 2 is that it will solve certain puzzles
about completions: namely, variations in what happens in the third turn in the
sequence. We shall claim that what the original speaker does in the third turn can be
understandable as addressing an issue of footing: what A orients to is not only the
accuracy of the words in B's putative completion, but rather the source from which
those words are meant to issue. Expanding on a suggestion by Levinson (1988:
201-203), our argument is that completions are evaluated by the original speaker f o r
their fidelity to the participant status in which the original utterance was given.
We should say, in what follows, that we are going to be rather inclusive about
completions. Our starting cases will be where the second speaker offers a syntactic
completion of the first speaker's hanging sentence, but we shall soon leave the
purely syntactical link behind. The eventual accumulation of examples will range
over completions that, as Lerner persuasively shows, are completions of turns rather
than syntactically defined sentences. There might be differences to be found along
the lines of the distinction between purely sentential completion and the range of
turn completions, but we will not be dividing up our examples along those lines. Our
principal aim is to show that where completions (of whatever kind) are concerned,
footing is a live issue for participants.
Now let us see the unfolding of the variety of completion sequences. Unless oth-
erwise indicated, the examples come from 176 completions we found in the London-
Lund corpus Of 50 spontaneous conversations (minimum length 5,000 words each)
between middle-class native speakers of English, recorded in their homes or offices.
For convenience of reference we shall refer to the transcripts in their printed form,
published as Svartvik and Quirk (1980).

2 We shall use the terms interchangeably,even though Goffman's usage is wider than the pragmatic
domain we are concerned with here; and we shall also use 'voice' in the same way.
 C. Antaki et al. /Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 155

3. Accepting and re.iecting completions as 'author', 'relayer' and 'spokesperson'

3.1. Author

In these simple examples, the original speaker (for convenience always referred
to, in our extracts, as A) accepts or ratifies B's putative completion as being given
on A's footing as 'author' - the person motivated to give the utterance, responsible
for its choice of words and for uttering it.

II. S 1.1 p. 57, 86

1 A N o . there was erm w what is. has happened since then is that there has been
another meeting of the executive committee at which it was quite clear that
Mallet and I did not see eye to eye. and curiously enough on that occasion
the [person]
2 B---> [Steven] Peel supported you
3 A y e s . most curious

Ill. S 3.1, p. 756, 147

A ~ there certainly is I k n o w . I was sure that would be one of the most dif-
ficult things
B I see
1 A buckling down to Anglo-Saxon
2 B---> and the history of the language
3 A and the history of the language (syllable)

The examples show that the third part ratifies the completion not only insofar as it
acknowledges the act of completion and agrees with what is said in it (as Lerner,
1987, has it), but also that it confirms that what was said was said in the participant
status of A (in Levinson's terms, as 'author').
Mistakes. It is vital to our argument to note that completers can make a simple
mistake: that is, to keep faith with A's footing, but just get the actual choice of
words wrong. This is different from stepping outside the participant status itself
(speaking on B's own account, for example, rather than A's), which we shall get to
in a moment. The following illustrates this simple mistake case:

IV. S 1.7. p. 195, 1104

1 A Well this brew I made I . I picked a bottle up just after you'd gone actually.
there was a filthy mess of yeast .. (where) it had pushed the cap o f f . and it
was a filthy you know not not nasty but quite a (k) thick creamy sort of scum
of veast on (the erm) it was dried you know
2 B--~ on the floor
3 A on (the) on (the) well on (the s) you know (the) hatchway there

A's turn at 3 is marked with the false starts (on the on the, the s) and hedges (well
you know) of dispreferred responses, strongly suggesting that the hatchway there is
 156 c. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

a place incompatible with B's candidate on thefloor; in other words, that A is reject-
ing B's completion as a mistake. That kind of rejection is different from the footing-
challenges we shall see next, inasmuch as the attributed source of the utterance is
right; it is only the propositional content which is wrong.
Rejecting a completion for not being on the 'author's'footing. In these next cases,
B's turn at 2 is indeed syntactically understandable as a sentence completion, but
now A's reaction at 3 rejects the footing on which it is offered.

V. S 2.8, p. 583, 513

t A (but how) if it's not going to happen how are you going t o . I mean the only
way .. albeit with a great lack of imagination the only way the British have
thought of s__oof a r . is o f . er sending their army to .. to (s) to erm. to attempt
to suppress these things .. [erm
2 b---~ [with notable lack of success
3 A well I don't know that that's, ac____!tuallyI don't know that that's true I mean
it's very difficult

The complete sentence is The only way the British have thought of so f a r is of send-
ing their army to atttempt to suppress these things, with notable lack of success. The
final clause B offers may or may not be consistent with the authorial voice in main
body of the sentence; it is up to the orginal speaker to accept or reject it as some-
thing he would have said. In fact, he rejects it with standard intiation-plus-correction
markers: Well, I don't know that's actually true ....
We might just look at a very similar example just to force home the point that
the 3rd turn is evaluating the acceptability of the footing of the putative comple-
tion. Compare the last example (V) with the next (VI), which, although it involves
more speakers, has a basically similar sentential completion both in structure and
in content.

VI. S 3.1 p. 766, 637 (A is a candidate; B and C are interviewers)

1 A Well at the moment I am prep__~ing (laughs .) myself for it to the extent o f .
e r m . trying to (take?) ordinary level Latin
B ah .v_~ .V_~
A which erm [and that in itself
2 c---~ [you haven't got
B you must {do
3 A {No I went to . Fourmiles which is a progres_..~sive school which
allows you to take either Latin or G e r m a n . and I preferred to take German

The complete sentence, in A's voice, would be 1 am preparing myself for it to the
extent of trying to take Ordinary-level Latin, which erm (I) haven't got. The com-
pleting which you haven't got could be treated by A as inconsistent with A's own
voice. This is what happened in the previous example (VI), where the very similar
with notable lack of success was met by an utterance clearly marked as a dispre-
ferred rejection (Well, 1 don't know that's actually true ...). Here, though, A gives the
 c. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 157

confirmatory negative No, I (..) preferred to take German, confirming C ' s comple-
tion as being an admission done in A ' s voice. (In parentheses we should note that
there is another candidate completion happening: B ' s completion of A ' s and that in
itself with you must do. This is not, however, taken up by A, who attends to C ' s
slightly earlier completion instead.)
All the examples so far have been of the successful or unsuccessful completion of
one participant status - the simple case of the 'author'. That is, on Levinson's four
criteria (Levinson, 1988), the speaking completee who is physically present, acting
on her or his own behalf, and responsible for the form of words they are using. Utter-
ances completable on that footing (usually successfully, but sometimes not, as we
shall see later) accounted for the bulk of our examples from this corpus (142 clear
cases out of the total 163). But there are other statuses a speaker can take on, and
each of these is completable and tzontestable. Two major kinds appeared in the cor-
pus (relayer and spokesperson), which we shall describe below, with their internal
variations. (See Table 1.)

Table 1
Distribution of 163 three-part sequence sentential completions found in 50 conversations, according to
the footing of their constituent parts. (These are clear cases: there were a further 13 cases where the foot-
ing of the second utterance was unclear tc the analysts.)

Footing of original utterance: Speaker A as

Author Relayer of other Joint author

speaker with B

Footing of completing utterance

Same as original utterance 127 16 5
Different from original utterance 15 0 0

3.2. Responsible for neither the form of words nor its motive: 'Relayer'

Here the physically present and speaking completee is simply relaying someone
else's lines, without personal motivation (or ostensibly so). There were 16 clear
cases of this in our corpus of completions; all were successful, bar the revealing case
we shall describe below in example XII. Most of the successful cases were cases of
the speaker relaying the talk of absent others, as in these two examples:

VII. S 1.4, p. 115, 567 (reading intructions)

1 A well what does it ~ . [stick an initial label] on the back
2 B--~ [stiLck an initial label]
3 A mm..

The completion's success is achieved by an exact overlap between B ' s and A ' s can-
didates for the completion; the footing is explicitly that of 'the instructions', or their
absent writer.
158 c. Antaki et al. /Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

VIII. S 1.9, p. 246, 1365 (relaying an absent speaker's lines)

A oh Meak ~ and he said Damn you sir Damn you and hit someone with
their [. his walking stick
b [yes this is Meak to Seddon and this is {true
A {Oh that is true is it. yes
C he said damn you damn you what
1 A well I don't know Seddon said to him
2 b---) Good morning [Meak
3 A [Good morning Meak oh yes ...

A signals the start of a piece of reported speech, which B opens with good morning,
Meak; A ' s partially overlapped echo, with an additional agreement token, ratifies it.
There were also cases in which the A speaker told a story in which they them-
selves had a speaking role, either singly or, as in the following example, jointly with
others:

IX. S 1.2, p. 59, 173 (relaying the speaker's own part, with others, in story)
A mid _A_12ril.we had reached the point of thinking that we weren't going to be
able to reach a p_o.!icydecision
B that's right
1 A and so we must. tell these guys
[that we'll carry on ..]
2 B---~ [we're going to carry o n . yep]
3 A you see
B yep
A a n d . erm that .. (we? we?) they said (....)

There is a slight difference in form between A and B's formulation of the same
telling: A reports it in indirect speech and with a 'will' future form (that we'll carry
on) and B in direct speech, with an 'are going to' future form (we're going to carry
on). This occasions a little turbulence, with A inserting a you see check before B's
confirmatory " y e p " and A's subsequent progress.
The remaining two cases of A relaying another's message were cases of A speak-
ing as the universal " o n e " or as the co-present B, as in this example:

X. S 2.3, p. 454, 780

1 A well I expect you don't need cyphers during (the) if by that you mean people
who
2 B---~ people who can decode [. yeah]
3 A [decode and] things like that (...)

B's completion is made as a formulation (in the sense of capturing the gist of the
preceding material; Heritage and Watson, 1979) of what "cyphers" means in that
context. A collects it and carries on with her own account. The sequence can be read
as A initiating a formulation of what B means in 1, and B completing it in 2; or as
 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 159

B formulating what A means in 2. In either case, the sequencing works to achieve

the intersubjective confirmation of what both speakers mean by "cyphers".

3.3. Jointly responsible for the form and motive: 'Spokesperson'

Levinson describes the ideal case of the 'spokesperson' as someone reading a

communiqu6 which they themselves had written, but on behalf of some third party.
There were no examples quite of that sort in our corpus, but, on the other hand, we
did find examples of a particular variant of the case, where the third party is actu-
ally the partnership between the co-present members, as perhaps might have been
predicted from Sacks' identification of completion as a device for collaboration
and joint telling (cited in Levin~,;on, 1988: 202; see also Sacks, 1992; Lerner,
1992).
There were 5 clear cases, and 5 less clear ones, in which the A utterance was
treated as being offered in the joint voice of both A and B together. The good exam-
ples of such joint footing occurred in conversations which included joint tasks. In a
panel interview (conversation S 3.1), for example, this exchange shows each panelist
finishing off what the other panelist started, presenting the interviewee with, as it
were, a common front:

XI. S 3.1, p. 758, 251 (A=interviewer, B=other interviewer, C=interviewee)

a erm your essay if I may just cut [across for a moment] erm
C [Thank you yes]
a we'd like you to er re-read this little passage {beginning}
C { (laughs) } yes I see]
1 a . (di) last paragraph as an example [that's the one
2 B--) [over the page you see to the end of (3
sylls)
3 a---~ where you talk about connections in that paragraph

B completes his colleague's question to the interviewee, and A continues that utter-
ance in turn.
The other main joint tasks which attracted such completions seemed to be joint
story telling, joint reasoning and, to a lesser extent (perhaps largely because of the
informal, social nature of most of the conversations captured in the London-Lund
corpus), joint problem solving.

XII. S 1.13, p. 339, 532 (joint storytelling)

1 A [story, leading up to.] and do you know there was simply (.) n__o_ocentral heat-
ing of any kind (.) in their rooms (..) they just had the odd electric fire and no
se__£rvants to rush [around lighting]
2 B--) [and this was in a] stone castle
{you see bloody cold
3 A {a stone castle and ex}cessively bloody cold
160 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

In this sequence, A and B contribute to a crescendo of coldness• Each contribution

by a different speaker lengthens the account and its syntactic structure, and also
draws the story together into a joint account: the result, as suggested by Lerner
(1987, 1992) is a story told collectively by the collective involved in it. What we
want to stress here is the sequential constitution of a single collective author•

XIII. S 1.5, p. 139, 659 (joint reasoning)

1 A there is infinite variety in the language and therefore trying to tie it down is
it. simply, a pedantic e__~xercise. I mean one's never. I mean you're making
.. conclusions which you can never really verify because (you can).
2 B---) by the time you've fi___n_nishedit will have changed anyway ......
3 A I mean language is always dating

In this case, what we have is B contributing to an argument with support for an argu-
mentative claim• A's claim is that variety in language cannot be, or ought not to be,
tied down. This is supported with the argument that to do so one would be propos-
ing unverifiable conclusions. B backs this argument with evidence that completes it:
by the time you reach the conclusions, language would have changed. A's ratifica-
tion of B's support is done in the form of a reformulation of (2): "language is always
dating". B's contribution completes A's sentence and argument in the way projected
by A. What makes the argument a joint one is the fact that B's support cannot be
reduced merely to an intervention into A's participant status of author of the argu-
ment. By contributing with a specific backing, B is participating in the production of
the argument in a way that commits him to it; this constitutes him as co-author. The
logic here is that a chain of reasoning, unlike similar kinds of talk, has a special rela-
tion between the conclusion and what precedes it; the conclusion necessarily 'comes
from' the premises in some way (see Antaki, 1994, for a more detailed account). B's
by the time you've finished it it will have changed anyway provides the starting
premises for A's previously stated 'conclusion' you can never really verify it and
commits both B and A to the finished premises-plus-conclusion sequence which the
combination of utterances represents. And, in the third part of the sequence, A rati-
fies the package with a restatement of one of the premises (language is always
dating)•
Finally, let us examine an occasion of co-authoring in a context of collective prob-
lem solving:

XIV. S 1.1 l, p. 296, 1026 (joint problem solving)

A well wait a minute I was still looking a t . Farnham actually, too much wait
a minute
B Farnham you pass west of Aldershot ...... or ......
1 A and on which road you're on three er one three when you ]cross]
2 B--) [when you cross]
• ~ after you come out of Farnham.
3A yeah but then you hit the three two three (...)
 c. Antaki et al. / Jo~'rnal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 161

This co-telling is adapted to the description of a route on a map, proposing a sequen-

tial order place by place. The 'problem' is getting the places right, and it is worked
out jointly, by adding contributions to the candidate sequence. By the time we get to
2, the string reads (..) you p a s s w e s t o f Aldershot, or ... and on which road y o u ' r e on
three er one three w h e n you cross. B's completion is introduced by a repeat of the
last part of A's former turn, and produced as a confirmation of the current descrip-
tion of where they are (when you cross . y e s after you c o m e out o f F a r n h a m ) . A's
ratification (yeah) of that formulation of the current place is used as a departure point
to introduce a problem with the next place (but then you hit the three two three) and
the sequence continues.

4. Accepting or rejecting the footing in a completion

We hope that the section above has demonstrated that we can, indeed, profitably
apply the notion of footing (specifically, three of Levinson's participant statuses of
actor, relayer and spokesperson) to the management of completions. Now let us see
in more detail how a completion's acceptance or rejection is managed.
There is a preference obligation on the original speaker to mark their third turn in
such a way as to signal that they h~tve appreciated the status in which the completion
has been offered. If they accept the offered status as maintaining the one in opera-
tion, it is open to them to correct the propositional content of a completion which,
although on the right footing, happens to make the wrong guess at what actually was
to be said. If they do not accept the; competion as one keeping faith with the original
source of the utterance, that then has to be marked. Let us see examples of how
acceptances, corrections and challenges are done.

4.1. M a r k i n g the ratification o f various f o o t i n g s

The greater part of completions in our corpus (148 cases that were clear to us, as
analysts, out of the total 163) were ratified as being on the original utterance's foot-
ing. These were distributed as follows: 127 cases of speaker A as 'author'; 16 of A
as relayer of another's talk; and 5 as joint spokesperson with a co-present B.
The ratifying reception was, in most cases (119 clear cases), explicitly marked
with agreement tokens, literal echos of the completion, or marks of appreciation (or
variants and combinations of these), as in the following examples, taken from the
range of footings:

XV. S 1.13, p. 340, 584 ('author' footing; explicit mark by agreement)

1 A course it was port really that kept them warm in the eighteenth century
2 B---~ and enormous quantities of food
3 A yes

XVI. S 2.1, pp. 386-387, 649 ('author footing'; explicit mark by echo)
1 A Charlie Wilson ... er J Walker .. bibliography ... of ... works on Indic statues
.. Indic
162 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

2 B--) Indic Indic sculpture

3 A Indic sculpture .... er before eighteen hundred (..)

This particular case is a candidate for one or other of what Jefferson (1988) describes
as 'exposed' or "embedded' correction. The first speaker mentions an element X
(which in this case is completable); another speaker replaces it with Y (in this case,
a completion); and the original speaker uptakes Y (here, with an echo). Whether one
calls it an exposed or embedded correction depends whether we (as analysts) read
the extract as showing that the correction slides into the flow smoothly and without
remark. Perhaps a more economical reading is to take the cue from A's generation
of an unsatisfactory candidate earlier (Indic statues) and see the completion as a
good example of what Lerner (1987) calls word-search. In any case, whether word-
correction or word-offering, it is ratified explicitly by A's echo.
We might also add here one of the three examples that Levinson (1988) offers in
his sketch of footing-completion:

XVII. Levinson (1988: 202) (echo plus appreciation)

1 A (...) and it's the most descriptive name ever, the shrimp plant because it looks
like a - what eighteen inch high bush covered with little shrimps
[some minutes later:]
And then wait until it starts just into growth again and then knock it out and
repot it ur (.) if possible into only one pot bigger, don't give it too much to
work on or it runs to leaf instead of er -
2 B---~ Shrimps !
3 A instead of shrimps heh

In turn 3, A accepts and appreciates (heh) the completion as being on A's footing as
telling what is marked as projectably his own joke (by the picking out, in B's utter-
ance, of A's shrimps from the preceding material).

4.2. Marking mistakes within the same footing

A 'mistake' is, by definition, a completion done on the orginal footing but which
the participants orient to as being an inaccurate prediction of exactly what would
have been said. There were 11 clear cases of these, participants marking the mistake
either by assessment marking (Pomerantz, 1984) or self-repair (Schegloff et al.,
1977).
This is an example of the mistake being signalled by speaker A using explicit
markers of a dispreferred assessment (in this case, a hedge, an agreement token and
a substitution item):

XVIII. S 3.3, p. 822, 1027 (mistake marked by Speaker A)

1 A we did do this last y e a r . but the kettle, is erm
2 B---~ disintegrated [is it
3 A [well it's an invalid, yes
 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 163

It was not always necessary for the mistake to be marked by speaker A. In a

minority of cases, the marking was done by speaker B themselves, who might either
self-repair or offer an overt apology. A good example of this happens in the next
case, in which B's mistake is made manifest by the fact that Speaker A continues
talking, and the overlapped content of what A says (and I get to the bank you see)
contradicts B's candidate completion (and you'll get your .). B is clearly then wrong,
and uses the next turn to acknowledge it himself:

XIX. S 1.1 p. 42, 438 (mistake marked by speaker B's self-repair in line 4)
1 A Well n___Qoif I catch the one twenty-eight from Victoria that gets me in at about
• half past two [(and) I get to]
2 B---~ [(and you'll get your .)]
3 A the {bank you se__ee
4 B {y__~. get to (the) bank yes

4.3. Marking rejections of footing

There were 15 clear occasions on which the original speaker queried B's fidelity
to the source of the utterance. In each case the original footing had been A as author,
and B's completion was cast as being on B's own footing as an author (that is to say,
there were no cases of any footing other than A's own being challenged, nor any
challenge being mounted on a footing other than B's own).
How were these challenges actually performed? In only one clear case was the
challenge done by an explicit rejection, but, interestingly, not by the original
speaker A:

XX. S 2.3, p. 452, 696

B like the Germans are
1 A but they'd also be wouldn't be so nice as they are if [their er]
2 B--~ [and they wouldn't be]
so good in dire emergencies.
{you see I} mean *(3 or 4 syllables)*
c {no I don't think that *follows*}.
3 A *( 2 to 3 syllables)* I'm afraid I don't really agree
with that Bill I don't know why you think that Germans aren't as good as in
dire emergencies as w___eeare

The explicit rejection no, I don't think that follows is actually done by speaker c and
when A does come in, it is with a standard correction initiation l'm afraid I don't
really agree with that Bill. Speaker A never, in our corpus, marked their challenge
so explicitly. Rather, they would rely on assessments marked as dispreferred dis-
agreements, as in the case above and the following examples:

XXI. S 1.4, p. 122, 995

1 A (...) he's taking finals for the third time this summer
164 c. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

2 B~ and (w) h e . knows Joseph

3 A well I introduced him and I asked Joseph could Joseph fix up someone to d_0_o
it (...)

An enlightening variant is the case in which A signals that B has failed to maintain
the footing of the utterance, even though the propositional content o f B ' s completion
is acceptable to A. This is very clear evidence that the propositional content and the
footing of the utterance are separable. Here is an example:

XXII. S 1.3, p. 97, 856

1 A (...) I (syllables) always .think
.... thay always (sort of er) preceded their
remarks with (things) this sot of erm. authoritative endorsement you know
I [always]
2 B---> [(just erm)] bit of er phatic .=
3A =yes it is isn't it [.. ~ .. yes .. yes ]
B [content so to speak]
A I always think, that .. Sunday breakfast ... (...)

The stem is they always p r e c e d e d their remarks with this sort o f authoritative
endorsement, and B ' s completion adds the commentary, as it were in brackets, (just
a bit o f phatic content so to speak). A might have let it go, but instead explicitly
addresses it with an appreciation Yes it is isn't it .. ~ .. ~ .. ~ . We hear the
appreciative isn't it as a sign that A is treating B ' s utterance as B ' s own contribution,
meriting evaluation and comment in its own right: it might be consistent with what
A is saying, but by appreciating it, A is casting it as being offered on B's, not A's,
footing. Perhaps to emphasise the point, A spools back his own utterance (to I
always think) before retaking his turn.

5 . Emerging findings: Keeping the floor, zero-entries in the third turn, suffixes,
and the weakness of footing in the face of the preference-organisation of cor-
rection.

Sections 3 and 4 above demonstrated (we hope) that one could usefully marry
together the notion of footing and the phenomenon of completion, and gave an initi-
tal idea of some of the ways in which acceptances and rejections of footing in com-
pletion were marked. Now, in this and the next section, we take a look at some find-
ings which emerge from our analyses.

5.1. Completions which keep the floor

There is an important set of cases which did not count towards our corpus of 176
completions. These were 29 occasions on which B ' s utterance had the form of a sen-
tential completion, but was not evaluated by speaker A since B kept the floor beyond
a time in which an assessment would be appropriate. Here is an example:
 c. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 165

XXlII. S 1.7, p. 198, 1251

A you can have two reels working
B [mm]
1 A [you know] two reels set up and switch from one to the o.ther {as you (2
or 3 syllables)}
2 B---~ {without a
break is t h a t . i f you} don'~E have you just have to have a break [now and
again
A [yeah
B yeah

It is an important consequence of our argument about third-part assessment that one

cannot evaluate the footing-consistency of these floor-holding completions since the
original speaker provides no relevant third part for us to use as evidence.

5.2. Zero appreciations in the third part of the completion sequence

This is an example of a 'zero third part', in which the original speaker leaves the
completion unaddressed:

XXIV. S 2.3, pp. 451-452, 646

1 A what I mean is that I don't think that it is a very good plan to rely on
[on. in
2 B---~ [on quirks no
3 A I don't I d o n ' t , like this business o f . 'dear old England is full of eccentrics' ..

We are tempted to speculate that in the 26 cases of these 'zero third parts ' we found
in the corpus, special rules are being observed. One possibility is that the zero third
part - the absence of a reflection on B's utterance - accomplishes a rejection. The
logic here would be that since the 3-part sequence projects an appreciation in the
third part, not to offer an appreciation is to signal rejection. This is on a par with the
implied rejection in (say) a teacher's absent appreciation in a response to a student's
answer, or the implied dissension in a patient's non-reflection on a doctor's advice;
in short it is on a par with any use of absence where an appreciation is expected.
This is certainly a possible reading of why there is no explicit assessment in turn
3, but there are at least three others. The first is that the sentiment being completed
is a negative one, making a positive endorsement potentially troublesome for partic-
ipants. The second possibility is that the sentiment A is expressing is, as the longer
extract makes plain, precisely a disapproval of the completing word quirks, and that
militates against A using the word again as a confirmatory echo.

B you see how do you us___gthese strange quirky people

A I don't believe in strange quirky people personally I think this is er oh well I
m e a n . n__oothat's a crude and inaccurate way of [putting it]
B [(laughs)]
 166 c. Antaki et al./ Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

1 A what I mean is that I d o n ' t think that it is a very g o o d plan to rely on

[ o n . in
2 B---) [on quirks no
3 A I d o n ' t I d o n ' t . like this business o f . ' d e a r old England is full o f
eccentrics" ..

The third possibility - though this is more tentative - is that the confirmatory no that
the completer himself suffixes to his utterance may act to release A from the oblig-
ation to evaluate explicitly. A m o n g the clear cases, about half of the completions
with a suffix remained unevaluated by the first speaker, but this is a much higher
proportion than the proportion of suffixless completions that were unevaluated (see
Table 2; a chi-square test reveals a statistically highly reliable effect: chi-square
=34.4, df=-l, p<0.001).

Table 2
Manner of original speaker's confirmation of the completion according to the completing speaker's use
of a suffix. (These are the clear cases; there were a further 13 cases, not shown, where confirmation
could not be assessed, e.g. because a third speaker intervened.)

Explictly confirmed in turn 3 Implicitly confirmed in turn 3

(by agreement token, echo (by topic development,
and so on) sentential continuation and so on)

Completion has no suffix 105 10

Completion has suffix 14 16

5.3. Footing as an author" does not seem to facilitate correction

Consider one of the extracts we saw earlier:

XXV. S 1.7, p. 195, 1104
1 A Well this brew I made I . I picked a bo__tttle up just after y o u ' d gone actually.
there was a filthy mess o f yeast .. (where) it had pushed the cap o f f . and it
was a filthy you know not not nasty but quite a (k) thick creamy sort o f scum
o f yeast on (the erm) it was dried you know
2 B---~ on the floor
3 A on (the) on (the) well on (the s) you know (the) hatchway there

The sense we made of it earlier was that A ' s turn at 3 is marked with the false starts
(on the on the, the s) and hedges (well you know) of dispreferred responses, strongly
suggesting that the hatchway there is a place incompatible with B ' s candidate on the
floor; in other words, that A is rejecting B ' s completion as a mistake.
We are prompted by an observation made by one of the reviewers of this paper to
note that this example suggests that there is a limit to the power of footing. Here, B ' s
completion is done on A ' s footing. Now, if that footing is live and powerful, then if
A chooses to correct the completion (as indeed happens), it would be A ' s own utter-
 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 167

ance that s/he was correcting, and that should need no dispreference markers. But, in
this example at least (with the false starts and well you know) there are indeed dis-
preference markers. That means that A in turn 3 is orienting not to the footing of the
utterance but to its physical speaker. Or, to put it another way, it means that the pref-
erence organisation of corrections trumps the footing of the to-be-corrected utter-
ance. It might be a scaled phenomenon, with corrections of mistakes-made-on-A's-
footing attracting less dispreference markers than mistakes-made-on-B's-footing, but
it certainly doesn't seem to be the case that the footing is powerful enough to allow,
in this instance at least, the correction to proceed wholly unmarked.

5.4. Reflecting on Levinson's previous hint of footing in completion

It is worth stepping outside our corpus to offer a re-interpretation here of an

intriguing piece of text that has been worked on by Schegloff (1976) and Levinson
(1983) as an example of how participants deal with ambiguity. We can, we think,
now develop Levinson's own hints 'that there is some footing work going on in it too.
Here is the extract:

XXVI. Schegloff (1976: D9) (B is talking about an argument he has had with his
teacher (T))
IB An's an ( ) we were discussing, it tur-, it comes down, he ((T)) s- he says, I-
I-you've talked with thi- i- about this many times. I ((B)) said, it came clown
t' this: our main difference: I feel that a government, i- the main thing, is th-
the purpose of the government is, what is best for the country
2A Mmhmm
3B H_.ge((T)) says, governments, an' you know he keeps- he talks about govern-
ments, they sh- the thing that they sh'd do is what's right or wrong
4 A---) For whom
5B Well he says [he-
6A [by what standard
7B That's what- that's exactly what I mean. He s- but he says

Schegloff (1976, 1988) and Levinson (1983: 329) are concerned to show that the
participants orient to the trouble that speaker A has caused by the ambiguity of his
interpolation for whom at turn 4. ~[]ae ambiguity, Levinson might now say, after his
analysis of participant status (Levmson, 1988), is caused by two rival footings on
which the utterance could be understood to have been delivered.
On the one hand, A could be speaking for himself, in which case his for whom is
in no sense a completion, but rather an intrusion into B's talk of a simple request for
information: on whose behalf did the teacher think governments ought to act? This
is the sense in which B shows he ihas understood it, by replying at line 5 with well
he says .... But A quickly corrects him, by reformulating the question as by what
standard? Note that this offers no real clarification of the content of the question.
What it does do, merely by breaking the preference of correction (self-repair before
other-correction) and interrupting B's utterance, is to show that B is somehow mis-
 168 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

firing. B's upgraded agreement in the next line shows that he appreciates that his
answer to a 'straight' question is somehow wrong, and that he must pick out some
other sense in which A's for whom is to be understood. His that's exactly what I
mean suggests that B now recognises that he had failed to see that A had intended
for whom to be aligned to B's complaint against the teacher. In other words, that A
was offering a rhetorical question in B's own relayed voice as it is being recounted
in B's story (rather than a genuine question, in A's own voice).
The completion A offered would turn the joint utterance into something like The
teacher says that governments should do what's right or wrong, but, as I objected,
"right or wrong for whom ? ". The trouble at lines 5 and 6 happens because B does
not at first pick up the fact that A's utterance is offered in B's voice, perhaps because
it is a 'completion' of a version of the sentence that B was actually saying, and
forces a certain retrospective rewording of what B was saying - after all, B had not
said 'but, as I objected ...'. In that sense what A is doing is offering what Sacks calls
a 'recompletion', in which an alternative stem is being offered along with its ending.
But B's enthusiastic that's exactly what I mean at line 7 finally ratifies what A has
said: both the rewording of B's utterance to project an objection, and then the com-
pletion of that objection.
Schegloff and Levinson mean the episode to illustrate how participants signal
trouble to each other and, more generally, how the placement of an utterance affects
its force. What we think we have done here is to use Levinson's own later hint that
there is a footing story to be told about such exchanges, (Levinson, 1988: 201-203)
to show just what it was that was causing the trouble - namely, B not at first seeing
that A was offering a (re)completion in the relayed voice of B's story.

6. Concluding summary

The aim of this paper was to argue that the link which made one utterance com-
plete another (as sentence, or more generally, as turn) was always accompanied by a
second kind of link: the orientation to the footing on which the utterance was given.
We hope we have shown that completions were built in three-part sequences and, as
a corollary, that only by taking this into account could one make sense of the third
turn in the completion sequence.
We are keen to press the point that one can really talk of completion as a three-
part sequence. We think this is necessary, in spite of the temptation to stick with the
more familiar and parsimonious adjacency-pair structure. The reason is that the third
part necessarily orients to something established in the first part: there would other-
wise be no sense in talking of having speaker A 'agree with', or 'reject', the footing
of B's utterance. Thus an original stem like The way the British have thought of so
far is of sending their army to atttempt to suppress these things could be sententially
completed by the utterance with notable lack of success; but it is up to the original
speaker to ratify it as consistent or inconsistent with the footing on which the origi-
nal sentence was offered. In fact, the original speaker in that actual example
responds with the disclaimer Well, 1 don't know that's actually true. By comparing
 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171 169

the position the completion is promoting with the position in the original stem, the
original speaker necessarily harks back to the first utterance in the three-turn
sequence. So although the latter two turns of the sequence are indeed understandable
as some kind of offer plus some kind of rejection, it is the comparison with the foot-
ing of the original utterance that reveals just what kind of offer and rejection it is,
and gives us our grounds for thinking of the sequence as having three parts.
The paper was structured around the scaffolding of Levinson's list of possible par-
ticipant statuses in conversations (Levinson, 1988: 201-203). We found that orien-
tation to synchrony of footing was not limited to the (statistically most frequent, in
our corpus) simple case of the 'author'; the two other familes of case in our corpus
were the footings of the speaker ~,s relayer (of a variety of absent authors), and as
joint author (in a variety of joint tasks).
Once we had established the synchrony of status, we listed some of the features of
ratifications of, and challenges to, completions. When completions were ratified, that
seemed to be done by an explicit agreement token, or by an echo of all or part of the
completing utterance. Where the completing speaker tagged a suffix onto the com-
pleting utterance, however, there was a tendency for the original speaker to be
exempted from making an explicit point of the ratification, and he or she would
press on instead with a continuation of their turn. Where the completion was explic-
itly challenged, it was always the case that the original speaker marked their third
turn with markers of dispreference. The only time this did not happen was when the
putative completion was initially assessed not by the original speaker, but rather by
a third party, who was quick to make an explicitly negative assessment; but then
the original speaker did come in, palliating the rejection with standard markers of
tentativeness.
We should say that the statistical information we have provided is, of course,
based on a restricted sample. A wider range of speech events will encourage (or be
constituted by) different varieties of footing, and so different varieties of footing-
completion; the fact that we saw a great deal of 'author' completions, and only com-
paratively few cases of 'relayer' and 'joint author' completions may be a function of
the middle-class, largely social-informal nature of the sampled conversations. More-
over, our initial observations about four emergent 'findings' are clearly just tenta-
tive: we noted that some completions kept the floor, that there were cases of zero-
entry in the third turn, that suffixes in the completion seemd to be significant, and
that footing seemed not to be able to trump the preference-organisation of correction.
All these are, we think, suggestive;, but far from fully worked out here.
Nevertheless, we feel that we have succeeded in demonstrating the main point of
the paper: that Goffman's dimension of footing is live for participants, and is an
issue which comes to the surface in the way they manage completions. We hope we
have shown that Levinson's initial notes on the application of participant status to
completions admit of expansion and extension, and, specifically, that the fulcrum on
which the phenomenon hinges is the ratification of the completion in the third part
of a regular three-part sequence.
170 C. Antaki et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 151-171

Appendix: Numbering and notation

The extracts are numbered consecutively with Roman numbers. The Arabic numbers which
then precede each extract identify it within the London-Lund corpus numbering system. The
first number (e.g., S 2.8) indicates the conversation, the second (e.g., p. 583) the page num-
ber in Svartvik and Quirk (1980), and the third (e.g., 513) the tone unit at which the comple-
tion starts.
We have relabeiled the speakers so that the provider of the first turn in a completion
sequence is always called A, and the completer B, whatever their labels in the original cor-
pus. We have retained the distinction between speakers who are aware of the recording
(denoted by lower case characters) and those unaware of it (upper case); the only significant
potential effect this has here is that the corpus only codes prosodic information for unaware
speakers, so the absence of stress marks in the aware speakers' speech is not informative.
We have simplified the transcription in the London-Lund corpus, retaining only the mark-
ings described below. Where appropriate we have added Svartvik and Quirk's own descrip-
tions (given in quotes).

pause 'of one light syllable'

longer pause 'of one stress unit or "foot"'
combinations of the above, representing still longer pauses
emphasis underlining denotes emphasis ('peak of greatest prominence')
[overlapped] material within brackets spoken at the same time (we alternate square and
[overlapped] talk curly brackets if there is a chance of confusing which talk is overlapped;
in one case [extract XX] we have used asterisks for a third set of brackets
where the overlapping is particularly complicated)
(well) transcriber's guess
(2 syllables) unintelligible material
(laugh) transcriber's description

In addition, we have used the following marks:

...) Indicates that the speaker's turn includes material we have not shown

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