Abstract
Accounts—verbal explanations for conduct—are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing or challenging a coparticipant’s behavior. I find that speakers use these accounts to shift responsibility for the focal action by treating it as caused by or responsive to the targeted coparticipant’s (putative) misbehavior. This practice indicates that accounts can be used not only to expiate the speaker but also to police others’ behavior, although such moves are vulnerable to retaliation. Data are taken from video recordings of everyday interaction in American and British English.
Introduction and background
Accountability, in a broad sense, is an omnirelevant feature of social interaction since we are always understood to be doing something (Garfinkel, 1967; Robinson, 2016; Schegloff, 1995). However, speakers have various resources at their disposal to influence how their actions are interpreted, including morphosyntax, lexical choice, prosody, and visible behavior. This paper focuses on one such resource, wherein speakers shape others’ interpretations by characterizing their conduct or the situation with accounts, explanations that articulate a reason for one’s actions (Antaki, 1994; Robinson, 2016). Rather than direct representations of interactants’ actual motives, social scientists have generally considered accounts to be post-hoc justifications for challengeable conduct (Garfinkel, 1967; Mills, 1940; but see Winchester and Green, 2019). In their classic formulation, Scott and Lyman (1968) argue that accounts are produced in situations where a speaker deviates from shared normative expectations. Following Austin (1956), they distinguish between excuses and justifications (see also Goffman, 1971: 109–113). Excuses mitigate responsibility for the action in question by acknowledging its problematic character. By contrast, justifications deny that the action is problematic in the first place, despite appearances. In producing either type of account, speakers claim commitment to the relevant norm by presenting their action as exceptional or legitimate despite appearances, thereby preserving the norm against disconfirmation (Pollner, 1974; Stivers et al., 2024). The tight relationship between accounts and normative obligation is evidenced by speakers’ use of explicit account solicitations as a vehicle for criticism (Bolden and Robinson, 2011).
Alongside these normative functions, accounts are typically aimed at maintaining positive relationships with coparticipants (Clayman, 2002; Heritage, 1984). This relational function is most clearly seen in their role in managing dispreferred responses. Offers, requests, invitations and proposals all provide recipients with opportunities to either accept or reject the course of action put forward by the initiator. Actions that reject the proposed course of action, thereby threatening positive relations between interactants, are structurally dispreferred, regardless of the speakers’ own inclinations (Lerner, 1996; Pomerantz and Heritage, 2012; Schegloff, 2007). When producing dispreferred responses, speakers routinely use accounts that disavow possible relational implications of rejection (Drew, 1984; Heritage, 1988). For example, in declining invitations, speakers may reference competing obligations, thus giving the rejection a ‘no fault’ quality (Heritage, 1984: 270–272).
While the greatest attention has been given to how accounts manage the social implications of dispreferred second pair parts, accounts support affiliation in a variety of contexts. For instance, in both requests and proposals, speakers may use accounts in first position to demonstrate attention to imposition on the recipient by orienting to constraints that may problematize compliance (Antaki and Kent, 2012; Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1990). Similarly, Baranova and Dingemanse (2016) argue that including a reason in a request can work to justify situational disregard for the requestee’s deontic or epistemic rights. Further underlining the pro-social orientation of typical accounts, speakers may, in the aftermath of instances of disaffiliation, produce remedial accounts that redefine previous stances as affiliative (Flint et al., 2019).
Accounts’ normative and relational dimensions are typically mutually reinforcing, in part because the interaction order is structured to maintain collective solidarity through attention to others’ social worth (Clayman, 2002; Goffman, 1967; Heritage, 1988). Yet, in reviewing data from naturally occurring interaction, I began encountering accounts that did not fit with prior descriptions provided in the literature. Specifically, despite accounts’ overall pro-social orientation, speakers sometimes give explanations for their actions that criticize or challenge someone who is co-present in the encounter. This practice relies on the vehicular structure of actions wherein multiple actions can be layered within a single turn (Schegloff, 2007). For example, an announcement can serve as a vehicle for delivering an offer (Stivers et al., 2023: 1562). The responses implicated by these multiple actions each impose pressures and affordances for interlocutors; in responding to such layered actions, speakers may prioritize one such action over the others, thereby treating it as primary. Complaints, in particular, have been described as often relying on this vehicular structure, particularly in relation to negative observations and noticings (Rossi, 2018; Schegloff, 1988: 119–27). What is surprising about disaffiliative accounts is thus not the fact that complaining is layered onto another action, but that speakers use accounts—which have been described as supporting affiliation—as the vehicle.
An example of this phenomenon is provided in (1). Here, a group of university students are sitting on a lawn. Jessica and Sarah are next to each other on a picnic blanket, with Sarah squarely positioned at the blanket’s center and Jessica on the edge with her legs on the grass. The group has been discussing the merits of sugar in one’s tea. After abandoning what appears to be the start of additional talk on this topic (line 1), Jessica asks Sarah to Move up—meaning to move away from the blanket’s edge—before launching an account of the request (lines 2 and 4)
The first part of the account—cuz I’m like really not on (line 2)—highlights Jessica’s own need. If Jessica stopped there, the talk would look like a routine account, with Jessica orienting to a possible disaffiliative implication of her action—impingement on Sarah’s freedom to position herself in space—by highlighting a justification for making the request. However, Jessica does not stop there. Instead, simultaneous with Sarah’s verbal granting and initial repositioning, Jessica continues, producing an explicit criticism by characterizing Sarah as hogging the whole thing (line 4). The characterization disaffiliates from Sarah by presenting her behavior—and specifically her position on the blanket—as inappropriately selfish relative not only to Jessica but to all others who might want to sit. This retrospectively casts Jessica’s initial account (I’m like really not on) as a blaming (Pomerantz, 1978).
Insofar as Jessica seeks to blame someone else for her own action, her account bares a surface similarity to scapegoating, a practice by which speakers reduce their own responsibility for an action by placing blame on someone else (Scott and Lyman, 1968: 50–51). However, while scapegoating disaffiliates from the targeted party, it does so at a distance while strengthening more proximal ties. Typical examples place blame on a mutually derided and absent third-party, sometimes a specific individual but often members of racial, ethnic, or religious outgroups (Bonikowski, 2017; Brubaker, 2017). By invoking an outsider, the speaker renders salient coparticipants’ membership in a shared social category, thereby both trading on and reinforcing social bonds derived from this imagined groupness (Brubaker, 2004; Sacks, 1989: 95–96; Whitehead, 2009). In sum, like other accounts, scapegoating usually seeks to reaffirm positive mutual relationships or to evoke sympathy from co-present interactants.
By contrast, in (1) Jessica uses an account as a vehicle for criticizing the actions of a co-present interlocutor, undermining proximal social ties. Sarah provides several pieces of evidence that she understands the account to be both disaffiliative and critical. Sarah first orients to accusatory aspects of Jessica’s turn with the reproaching, ‘Why you say tha:gh?’ (Stivers et al., 2024). This use of a why-interrogative solicits an account from Jessica and conveys the stance that the targeted action is unwarranted (Bolden and Robinson, 2011; Clift and Pino, 2020). As Jessica struggles to respond (line 8), Sarah provides her own account for her prior position (lines 9–12). This works against Jessica’s negative characterization of Sarah’s behavior by claiming that her previous location was occasioned by another person joining the group, and thus was initially other-attentive.
The existence of cases like this one presents a puzzle: If accounts are normally aimed at maintaining social relationships, why might a speaker produce an account that serves as a vehicle for actively disaffiliating from a coparticipant? In this paper, I use conversation analysis to investigate the production of disaffiliative accounts within request sequences. This focus is apt since—as actions that are central to the practical achievement of cooperation—requests are a particularly valuable context in which to study how interactants manage social solidarity (Clayman, 2002; Curl and Drew, 2008; Rossi, 2012). After describing my data and methodology, the analysis begins with disaffiliative accounts produced by requesters. I then examine two cases in which requestees use a disaffiliative account as part of a dispreferred response. Finally, I demonstrate that disaffiliate accounts can be produced in a variety of action contexts by drawing on a supplemental case in which a speaker rejects an offer with a disaffiliative account. Overall, I argue that speakers use such accounts to shift responsibility for the focal action onto a coparticipant, treating the speaker targeted for criticism—often but not always the recipient of the request—as having occasioned the action through some misbehavior. In showing that accounts are used not only to expiate speakers, but also as a vehicle for policing others’ conduct, this paper advances research on accountability, with broad implications for the study of morality in interaction.
Data and methods
This study uses conservation analysis (CA) as its methodological approach (Sidnell and Stivers, 2012). After initial observations led me to notice some first specimens of disaffiliative accounts, I conducted a targeted search of 19 hours of video-recorded naturally occurring interaction in American and British English. The data spanned diverse activities, including food preparation, mealtimes, games, and friends hanging out without a common task. The bulk of encounters involved informal interaction between people who knew each other well. All data were collected with the approval of relevant IRBs, following established CA procedures (Mondada, 2012). Most of the recordings analyzed come from the corpuses of two colleagues (Giovanni Rossi and Tanya Stivers). These were supplemented by data from the Language and Social Interaction Archive (2023).
To facilitate comparison, and to provide a structural anchor for analysis, I limited my search to accounts that were part of request sequences—whether within preliminary work, the base sequence, or post-expansion (Schegloff, 2007). Some researchers have distinguished between requests and directives (Craven and Potter, 2010), with the latter encoding no orientation to contingency or the recipient’s willingness. While this distinction points to important variations in turn design, this paper follows an alternative strand of literature that groups together actions that seek to get another to do something under the umbrella of ‘requesting’ due to these actions’ shared structural features (Rossi, 2012; Wootton, 1997; Zinken, 2016). As such, I focused on the benefactive import, rather than grammatical structure, of the focal turn. I considered something to be a request if it sought to launch an action or series of actions that, if completed by another, would benefit the initiator, or would contribute to the completion of a shared project in which both parties were engaged (Clayman and Heritage, 2014; Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Rossi, 2012).
Following prior studies, I treated something as an account if it was used to provide a reason for the action—thereby claiming a particular explanation as situationally relevant—regardless of whether this reason was linked to the action with an explanatory connective such as because (Antaki, 1994; Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1990; Parry, 2013). To be included in the collection, the account had to entail a challenge or criticism above and beyond that of the request to which it was connected. I excluded requests that were themselves highly disaffiliative, but where an account worked to mitigate or moderate this. This yielded a final collection of 28 disaffiliative accounts. Of these, 22 cases were produced by the requester and six by the requestee. I examined all cases to look for both variation and common patterns. I stopped collecting new cases when I had reached saturation and additional instances ceased to provide new insights.
Analysis
Across the collection, speakers use disaffiliative accounts to present the action to which the account is appended as caused by or responsive to a coparticipant’s misbehavior. In contrast to the functions associated with accounts in the literature discussed above, these accounts serve as a vehicle for delivering a criticism or challenge, thereby drawing attention to putative transgressions (see Schegloff, 2007:74; Stivers et al., 2023 on action layering). Such moves are risky, however, as other interactants may push back by providing alternative characterizations of their actions.
Requester-initiated disaffiliative accounts
Returning to (1), Jessica’s focal account presents Sarah’s conduct (rather than Jessica’s own desires or needs) as having occasioned the request, thus shifting responsibility for the requested action from the speaker and onto a coparticipant (in this case the requestee). Jessica’s disaffiliation cannot be explained as a strategy aimed at soliciting compliance, since Sarah readily begins to relocate and Jessica does not wait for Sarah’s response before producing the disaffiliative account. Rather, the action specifically targets and reproaches the prior violation.
Here, this shifting of responsibility works to overcome an attenuated deontic right to make this request at this moment (Stevanovic and Peräkylä, 2012; Chalfoun et al., 2024). Jessica has been sitting in approximately the same place for the previous 7 minutes, during which time she has actively participated in the conversation without providing verbal or embodied evidence that she is unhappy with her current position. As such, she has tacitly accepted her spot, making it awkward to launch a request at this point. Indeed, she had earlier been more squarely located on the blanket before moving off it as part of adjusting her legs. Two other participants in the interaction are fully on the grass, so the fact that Jessica is not on the blanket is not itself evidence of a problem. By accounting for her request by treating it as occasioned by Sarah, Jessica works to overcome this problematic environment by delivering a criticism.
We see a similar case in (2). Kerry, Ben, and James are housemates. Just before the start of the extract, they have been talking about Willow, who James has just started seeing. After shifting the topic to sex, Ben makes a dirty joke about Willow, in response to which Kerry—who is eating cold breakfast cereal—spit takes, laughing in a way that sprays milk onto her computer. Kerry then fetches paper to wipe up the mess. The extract begins after she has finished cleaning the laptop and has returned to work.
As Ben begins relating an anecdote, Kerry enters loudly to complain about the results of the milk incident (lines 1–3). After repeating the part of his turn that occurred in overlap (line 4), Ben delivers a request with a through-produced account to Kerry: ‘Can you get the
The account is hearable as disaffiliative in that it works to treat Kerry’s own comportment—and specifically her disattention to the milk on her face—as the reason for the request. Here, Ben’s recycling of the milk and your chin draws attention to the problem (Schegloff, 2002). He also characterizes Kerry’s conduct as not a good impression, which specifically thematizes the negative valence of milk on her face, thus highlighting the turn’s disaffiliative import. Notice that Ben does not orient to the possibility that Kerry might not be aware of the milk on her chin, instead treating its presence as something for which she is culpable. In contrast to (1), where the requestee resisted the criticism done via the focal account, Kerry complies without a verbal response (line 7). However, James characterizes Ben’s turn as disaffiliative (lines 10 and 12), unfavorably contrasting the latter’s behavior to the standard of good impression (Pino, 2018).
As in (1), Ben’s making the focal request in this context is problematic, both because it impinges on Kerry’s bodily autonomy and because drawing attention to the milk on her chin would more typically be done with verbal noticing (e.g. You’ve got something on your chin) or with a gesture (e.g. tapping on one’s own chin to indicate the spot). As such, the disaffiliative account occurs in a context where Ben has attenuated deontic rights to launch the request and works to overcome this by shifting responsibility onto Kerry.
In (1) and (2), the target disaffiliative accounts are through-produced as part of the base sequence of the initial request attempt. However, speakers may also produce disaffiliative accounts in situations where they have difficulty securing compliance. In these settings, the account escalates an ongoing course of action, thereby reinforcing the need for compliance. In (3), Ally and Brad are heading to a music festival at rush hour. Brad is driving and Ally is in the front passenger seat. As they enter the freeway, Ally—who is primarily responsible for the recording—adjusts the camera to focus on Brad. Shortly afterward, as part of an extended complaint about the traffic, Brad turns to the camera and delivers a comment to viewers of the video (not shown), during which he observes the camera’s new location. Brad then repeatedly requests that Ally put the camera back in its original position (lines 1, 5, and 7–8). Ally refuses, providing various reasons (lines 3, 4, and 6).
After multiple failed attempts, Brad reiterates the request with a post-positioned account that presents Ally as having ‘fucked it up’ (line 10). This characterizes her moving the camera in negative terms, emphasizing the relative inadequacy of its current location compared to earlier. Further, as in (1), he treats his request as occasioned by this (alleged) misbehavior. Since it [the camera’s position] was perfect before, the request would have been unnecessary in the absence of Ally’s repositioning. Ally responds by adjusting the camera (line 11). However, she also pushes back on his characterization of her actions with ‘I fucked
In the previous examples, the focal account served as a vehicle for delivering an on-record criticism of the requestee’s behavior. However, disaffiliative accounts can also target other co-present individuals. For example, in (4) a speaker uses a disaffiliative account to present a request to search for an item in a particular location as justified despite another interactant’s previous announcement that the item is not there. Jack and Isabella have invited Pam and Kevin over for drinks and games. The two couples are in the middle of the card game Apples to Apples when Pam receives a phone call. Whatever sound the phone makes is not audible on the recording. However, the participants’ reactions display that they can hear the phone vibrating but have difficulty identifying whose phone is going off.
Once they notice the phone call, the participants engage in a joint search to identify the source. After Kevin and Isabella both announce that they aren’t receiving the call (lines 6–9), Pam points across the table and says, ‘So the only thing left is my f:- purse.’ In response, Jack reaches off camera (line 13). While the video does not capture exactly what he does, his arm stays static, indicating that he does not reach inside the purse to look for the phone. After a short spell, he then withdraws his arm and announces, ‘Nope, (.) not your p
In line 29, Kevin makes the focal request, telling Pam to ‘
In line 30, Kevin launches into a turn that is projectable as a characterization of Jack. In the silence on line 31, Kevin looks off screen, likely monitoring Pam’s search. In line 32, Kevin completes his pending characterization of Jack, describing him as not the smartest ketchup in the bottle. The turn accounts for the request by presenting an unflattering characterization of Jack’s abilities, and, by implication, the accuracy of his earlier announcement regarding the purse’s contents. The account further treats the request as occasioned by Jack’s inadequate prior evaluation. Indeed, if Jack had passed the bag to Pam earlier, Kevin’s request would be unnecessary. As in (3), the account thus works to escalate the situation, reinforcing the request’s appropriateness in the face of a prolonged failed search. The video does not show when exactly Pam locates the phone. However, given the extended silence between the initiation and completion of Kevin’s turn, it is likely that he is waiting until the search is complete to produce the turn as an assessment, thus avoiding the search’s possible failure and ensuring that the critical evaluation is warranted.
Rather than disavow his request’s possible negative relational implications, Kevin’s account specifically highlights them. However, unlike the previous cases, this turn’s comparison of Jack to ketchup has a jokey quality that softens its disaffiliative impact while still drawing attention to problematic conduct (Drew, 1987; Edwards, 2005). Consistent with Drew and Holt’s (1988) analysis, the idiomatic quality of the turn—similar to ‘not the smartest tool in the shed’—orients to the inauspicious environment of the complaining aspects of the turn. Specifically, Jack’s presence complicates the complaint’s delivery. Kevin’s action thus evidences competing interactional projects, privileging an account for the request that draws attention to Jack’s problematic conduct, while simultaneously seeking to manage the action’s disaffiliative import through secondary elements of turn design. Despite this jokey quality, there is evidence that other participants orient to the account as disaffiliative. Specifically, Pam enters in competitive overlap with Kevin to provide an other-initiated account for why Jack might have missed the phone, thereby presenting an alternative version of the situation that avoids the implication of Jack’s incompetence (lines 33–34). In doing so, she works against the critical implications of Kevin’s turn.
Disaffiliative accounts by requestees
While requesters can use disaffiliative accounts to underline the reason for making the request, such accounts can also be produced by requestees in order to shift responsibility for a dispreferred response onto a coparticipant by treating the request as unreasonable. In (5), we see this done with an excuse. Here, Mom and her son Daniel are at the kitchen table, where Mom has been helping Daniel study for a test. Daniel’s older sisters (Sabah and Dina) are loudly talking about unrelated topics, resulting in repeated interruptions (the transcript starts during one of these). Daniel has already complained about the distracting impact of this talk to Mom without succeeding in getting his sisters to quiet down.
In line 1, Mom tells Daniel to study on his own—‘Okay, Sit down here with
We see a similar case in (6), here with an account for a non-answer response (Stivers and Robinson, 2006). Throughout dinner, Virginia has been lobbying her mother for a raise in allowance to ten dollars a week and has received repeated rejections. In lines 1–3, she reissues this request. In line 10, Mom refuses, accounting for doing so by invoking a lack of funds. Virginia reissues the request yet again (lines 12–13). She first acknowledges Mom’s account (‘I
Rather than answer, Mom produces a non-answer response (line 19) in which she accounts for not answering by characterizing Virginia’s request as nonsensical. Rather than treat herself as responsible for having made a dispreferred action, Mom claims that Virginia has not even produced the bare minimum needed to occasion a response, namely provide an adequate reason for her request. She thus works to shift responsibility for the non-answer onto Virginia through a characterization of Virginia’s prior turn. Providing further evidence of disaffiliation, in lines 19 and 21, Mom immediately shifts to criticizing Virginia’s behavior more generally, targeting the latter’s insistence in reissuing the request (see Drew and Holt, 1988 on the idiomatic expression). In doing so, Mom works to disavow the possibility that she does not understand what Virginia is after, treating the sense-making problem as not pertaining to the request itself but rather to Virginia’s justification in issuing it. In sum, in both (5) and (6), the disaffiliative account works to shift responsibility for the dispreferred response by treating the request as unreasonable through the implementation of a complaint.
Disaffiliative Accounts in Other Action Contexts: As noted above, my main collection was limited to requests. In (1–6), I argued that speakers use disaffiliative accounts in this action context to shift responsibility for an action onto a co-present interactant. However, disaffiliative accounts can be produced in a variety of action contexts with similar effects, likely indicating that this core usage reflects a generic property of the phenomenon. The following supplemental case from outside my main collection illustrates this. In (7), a speaker uses a disaffiliative account to do rejection in the face of persistent pressure to accept an offer, thereby treating the offer as unreasonable. We have already met Ally in (3). Here, she is in the kitchen with her mom and brother. Immediately before the start of the transcript, Ally has been pressuring her brother to drink some lemonade that Ally made earlier. Ally has placed the lemonade pitcher on the counter. In line 1, she announces at high volume, ‘E
In line 5, Ally offers Mom some lemonade, receiving a prompt rejection (line 6). Ally persists, accounting for doing so by claiming that the lemonade needs to be finished (line 7). In pushing for compliance despite resistance, and in providing a reason other than the recipient’s benefit, Ally reveals a potential ulterior motive for making the offer (Clayman and Heritage, 2014).
In competitive overlap with Ally, Mom again rejects (line 8), this time with the prosodically marked, ‘No^::.’ (Raymond, 2010). Following a silence (line 9), Mom then accounts for her rejection with, ‘I don’t want it.’ (line 10), displaying a stance toward the lemonade that is incompatible with the one taken by Ally, meaning the account is vulnerable to being treated as disaffiliative (Stivers, 2008). Moreover, Mom’s turn is simultaneously vulnerable to being heard as a criticism of the lemonade itself and, by extension, of Ally as the lemonade’s maker. Rather than accept Mom’s response—along with this potential negative implication—Ally specifically contradicts Mom’s account (line 12), thereby impinging into Mom’s epistemic authority (Bristol and Rossano, 2020; Heritage and Raymond, 2005).
In line 14, Mom upgrades to ‘I don’t (.) even li^:ke it.’, which shifts from a potentially temporary rejection to a permanent refusal. The use of even and the prosodic stress on like further reinforces the rejection’s upgraded nature by contrasting with Mom’s previous turn. Notice that Mom does not claim to not like lemonade in general, which might reflect her tastes and thus not be treatable as a complaint. Instead, she does nothing to forestall the inference that she is referring to this specific lemonade. After Ally expresses dissatisfaction (line 16), Mom further upgrades the disaffiliative import with ‘It tastes bad.’ (line 18), which shifts to an ‘object side’ formulation that treats the characterization as pertaining to the lemonade itself, not to Mom’s subjective and contestable stance toward it (Edwards and Potter, 2017). Thus, across a series of turns and in the face of continued pressure to accept, Mom accounts for her rejection with an increasingly negative characterization of Ally’s lemonade that sharply contrasts with Ally’s own stance toward the drink. While done in a different action environment from the cases discussed above (1–6), the accounts produced here do similar work, with Mom shifting responsibility for the rejection away from herself by denigrating what Ally has made and treating the offer as unreasonable. That Ally understands Mom’s action to be disaffiliative is evidenced by her evaluation of Mom’s conduct as brutal (line 23).
Conclusion
Previous research has documented that speakers use accounts to reduce responsibility for actions that are socially or interactionally problematic. Normally, this mitigates disaffiliation by disavowing relational reasons for problematic behavior. As such, the normative and relational aspects of accounts have tended to be lumped together. However, this paper identifies a special usage of accounts in which speakers explain their production of a request by providing a reason that works as a vehicle for challenging or criticizing a coparticipant’s behavior, thereby actively disaffiliating from the targeted party. While prior research has found that complaints are frequently done via other actions (Heinemann and Traverso, 2009; Pino, 2016; Rossi, 2018; Schegloff, 1988), this paper advances existing work by demonstrating that complaining can be done through accounts, a practice that has been quintessentially associated with affiliation.
I find that requesters use disaffiliative accounts to shift responsibility for making the request onto the targeted coparticipant by treating the action as occasioned by, or responsive to, some alleged misbehavior on the part of that coparticipant. By producing a disaffiliative account, the speaker thus treats a requested action as something that would not have been needed in the absence of the coparticipant’s misbehavior. In doing so, the requester may work to overcome attenuated deontic rights to make the request (1–2) or to escalate an ongoing course of action (3–4). Similarly, requestees may use disaffiliative accounts to shift responsibility for a dispreferred response, thereby treating the request as unreasonable (5–6). While I have focused on a particular action context (requests), speakers use disaffiliative accounts in other circumstances, including offers (7). As such, future research should analyze when and where speakers deploy disaffiliative accounts across a variety of action contexts to identify variation and similarity in usage across situational exigencies.
Speakers’ use of disaffiliative accounts indicates that the normative and relational work done by accounts are separable and (somewhat) autonomous, with speakers occasionally privileging the work of excusing or justifying their own actions over the maintenance of joint solidarity. While affiliation is usually supported by justification or the provision of excuses, interactants can disaggregate accounts’ normative and relational functions by articulating reasons for their actions that criticize coparticipants. These findings indicate limits to the production and preservation of positive social relationships as an explanation for the structure of interaction (see Schegloff, 1988) indicating that researchers should not presume affiliation to be interactants’ primary objective trans-situationally. At the same time, even when actors use accounts as vehicles for criticism, they may simultaneously display an orientation to the ongoing salience of maintaining social solidarity through elements of turn design or prosody, as with Kevin’s competing interactional projects and mitigated formulation in (4).
This paper contributes to a significant body of research on how disaffiliative actions provide insight into interactional morality (Dersley and Wootton, 2000; Drew, 1998; Heinemann and Traverso, 2009; Pino, 2018). Specifically, disaffiliative accounts should make researchers rethink the relationship between the provision of explanations and the management of normative expectations. Previous research has highlighted the defensive role of accounting practices, emphasizing how explanations work to mitigate fault, whether in anticipation of, or subsequent to, another’s reproach (see Stivers et al., 2024). This paper’s findings indicate that accounts can be used not only to expiate the speaker but also to police others’ behavior. Speakers use accounts to highlight and bring into the open other’s (putatively) problematic behavior, thereby working to define the situation in ways that provide a warrant for their own actions. However, as evidenced in (1), (3), and (7), such moves are risky and subject to retaliation from targeted coparticipants, who in various ways resist and seek to discredit the negative characterizations put forward in disaffiliative accounts. Rather than treating the applicability of normative strictures as self-evident, participants’ displays indicate ongoing struggles to define encounters in favorable terms.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Giovanni Rossi and Tanya Stivers for feedback throughout this paper’s development. Versions of this paper were presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis in June 2023 and at the Language Interaction and Social Organization unit at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks to the audience members for their insightful and thought-provoking comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based on work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract number HR 001122C0032.