Table Of Contentebook
THE GUILFORD PRESS
EvEryday Talk
Everyday Talk
Building and reflecting
Identities
SE c o n d E d I T I o n
karen Tracy
Jessica S. robles
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
© 2013 The Guilford Press
A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc.
72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012
www.guilford.com
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval
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Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tracy, Karen.
Everyday talk: building and reflecting identities / by Karen Tracy
and Jessica S. Robles. — Second edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4625-1147-1 (paper: acid-free paper)
1. Oral communication. 2. Identity (Psychology) 3. Ethnicity. 4. Speech
acts (Linguistics) 5. Social interaction. I. Robles, Jessica S. II. Title.
P95.T7 2013
302.2′242—dc23
2013012330
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed to the development and revision of the second
edition. Faculty and doctoral student colleagues at the University of
Colorado who participated in data sessions and used this book in their
classes contributed ideas about how the text could be improved. We par-
ticularly thank David Boromisza- Habashi, Bob Craig, Jess Hughes, Susana
Martínez Guillem, Nancie Hudson, Russell Parks, Bingjuan Xiong, and
Mike Zizzi. Thanks also to the many students who took the courses Dis-
course, Culture, and Identities at the University of Colorado and Intro-
duction to Language and Social Interaction at the University of New
Hampshire. Their questions, comments, and collective reactions helped us
determine what concepts needed to be explained better or required more
engaging examples. Cynthia Gordon and Kathleen Haspel deserve an espe-
cially emphatic thank-you. They read the revised text in its entirety, offer-
ing wonderful ideas about how to strengthen sections. In addition, the five
anonymous reviewers of the initial proposal contributed ideas that helped
us identify issues we wanted to give attention to in the revised edition. We
also thank Kristal Hawkins, Editor at The Guilford Press, for her timely
input and encouraging nudging.
v
Preface
The first edition of this book sought to bring the findings of discourse
analysis— a rich, interesting, and too often overlooked area of study—
into the mainstream of communication coursework. Its aim was to draw
attention to talk as the focal activity of ordinary life and to highlight how
talking is the means by which people express who they are and who they
want to be, and how it is the vehicle through which people build relation-
ships, as well as create relational problems. At work, in public meetings,
and in everyday social occasions, talk is the instrument that creates, exac-
erbates, and—not quite as often as we would like— solves troubles.
Everyday Talk assumes that some students will be reading this book
with no prior coursework in communication. As such, core concepts are
explained, key vocabulary is highlighted, and each chapter has a preview
and summary. In addition, references are used sparingly in the body of the
book. Although the intended focal audience is undergraduate students, the
book should also be useful to novice scholars (graduate students and aca-
demics new to discourse studies) as well. To facilitate scholarly engagement,
there are extensive notes, which identify authors responsible for ideas, dif-
ferences in terminology, and current debates. The notes also discuss how
we adapted or combined different viewpoints, our reasons for doing so,
and likely criticisms of the choices. Our hope is that this book will be useful
in a variety of teaching venues: in classes exploring social interaction, lan-
guage, and discourse analysis; in interpersonal and intercultural communi-
cation classes; in introductory courses in communication departments; and
in communication classes that are required as part of business, education,
or health science curricula.
The second edition, in which Jessica S. Robles joins Karen Tracy as
a coauthor, introduces a number of changes. First, examples have been
vii
viii Preface
updated to draw on the discourse research that has appeared in the past
decade. Second, a new chapter on genre has been added. After introducing
the idea of genre in everyday talk, six genres are described and linked to
identity- work. Third, an expanded concluding chapter features two case
studies composed of transcripts, Internet links to audio or video files, and
discussion questions. The cases are intended to help students integrate and
apply the ideas about identities and talk developed throughout the book.
Fourth, we have added discussions of texting, conversations on mobile
phones, and other social media in different chapters as they relate to the
concepts being discussed. Fifth, we have added more examples from non-
Western cultures to underscore the wide applicability of notions of talk and
identity. Sixth, we have provided a glossary that contains brief definitions
of all the terms introduced in boldface in the chapters. Finally, we made
a host of small changes throughout in an effort to explain concepts more
clearly and build greater cohesion with later chapters by referring to con-
cepts introduced in the earlier chapters.
A final note: The examples of everyday talk that we use in this book
are taken from studies appearing in discourse- analytic journals and books,
as well as from our own research and teaching materials. Whenever we
could, we have used actually occurring instances of talk to illustrate the
point being made; however, when we could not, we invented exchanges that
seemed plausible. We have labeled instances in the book as either excerpts
(actual instances of talk) or examples (imagined but plausible instances) to
make this distinction clear.
