ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

The discursive accomplishment of normality"

On 'lingua franca' English and conversation analysis
Alan Firth*
Department of Languages, Aalborg University, Havrevangen 1, DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark

Abstract

Lingua franca interactions in English - those exclusively involving nonnative speakers -

are common, everyday occurrences worldwide, yet have not been studied by conversation
analysts. By examining the naturally-occurring, work-related talk of management personnel
communicating in 'lingua franca' English, this paper explores a range of issues surrounding
the applicability of conversation analytic methodology to lingua franca talk-data. While con-
versation analysis (CA) does provide a basic methodology through which we are able to
describe in detailed ways how such interactions are sequentially and thus socially constructed,
consideration of the data type itself allows us to cast new light on some of CA's methods and
working assumptions. At the same time, the paper documents some of the various methods
through which participants do interactional and discursive work to imbue talk with an orderly
and 'normal' appearance, in the face of extraordinary, deviant, and sometimes 'abnormal' lin-
guistic behaviour.

1. Introduction

C o n v e r s a t i o n A n a l y s i s (hereafter, C A ) has e m e r g e d as one o f the most powerful

and influential m e t h o d o l o g i e s hitherto d e v e l o p e d to analyse talk and, in a wider
sense, social action. In its t h i r t y - y e a r d e v e l o p m e n t , b e g i n n i n g with H a r v e y S a c k s ' s
first Lectures on Conversation in 1964 (see Sacks, 1992a,b), C A has a c c u m u l a t e d an
array o f findings on the nature and social organization o f what S c h e g l o f f (1987) has
referred to as its p r o p e r object o f study: ' t a l k - i n - i n t e r a c t i o n ' . t Building upon eth-
n o m e t h o d o l o g i c a l foundations, w o r k within C A has d e m o n s t r a t e d that ordinary,
interactive talk m u s t p r o p e r l y be v i e w e d as a locally and delicately a c c o m p l i s h e d

* E-mail: firth@hum.auc.dk; Fax: +45 98 13 80 86.

Limitations of space obviate an exposition of CA's findings, concepts and working methods. Useful
and detailed overviews can be found in Heritage (1984: ch. 8), Zimmerman (1988) and Psathas (1995).
Collections of CA studies include Schenkein (1978), Psathas (1979), Atkinson and Heritage (1984),
Button and Lee (1987), Boden and Zimmerman (1991), Drew and Heritage (1992), and ten Have and
Psathas (1995).

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

PII 0378-2 166(96)00014-8
238 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

a c h i e v e m e n t , and that the ' n o r m a l ' and 'routine' appearances o f talk are the result of
the participants' ceaseless and contingent application of complex though methodic
practices. Utilising transcripts of naturally-occurring talk, conversation analysts have
viewed as their major task both the explication o f those methodic practices and the
detailed description o f how talk is sequentially structured and interactively managed.
Although practitioners have maintained that casual conversation is the 'basic',
'primordial' form, or 'bedrock', of all forms of talk (see, e.g., Sacks et al., 1974:
730; Zimmerman, 1 9 8 8 : 4 2 4 425; Drew and Heritage, 1992: 19), the epithet 'talk-
in-interaction' informs us that the researchable domain of C A is not restricted to
'casual' or ' m u n d a n e ' conversation. Over the last decade in particular, a good deal
of CA-based research has begun to examine a wide range of non-conversational
interactions, most o f which are located within institutional or workplace settings and
practices (e.g. classrooms, courtrooms, emergency services, doctors' surgeries, jour-
nalistic interviews, and political speeches). 2 Yet there remains a large number of set-
tings, talk-based practices and data types that have not been subjected to conversa-
tion analytic scrutiny. Indeed, if we begin to examine the data types analysed in
studies o f 'casual' conversation or institutionally-anchored talk, a picture emerges of
an enterprise that has shown a remarkably consistent though restricted interest in the
talk of ' n o r m a l ' a d u l t s who are members of the s a m e c u l t u r e 3 and who share and use
the s a m e n a t i v e l a n g u a g e - in the majority of cases the English language. 4.5
As I want to show here, the implications of this restricted focus are important for
a number of reasons, though have rarely been addressed within the literature. A com-
m o n working assumption within CA, for example, is that the analyst is able to make
observations on the data transcripts partly on the basis of his or her c o - m e m b e r s h i p
of the participants' linguistic-cultural community. Some of Sacks's earliest work
was based on the observer-analyst sharing - with the parties observed - access to
culturally-based knowledge of such things as ' e v e r y d a y ' scenes and social roles:
" w e can use that information which we have as members of the same society that
these ... people are in" (Sacks [Lecture 14, 1964], 1992a: 116). Co-membership,
then, is a resource for both analysts and participants alike. It is on this basis that the
analyst's "intuitively plain observations" (Jefferson and Schenkein, 1978: 170, fn.

2 For a recent review of this work, see the introductory chapter in Drew and Heritage (1992). The col-
lected studies in Drew and Heritage (1992) are representative of current institution/work-related CA
studies.
3 For the sake of the argument to be developed in this paper. I am at this juncture using the term 'cul-
ture' as a commonsense notion that implies a community's shared "system of standards for perceiving,
believing, evaluating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1971: 41). This is not to deny that such a 'system' is
locally enacted and situationally motile.
4 Some conversation analysts might claim that categorizations such as cultural membership are rele-
vant only insofar as they are made 'procedurally relevant' in the talk itself (see, e.g., Schegloff, 1991).
However, in light of the remarkable uniformity of data types examined in CA, it appears that - implic-
itly at least - such categorizations do have relevance for analysts, in their selections of data materials.
5 Of the (relatively few) conversation-analytic studies undertaken on languages other than English, see,
e.g., ten Have's (1987) work on the Dutch language, Moerman's (1988) and Bilmes's (1992) studies on
Thai. Bergmann (1987) on German, and Lindstr6m on Swedish (1994).
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragrnatics 26 (1996) 237-259 239

10) are considered warrantable, the supposition being that, since I as an analyst
' k n o w ' or 'belong' to the participants' linguistic and cultural community, I can war-
rantably recognize situationally (ab)normal, (dis)orderly - and hence describable -
ways of doing things.
Moreover, the interactants whose talk is examined are presumed to share knowl-
edge of, and equal access to, a c o m m o n linguistic code, which is itself underpinned
by a shared and stable linguistic and interactional competence. Analysts have thus
been able to propose the existence of 'standard' or 'patterned' deployment of con-
versational phenomena [e.g. so-called 'change-of-state' tokens (Heritage, 1984) and
proverbs (Drew, 1994)], and that parties 'share' knowledge of conversational prac-
tices. Claims have been made that participants orient to 'standard' silences (of one
second) (Jefferson, 1987), or have 'canonical' ways of opening (Schegloff, 1986)
and closing telephone interactions (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973), taking and coordi-
nating turns at talk (Sacks et al., 1974), doing 'repair work' (Schegloff et al., 1977),
talking about 'troubles' (Jefferson, 1988), and more. It is through the social and
local accomplishment of these (and other) practices, Michael Moerman (1988) has
argued, that people are able to enact, reproduce and confirm their common cultural
membership.
It is not the intention of this paper to challenge the veracity of such work, for I am
convinced of the integrity of the findings made, and of the inherent soundness of the
assumption of a commonality of individuals who for all practical purposes share lin-
guistic and interactional competence. After all, as analysts have shown, such shared
competence is procedurally though tacitly demonstrated by the participants them-
selves in their 'normal', 'routine', 'orderly', and 'recognizable' interactions with one
another (on this, see esp. Schegloff and Sacks, 1973: 290). What I want to do here
is to enter into the equation a data type that - at least in theory and, at certain
moments, in practice - renders problematic an assumption of a common community
of language users - professional analysts included - who share a developed and sta-
ble linguistic and interactional competence. The data I am referring to is a type of
spoken interaction within which participants typically make unidiomatic and non-
collocating lexical selections, and where the talk throughout its duration is com-
monly ' m a r k e d ' by dysfluencies, and by syntactic, morphological, and phonological
anomalies and infelicities - at least as such aspects are recognized by native-speaker
assessments. 6 This is the naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction produced by non-

6 Two important caveats are in order. First, in making these cursory observations I do not wish to be
seen to be making evaluative assessments of the data type to be considered here. Indeed, as I attempt to
show, although the non-native speaker data evidence various kinds of non-standard and 'marked' usage,
a remarkable feature of these interactions is the fact that the participants are routinely able to overcome
such apparent linguistic anomalies and accomplish their practical, work-related tasks. Second, I am not
implying that all non-native speaker interactions are characterizable in this way. As explained below, the
observations made in this paper are restricted to a data corpus of naturally-occurring non-native speaker
interactions engaged in within two specific work settings. While acknowledging that some - indeed,
many - non-native interactions may be hardly distinguishable from 'ordinary' native speaker interactions
in terms of observable linguistic and conversational competence, it is reasonable to regard the linguistic
 240 A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

native speakers of (in this case) English. Here, English is used as a 'lingua franca'
- a 'contact lan g u ag e' between persons who share neither a c o m m o n native tongue
nor a c o m m o n (national) culture, and for w h o m English is the chosen foreign lan-
guage of c o m m u n i c a t i o n .7
Although foreign-language, or lingua-franca, interactions are an extremely com-
mon, ev en quotidian, occurrence in m a n i f o l d settings throughout the world - and
particularly English lingua franca interactions8 - such interactions have been over-
looked by conversation analysts (though see Jordan and Fuller, 1975). In light of
this, a n u m b e r of basic questions require attention. For example: are C A ' s working
assumptions (on, e.g., orderliness in talk) and findings (on, e.g., the sequentially-
based m a n a g e m e n t of talk) equally as applicable in linguafranca interactions as they
are in the analysis of m o n o l i n g u a l talk? A n d is C A methodology a m e n a b l e to the
analysis of linguafranca interactions? 9 The argument developed in this paper is that,
while C A does provide a basic methodology through which we are able to describe
in detailed ways how lingua franca interactions are sequentially and thus socially
constructed, consideration of the data type itself allows us to cast new light on C A ' s
methods and working assumptions. At the same time, an attempt is made to show
that addressing lingua franca interactions from a conversation analytic perspective
will contribute to an improved general understanding of (1) the nature of conversa-
tional competence, and (2) t h e linguistic and interactional resources deployed and
required in order to conduct m ean i n g f u l , orderly and indeed ' o r d i n a r y ' discursive
practices.

and interactional features observable in the current corpus as representative of a fair proportion of
comparable naturally-occurring non-native interactions, at least amongst management personnel in the
(non-English-speaking) industrialized world.
7 In an earlier paper (Firth, 1990) I proposed a conceptual distinction between English as an intrana-
tional "lingua franca' and as an international 'lingua franca'. The former refers to English used as a 'con-
tact language' within national groups whose first languages are mutually incomprehensible (e.g. in India
and Nigeria), whilst the latter refers to English used amongst different nationality groups (e.g. the native
Danish speaker interacting with a native speaker of Greek, a native speaker of Dutch and a Japanese
native speaker). While recognizing the rudimentary character of this dichotomy, and the number of bor-
derline cases it invokes, the 'international' understanding of 'lingua franca' is nevertheless represented
in a large number of clear-cut cases.
8 Althoughthere are at least 360 million native speakers of English world-wide, Sir Randolph Quirk,
writing in The Sunday Times on 17 April, 1994, estimates that on a global basis non-native speakers of
English now outnumber native speakers. This tells us very little of non-native competence in nor use of
English, however. Certainly English is the world's most studied and geographically widespread lan-
guage, the implications of which have only relatively recently begun to attract commentators' and
researchers' serious attention. Bryson (1990: 177) notes that "there are more people learning English in
China than there are people in the United States", and McCrum et al. (1987) claim that nearly half of all
business deals in Europe are conducted in English. Dinyon and Greaves (1989: 14) describe English as
the "lingua franca sine qua non" in the European Union's headquarters in Brussels.
9 Such questions are not restricted to 'lingua franca' talk, but are likely to be of relevance for a range
of (potentially) 'non-standard' linguistic-performance materials, including the talk of aphasics, the men-
tally retarded, the senile, and very young children - to name but a few.
 A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 241

2. Lingua franca data

The point should be made from the outset that this paper is not addressing all
potential 'lingua franca' interactions, and therefore does not claim to cover the man-
ifold settings, activities and levels of proficiency within which such talk commonly
occurs. Rather, the observations and discussions are restricted to a corpus of audio-
recorded data from two Danish international trading companies. The discussions
here should thus be seen as initiatory and preliminary. The data examined are a col-
lection of telephone calls involving Danish export managers and their international
clients. In the Danish companies concerned, international communications are
invariably conducted in English. 10 Most frequently, such interactions are of the 'lin-
gua franca' type; i.e., they exclusively involve normative speakers.
The telephone calls comprising the present corpus are visibly 'business calls'.
That is, through their discourse actions, the participants overridingly display an ori-
entation to the work-related nature of their interactions, and by so doing reflexively
accomplish the 'business-like' character of the calls. 11 The 'business' involves sell-
ing and buying commodities (foodstuffs and micro-electronics).
From a conversation analytic perspective, the notion of 'lingua franca interac-
tions' is an analyst construct, potentially without procedural relevance (i.e. rele-
vance that is demonstrable in the talk itself; see Schegloff (1991)) for parties so cat-
egorized. The notion, then, is comparable to such categorizations as, say, ' w o m e n ' s
interactions' or 'old aged persons' interactions'. And yet, as we shall witness
presently, the notion does have some real-world (members') validity, in that parties
to lingua franca interactions on occasions do make the 'lingua franca' status 'proce-
durally relevant' for the production and management of talk.
As a conceptual categorization, however, the 'lingua franca' epithet does have
some advantages, particularly when contrasted with more ideologically-fused cog-
nates such as 'foreigner talk', 'interlanguage talk', or 'learner interaction', t2 For in
contrast to these latter-mentioned categorizations, the term 'lingua franca' attempts
to conceptualize the participant simply as a language user whose real-world interac-
tions are deserving of unprejudiced description, rather - as these latter categories -
than as a person conceived a priori to be the possessor of incomplete or deficient
communicative competence, putatively striving for the 'target' competence of an
idealized 'native speaker'.

~o A study conducted in 1988 for the Danish Council of Trade and Industry (Hesselberg-M011er, 1988)
reported that, for Danish companies, English is used in over 80% of all international business contacts
and communications.
ii This is not to claim that the calls do not contain phases of activity which are 'social' or 'non-work'
related. On some occasions during some calls, parties engage in 'casual talk' (see Firth, 1995) on such
topics as the weather and vacation plans. However, such topics are typically evanescent, and invariably
occur at very early stages of the calls. They are, moreover, made to appear as 'preliminary' to the work-
related reason for the call.
12 Such studies include Gass and Varonis (1985), Long (1983), F~erch and Kasper (1983), and
Bialystok (1990).
242 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

3. Lingua franca talk

What, then, do 'unprejudiced' descriptions of lingua franca interactions reveal?

Seen in terms of the participants' orientations to their own concerted activities, the
dominant impression is that lingua franca talk is not only meaningful, it is also 'nor-
mal' and, indeed, 'ordinary'. The crucial point, though, is that the talk is made 'nor-
mal' and 'ordinary' by the participants themselves, in their local discursive practices.
That is, the orderly and 'normal' character of the talk is an accomplished and con-
tingent achievement, sustained through locally-managed interactional, interpretive
and linguistic 'work'. Such 'work' is fundamentally predicated upon the situated
application of a range of conversational mechanisms and resources as these have
been explicated and described in numerous studies of monolingual casual conversa-
tions. However, preliminary observations suggest that, at times, the mobilization of
conversational mechanisms and resources can be done differently in some circum-
stances, thereby giving rise to different kinds of 'interactional work' than has been
accounted for previously in monolingual studies. Such 'interactional work' has two
major aims: first, to pursue, through talk, substantive institutional goals (e.g. to
agree upon conditions of economic exchange); second, to furnish the talk with a
'normal' and 'ordinary' appearance in the face of sometimes 'abnormal' and 'extra-
ordinary' linguistic behaviour.
In order to see this, consider, first, the following extract, where H, the Danish
seller, has called G, an Indian buyer (transcript conventions are reproduced in an
appendix to this paper):

(1)
1 H fine than(k) you (.) you know now the summer time had- t-come to D'nmark
2 as well (.) hh:uh ((laugh))=
3G =((laughing)) huh hh:eh heh heh heh:.hh
4H so for:: the:- us here in Denmark it's hot (.) it's uh twenty five degree, (.) .hh
5 but for 2L[o__~uit will be-
6G [ya:h,
7H it would be "['cold (.) I think
8G n___oo,here in this pwu:h forty- forty tw___.QO
9H y_~?
l0 (1.0)
llH [[well
12 G [[yes
13 (1.o)
14 H well I prefer twendy five. (.) it's better to m__ee
15 (0.9)
16 G yeah

Even a superficial examination of the linguistic encoding in this extract indexes the
talk as 'nonnative'. There are grammatical infelicities (e.g. H's 'now the summer
time had come to Denmark', line 1 ; H's 'twenty five degree', line 4; H's 'it's bet-
ter to me', line 14), unidiomatic clause constructions (e.g., G's 'here in this forty,
forty two', line 8), and prosodic and pronunciation variants that furnish the talk with
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 243

a 'nonnative' timbre. Also noteworthy is an apparent misunderstanding arising in

lines 4-9. Judging from G's utterance at line 8, it appears that H's 'in Denmark it's
... twenty five degree(s) but for you it will be- it would be cold' (lines 4-7) is heard
not as a comparative (i.e. 'but that temperature would be cold by your standards') -
as it is surely intended - but as an estimation of the current climatic conditions in
Saudi Arabia (i.e. 'it must be cold in Saudi Arabia now'). To G, moreover, this is an
estimation that is wide of the mark, hence his 'disagreeing' turn-initial no, followed
by here in this forty, forty two at line 8.
Now while one could attempt to account for the cause of the misunderstanding as
H's opaque formulation (at lines 5 and 7), or G's reduced receptive proficiency aris-
ing from his non-native status, the central issue from a conversation analytic per-
spective is that, since neither party orient to or display awareness of the 'misunder-
standing' (see H's subsequent 'yes?' at line 9, and G's 'yes' at line 12), it is
rendered interactionally irrelevant. If H was cognizant of G's apparent misunder-
standing, we may reasonably surmise that he 'let it pass', since at this sequential
moment, and during this particular activity in the call, the misunderstanding was
adjudged to be inconsequential or, as Jordan and Fuller (1975) put it, 'non-fatal'.
The same can be said of the grammatical, phraseological, phonological and prosodic
infelicities throughout this segment. As this paper shows, participants demonstrate a
remarkable ability to systematically and contingently - and on the basis of quintes-
sentially local considerations - attend and disattend to a range of anomalies and infe-
licities in their unfolding interaction.
For conversation analysts, what is analytically important in this regard, then, is the
participants' orientations to, and reflexive accomplishment of, interactional order in
the unfolding talk. Through the conjoint management of topic, the orderly distribu-
tion of turns at talk and the participants' orientations to a basic 'rule' of interaction,
namely that 'one party talks at a time', through a demonstrable reliance on the
assumption that utterances are sequentially linked, that is, a reliance on and deploy-
ment of what Sacks called 'the fundamental ordering principle', through a proclivity
to let grammatical and pronunciation (etc.) anomalies and misunderstandings 'pass'
where these are adjudged to be transparent and/or interactionally 'non-fatal', what
the interactants are doing is both constructing order and letting the appearance of
order prevail. Thus the supposition of normality is reflexively underpinned by the
'normal' though contingent deployment of the mechanisms and resources of interac-
tive talk.

3.1. 'Let it pass'

The 'let it pass' concept, emanating from Schutzian phenomenological sociology,

is an 'interpretive procedure' (Cicourei, 1973) that hearers adopt when faced with
problems in understanding the speaker's utterance. The hearer thus lets the
unknown or unclear action, word or utterance 'pass' on the (common-sense)
assumption that it will either become clear or redundant as talk progresses. This
procedure would appear to be a commonly-deployed resource in lingua franca inter-
actions, though is by no means unique to such interactions. However, despite the
244 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

c o n c e p t ' s intuitive appeal, it is generally difficult to handle in conversation analytic

terms. For it is often the case that we cannot know whether the ' p r o b l e m ' was
missed by the hearer (but not by the analyst), or whether it was heard or seen by the
hearer and allowed to pass. The central methodological point, again from a C A per-
spective, is that one focuses analytic attention on the participants' demonstrable
orientations and relevancies as these are publicly displayed and continuously
updated.
In the following extract, the Dane, H, is talking to B, a Syrian. Here it is possible,
on the basis o f displayed orientations, to identify both the 'let it pass' procedure in
operation, and its interactional consequence:

(2)
IB ... so I told him no___!to u: :h send the:: cheese after the- (.) the blowing (.) in
2 the ?customs
3 (0.4)
4 we don't want the order after the cheese is u: :h (.) blowing.
5H I see, yes.
6B so I don't know what we can uh do with the order now. (.) What do Y._Q.U_
7 think we should uh do with this is all "l'blo:wing Mister Hansen
8 (0.5)
9H I'm not uh (0.7) blowing uh what uh, what is this u: :h too .~g or what?
10 (0.2)
liB n._.oothe cheese is "['bad Mister Hansen
12 (0.4)
13 it is like (.) fermenting in the customs' cool rooms
14 H ah it's gone off?.
15B yes it's gone off,l,
16H we: :11 you know you don't have to uh do uh an__~thing because it's not ...
((turn continues))

In retrospect we can observe that B ' s use of the term blowing (lines 1 and 4) is
unknown to H, though initially he lets it ' p a s s ' (line 5). However, in the ensuing talk,
and now building upon a presumed (and displayed) ' c o m m o n ground', B asks H a
direct question relating to the ' b l o w i n g ' cheese (lines 6-7). At this stage, H is c o m -
pelled to display - to make public - his unfamiliarity with the term. Clarification
takes the form of an 'insertion sequence' (Sacks, 1992b: 528 [Lecture 1, 1972],
Schegloff, 1972), constituted by turns in lines 9-15. H ' s ' a n s w e r ' is finally forth-
coming in line 16.
Briefly, what this extract shows is two things: first the interactional vulnerability
of the 'let it pass' procedure, and second the fact that participants, regardless of their
different cultural m e m b e r s h i p and/or varying linguistic ability, m a y act as if they
understand one another - even when they in fact do not - unless and until special
techniques are deployed to challenge the assumption of mutual understanding. This
extract is thus a vivid example of the way parties treat verbal interaction as both the
product and the source of mutual understanding (see Taylor, 1992: 214). And, more-
over, it is on the taken-for-granted basis of an assumed mutual understanding that
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 245

parties to talk - monolingual or lingua franca - are able to achieve their practical
ends.13

3.2. 'Make it normal'

The notion of 'let it pass' carries an implication o f passivity on the part of the
hearer, though it is more accurate to say that the hearer is actively though implicitly
engaged in the task o f attempting to make sense of what is being done and said. On
m a n y occasions, faced with the other party's marked lexical selections and unid-
iomatic phrasings, the hearer behaves in such a way as to divert attention from the
linguistically infelicitous f o r m of the other's talk. This c o m m o n l y precludes, for
example, doing 'other repair' and 'candidate completions' - actions that potentially
make manifest the other party's encoding-related difficulties. The orientation, which
appears to have maxim-like qualities in these data, serves to effectively make the
other's 'abnormal' talk appear 'normal'. One way o f doing so is by producing
'upshots' or 'formulations' o f the other's ' m a r k e d ' or opaque usage. Consider
Extract 3; B is Syrian, H is Danish, e m p l o y e d by ' M e l k o ' dairies:

(3)
1B ... SMelko is the reputation in the Syrian market=it's a ve:ry good names
2 (0.4)
3H yes?
4B you have a v:ery good "['name, very good uh reputation in the Syrian
5 market
6 ---).hh an' that's why I don' wa:nt uh there to be:: at the same time it's the TOP
7 (pe) for united products
8 (1.0)
9 ---)THE "]'TOP OF THE WORSTS
10 (0.8)
IlH of [course that will co:st]
12B [an' so that's why ] =I don' want the same thing to be LINKED with
13 United products=saying that Melko is going with United products by the
14 worst qua:lity:
15 (0.4)
16H of course not because uh that wi:ll destroy the brand name
17B yes

Here, in lines 4--7, B says: 'it's the top for United products, the top of the worst',
referring to one o f H ' s competitors. At lines 12-14, B remarks: ' M e l k o is going with

~3 Considering the nature of the work being engaged in, and the relationships of the interlocutors in the
calls recorded, one can surmise that, as a general rule, the parties are highly motivated to focus on the
substantive content component of their interaction and thus to concomitantly minimize and/or overcome
potential linguistic and interactional problems associated with the form of the interaction (see also
Stalpers, 1993: 1). This general orientation does not preclude, of course, the ceaseless local management
and assessment of linguistic problems.
246 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

United products by the worst quality'. Rather than drawing attention to the (abnor-
mal) form (e.g. going with and by the worst quality) of B ' s utterances - to the 'sur-
face' o f discourse encoding - H focuses on the substratum of message content, offer-
ing upshots (at lines 11 and 16) which indicate understanding of and agreement with
what has been seen to have been said. j4
This orientation can also be seen in Extract (4):

(4)
1B and u : : : h the problem is the quality after being uh released from the customs
2 two weeks later .hh (0.2) they started with this oroblem
3 (0.7)
4I-I --)their::: yes their::: u:h (0.2) their cartons- k- their bricks get u : : : h (.) blowing
5 uh [like the balloons]
6B [yah that's it ] yeah the bricks g- get blowing and uh they had
7 suffering=they have a very bad reputation (.) very : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ((2.8
8 sec. sound stretch)) (.) worse name.hh commercial name in the market

At line 7, B produces an extraordinarily long (3-second) sound-stretch on the final

syllable of the word very, followed by a micro pause, during which he is quite
clearly 'searching' his mental lexicon for a subsequently appropriate word (adjec-
tive) or expression (note, incidentally, that his choice of very ... worse name is lexi-
cally marked). However, rather than offering a 'candidate completion' of the other's
turn at talk (and one m a y deduce that a completion would have been at least feasible
here), H, it appears, resists doing so. Such activity typifies the corpus as a whole,
where there are strikingly few 'candidate completions' of others' talk in components
o f turns where completions would appear to be viable and legitimately 'guessable'.
Extract (4) is also noteworthy in another regard, since it displays an additional
resource which parties to lingua franca talk routinely exploit, and which in many
ways shows how the talk m a y evince differences from monolingual interactions.
This is the practice of incorporating - into o n e ' s own turn - marked lexical and
grammatical resources furnished by the other party. N o w while the phenomenon of
incorporating co-participants' expressions, grammatical constructions and wordings
directly into o n e ' s own turn has been described in monolingual talk (see, e.g., Good-
win and Goodwin, 1986), the interesting and perhaps previously unobserved feature
of its deployment here is the incorporation of unidiomatic, or ' m a r k e d ' , usage into
o n e ' s own turn.J3 In this extract (4), which occurred shortly after the talk reproduced
in extract (2), H now uses the previously unfamiliar term ' b l o w i n g ' in his turn,

t4 We must allow for the possibility that the recipient (H) was not cognizant of the linguistic abnor-
malities in the other's talk. This proviso does not invalidate the point being made, however, since in the
corpus as a whole there are very few instances where marked (often almost opaque) usage is followed
by other-repair. This issue clearly demands further considered attention.
15 Jefferson (1987), for example, found the opposite phenomenon in her study of mono-lingual con-
versational talk, that being the activity of rephrasing or reformulating the other party's errant usage in
one's own turn in such a way that the rephrasings effectively 'corrected' the deviant form. Jefferson
referred to this phenomenon as 'embedded repair'.
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragrnatics 26 (1996) 237-259 247

though its grammatical construction (the 'get' + 'blowing' form, as in: 'their bricks
get blowing', line 4) is marked. In next turn, B reproduces both the 'blowing' term
and the marked grammatical construction (line 6). As well as demonstrating close
monitoring of the co-participant's talk, and an ability to re-use the linguistic
resources provided in the other party's turn, the extract also demonstrates that par-
ticipants can learn and use known (and also nonstandard) resources as they become
known-in-common during the talk itself.
A related phenomenon can be observed in Extract (5):

(5)
1B okay I will explain to you=actually: (.) .hh u: :h there is (.) %a very very
2 very bad impression regarding the five hundred grams the bricks in the
3 market%
4H I- I c'n understand that uh if there: have been so many: (.) bad uh::::::
5 ((sound stretch 0.5 secs.)) bricks in the market=
6B =right- yes .hh a:nd that's why uh the woolsale are refusing to buy actually
7 (.) the bricks
8 (0.3)
9H yes
10B a:nd at the same time they have uh goods 1"everyday returned to the shops$
11 (0.5)
12H yes I: see

In line 6, B ' s pronunciation of what must presumably be intended as wholesale is

actually encoded as woolsale. (B is a cheese wholesaler and is talking about
wholesalers' problems with 'bricks' [500 gram packagings] in the market). Judg-
ing by H ' s response at line 9, he lets the deviant pronunciation pass, presumably
because the sense of the utterance is contextually recoverable. Once again, this is
a case of utterance meaning consisting of significantly more than its constituent
(and what may be mispronounced and syntactically marked) parts. Again this is
a clear example of participants' remarkable ability and willingness to tolerate
anomalous usage and marked linguistic behaviour, even in the face of what
appears - to this analyst-observer at least - to be usage that is at times acutely
opaque. This in turn inevitably raises the important question - a question that can
only be touched on in this paper - of what kind of, and how much, anomalous and
marked usage can be tolerated by participants before intersubjective meaning is ren-
dered impractical.
With its focus on the fine detail of talk as retained in transcript form, CA method-
ology can awaken us to and can provide a set of resources for describing the local
practices and contingent methods through which participants accomplish both instru-
mental goals and intersubjective meaning. For activities and understandings are of
necessity ineluctably achieved on a sequential, turn-by-turn basis. By attending to
the ways in which participants make public their understandings, and thus conjointly
construct coherent activities, we can observe what are f o r them and at that par-
ticular sequential moment features of the talk that are 'opaque', 'transparent', or
otherwise.
248 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

3.3. lnteractional robustness

The observations made above permit us now to venture that, in some contexts and
during some specific language-based activities, talk is inherently more 'robust' and
better able to withstand anomalous and deviant linguistic behaviour than in other
contexts and/or activities. This is an empirical matter, and C A appears to be well
placed to allow such investigations. But C A cannot tell us carte blanche which lin-
guistic and/or interactional resources are essential, necessary, or optional in order to
sustain meaningful conversational involvement. CA was never developed for such a
task. Rather, C A provides a methodology that allows us to capture the way members
make situated assessments as to the 'robustness' of their activities, and the way
resources are deployed 'in flight', so to speak.
The following extract captures, with exceptional clarity I think, a talk-based activ-
ity that is less 'robust' in terms of its capacity to allow for linguistic and interactional
anomalies to be 'ironed out' implicitly, as we have noted in the cases above. Here M,
an Arabic native speaker, asks J, a Dane, to spell his (J's) name. What is almost
excruciatingly clear throughout the subsequent turns is that such an activity -
spelling names - is inherently 'fragile', that fragility being perhaps brought more
prominently to the fore when the name (or words o f any kind, for that matter) being
spelled is unfamiliar to the hearer. This element of fragility is crucially related to the
need - if indeed it arises - for an explicit and specific display, on the recipient's part,
of understanding following each and every turn. 16 Thus, for an exchange of approx-
imately ten turns, turn-size is reduced to one or two words (or syllables) per turn, as
J first says a letter, followed by M ' s repetition of the letter-as-heard, followed by J ' s
confirmation of the correctness or, as the case may be, 'repair', o f M ' s turn. While
the sequential organization of talk furnishes the parties with a critical resource for
the accomplishment and display of mutual understanding, the resources are in this
case made to bear a heavier interactional load than is ordinarily the case:

(6)
1 M allright (.) allright, so uh can I have uh (.) your name so he can call you
2 (0.2)
3 J .hh okay uhw (.) our: company: name is mel ko dairies,[,
4 M that I know very well
5 J an uh my name is e__fisbenje__n_nsen((as in 'yensen'))
6 (0.2)
7 M i:s what?
8 J e_.fisbenje_._n_nsen:
9 M can you spell it?

~6 Quite clearly it is not invariably the case that 'spelling names" demands a letter-by-letter turn con-
struction and turn exchange, as is required in the extract ((6)) examined here. And yet, as this case
proves, such an activity provides what I think is compelling evidence that some activities are, as a result
of the interactional and substantive demands they impose on the participants, inherently less 'interac-
tionally robust' than others.
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 249

10 J jay ee em, es__fisee [yem ((j. e. m. s. e. m.))

11 M [/3/ay?
12 J jay ee=((j, e.))
13 M =/3el/uh/3i:/for/3/aguar?
14 (0.5)
15 J eefor::: ~'e_gyptor
16 (.)
17 M ee for egypt
18 J yes
19 (.)
20 M ee ((e))
21 J emm ((m))
22 M emm ((m))
23 (0.4)
24 J sorry, enn ((n))
25 M en[n? ] ((n))
26 J [uh ] yes
27 (0.2)
28 J ' n ' es_~s((s))
29 M yah
30 (0.4)
31 J l"ee ((?a/e?))
32 M yah
33 J enn ((n))
34 M emm ((m))
35 (0.4)
36 J no sorry, en__.n(.) like uh l"n.aation or
37 M nations (.) so,l, Tee enn (.) essay ((a)) en.___n_n$((e.n.s.a.n.))
38 (0.6)
39 J uh "['jay ee enn (.) ess ee enn$ ((j.e.n.s.e.n.))
40 (0.2)
41 M yeah
42 (1.8)
43 M "['/3el/ee enn, ess ee enn?
44 J ~ that's correct
45 (0.2)
46 M all: :right,],

J tells M his full name at line 5. Upon being asked to 'spell it' (line 9), J (line 10)
actually elects to spell his last name, and this he does in its entirety within one-and-
the-same turn as /dsel/, /i:/, /em/, /es/, /i:/, /em/. The fact that J has pronounced
- in line 5 - his name as he would in Danish (where initial-position ' j ' is pronounced
/ j / ( a s i n / j e s / ( ' y e s ' ) rather than the English/dseff) m a y be the cause of M ' s appar-
ent desire to have the correctness of his hearing of the first letter confirmed by his
interlocutor. (Note M ' s / s e l / , produced with rising intonation, line 11.) By this stage,
we m a y observe that both participants pronounce English letters in non-standard (or
even deviant) ways; J pronounces n a s / s m / a n d M pronounces j as/Sel/. By line 12,
however, the non-standard usages are not oriented to, though they are visible in the
250 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

audio-recording (and retained in the transcript): M does not orient to J ' s mispro-
nounced n and J has not oriented to M ' s marked j. Following J ' s pronunciation of
each letter of the name 'Jensen', turn-change occurs, whereupon M either repeats the
letter-as-heard or utters ' y e s ' (or a token of the type, e.g. ' y a h ' , line 32). M ' s hear-
ing projects J ' s confirmation of its correctness or incorrectness in the subsequent
turn.
By this activity's very nature, perceived problems in understanding must be dealt
with immediately, rather than being allowed to 'pass'. That is, it is necessary, here
and now, for M not only to record his co-participant's (J's) name, but also to record
(spell) it correctly. As witnessed through his actions, J acknowledges the necessity.
Thus, for example, at lines 24 and 36, J 'repairs' a perceived problem displayed in
his interiocutor's immediately preceding turn.
In such an activity, then, the resource of providing an ' u p s h o t ' of the preceding
turn (as an implicit display of understanding), observed in extract (3) (above), is
non-viable. Here, during the 'spelling' activity, the need arises for the participants to
accomplish and to make explicit their substantive understandings on a turn-by-turn
basis.
In the following extract (6), both participants make the assessment not to 'let pass'
potentially problematic features of talk in the hope that they will subsequently be
rendered irrelevant or transparent. The issue here is whether or not commodities are
being sold at f i x e d weights. In this case it is not so much the activity itself (e.g.
spelling what is assumed to be - for the hearer - an unfamiliar name) that reveals the
lack of robustness - the fragility - of the talk; rather it is a need to clarify, at the next
turn 'transition relevance place', a specific detail in the other's talk. Such an assess-
ment results in the recipient doing discursive ' w o r k ' in order to explicate mutual
understanding:

(6)
1 H --~ yes .hh eh uh the quotation you have received, is that with fixed weight
2 (0.4)
3 because uh: we can g_¢2it with ah: (.) eh:¢uh:: different weights
4 on (.) each unit=but an averayge around four hundred
5 'n' fifty=but (.) they can be from four hundred to five
6 +hundred gra: m.,[,
7 (0.7)
8 but w__eehave decided to=
9 G ---) =NO +no. one uh l"fi___xxuh: this
10 four 'undred fifty ,[,grah [m.
11 H --~ [it's a fixed uh
12 (0.5)
13 G --) f[ixed]
14 H [(*)
15 G yes
16 H yes °ah uh °
17 G --~ four hundred fifty gram fixed
 A. Firth /Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 251

In order to examine and discuss briefly the CA notions of orderliness and partici-
pants orientations in talk I should like to undertake two cursory analyses of this
extract. The first analysis takes what we may submit to be the conventional CA posi-
tion - as outlined, for example, by Heritage (1984: 241) - that "no ... detail can be
dismissed a priori as disorderly [or] accidental", and encapsulated in Sacks's obser-
vation that " w e may ... take it that there is order at all points" (1984: 22). The sec-
ond analysis allows for the possibility that some order of detail may be accounted for
as a result of an a priori consideration of participants reduced linguistic (i.e. foreign
language) competence.

Analysis 1: The 'conventional' position

On line 1, H asks G whether a quotation received from a competing producer is
for 'fixed weight' cheese. As a general rule in this context, inquiring into the details
contained in a competitor's offer is a delicate matter. Note, then, that the question
has been formulated in such a way as to reveal the delicacy of the matter being
inquired about. This is displayed in the eh and uh in turn-initial position, as well as
in the 'account' for the question; the account begins at line 3. Research in CA has
shown that delay markers - such as 'uh' and 'eh' - and 'accounts' are indicators of
'delicacy' in talk (see, e.g., Heritage, 1988). The account for the question is occa-
sioned by G ' s lack of response at line 2. In the account H explains that his company
can supply multiple-weight cheese (which is normally regarded as more advanta-
geous and saleable than fixed weight). At the turn transition relevance place at line
6, G does not take the floor, although the 0.7 second ' g a p ' at line 7 suggests that he
is being given the opportunity to do so. Consequently, H 'self-selects' (Sacks et al.,
1974) and continues, and is apparently in the process of disclosing what his company
have 'decided'. It is at this moment, within H ' s turn, that G interjects with no no, one
uh f i x (line 9). It now appears that G, on seeing that H is constructing a case on the
assumption that the quotation received is for multiple-weight cheese (i.e. not fixed
weights), now sees the necessity to point out that the contrary is in fact the case. In
line 11 H seeks confirmation of this. ~7 G ' s confirmation is provided in line 13.

Analysis 2: The 'foreign language' position

H, seeing that no answer to his question is forthcoming, continues his turn at talk
on line 3 by accounting for his reasons for asking the question. This allows him to
emphasize the fact that his company can supply multiple-weight cheese, which is a
possible advantage over a competitor's quotation. In so doing, H orients to the pos-
sibility that G has not adequately understood the question. This he does firstly by
revealing his reasons for asking the question, and secondly by carefully stressing the

17 Note, first, G's equivocal juxtaposition of no, no andfix (line 9). H's question at line 1 projects yes
confirming the quotation is for fixed weights, no for multiple weights. Yet here G has juxtaposed no and
fix. Observe also G's usage; whereas H has used the adjectival -ed ending (fixed), G has not (fix). G
responds by confirming, though this time reproduces H's (standard) -ed (fixed) formulation (line 13).
This form is repeated in line 17. This is an instance of what Jefferson (1987) has described as 'embed-
ded repair'.
252 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

words different weights (line 3); the theme of 'different weights' is repeated in the
formulation f r o m four hundred to five hundred grams (lines 5-6). With the ques-
tion's answerability enhanced, G's answer is once again relevant at line 7. The 0.7
second 'gap', however, is again treated as being indicative of G's failure to under-
stand the question, as evidenced by H's new turn at line 8, which shifts the topic
from weights of cheese to decisions made by his company. Now, seeing that the
topic is being changed, and needing to address the question which wasn't adequately
understood, G responds to it at line 9, interrupting H and thus pre-empting a new
topic. G's formulation of 'fixed' - which is morphologically marked as f i x - and the
subsequently 'self repaired' standard grammatical formulation (fixed, line 13), sug-
gests unfamiliarity with the word, and hints at the cause of the problem in under-
standing.
These cursory analyses are provided for illustrative purposes only, for they
attempt to raise an issue that is encompassing, and I think important. While one of
CA's claimed 'fundamental assumptions' - namely that no detail can be dismissed a
priori as disorderly (cf. Heritage, 1984; Sacks's 'order at all points') - is a powerful
and fruitful analytic position, it is nevertheless predicated on an assumption that par-
ticipants are linguistically and conversationally competent, that the competence is
shared, fully developed, and stable. Thus features of talk that have been dismissed
(often by linguists; see Chomsky, 1964) as disorderly and inconsequential - e.g.,
laughter tokens (see, e.g., Jefferson, 1987), turn restarts (see, e.g., Schegloff, 1987),
uhs and ahs, and even silence (e.g. Levinson, 1983) - have been shown by conver-
sation analysts to be ordered, systematically placed, and both produced and
responded to with awesome precision. In the conversational data analysed in CA, the
assumption has been surely warranted, for the participants themselves operate with a
'default' assumption that competencies are fully developed, shared, and stable.
Yet as I hope to have at least suggested in the two juxtaposed analyses above, the
assumption is illustrative of a particular analytic 'mind set' that informs the way
conversation analysts approach data, including what participants are seen to be 'ori-
enting to' in their talk (on this, cf. Beach, 1990), and also, ultimately, what is seen
as viable and researchable topics. When we enter into the analytic equation the pos-
sibility that (some of) the participants have neither fully developed nor stable nor
shared competence and, more importantly, that they themselves demonstrate cog-
nizance of such a state of affairs, it would appear that analyses (of participants'
actions in the transcript) will be affected accordingly. Thus, for example, assigning
interactional significance to, say, restarts, 'gaps' and filled pauses is rendered poten-
tially more problematic. Because linguistic competencies vary and are unstable, a
greater array of variables appear to be operative; this in turn has the potential to pose
an additional set of problems for the analyst.
As I have tried to show, CA's resolution of such issues - which is to focus on
what the participants render interactionally significant - is also less straightforward
and transparent than one might initially suspect. Hence, as demonstrated above, with
restricted and/or unstable competence entered into the analytic equation, analyses
may be opened to considerations (including participants' orientations) that analysts
might otherwise overlook.
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 253

An additional implication of the data type considered here relates to CA's research
practices. Two prominent, even dominant, practices are (1) the discovery and expli-
cation of what might conveniently be termed conversational 'objects', and (2) a
focus on activities undertaken and accomplished through action-sequences.
'Objects' studied have included 'restarts', 'recycles', particles such as 'oh', individ-
ual words such as 'and' and 'no', proverbs, and laughter. These 'objects' are exam-
ined for their distribution in talk, how they are occasioned in talk, what 'trajectories'
or consequences follow upon their use, and their general interactional characteristics.
Most typically, such objects are examined across a (relatively large) corpus of tran-
scribed data. Studies of this nature have been based almost exclusively on recordings
of 'ordinary', casual, adult, monolingual conversation.
The focus on activities has dominated CA-based studies of work tasks and talk in
institutional settings, though is not restricted to such studies. Activities explicated
include how telephone calls are opened and closed, how members of the public ask
for and receive emergency assistance, how witnesses are cross-examined in court,
how plea-bargaining is undertaken, and how clinicians impart diagnostic news to
patients. On work of this nature, Drew and Heritage (1992: 17) observe that "CA
begins from a consideration of the interactional accomplishment of particular social
activities" (original emphasis).
It would seem to be reasonable to propose that 'lingua franca' materials - partic-
ularly the kind of materials examined in this paper - are more amenable to this sec-
ond research practice in CA, one of the reasons being that, when using lingua franca
materials, as an analyst one cannot so unproblematically assume (or, moreover, wit-
ness) the same degree of consistency, systematicity and stability in the use of con-
versational 'objects' as one can when examining monolingual corpora. What one can
focus upon, however, and in so doing retain the analytic rigour and detailed explica-
tion that is the hallmark of CA, is the way in which people go about the task of struc-
turing and accomplishing their social and practical goals. For it bears repeating that
such goals are of necessity achieved locally, on a turn-by-turn basis, using resources
that are transparent and publicly available for inspection. And the activities engaged
in are, moreover, made recognizable, and thus rendered 'orderly' and 'normal', by
the participants. Describing the sequential nature of such achievements is the legiti-
mate goal of conversation analysis, and is equally as challenging and legitimate
regardless of whether one analyses lingua franca materials or other types.

3.4. Lingua franca status

In lingua franca interactions, participants have different ways of dealing with their
status as nonnative speakers, and with what may be perceived as linguistic (foreign-
language) incompetence. As I have shown, most often participants 'do work' to
divert attention from the 'surface' features of talk, and are differentially able to dis-
attend to encoding difficulties and linguistic infelicities. On some occasions, though,
the participants' (perceived) lack of competence is made relevant in the talk, though
this can be achieved in different ways. Consider two instances. First Extract (7):
254 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

(7)
1 L ((Hungarian: name of company))
2 (0.4)
3 H yes he'l'llo: this is Hanne from "l'CellPhone
4 (0.2)
5 L oh$ '['hello [how are you? ]
6 H [he: $11o::]
7 (0.2)
8 H 1"fineS thank you an you::$
9 L .hh oh fine thank Syou
10 H how are sales going in SBudapest
II (0.3)
12 L oh (.) "['sorry'l"
13 (0.2)
14 H how are sales going in SBudapest=
15 L =o:h I think now its- its a little bit "['middle h(h)h, hh. middle power hu(h)
16 hu(h)h [h(h)u(h)
17 H [(h)o:k(h)a(h)y: :$
18 L it's not- it's not so "]'ni::ce
19 (0.2)
20 L .hh=
21 H =so [why's that
22 L [but it's going hh. h(h)hu(h)
23 H okay:

In line 14, H asks L, a Hungarian, h o w are sales going in Budapest?. L ' s response -
it's a little bit middle, middle p o w e r (line 15) is followed first by L ' s and m o m e n -
tarily later H ' s laughter. What does the laughter tell us about the participants' orien-
tations? I would venture that this displays mutual orientation to L ' s marked usage -
a little bit middle ... p o w e r . Moreover, by laughing at his own marked usage (and
note that L laughs first), L is not only displaying an awareness that the usage is
s o m e h o w marked, he is also displaying an orientation to the 'non-fatal', even humor-
ous, nature of the anomalous usage, and inviting H to do likewise.
Rather than dealing with usage problems or abnormalities in this implicit manner,
occasionally participants make their non-native status, and lack of competence,
explicit in the talk. Consider Extract (8):

(8) (Gramkow Andersen, 1993: 99)

l M we're going to send a: mm how do you say in English I don' know
2 [I (0.3) li ]ke eh.hh
3 P [in Espanol ]
4 M recibo negociable
5 P sisi
6 M ehm draft

Here M, in remarking ' h o w do you say it in English' is making both his nonnative
status and a (perceived) lack of competence explicit. Whereas it is not u n c o m m o n in
monolingual interactions for participants to produce utterances such as its
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259 255

whatchamacallit, or that's a, uhm, now what's the name of it?, it would be highly
unlikely for native speakers of English to ask how do you say it in English? Inter-
estingly enough, in response to M's remark, P - the coparticipant - code switches to
M's first language (Spanish). I shall not dwell on this feature here, suffice to say that
there are remarkably few instances of code-switching in my data corpus. This may
be related to the fact that the first languages of the interactants in my corpus are lan-
guages that the parties are unlikely to have any knowledge of (the first languages are
Danish on the one hand and Arabic, Japanese and Urdu on the other). In European
contexts, where participants might reasonably be expected to have some (albeit
scant) knowledge of other European languages, the case may be that a first language
is more commonly invoked into the interaction as a resource when required. This
clearly requires empirical investigation.

4. Conclusions

In a world where international travel and cross-national communications are

everyday occurrences, the English language is overridingly the modus operandi for
communicators. In a great number of instances English is used as a linguafranca, in
which case none of the interactants involved has the language as their mother
tongue. It is somewhat surprising, then, that 'lingua franca' interactions have not
been investigated or described by conversation analysts. In fact, CA has demon-
strated a remarkable uniformity of data type selected for analysis, overridingly
restricting its focus to the interactions of monolingual adults. This paper has been
a preliminary exploration of the methodological implications of this restricted focus.
The nature of the lingua franca data suggests that important questions require
attention. Such questions pertain especially to the assumptions conversation analysts
operate with while undertaking analyses of recorded talk-data. The working,
methodological assumption of 'order at all points', for example, based as it is on an
observed stable community of language users, has enabled analysts to explicate and
document community-wide ways of doing things with words, utterances, pauses,
reformulations, turn overlaps, laughter, and more. Studies have shown that phenom-
ena that may ostensibly appear as incidental aberrations of encoding and general
speech dysfluencies can be delicately so-designed and/or occasioned in systematic
ways.
Yet such an assumption of order emanating from stable and developed commu-
nicative competence - so profitable in monolingual talk-data - appears to be less
secure when one is confronted with talk produced by people with less than stable, or
native-speaker-equivalent, competence. The full theoretical and methodological
implications of this remain to be investigated more fully than has been possible here,
although such investigations would, we may presume, seek to investigate the uni-
versality of such notions as the '(dis)preferred' construction of turns, and the func-
tions of 'accounts', laughter, silence and hesitation phenomena, reformulations, and
'repair'. It would appear reasonable to conclude - on the basis of the empirical mate-
rials examined here at least - that certain conversation analytic procedures, specifi-
256 A. Firth / Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 237-259

cally those which seek to detail the linguistic and interactional characteristics of con-
versational 'objects', are rendered inherently more problematic when the observer-
analyst is confronted with lingua franca data comparable with the type examined in
this paper. While this is so, it was also argued that other analytic procedures - those
that attempt, first and foremost, to document the way activities are accomplished
through lingua franca talk - are predicated on firmer methodological assumptions.
This preliminary study of 'lingua franca' talk in English has also argued that,
although the lingua franca interactions evince linguistic infelicities and abnormali-
ties, the parties nevertheless do interactional work to imbue talk with orderly and
'normal' characteristics. The bulk of this discursive, interactional 'work' deploys the
basic mechanisms of conversation, notably those of turn-taking, sequential relations,
and topic management. Some resources - such as 'other-repair' and 'other comple-
tions' - appear to be less prevalent in the data examined here, and it was suggested
that a reason for this was that such devices have the potential for focusing attention
on the form of the other's talk - a practice these interactants appear averse to engage
in. Although interactants represent diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, data
analyses show that parties to talk overridingly adopt the ('default') position that their
talk is understandable and 'normal' - even in the face of misunderstandings and
abnormalities. However, it was also shown that some talk-based activities and/or
topics may be less 'interactionally robust' than others, in which case the 'default
position' is overridden, as participants are compelled to focus attention explicitly on
each other's discourse encoding and decoding.
Finally, the data-type examined here is vivid and salutary testimony to the remark-
able flexibility and robustness of natural language, and offers compelling evidence
of people's often extraordinary ability to make sense in situ, as part and parcel of the
local demands of talking to one another. It may be hoped that some of the observa-
tions made in this paper open the way for new insights into the nature of conversa-
tional competence - its 'vulnerability' or 'robustness' included. CA seems well
placed to investigate the locally and contingently accomplished character of that
competence.

Appendix
Transcript notation

The audio-recorded materials in this paper are transcribed according to the following nota-
tions. The notations are a set of symbols designed to capture the interactional qualities of
speech delivered in real-time.

Symbol Represents
(1.5) Inter- and mid-turn silences, timed in 10th's of seconds.
(3 Micro-pauses of less than 0.2 seconds.
(**) Unrecoverable speech; the number of asterisks represent the number of unrecov-
ered syllables uttered.
(()) Double brackets contain relevant contextual information.
 A. Firth / Journal of Pragrnatics 26 (1996) 237-259 257

a: :nd Colons represent lengthened vowel sounds; the number of colons show the rela-
tive stretch of sound.
::hh Colons preceding h's show audible inhalations.
hh:: Colons following h's show audible exhalations.
very Underlined letters indicate emphasis.
ALL Capitalised letters indicate that the utterance/word is enunciated louder than sur-
rounding speech.
ALL Underlined, capitalised utterance/word shows emphatic stress, enunciated louder
than surrounding speech.
°yes ° Degree signs encapsulate talk that is quieter than surrounding talk.
A single dash indicates an abrupt cut-off in the flow of speech.
Equals signs show latched speech, where the turn or utterance is followed without
a perceptible pause by the next turn or utterance.
[[well
[[yes Utterances starting simultaneously are linked together with double left-hand
(square) brackets.
[right ]
[huh mm] Overlapping utterances are marked by single (square) brackets; the left-hand
bracket shows where the overlap began; the right-hand bracket shows where the
overlapped speech is terminated.
A period indicates falling tone.
A comma denotes tone group boundary.
9 A question mark indicates rising intonation.
$$ Marked rising and falling shifts in intonation are indicated by upward and down-
ward pointing arrows.
%..% Talk encapsulated between percentage signs is produced at a markedly slower
tempo, relative to preceding and subsequent talk.

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