The purposes of this workshop are to gain an adequate understanding of what Harvey Sacks aimed for in one of his publications that addressed membership categorization devices, “An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data,” and to develop his idea to investigate action constructions in the details of interactions. Note that the type of utterance on which Sacks focused, “no one to turn to,” does not contain any membership categories (“no one” is not a membership category, though only intelligible in relation to a specific membership categorization device). However, the utterance categorizes the speaker and the recipient to constitute a specific action (“seeking help”) such that an account of how that action has come to be done to the recipient is incorporated into it. We also discuss how we find a set of appropriate membership categorization devices that serve as an apparatus for generating a specific action construction. 

The workshop will be organized in the following way: (1) We share our understanding of what Sacks said in some lines of the above text (with some other supplemental texts); (2) by examining some (Japanese) episodes in which the participants do not explicitly mention membership categories to categorize the possibly relevant population (including the speaker and the recipient), we discuss how they use specific membership categorization devices to organize their actions in specific manners; and (3) we examine similar episodes in various languages that I encourage workshop participants to bring in. 

Facilitated by: Aug Nishizaka