Acting as a Resource for Sharing Attitude and Interest: An Analysis of Acting in Informal Conversation

Abstract

This paper investigates ‘acting’ in conversation. The authors focus on what actors and other participants do together, over the course of a conversation, particularly in the context of chats. Although literature on ‘acting’, which occurs often in everyday conversation exists, studies have tended to focus on what actors achieve through their acting and the joint achievements of actors and other participants has been neglected. Direct report speech (DRS) is similar in form to ‘acting’ and has been argued to be a device specifically used to share attitudes and interests. We felt a need to investigate ‘acting’ as a similar device in face-to-face interaction. This study focuses on Conversation Analysis (CA) of video-taped conversation data to investigate sequences of ‘acting’ followed by speech and actions. The results indicate that during acting procedures, other participants are invited to share attitudes and interests about the preceding utterance with the actor and among themselves. This may convey acute interest and promote affiliative attitudes. Moreover, ‘acting’ encourages other participants to respond affiliatively.