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I was gonna say…

On the doubly reflexive character of a meta-communicative practice*

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Sprachreflexive Praktiken

Part of the book series: LiLi: Studien zu Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik ((LiLi,volume 4))

Abstract

Meta-communicative practices are generally reflexive in a fairly obvious sense: Inasmuch as speakers use them to talk about or comment on earlier/subsequent talk, they use language self-reflexively. In this paper, we explore a practice that is reflexive not only in this meta-communicative sense but also in a sequential-interactional one: Prefacing a conversational turn with I was gonna say. We show that the I was gonna say-preface furnishes the following general semantic-pragmatic affordances: (1) It retroactively relates the speaker’s subsequent talk to preceding talk from a co-participant, (2) it embodies a claim to prior, now-preempted, communicative intent with regard to what their co-participant has (just) said/done, (3) it therefore displays its speaker’s orientation to the relevance or the appropriate placement of the action(s) done in their own subsequent talk at an earlier moment in the interaction, and (4) it reflexively re-invokes, or retrieves, this earlier moment as the relevant sequential context for their action(s). We then go on to illustrate how speakers draw on these sequentially reflexive affordances for managing recurrent interactional contingencies in specific sequential environments. The paper ends with a discussion of the role that reflexivity plays in and for the deployment of this practice.

* We thank Emma Betz and Alexandra Gubina for their invaluable contributions in joint data sessions on this project. We are also grateful for Alexandra Gubina’s insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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  • 28 November 2022

    „In der ursprünglichen Fassung dieses Kapitels erschien Anmerkung 10 versehentlich im Haupttext. Dies wurde korrigiert.“

Notes

  1. 1.

    On the use of collections, see Clift/Raymond (2018).

  2. 2.

    This collection forms part of a larger collection of X was/were going to Verb-formatted turns and TCUs (e.g., He was going to say, I was going to call you, She was going to send him money, They were going to go in on a gift, etc.), which we compiled for another project.

  3. 3.

    Moreover, in this single ‘turn-medial’ case, it is worth noting that the IWGS-preface occurs at the onset of the then portion of an if/then turn format, a point where TCU boundaries are, in Lerner’s (1996) terms, “semi-permeable”.

  4. 4.

    See https://ca.talkbank.org/browser/index.php (accessed: November 13, 2020).

  5. 5.

    As it turns out, even this partially successful attempt at unpacking Alice’s gloss is problematic, in that Alice’s next turn in line 14 suggests that changes have been going on with respect to Frank’s practice as well. This not only retroactively accounts for Alice’s use of vague and general descriptors in her earlier gloss of there being TOO many things going on (line 07), it also foregrounds her more recent epistemic access to developments in the community. As such, it seems to push back slightly against Barbara’s claim to an ‘independently held stance’ with regard to Frank’s decision, as expressed by her use of the IWGS-preface.

  6. 6.

    For more discussion of such second-positioned grammatical resources, see Raymond et al. (2021) and Thompson et al. (2015).

  7. 7.

    Further research is needed to more fully address these differences and to work out in detail how they shape (e.g., constrain or promote) the use of distinct prefaces.

  8. 8.

    Note the similarity to the second-positioned use of the IWGS-prefaces discussed earlier.

  9. 9.

    Note in this regard the conjunction but in line 13. Inasmuch as it indexes an upcoming contrast and could well introduce a TCU that cancels any implication of criticism of Eric’s friend contained in Paula’s preceding assessment, this could be seen to corroborate her later claim that she was about to introduce this point then and there.

  10. 10.

    The most explicit version of this observation can be found in Schegloff (2007), who writes in a footnote:.

  11. 11.

    We thank the editors of this volume for raising this point.

  12. 12.

    The reasons for this are irrelevant to our argument, but it may have to do with the fact that Jason, as the caller, would have received $20 upon successful completion of the call, a prospect which a failure to initiate the recording properly would have jeopardized.

  13. 13.

    Inasmuch as this is given linguistic expression through the morpho-syntactic encoding of ‘future-in-the-past’ (Quirk et al. 1985) in the verb phrase of I was gonna say, it may be considered an integral, if not essential, part of the practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache – Standort Augustacarree -, Augustaanlage 32, Mannheim, Deutschland

    Uwe-Alexander Küttner

  2. University of Colorado, Boulder, Department of Linguistics, Boulder, USA

    Chase Wesley Raymond

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  1. Uwe-Alexander Küttner
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Correspondence to Uwe-Alexander Küttner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Germanistisches Institut, Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle (Saale), Deutschland

    Florian Busch

  2. Germanistisches Institut, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Deutschland

    Pepe Droste

  3. Germanistisches Institut, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Deutschland

    Elisa Wessels

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Küttner, UA., Raymond, C.W. (2022). I was gonna say… . In: Busch, F., Droste, P., Wessels, E. (eds) Sprachreflexive Praktiken. LiLi: Studien zu Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, vol 4. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64597-0_3

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