drew po faced receiptsocr

218 E. A. Schegloff

References

Button, G. (forthcoming a). Moving out of closings. In G. Button and J. Lee (eds.), Talk andSocial Organization. Multi-Lingual Matters.

-(forthcoming b). Varieties of closings. In G. Psathas and R. Frankel (eds.), InteractionalCompetence. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

Gumperz, J. (1982a). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.-(ed.) (l982b). Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of

preferredjdispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.), Structures ofSocial Action, 57-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, H. (1972). An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doingsociology, In D. N. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction, 31-74. New York: FreePress.

Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On some questions and ambiguities in conversation. In J. M.Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. (First published 1976 in Pragmatics Microfiche, 2.2, D8-G1.)

-(n.d.). Repair after next turn. Unpublished manuscript.-, arid Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 7, 289-327.-, Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977).The preference for self-eorrection in the organization

of repair in conversation. 'Language 53, 361-382.

Po-faced receipts of teases'

PAUL DREW

Abstract

This paper concerns the verbal activity of 'teasing'; that is, mocking butplayful jibes against someone. The particular phenomenon investigated isthat of 'po-faced' responses to teasing. In a large collection of teasesoccurring in natural conversations, recipients of teases recurrently respondquite seriously to the teasing proposal. Even where there is evidence thatthey recognize that the tease was meant humorously, recipientsneverthelessusually deny and correct the tease: in only a small minority ofcases do theyplay along with it. This paperfirst documents a continuum ofresponses, themost common of which are patterns of serious responses to teases.

The analysis proceeds, using the conversation analytic approach, toaccount for the phenomenon of 'po-faced' responses, by first identifying thesequential environment in which teasing occurs: namely, one in whichrecipient has been complaining, extolling, bragging, etc., in a somewhatoverdone or exaggerated fashion. Thus teasing can be a form of socialcontrol of minor conversational transgressions. Also teasing jokinglyattributes certain deviant actions/identities which are mapped onto (an)identity(s) which recipient actually possesses; insofar as recipients seethemselves as conceivablyportrayed as deviant, teasing is 'close to the bone'.Recipients respond to these 'social control' and 'deviance attribution'properties defensively, hence in a po-faced manner.

Introduction

Humorous remarks in conversation are not always treated humorously;for instance, a recipient may not always laugh.? And for one kind ofhumorous remark - the kind of playful humorous jibes which are calledteases in English, though an equivalent form of humor is reported inmany very diverse cultures (see Radcliffe-Brown 1952) - I have beenfinding that recipients of teases rarely respond by going along with the

Linguistics 25 (1987), 219-253 0024-3949j87jOO25-0219 $2.00© Mouton de Gruyter

220 P. Drew

humor of the tease. And even in cases where they do respond to the tease'shumor, for example by laughing, they do so almost always either as apreliminary to or in the course of making a serious response. It is thisphenomenon of responding to teases seriously to which I am referring aspo-faced receipts of teases." My aims in this paper are to describe therange of po-faced or serious responses to teases; and to account for therecurrent propensity recipients have to treat teasing seriously, in terms ofcertain properties of teases - properties both of their design and of thesequential environments in which teases occur.

The instances of teasings which are analyzed in this paper were collectedfrom a very large corpus of recordings of naturally occurring conversationsover the telephone, and face-to-face in what are intuitively informalcircumstances, such as around the dinner table, during informal therapysessions, on visits to relatives' or friends' homes, etc. They are conversations between people who in one way or another not only have a basis forbeing closely acquainted (for example as family members, friends, colleagues, or classmates), but can also be seen in their talk to be treatingthemselves as familiar with one another. I do not know whether teasing isrestricted to close acquaintances in informal talk, largely because we haveonly very limited data from more formal occasions and/or between peoplewho are not well acquainted. However, a danger in representing the datacorpus in such a way is that an interaction might in the first instance bejudged or classifiedas informal or as between close friends/intimates on thevery grounds of their engaging in such things as teasing. That is, whether ornot two people,tease one another can be a conventional index of how closethey have come to be or how comfortable they have come to feel, in asimilar way as JetTerson et al. (1984) argue that the introduction ofobscenities into talk can be an index (and thereby interactionally, a display)of intimacy. As a means of displaying and assessing informality, intimacy,close acquaintance, and so on, teasing can be an index which is somewhatindependent of such markers as age, relative status, and family bonds participant identities which are often used to 'explain' sociolinguisticpatterns of usage. This point about teasing being a possibly independentindex of familiarity and acquaintanceship is not going to be crucial to theanalysis which follows: I am not here going to investigate its interactionaluse by participants to display to one another what they take theirrelationship currently to be. I mention it for this reason: commenting on theanthropological and ethnographic literature on teasing as a form of jokingrelationship, Loudon (1970: 294) remarks that

Any attempt to assess the relative 'reality' of the hostile and friendly componentsof teasing behaviour therefore requires close examination of the context and

Po-faced receipts of teases 221

content of a series of particular instances; it would also seem to demand someattempt to analyse the apparentmotivations of the individual actorsconcerned inwhat must be regarded as purposive behaviour.

In many respects I think that my analysis of responses to teases is in linewith this precept of Loudon's, but in a way which takes a ditTerent viewthan Loudon of 'context and content'. I shall come back in the conclusionto consider how my analysis of teasing reveals something about the wayparticipant identities or category memberships are attributed, occasioned,or negotiated in conversation - and the implications this has for the studyof sociolinguistic patterns in general and joking relationships in particular.

A continuum of responses to teases

An instance in which the recipient of a tease treats it seriously occurs inthe following extract, taken from a video recording of a family dinner: thetease 'Do we have two forks 'cause we're on television?' ('television'referring to their being filmed for a video recording) is addressed by onedaughter to her mother.

(1) (Goodwin: Family Dinner: 1)4Dot: Do we have two forks 'cause we're on television?

-+ Mother:cNo we- -Angie: huh huh [huh hh [h ( )Father: Yeahah h hah .hh =

Mother: uh huh [hUh huhAngie: [heh heh hehFather: = Right yeh

pro [.bably the answer right (the [re)Angie: eh hah hah

-+ Mother: .hhh You have pie-+ Mother: You have ~ie:: tonight -

Mother's immediate response to the tease is to begin a serious response,'No we-', which from its start was going to have been a correction ofDot's teasing proposal for why two forks have been laid. However that pojacedresponse is abandoned, happening to have been begun simultaneously with her other daughter's laughter at the humor of the tease. Soonafter her husband joins that laughter, so does she: but on completion of thelaughter and Father's facetious rejoinder to the tease, Mother goes on tocomplete her po-faced correction with an explanation for her setting twoforks, which is that 'You have pie:: tonight'. So that although Mother joinsin the laughter which had caused her to break otT her initial and immediate

222 P. Drew Po-faced receipts of teases 223

(3) (GTS: I: 1: 44: R: 7)

(4) (NB: II: 4: R: 14) (Nancy is describing a man she recently met.)

the tease, and then (separately) reject what is proposed in the tease. Twoexamples are the following:

VERY SWEET..hhh VE:RY: (.) CONSIDERATE MYGOD ALL I HAD TO DO WAS LOOK-AT A CIGARETIE AND HE WAS OUT OF THE CHAIR LIGHT-ING (h)IT YhhhOU KNO(h)OW = -

[I: KNO:W IT]= .hehh.hh One of th ose kind .hhhhh =

[Yes - -

A::nd SO[ : but we were]THEY DO THAT [BEFORE AND A:FTERJ

eeYhhehee AHH

THEY DO:n't.

HAH HAH.hhhh

What do you do to make yourself distinct== I mu-1 must do something [I mean 'c [ ause

Mmhm You do,ehhh hh n hn -- You JA:CK off in your chai:rehh heh .hehh Ya:h .hnff.hh -

(:)No everybody: (.) you know: looks for this distinction.

Nancy:

Emma:Nancy:Emma:Nancy:Emma:

-+ Nancy:Emma:Nancy:Emma:

-+ Nancy:(Or he's)NO :7e-MARTHAHAS known Cli:ff, ... «a good 30 yearsand he's an absolute boy scout»

In each case the recipient of the (sexual) tease - in (3) 'You JACK off inyour chai:r', and in (4) 'THEY DO THAT BEFORE AND A:FTER THEYDO :n't.' - responds initially by laughingly agreeing (see the first arrowedutterance in each fragment). On completion of their laughter, recipients goon to reject the teasing proposals with [No]+ [serious account].

In the types of responses to teases illustrated in fragments (1)-{4)recipients overtly REJECT whatever is literally proposed in the tease, albeiteither with laughter or having laughed. While recipient's laughter inextract (I) was prompted, in extracts (2}-(4) it is plainly spontaneous,volunteered. At the extreme nonserious response end of the continuum,however, are cases where the teasing proposition is NOT rejected, and inwhich recipients GO ALONG WITH the tease. For example, a recipient maygo along with the tease by just laughingly agreeing with it.

-+ Roger:

Louise:Roger:Louise:Roger:AI:

-+ Roger:

serious response to the tease, nevertheless at an early opportunity as themirth wanes she resumes giving the correct explanation.

The mother's pursuit of her po-faced response in this extract demonstrates that the recipient of a tease may recognize the tease, recognize thatit is intended as a humorous remark or proposal, but nevertheless respondseriously to it. That is, it might be supposed that the regularity of po-facedresponses arises from recipients simply failing to recognize that thespeaker was teasing. Even ifin extract (1) it were possible that Mother didnot initially recognize that she was being teased, she subsequently displaysrecognizing that the remark was not serious when she laughs with Angieand Father. That recognition does not prevent her going on to respondseriously to the tease.

In a little over a third of cases in the collection, recipients exhibit theirrecognition that they are being teased, usually by laughing. The instancein extract (1) lies at one end of a continuum of responses in whichrecipients acknowledge the nonseriousness of the teasing remark. In thatinstance, recipient (Mother) is only brought to display her recognition ofits nonseriousness by the laughing of others; in that respect her display ofrecognizing the tease's humor is prompted by the laughter of others.

This contrasts with the next type along the array of nonseriousresponses, in which recipients combine laughing at the tease whilesimultaneously rejecting whatever is proposed in the tease about them ortheir behavior;" in the following case, for instance, the laughter iscontained in the initial rejection component.

(2) (AL: 83 002) (The visitor has just come into the house with Annette'smother.)Annette: Hell [ ~:,

. He:llo::how are you: [ :.Annette: Alright thank you?Visitor: I saw your Mum at the bu:s stop so I -

[(give her a li(h)ft) ] - -Annette: (and) you started ya eking

-+ Visitor: N~(hh)o I give her a lift ba [ckAnnette: Oh:::

Annette's teasing formulation of two people stopping to chat, '(and) youstarted yacking' (built as a collaborative completion of the visitor's reportof their chance meeting) is immediately rejected by recipient (the visitor);although the rejection 'No(hh)o' is said with a chuckle. In such casesrecipients simultaneously acknowledge the humor of the tease and treatthe tease seriously, by building laughter into the rejection/correction.

Next along the continuum are instances where recipients first laugh at


Bill:

-+ Bill:Arthur:Bill:

-+ Vic:Mike:Joe:Vic:

= Yeah. ==eh! .hhhh! hh! [hh! .hhhh

Some shit Ii [ ke thatJust us two [fa(h)ggots =

eh!

-+ Vic:Carol:Mike:Vic:Mike:Carol:

-+ Vic:Carol:

-+ Vic:

=Yup, .hh=[Victor,

= Tha:t's what I a:m man if I got to marry tha:t shit youknow, - -

Each of Vic's responses go along with the teases. He displays hisagreement/accord with the first by repeating" Mike's proposed completion '(h)women', and with the second by 'Yeah.'. His going along with thethird and most explicit attribution of homosexuality ('fa(h)ggots') is amore elaborate agreement, in a jokey explanation for his fictionalhomosexuality. In each of these responses, Vic can be heard to be broadlysmiling. The recipient of the tease in the next fragment (7) perhaps goesfurther than Vic's third response.

(7) (Actors Group: 3-4) (Gerald has a brand new Mustang sports car.)Gerald: Hi how are youMartha: Well, you're late as usual.Gerald: eheh eheh eheh ehehLee: What's the matter couldn't you get your car started?

-+ Gerald: hehh That's right. I had to get it pushed, eheh eheh eheh

Here Gerald not merely goes along but PLAYS along with Lee's teasingexplanation for his being late, by laughingly agreeing with it, 'hehh That'sright.', and then adding something more to the joke, 'I had to get itpushed, eheh eheh eheh'.

In this half of the continuum the array so far outlined is as follows: (i)initial serious response to reject the teasing proposal, prompted to laughby others, returning to po-faced rejection; (ii) simultaneously laughing attease and rejecting its proposal; (iii) laughing acceptance, followed byserious rejection of the proposal in the tease; (iv) going along with thetease (as with laughing acceptance+further quip). In each of theseresponse types there is some treatment by recipients of the humor of thetease, though usually (that is, except in type iv) combined with a po-facedcomponent of rejection/correction.

I want to underline some points evidenced by this array. In all casesacross the array, recipients plainly recognize that they are being teased asdisplayed in, for example, laughing or making' a further playful remark.But despite understanding that they are being teased and treating the

(5) (Campbell: 4: 5) (Bill has reported being sick in the night and haselaborately described the symptoms of what he is attributing to foodpoisoning.)

Arthur: Well you probably got at least a week.(0.4) --

What of thi:s:.(0.3)

Arthur: No a week before you die:,- (0.7) -

Ohh yhhe heh heh uh-.hhh [hhIt's a rare disea:se. see,

Yeh yeh yeh. -

Although Bill does not at first recognize the tease about having a week leftto live, when it is explained to him, 'No a week before you die.,' heresponds with just the sort of laughing agreement (a 'yes' just audibly saidthrough laughter) with which for example Lottie initially receipted thetease in extract (4). The difference is that here in (5) Bill's response isSOLELY laughing agreement; he does NOT subsequently reject the teasingproposition, as Lottie did, and hence he is going along with the tease.

In this next extract, there are three teasing attributions to Vic ofhomosexuality, occasioned by his story and particularly his line 'I'm inthe Navy and I don't mess with you know..', The first is Mike'scollaborative completion -r don't mess with women eh heh ha .. .', thesecond Joe's 'If it were a ma:n, be all right.', and the third isMike's 'Justus two fa(h)ggots'. -

(6) (Frankel: USI: 121) (Vic is telling a story about an incident inNewfoundland, when he and a friend are almost caught by the RoyalMounted Police in a room with a prostitute. Apparently inNewfoundland if one is caught 'having, relations' with a woman, youhave to marry her.) ,Vic: So w(hh)e sst: sstuff her under the goddam bed rolled up in

the blanket and Royal Mounted Police comes in, says I heardthere was a complaint from landlord last night that somewomen and some guy come through the window uh .hh anywomen in here I says n:o sir. I'm in the Navy and I don't messwith you know (I'm [-) ) - - -

Mike: I don't mess with womeneh heh ha [ ha ha ha ha ha ah ah ah ah ah! =

A(h)h (h)women, yeh.[a h! a h! a h! h h! h h! h h!-[ If it were a ma:n, be all right.1

S 0 m e s hit like that,

-+ Paul:

Paul:Del:Del:

226 P. Drew

remark as nonserious, nevertheless they overwhelmingly go on to treat thetease as requiring a serious response. In all cases except those ofthe lastcategory - and such instances of going along with the tease illustrated infragments (5), (6), and (7) are very rare indeed in the collection I have 7

recipients go on, in one way or another, to reject what is in the tease, doneexplicitly by 'No' followed by a correct version and/or returning to theserious point. So that even when recipients not only recognize but displaythat they recognize that they are being teased, in the majority ofcases theystill ALSO treat the tease seriously in giving a form of a po-faced response.

There is a further point to be made from the distinction betweenrecognizing and displaying recognition of the tease: in the array so fardescribed, illustrated in extracts (l )-(7), recognizing the tease and displayingrecognition can have a certain independence and need not cooccur. Wherein their responses recipients are treating the tease seriously (for example incorrecting it by producing the proper explanation), they are not at thosepoints displaying recognition, even though in their prior or subsequentlaughter they show they understood the remark to have been humorous. Sothat at those points not displaying recognition ofa tease is not thereby to beseen as recipient not having recognized it as such. Thus recognizing anddisplaying recognition are analytically separable activities. Although inpractice the only research methodology for seeing that someone hasrecognized a tease is through their displaying that recognition (for exampleby laughing), it cannot be inferred from an absence of such a display thatthey did not recognize the tease. So in the two final types of cases to beconsidered, lying at the opposite end of the continuum and consisting ofENTIRELY serious po-faced responses to teases, it does not follow from theabsence of an overt display of recognition of humor (for example, in noneof these instances is there audible laughter in their responses) that they havenot recognized the tease. In other words, the kind of serious responsesillustrated below in extracts (8)-(13) cannot.automatically be explained bythinking that the recipients just did not realize they were being teased.

Some examples of entirely po-faced responses to teases are the following:

(8) (Northridge: 2: JP/DP: I) (Del is caller.)Del: What are you doing at ho:me.

(1.7)Sitting down watching the tu: [ be,

khnhhh:: ih-huh .hhhWa:tching n-hghn .h you-nghn (0.4) watching dayti:mestories uh? - - - --

(.)No I was just watching this: uh:m: (0.7) .h.khh you knowone of them g~:me shows, -


In response to Del's teasing checkout 'watching dayti:me stories uh?',Paul .ov~rtly ,rejects ('No') the teasing version and then corrects it bysu~st..tuting one of them g~:me shows,'. In this next fragment, (9),recIpIe~t u~es a similar rejection/correction marker; but his subsequentcorrection IS not so much a substitution as a counterversion or rebuttal ofAnne's teasing trivialization of his story.

(9) (Goodwin: G26: 28) (John is telling about a course he's taken, run by~he Sev~nth Day Adventists, to help him give up smoking. Part of theinstruction on the.course is to devise 'specific things to do each day',such as 'on Tuesday you scratch your nose and on Wednesday youscratch your left ear' ...)John: And they have a different thing each day so that it

doesn ['t get you- ] =

Ann: Is that true:?= Like what. Like pick your no:se? really?

(0.5) -Don: hmh-hmh- [hmhAnn: Like what.

-+ John: .tch No I, ! find I Just get very euphoric.

In this next extract there are two teases concerning when Larry shouldcome home:

(10) (Tel (b). 13: 3---4) (Larry has been mildly complaining about afunction he and Alice have to go to that evening and which heknows starts at seven o'clock.)

Alice: UH:::: Hey try and get home at a decent hour 'cause [:Larry: Yeh

I be home by ni:ne,- (.) -

-+ Alice: N~: (.) g~t home pretty early okay?hh(0.5)

Alice: P [ lease,Larry: W~ll ! can leave right now if you want, =

-+ Alice: =No::,h [hh - -Larry: khh-hhAlice: .hhih::::hh So:, (0.3) Okay?

:"-lice's response to Larry's teasing agreement to 'be home by ni.ne,' (thatIS, two hours after he knows it starts) is to reaffirm her request that he gethome 'at a decent h~ur'/,pretty early': that is preceded by a correctionmarker, 'N~:', which she uses also to reject his followup tease 'Well I canleave right now if you want,', - -


(13) (Goodwin: Smiley: 222) (Angie has been telling a story about a friendat camp who had been awakened by the phone ringing in the early

(Il)(Kamunsky: III: 16)Mary: Well I know him from sight I u-he doesn't know me.AI: Oh.

These utterly po-faced receipts of teases are, then, explicitly marked ascorrecting the teasing version, as in some way putting it right. Suchresponses, which are the most frequent in the collection I have, can be setalongside instances like extract (1), in which Mother began just such anovert and serious correction as recipients do in (8)-(10); whereas she cameto display her recognition of the tease by joining the others' laughter,before going on to complete her serious correction, here in (8)-(10)recipients do not treat the tease humorously at all.

A final type of response in which there is similarly no explicitacknowledgement of the tease's humor occurs in the following threeinstances, in which the recipients variously IGNORE the tease.

(12) (AN: 83: 3) (Myra and Bob are newly married, though well intomiddle age. They are telling Heather, whom they are visiting, about acouncil house which they have been allocated and into which theyhave recently moved. 'They' and 'he' in Myra's first turn refer to thecouncil safety inspectorate.)Myra: Apparently they'd looked at it befo:re (0.7·) and uh (.) he

turned round and said it wasn't dangerous (0.6) and nowhe's turned round and said it's dangerous.

(0.6)Myra: [Hasn't he 'Heather: Well with [two of you bumping around in itBob: Mm

(0.6)Myra: Yeah =Bob: =E [hmHeather: It's all the action isn't it [uh:::::hh- h- h- h-Myra: [ Yeah that's probably rightBob: Supposed to be supposed to

be someone coming in (.) and down to do it though--

( )Yea:h,

(.)[But- anyway

Boy I almost fell asleep coming home too that night boy Iwas so tired driving home ( )

hours of the morning, and in rushing to answer it had fallen and cuther lip. Earlier in the story she said 'I went to bed really early, Peteleft like about what eleven thirty ... ',-Pete being her boyfriend.)Angie: Oh::. She go:t to the pho.ne. She- she was like (.) she just

kept running 'cause she was like r(hh)ea(h)lly stillasleep = she hit her: hea:d. and she just kept running =Right when she got to the phone the person hung up( ) ca:lled.u [hh:::rn

~ll that hassle for that, nothing.Should've called them back and found ou:thccnh hunh hu [ nh hun --

I was going to but it was a little too la:tenYeh -

hcca hch huh [ huhYou weren't su(h)pposed to be: there

() -- -

Dot:Angie:Father:Angie:Pete:Father:Angie:Dot:

Father:

Angie:--+ Pete:

Father: Who.

Extract (11) is from a call Al has made to invite Mary to a party, and inthis fragment they are discussing a fellow who will be another guest: he isa (possibly new) member of a rock band, some of whose other membersMary knows well and has dated from time to time. Al teases her that'He'll ~et to know you (won't he).', whereupon she continues with thekind of INNOCENT INTEREST in this fellow, 'He seems like he's rilly a niceperson.', which AI's tease had parodied. Her innocent continuation here~either ~orrects the teasing suggestion nor acknowledges its humor; MarySImply Ignores the tease, continuing as if it had not occurred. In extract(12) Heather teasingly attributes the recent deterioration of the safety ofBob and Myra's house to their 'bumping around' (that is, in bed). Theresponse with which Bob began, 'ehm', is overlapped and cut off byHeather's more explicit teasing reference to the sexual conduct of thenewlyweds, 'It's all the action isn't it', which Bob ignores" in his(coll~~orative) continuation of his wife's story about the dangerouscondition of the house. In (13) Pete responds to Dot's teasingly supposingthat after all he stayed the night with her sister Angie (Pete's girlfriend) by

(.)He'll ~et to know you (won't [ he). ihh

He seems like he'srilly a nice person. ==Yeh he's okay,AI:

AI:--+ Mary:


(from 4) Emma: THEY DO THAT BEFORE AND A:FTERTHEY DO :n't

(from 5) Arthur: Well you probably got at least a week.(from II) AI: He'll get to know you (won't he)-

In (4) Nancy had illustrated the consideration and attentiveness of thisman toward her by reporting how he would jump up to light a cigarette ifshe so much as looked at one. Emma teasingly satirizes this through aformulaic contrast between how a man will behave to impress a woman

mentioned that in many cases recipients display their recognition of thetease: but a recipient who does not show recognition of a tease is notthereby to be seen as not having recognized it as such. Examining theteases themselves reveals a strong basis for their recognizability, which isthat they are built in various ways to signal or make it very obvious thatthey are humorous and NOT, for example, sincere proposals. This isusually achieved through the selection of some lexical item(s) in the tease,highlighted in these fragments from extracts cited above by being incapitals.

Dot:

Annette:A:Mike:Del:Anne:Larry:Heather:

(from I)

(from 2)(from 3)(from 6)(from 8)(from 9)(from 10)(from 12)

Do we have two forks 'cause we're on TELEVI-SION? --

and you started YACKINGYou JA:CK OFF in your chai:rJust as two FA(h)GGOTS -watching DAYTI:ME STORIES uh?Like whatLike PICK YOUR NO:SE? really?Well ] can leave RIGHT NOW if you want,Well with two of you BUMPING AROUND in itIt's all the ACTION isn't it

In each case the words used to depict something/somebody/some actionare exaggeratedly gross. For example 'on television' is an exaggeratedversion of being videorecorded by a friend; 'yacking' an exaggeration oftalking; 'fa(h)ggots' a particularly extreme and pejorative version of notmessing with women; 'dayti.me stories' a more extreme version of junkTV, soap opera, etc., by having a babyish quality (that is, comparing itwith bedtime stores); 'right now' is an extreme version of leaving early;and 'bumping around/action' are jokey, gross versions of making love.Each of those lexical choices is therefore immediately recognizable as anexaggerated or extreme version," and by virtue of that as not meantseriously to apply.

Some other teases likewise contain or propose an exaggerated versionthrough the more formulaic character of the whole turn.

The recognizability of teases

Before trying to account for the pattern of po-faced receipts of teasesevidenced in the continuum outlined in the previous section, I want brieflyto note a basis on which teasing remarks are recognizable as such. I have

similarly collaboratively adding to Angie's story - although in this casehis continuation about how sleepy he felt when he was driving home afterleaving her implicitly contradicts Dot's teasing suggestion while seemingto ignore it.

By choosing to IGNORE the tease there is perhaps some implicit evidencein these cases that recipients recognize they are being teased. They are atleast treating the prior remarks (that is, the teases) as not serious enoughto address or answer. For instance in (11) Mary does not answer AI's'question' 'He'll get to know you (won't he)': nor does Bob answerHeather's 'question' in (12), 'It's all the action isn't it': By continuingseriously along the lines of what they or their partner had been sayingprior to the tease, Mary and Bob respectively suspend the usual conversational practice or rule of tying a current turn at talk to the adjacent priorturn. In so doing they treat that prior turn as not requiring a response, asperhaps not serious enough to need answering. Once again, there is anindication here that recognizing a tease and displaying recognition of itare separable activities and need not cooccur. There is evidence thatrecipients may well recognize that the question/remark is nonserious andis meant to tease, though they do not display that recognition (forexample, by laughing) except insofar as they choose to ignore it.

In this section I have outlined an array or continuum of responses toteases, ranging from those which humorously go along with the tease tothose which seem to ignore it, at least interactionally. Only in cases ofgoing along with the tease - and these are very infrequent in the data are responses free of any element of taking the tease seriously. Even inthose types where recipients variously treat the tease nonseriously, bylaughing, they go on seriously to reject and correct the suggestion made inthe tease. Further along the continuum are responses consisting entirelyof such po-faced rejection/correction components in which the humor ofthe tease is not addressed. The overwhelming pattern is, then, thatrecipients treat something about the tease, despite its humor, as requiringa serious response: even when they plainly exhibit their understandingthat the teasing remark is not meant to be taken seriously (as when theylaugh at, or possibly ignore, it), recipients still almost always PUT THE

RECORD STRAIGHT.

232 P. Drew

before, and his disregard for her after his sexual conquest of her (therebytreating his good manners as sexually manipulative). In (5) having a weekto live is a cliched extreme prognosis of a minor ailment: ami in (11)getting to know someone is a formulaic understatement for knowingsexually, where the understatement works to overstate what may happenon a first meeting.

It may be noticed that there is also a considerable degree of contrastiveness in the teases in those fragments (4), (5), and (11): Emma's cynicalimage of men's manipulative use of considerateness only to get what theywant contrasts with Nancy's depiction of this man's chivalrous attentiveness; the prognosis of a week to live contrasting with the minor ailment;and the sexual implications of 'he'll get to know you .. .' contrasting withMary's prior remark of innocent interest. This property of a tease'scontrastiveness is further evident in the remaining instances cited so far: inextract (7) the teasing explanation for Gerald's late arrival, that he couldn'tget his car started, contrasts with the car they know he has, a brand newone (and ofcourse not getting a car started is also an exaggerated version ofa difficulty in starting a car - that is, complete failure). In extract (10)Larry's tease that he'll be home by nine directly contrasts with Alice'sproposal to get home at a decent hour, given their knowing the functionthey are going to starts at seven. And in (13) Dot's teasing suggestion thatPete was there with Angie in the middle of the night contrasts with Angie'sbeginning her story by reporting that Pete had left.

In summary, teases are designed to make it very apparent what they areup to - that they are not intended as'real or sincere proposals - by beingconstructed as very obviously exaggerated versions of some action etc;'?and/or by being in direct contrast to something they both know or onehas just told the other. So that speakers are not only proposing somethingwhich might constitute a tease but are building these propositions in sucha way as to signal- to leave recipients in no doubt - that they are not tobe taken seriously as real versions of anything.

A sequential environment for teasing

I am going to begin now to try to account for what it is about teases towhich recipients respond so recurrently in a serious, po-faced fashion despite the teases being designed to signal their nonseriousness, anddespite recipients so frequently recognizing and responding to theirhumor. The puzzle is, how is it that despite teases being very apparentlynot sincere proposals, and recognized as such, nevertheless recipients treatthem as requiring a serious response?


A clue as to how to begin may be found in the point in the previoussection about the contrastiveness of some of the teases, especially theirdirectly contrasting with something which was proposed in a prior turn.

(10) (Excerpt.)Alice: UH:::: Hey try and get home at a decent hour

'cause [: -Larry: Yeh I be home by ni.ne,

Larry's utterance in the fragment is a tease - rather than sincerelyreporting when he will be home - by virtue of his agreeing to Alice'srequest to be home early, 'Yeh', but mentioning a time which, given theyhave to be somewhere at seven, would be very late. Now while not all theteases in my collection have the same kind of directly contrastiverelationship with the prior turn which the tease in (10) has, this exampledoes illustrate some general common properties of teases. These commonproperties are (i) the teases are not topic-initial utterances, (ii) they are allin some way a second, or a next, or a response to a prior turn, almostalways the adjacent prior turn.l ' and (iii) that prior turn is spoken by theperson who is subsequently teased;'? in multiparty as well as two-partytalk. So that teases are not freely occurring in conversation, but aresequentially 'seconds' to some prior utterance(s) of the one who is teased.This sequential environmentcan be more closely specified by consideringhow, as 'next turns', teases trade off the teased's prior turn. This can beinitially illustrated in extract (8):

(8) (Excerpt.)Del: What are you doing at ho:me.

(1.7) -

-+ Paul: Sitting ~own ~atching the tu:. [ be,Del: khnhhh:: ih-huh .huh

-+ Del: Wa:tching n-hghn .h ~ih-nghn (0.4) watchingdayti:me storiesuh? - - - -

Del's tease that Paul is watching daytime stories follows Paul's admissionof laziness. It is an admission in response to an enquiry, 'What are youdoing at ho.me', which is already offense-relevant by Del calling andfinding Paul at home in the middle of the afternoon and marking that byadding 'at ho.me' (instead of just something like 'what are you doing/areyou busy'). In response to this Paul seems to be freely admitting theoffense implied in his being at home (and not therefore at work, in thelibrary, etc.), in depicting a kind of laziness. This is done by his including'Sitting down .. ': and then characterizing what he is doing as 'watching thetu.be,', that is watching anything that happens to be on rather than some

234 P. DrewPo-faced receipts of teases 235

specific programme. Using the slang 'tu:be' to refer to television completes his self-description as being slobby/lazy. And it's Paul's admissionto being slobby which Del subsequently exploits in his teasing characterization of infantile, pulp, noninformative, noneducational television,'dayti:me stories'.- The waY"in which the tease in the following extract exploits priorturn(s) by the person who is teased needs less elaboration.

The nurse in extract (14) reports a rumor that either' she or a friend is to betransferred to another team in the hospital. Having in the first placedenied that the rumors are true (lines 8 and 12), the doctor then teases thenurse that it is true: he CONFIRMS the rumor by almost exactly repeatingthe words with which she reported it, 'I asked one of you to be transferredto other team .. .' (the nurse's almost identical version is line 7). Herepresents the transfer as HIS decision, 'I asked.. .'; and then adds to thesense of grievance implied in her characterization of it as a rumor (that is,that they have not been consulted or told first) by saying that he is

(Goodwin: Family Dinner: I)Father: Mother where's the salad .

(1.0) -. (Considerable overlapping laughter, and quips about. 'giving your father his rations'.)

Father: I[s this is for the two of us? I mean just you and =Dot: eh hehFather: = I planning for [dinner tonight?Dot: Do we have two forks 'cause we're on

television?

(15)

going to leave them guessing about which of them is being transferred. Sohis tease exploits both her description of the rumor and her grievanceabout it.

There is not space here to show for all the instances how teases exploittheir prior turns: but in each case in the collection the tease variously uses- for example, embellishes, satirizes, makes a play on, doubts, trivializes,finds a hidden meaning to - materials in the prior turn(s). These arealmost invariably the prior turn(s) of the person who is then teased.Because extract (I) is the only significant exception, it may be necessaryjust to show that there is nevertheless a similar direct exploitation by thetease of the prior turn, even though that turn happens in this case not tobe spoken by the recipient of the tease. This is what occasions the tease inextract (I).

Father's somewhat disingenuous enquiries are drawing attention to andfacetiously complaining about there being little salad left in the bowl bythe time it is passed to him. Dot's subsequent tease is similarly formatedas a disingenuous enquiry, addressed to the same recipient as Father's,and recycles the two in Father's 'two of us' as 'two forks'. So even thoughin this case the tease was not directed at the person who last spoke, it is asdirectly PARASITIC upon the adjacent prior turn(s) which it exploits as areall other cases.

Thus a speaker in conversation may be VULNERABLE to being teased tothe extent that materials in a current turn of talk may be exploited by nextspeaker to construct a tease. But there is a further property of the turn(s)of talk immediately prior to the tease which might be associated with thisvulnerability to being teased. This property can be introduced by lookingagain at the nurse's enquiry in extract (14) concerning a rumor.

(14) (Excerpt.)I Carmen: Can I ask a question,2 Vega: Y~s ~lea:se.

You gu~ss a little during the weekend.

oif [ that's [ gonna come to pa:ss ..hh

No. No. No.-(0.8)

I asked one of you to be transferred to other team butI don't want to tell who.hhh [hhh

hhhhhhI would like it it's a littleguess,

23 Vega:

9 Carmen:10II Carmen:12 Vega:1314 Vega:1516 ( ):17 ( ):18 Vega:

I Carmen:2 Vega:3 Carmen:45 Vega:6 Carmen:

78 Vega:

(14) (Agorio: 73-76) (Medical clinic meeting between nurses and DrVega, a recent arrival from South America.)

Can I ask a question,Yes plea:se..hhh Uh it doesn't pertai:n to any of thi:s but- (.) itpertains to Laura and rriYself. -Yeah..hhhh ~h::. We heard rumors (1.0) that uh::: wen:ah-one of us might be transferred to the other tea:m. =

-;, No: no. No. That's not [true.And we want to know,(0.2) if,


Bill: But uh, (0.3) ·tsk (sti:ll.)Arthur: Well you probably got at least a week.

Bill: ee I think it was food poisoning (last night) 'causeI was

Arthur: ( look ),Bill: I'm still gettin:g you know,hh .hh stomach pains I spewed

last ni:ght, chronic diarrhea as we-e-ll, just before I wentto bedand this morning (well) I've had this bad stomach.Sol guess the same's gonna happen tonight. ... I've beengetting funny things in front of my eye:sactually ..hh A bi:t,just slightly, Li.ght flashes. - -

The elaborateness with which Bill details his symptoms in this extractamounts almost to self-pity. But what I want to notice about each case in(14) and (16) is that the speakers, Carmen and Bill respectively, are notjust stating a complaint (about a grievance concerning a rumor; aboutfeeling unwell) but ELABORATING one - in certain respects the complaintsare being OVERDONE. Not only is this character of the complainings beingoverbuilt conveyed in their design (through the features already explicated for extract [14], and in [16] through the somewhat unnecessarydetailed listing of symptoms); it may also be oriented to by their recipientsas unwarranted (in the Doctor's denials in [14], and in Arthur's less thanfull sympathy in [16]). In each case the elaborated, overbuilt complaintgenerates a tease. The tease puts the complainable matter BACK IN

PROPORTION, as unfounded in (14), and in (16) as not so serious that Billwill die. Thus the elaborated complainings generate teases which treat thecomplainings as unwarranted, as overdone: in this respect teases areexpressions of scepticism about the complaint, about whether the complainant has the matter in proportion.

Three other fragments in which overdone - sometimes outraged complainings generate teases are the following: in each only the lastturn(s) of the complainings are shown, because as in (16) above theyextended over a considerable number of turns.

3 Carmen: .hhh Uh it doesn't pertai.n to any of thi:s but- (.) it4 pertains to Laura and myself.5 Vega: Yeah.6 Carmen: .hhhh Ah::. We heard rumors (1.0) that uh::: we n:ah-7 one oftis might be transferred to the other tea:m. =

8 Vega: ~No: no. No. That's not [true.9 Carmen: And we want to know,

(0.2) if,10 (.)11 Carmen: if [that's [gonna come to pa:ss..hh12 Vega: N~. N~. N~.

The nurse, Carmen, is plainly formulating the rumor as something overwhich she may have a grievance or a complaint. This complainablecharacter of the topic is achieved in several ways. First, she begins theenquiry with a preliminary enquiry, 'Can ! ~sk a question,', which rightaway signals that what is to be asked is going to be something sensitive ortroublesome (I rely here on Schegloff's analysis of this phenomenon: seeSchegloff 1980, especially sections IV and V). Then there is a ratherelaborate marking of the matter being topically disjunctive (line 3, 'itdoesn't pertai:n to any of thi:s but- .. .'), and of it being a personal concern(lines 3/4, 'itpertains to Laura and myself.'). She refers to what they haveheard as specificallya rumor (and not just, for example, 'We heard that ... ');this can convey something concerning them about which they have notbeen told/consulted but others know ahead of them. The sense of herhaving geared herself up to make this speech is enhanced by the formalityof 'it pertains to' and 'gonna come to pa:ss'. And finally she persists in herenquiry/complaint despite the doctor's immediate denial (line 8, 'No: no.No. That's not true.') and his continued denial (in line 12).So that it is notjust a simple enquiry she is making about whether or not one of them isgoing to be moved: it is rather elaborately built as a little speech concerninga grievance she has, a complaint about a rumor that is circulating.

Even more elaborated is the way in which Bill, prior to the tease cited inextract (5) above, complains about being ill and details the symptomsfrom which he has been suffering. In order to highlight this, once Bill'sdetailing is underway in the following fragment only Bill's utterances areshown.

(16) (Campbell: 4: 5)Arthur: ... you feeling better now.Bill: Uh:m mNo:.Arthur: Oh you poor cunt, .hh

(0.4)

(12) (Excerpt.)Myra: {APparently they'd looked at it befo.re (0.7) and uh (.)-+ he turned round and said it wasn't dangerous (0.5) and

now he's turned round and said it's dangerous.(0.6)

Myra: [Hasn't heHeather: Well with two of you bumping around in it

Bill:Ellen:Bill:

238 P. Drew

(17) (Sch: I: 31-32) (Ellen 11~ been telling a story about how a friend'sson 'hurt them' by not introducing them to some important people.Bill is Ellen's son.)Ellen:!.hh She said he got such a funny look on his tay --'-uh face

as if to say, .hh you're - tih - Cli:ff's parents are rightnext door he didn't even take - at the next table and didn't

-+ even take time to introduce his parents to me? .hh So yousee it was just e::verything just went off wro:ng. for them.

(4.0) (Ellen lights a cigarette.) -Yeh. (clears throat.)She's over i [ t.

- That's tough I don't know whether I'd wantto introduce you::,

(18) (Frankel: HG: 36) (Hilda has been telling Sally about an AgonyAunt's reply to a teenager's problem letter in a magazine, a reply

. she didn't like. Sally collaborates with statements of outrage.)-+ Sally: ~:bbey just ~des with the mo:: rm, J

Hilda: ekhh: V - ! was so

[ mad at that. ]-+ Sally: Go:: d.

- (.)

-+ Sally: rou - ·tch How can she ~ay tha:t.(.)

Hilda: It's easy. She ~rites it .out.

Overbuilt complainings of the sort illustrated above in (12), (14), (16),(17), and (18) are a frequent environment in which teases occur. 13 But ofcourse they are not the only action sequence providing such an environment. For example the tease cited in extract (4) occurs after an extensiveand laudatory description by Lottie of a man to whom she was recentlyintroduced.

(19) (NB: II: 4: R: 14)Nancy: He's fifty two:,Emma: Mm (hm:'J . ' .Nancy: .hhhh mBut he:'s ju.st a rea:l: (.) dea:r,h (0.4) m:ce:

(0.2) g~:y. J~ [ st ar: ] ~al: real n "]ice gu.y, -Emma: We:ll: GOO: :d.Nancy: .hh [ hh So wewerereally talking up [~sto:rm an:d .t having =Emma: .hhhhhhhh .hhhhNancy: = a r:eal good time had a few drinks an:d h-and so for:th

and he's a real: (0.5) easygoing he was in: u-he was un (.)uh:m(.) 'ptch .hhhhhhhh (0.4) C~Ptain in the mar!:nes.hh


EmmalOo::: J:'Nancy: A::nd reti.red e-a.nd now has worked for this:: he's got a

real good job with a big ,!ir conditioning company:,h =Emma: = M [m: h m JNancy: A:nd a h, .hhh h!!s been with them for about

fifteen yea:rs.h a:nd ah,h So co:nsequently he's very? (.) he'sintelligent? and he's ah .hh NOT HA:NDSOME.-.hh Buth~'; ni~e looki-ng [ih a::n dJ ah just a rea.l real nice:-=

Emma: Mm hmNancy: =Pl;;Rsonable, V~RY personable, V~RY SWEET..hhh

VE:RY: (.) CONS!DERATE MY GQD ALL I HAD TODO WAS LQOK AT A CIGARETTE AND HE WASQUT OF THE CHAIR L!GHTING(h)IT YhhhOU KNO(h)OW=

EmmalI: K NO: W ITNancy: .hehh.hh One of th Jose kind .hhhhh =Emma:[Yes JNancy: Ann .d SO[: but w e wereEmma: THEY DO THAT JBEFORE AND A:FTER

THEY DO:n't.

Right from reporting this man's comparative youthfulness (Nancy is wellinto middle age), Nancy details things about his biography, manner, howthey hit it off, etc., in such a way as to imply his eligibility. She EXTOLLS hisvirtues over a number of turns, and in an extravagantly positive fashion,as when she portrays how considerate he was toward her ('VE:RY: (.)CONSIDERATE MY GOD ALL I HAD TO DO WAS LOOK AT ACIGARETTE AND HE WAS QUT OF THE CH~IR L!GHTING(h)IT ... '). In extract (9) John has similarly been extolling the course he hasbeen taking, run by the Seventh Day Adventists, to help him give upsmoking. Space prevents the reproduction here of his extensive andextravagant detailing of how remarkable the course is, how it helped himquit, how it works, etc. The tease which it generates,

(9) (Excerpt.)John: And they have a different thing each day so that it

doesn ['t get y 0 u-J=Ann: Is that true:?Ann: = Like what. Like pick your no.se? really?

like Emma's tease in (19), displays a certain scepticism at the virtueswhich John (and in [19], Nancy) has been so enthusiastically extolling.


In two instances cited earlier, speakers report something in a fashionwhich conveys UTTER INNOCENCE.

(II) (Excerpt.)~ .Mary: Well I know him from ~ight I u-he doesn't ~now me.

AI: Oh.(.)

AI: He'll ~et to know you (won't he). ihh

(2) (Excerpt.)~ Visitor: I saw your Mum at the bu:s §.top so I

[(give her a li(h)ft)Annette: (And) you started yacking

Mary's description of knowing this man is formulated as nothing special,as quite innocent, by reporting that she knows him only by sight and thathe does not know her: and in (12) the visitor accounts for her returningwith' Annette's mother as the result of a chance encounter. In other casesteases are generated by jokes or stories about farcical or impossibleevents.

B~ [:t .hhh since this one's already set up there's not =Yeah.

=much we can do about it.Q [h:::::::. hih-hih-ree r!(h):: [ght ri:: [ght.

Right? .hh hh UH:::: Hey try andget home at a decent hour 'causey- -

Yeh I be home by ni:ne,(.) --

N~: (.) g~t home pretty early okay?hh(0.5)

P etease,W~ll ! can leave right now if you w~nt,

Alice:

Alice:Larry:Alice:Larry:Alice:

Larry:

Alice:Larry:

~

~

~

getting to the telephone, whereupon it stopped ringing just as she got to it.Father then jokes about calling back some obviously unknown person(given they could not know who called); to which Pete makes a relatedjoke, its humor further playing off the impossibility of knowing who hadbeen calling.

Finally, here are three further instances in which the speaker who iseventually teased is overdoing something. Leading up to this next extract,Larry mentioned that in order to go to the function that night he haspassed over an opportunity to do overtime at work. Alice proceeds toemphasize (what he already knows) that the event is already set up, thatthey can't change it, that they don't have a choice, etc. The last part of herlittle lecture is shown here.

There is a sense in which Alice's po-faced response after Larry's first tease,'No:(.) get home pretty early okay?', contributes to the sense of hercarrying on about it unnecessarily, and so generates the environment forhis second tease. In this next instance Mother has mentioned that Angie'sex-boyfriend called and left a message; Angie has made several excitedattempts to find out what the message was, but is interrupted each time.The combination of her persistence and eagerness (for example, in herarrowed utterance in [20)) result in Father's tease.

(20) (Goodwin: Family Dinner: 16)~ Angie: Okay mu:m what did he say (.) Is he calling ba:ck

([8)Father: We- hi- [he decided to get marrie.d.Mother: I asked himFather: And then he decided what he wanted to call you first to

make sure if he could - -

(10) (Expanded.)

~

(Excerpt.)Vic: So w(hh)e sst- sstuff her under the goddam bed rolled up in

the blanket and Royal Mounted Police comes in, says I heardthere was a complaint from landlord last night that somewomen and some g~y come through the window uh .hh anywomen in here I says n:o sir. I'm in the Navy and! don't messwith you know (I'~

Mike: I don't mess with women ehheh ha ha ha ha ha

(Excerpt.)Angie: Right when she got to the· phone the person hung up

( ) ca.lled.Dot: u [hh:::rnAngie: All that hassle for that, nothing.Father: Should've called them back and found" ou:t- -Angie: hccnh hunh hu [nh hunPete: I was going to but it was a little too la:teFatherlnYehAngie: hcca hch huh [huhDot: You ~eren't su(h)pposed to b£: there

The farcical character of Vic's story in (6) does not need elaboration. In(13) the point of Angie's true story is that her friend had injured herself in

(13)

-

(6)


(21) (GTS: 5: 6-7: R)

This final instance is rather straight forwardly bragging about, ratherthan just reporting, an achievement. K's bragging is achieved by 'almostkilled the teacher' and that the only explanation which the teacher had forsuch a good result was that he cheated - which is then turned into a teaseby T and R, a tease which again proposes a scepticism about theachievement.

Across these instances what appears to be distinctive about the turn(s)just prior to the tease is that the person who is subsequently teased isoverdoing something. The specific actions occurring in those turns vary:although many are outraged complaining, others are extolling the virtuesof someone/something, bragging, lecturing or going on about something,telling a far-fetched or farcical story or impossible joke, extreme selfdeprecation, freely admitting to being lazy/slobby.l" and playing innocent. These pretty much cover the whole corpus of teases. They are ofcourse a limited range of activities, having in common that they are moreextravagant or extreme forms of something than they might be. Forinstance, speaker is not merely reporting liking or praising someone in(19) but extolling his eligibility and chivalrous virtues ofexaggerated goodmanners; or not merely telling a story or a joke but a farcical orimpossible one; or not merely telling about a sickness but complaining ofsymptoms self-piteously; or not merely telling about an achievement butbragging about it, etc. In many cases the character of something beingoverdone is conveyed through specific, local features or components ofthe design of the turn(s). Often in conjunction with such components,however, is another very common way in which an activity may beoverdone; which is the speaker's sheer persistence, over a number ofturns, in telling, complaining, praising, etc. Although space has notallowed the full extent of such sequential persistence to be illustrated inmost cases, it is a notable feature of their being overdone, of speakergoing on about the matter, in the great majority of cases cited above.

Ken:Roger:

Ken:

Jim:Roger:

. Roger:Ken:

So far my grades've already come u:p,Yea:h? --

(0.3)Ye:ah. .hhhh I got a B plus on a (0.4) biology test whichalmost killed the teacher he thought I'd cheated.You di [d. - --

Did.(0.2)

hhih .hhhNo I was sitting by myself.

Also, it is evident that the teases do not just exploit materials in thetease-recipients' prior turns: they do so in a way which suggests somescepticism about the prior complaining, praising, bragging, etc., or nottaking it too seriously. Hence insofar as activities may be treated asoverdone - persistent, 'outraged, too enthusiastic, etc. - they arevulnerable to being teased about by being treated sceptically, not tooseriously, as over the top 'etc.

The sequential environment in which teases occur can thus be summarized as follows. They are typically second/next positioned, responses tosome prior (and thus unlike, say, invitations, announcements, questions,etc., which can occur in initial position). Moreover the speaker of theadjacent prior turn(s) to which the tease responds is almost always thetease recipient. Those prior turns tend to come from a limited range oftypes of activities, such as extolling, complaining, bragging, etc.; which byvirtue of both turn design features (associated with being extreme) andsequential features (associated with persistence, going on about) have theproperty of being overdone (too enthusiastic, overeager, bitterly/outragedcomplaining, etc.). The teases are parasitically exploiting materials intheir prior turns in such a way as to display some scepticism about theprior speaker's (teased's) claims. The vulnerability, then, of these priorturns lies in their being overdone, extravagant versions - for which theycan be mocked, not taken as seriously as by the speaker. And of coursethis sequential environment, and what the teases are exploiting andmanaging in it, goes some way to accounting for the po-faced receipts ofteases. That is, in rejecting/correcting the suggestion in the tease, inputting the record straight, recipients of teases are holding on to (thetruth, validity of, etc.) their original claims, story, etc. From theirperspective in the po-faced receipts, their prior complaints, extollings,etc., are not overdone, but represent real versions.

Teases attribute deviant actions/categories

I showed in an earlier section that teases are typically built so as to makeit perfectly obvious that they are teases, and not sincere, by includingwords which are recognizably gross, extreme, or outrageous versions ofsomething. So that in (I) Dot uses "cause we're on television', not justbeing recorded/filmed; in (2) Annette uses 'started yacking', not startedtalking/gossiping; in (3) A says 'ja:ck off', not masturbate; in (6) Mikesaid 'dayti:me stories', not soap opera, and so on. From points made inthe preceding section we can see a basis for how teases come to be builtthis way: they are displaying a certain scepticism with prior speaker's


Gene: hhh!

(12) (Excerpt.)

(0.2)Gene: hheh-heh-heh- [heh(-heh)Maggie: Shit you I think you got the original

nickel.

In response to Gene's reporting the news of both the achievement of hispromotion and the good fortune of that coinciding with a raise forprincipals, Maggie's tease attributes to him something like wheeler/dealerstatus, someone who makes sure he comes out on top, ahead of the restwhen it comes to pay deals.P

In each of extracts (9) and (22) a normal activity or laudable achievement/category has been mentioned in the tease recipients' prior talk. Thefollowing instance from extract (12) illustrates how the tease trades off,and thereby itself occasions, a normal activity for the category of personsbeing teased.

Myra:Bob:Heather:

Myra: Apparently they'd looked at it befo:re (0.7) and uh (.) heturned round and said it wasn't dangerous (0.5) and nowhe's turned round and said it's dangerous.

(0.6)Myra: [Hasn't heHeather: Well with [two of you bumping around in itBob: Mm.

(0.6)Yeah =

=E [hmIt's all the action isn't it uh:::::hh--+

Myra and Bob have been telling about the structural condition of theirhouse and the council's changing assessment of that condition. The teaseoffers a nonserious explanation for the house appearing to have falleninto a dangerous condition since they moved into it, an explanation whichinvolves an activity which was not mentioned in their story. This activity,sexual intercourse, is occasioned through a membership category to whichthey belong, that of married couple, for which that activity is normal.l"But they are depicted as abnormally sexually active ('bumping around'and 'all the action'), as behaving like people of another category to whichthey belong, that of newlyweds. Now newly wed they may be, but youngthey are not (they are well into middle age): so by virtue of theconventional association between being newly wed and being young, thetease gains an added ribaldry in implying - through the contrastive

(tease recipient's) overdone version of claims - and in a sense exposingthat 'overdone' quality - 'going even further' than prior speaker. Forinstance when in (21) Ken says his teacher thought he cheated, the tease ishe DID cheat; this goes further by omitting the qualification 'he thought'.And in (16) when Bill describes the symptoms he has been experiencing ofwhat he thinks is food poisoning, Arthur teasingly proposes that hisillness is serious enough to die from. And in reply to Alice's admonition in(10) to Larry to 'get home pretty early', he teasingly proposes leavingwork 'right now'. So that typically in the tease a speaker goes evenfurther, proposes a more extreme version, etc.

Inasmuch as the teases are thereby SCEPTICAL of prior speakers' claims,reports, assessments, etc., that is a basis for - a motivation for responding seriously to the tease. Another such basis is that recurrentlyteases attribute some kind of DEVIANT activity or category to the personwho is teased.

A procedure can be identified in teasing, whereby a kind of innocentactivity or category membership which is occasioned, usually in the teasedperson's prior turn(s), is then transformed in the tease into a deviantactivity or category. Something which is normal, unremarkable, etc., isturned into something abnormal. For instance, in the following case Johnhas been describing a method he has been taught to help him quitsmoking, which is that when he would otherwise want a cigarette he setshimself something to do instead, 'specific things to do each da:y'; such as'on Tuesday you scratch your nose and on Wednesday you scratch yourleft ear'.

(9) (Excerpt.)John: And they have a different thing each day so that it

doesn [ 't get y 0 u- ] =Ann: Is that true:?

-+ Ann: = Like what. Like pick your no.se? really?

In her tease Ann adds to John's list of quite normal things to do onewhich is a dirty habit, picking one's nose. In this next case Gene has toldMaggie that he has been promoted to a principal in his school and thatthe salary for principals is likely to be raised.

(22) (JG: II: 2: 8-9)Gene: They're- (0.4) ta:lking now about going up to thirty one

gra:nd as a principal. -Maggie:Oh r:really? -Gene: Yea::h.

-+ Maggie:.hh Well knowing you you'd have thirty one and, (.)thousand a:nd a nickeC


unmarried couple

having/learning ahabit

being home on time

meeting someone

married couple

ex-boyfriend

getting good results

getting to the top

any associate (family,colleague)

relaxing

Minimally requiredidentity/activity

being different

men being attentiveto women

feeling ill

not sleeping withprostitutes/women

buying a new car

wheeler/dealer

socially deficient(someone to beashamed of)

dependent

cheat

skipping work

sexually loose

sexually deviant(hyperactive)

sleeping together

dirty habit

watching trash

mug, conned

dying

homosexual

Tease-implicateddeviant identity

sexually deviant

sexually manipulative

Pick your nose

I can leave right now

He'll get to know you

Bumping around/allthe action

You weren'tsupposed to be there

I don't know whetherI'd want to introduceyou

He wanted to ask you

You did (cheat)

You'd have threethousand and a nickel

In each case the normal, unremarkable, unexceptional identity or activitylisted in the final column is pivotal: it is both an identity to which therecipient (or the subject) of the tease belongs, and also the identity /activity which is minimally required for the deviance ascription implied in thetease to conceivably apply. Insofar as recipients recognize that the normalidentity/activity applies to themselves (usually they've laid claim to it intheir prior turns), then they recognize that such is the basis for thedeviance ascription conceivably applying also. And therein lies the sensethat teases are close enough to reality to have a hostile element; or at least,close enough to reality to provide recipients with the motivation to set therecord straight in their serious, po-faced responses to teases.

(20)

(21)

(22)

(17)

(13)

(10)

(11)

(12)

(9)

(7) Couldn't you get yourcar started

(8) Watching daytimestories

Tease (simplified)

(3) You jack off

(4) They do that beforebut after they don't

(5) A week to live

(6) Just us two faggots

Minimally requiredidentity/activitybeing in the presenceof nonintimatesfriends/womentalking

talking endlessly,gossiping

Two forks becausewe're on TVYou started yacking(2)

(1)

relevance of their identity as middle-aged - that they are behaving (beingunusually sexually active) like young newlyweds.

Out of this a procedure can be identified which is employed inconstructing the tease, and whereby teases can be CLOSE TO THE BONE. Inthe tease, an abnormal or somehow deviant category or activity isattributed to the recipient (or in cases such as extract [4], to the subject ofthe tease). For that deviant attribution to CONCEIVABLY apply, it minimally requires that some category or activity should apply to therecipient/subject of the tease. Inasmuch as this minimally required normalactivity or category actually does apply to them, recipients can seethemselves as conceivably portrayed in the tease.

This procedure applies to nearly all instances of teasing in the corpus,but' for reasons of space I will just illustrate how this procedure isemployed in one further case. The tease in extract (I), 'Do we have twoforks 'cause we're on television?' treats something as unusual, a differencein the regular pattern. Certain changes or making improvements in afamily's mealtime routine, such as putting a cloth on the table, puttingmilk in a jug instead of the usual practice of bringing the milkbottle ontothe table, tidying the house, etc., can be regarded as phony or pretentious, inasmuch as the changes are made for the sake of appearances infront of strangers (to fool them into believing this is how we usually live).The deviance which is attributed here - to the person responsible for theplace setting - is that of being phony/pretentious (setting two forks):that attribution minimally requires the activity/identity being in thepresence ofnonintimates to apply - an identity which is thus occasionedin the tease and can of course be recognized by recipient as applying.When in her po-faced receipt Mother provides a different explanation forthe change, 'You have pie:: tonight', she disputes the charge of beingphony by implicitly rejecting that the presence of nonintimates is whathas made the difference. She is not of course disputing that it applies: sheputs the record straight so far as its relevance is concerned in accountingfor the change, the unusualness of setting two forks. This and the otherinstances of teasing cited in this paper!" can be represented schematicallyas follows, showing the deviant identity which is implicated in the tease;and the minimal identity/activity required for the deviant identity toconceivably apply to the recipient.Tease (simplified) Tease-implicated

deviant identityphony, pretentious

248 P. Drew

Conclusion

I referred in the last sentence to the HOSTILE element in teasing in order tomake explicit a connection with the largely anthropological and ethnographic literature on teasing as a particular form of joking behavior. As isindicated in the quotation in the first section of this paper from Loudon,the mixture of hostility and humor in teasing has been a central theme inthat literature, in which the seminal work was that of Radcliffe-Brown.From his research into marriage and kinship in African tribes, RadcliffeBrown identified formalized joking relationships, principally involvingteasing, which he described as

... a peculiarcombination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviouris suchthat in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is notmeant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostilityand a real friendliness.... Any serious hostility is prevented by the playfulantagonism of teasing, and this in its regular repetition is a constant expression orreminderof that social disjunction which isoneof the essential components of therelation, while the social conjunction is maintained by the friendliness that takesno offence at insult (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 91-92).

While most subsequent studies (see for example Sykes 1966; Emerson1969; Loudon 1970; Spradley and Mann 1975) have been into whatRadcliffe-Brown would have considered unformalized modes of jokingbehavior, researchers have followed him in accounting for teasing as afunctional device for managing social structural conflicts or tensions, andthereby as a means of social control. As a form of tension management,teasing enables people to give expression to underlying conflicts betweenthem (the social disjunctive element r.eferredto in the quote above), but insuch a way that in sharing the joke or humor (laughing at the same thing)they simultaneously express their positive communality or conjunction(see also Brown and Levison 1978: 129). The type of social disjunctionand hence source of conflict and tension identified in the different studiesvaries. Radcliffe-Brown identified the divergence of interest between ahusband and his wife's kin: Spradley and Mann focused on the conflict inthe relationship between bartender and waitress in a cocktail bar; whileEmerson's analysis is of the joking between patients and medical staff in ahospital. Each of these, therefore, treats teasing as evidence for and asolution to conflicts which arise from participants' social structuralpositions, that is, their respective categories (male/female; bartender/waitress; nurse/patient; husband/brothers-in-law; cross-cousins, etc.). Thissocial structural framework is of course rather broadly relevant tosociolinguistic attempts to explain for instance lexical choice, using


speaker/recipient categories as an index of relative status and familiarity(see for example Ervin-Tripp 1971 for an explanatory model of theselection of address terms and pronouns).

However, we can see, I think, an important limitation to the generalapplicability of Radcliffe-Brown's social structural explanation of teasing,and also of sociolinguistic models in which participants' categories aretreated as explanatory variables. The analysis of teasing given above, andparticularly in the preceding section, demonstrates that recipient identitiesor categories ARE OCCASIONED either in recipients' own talk prior to beingteased, or in the teases themselves. From among the indefinite number ofidentities someone may possess, in the sense of categories to which theymay belong, one or some of those identities are being occasioned in andthrough the teasing sequences. So for example the occurrence of the tease inextract (12) about Myra and Bob 'bumping around' is not to be explainedby their being [a couple], [newly married], and [middle-aged]: rather, theseare categories whose relevance is occasioned as a resource in constructingthe tease. Similarly in extract (1), the respective identities of Dot andMother as [daughter] and [mother, provider of the meal] and their collectiveidentity of [in the presence of strangers] are resources whereby Dot canconstruct a tease directed at Mother. Those categories do not explain WHY

she should tease her, for instance in terms of some structural conflict whichthose identities generate, because there is no principled reason for selectingthose as explanatory instead of other identities which they also possess(such as teenager, middle-aged; women; in the presence of Dot's boyfriend),and between which other structural conflicts can plausibly exist. No oneplausible explanation is the correct one because no one description of theparticipants (in terms of their possible identities) is more correct thananother. One could not therefore predict - in the manner suggested bycertain sociolinguistic models - the occurrence of teasing, because onecannot know in advance how a tease will be constructed and hence whichof an indefinite number of social structural tensions which can plausiblyexist between any two people is going to be operative. Nor could onepredict whether for any set of, for example, contrastive categories such asmother/daughter, teenager/middle-aged, which identities will.be a source ofsocial bonding (Radcliffe-Brown's social conjunctions or of conflict (socialdisjunction) between the participants. But what I wish to emphasize is thatparticipant identities are being occasioned in sequences of talk as resourcesfor realizing speakers' purposes - the products of which are teases: thusthe conversational relevance of participant identities is circumscribed bytheir interactional use by speakers in particular segments of talk (for a moreelaborate and general argument along these lines, see Schegloff forthcoming).


I. Only someone who had read her comments on an earlier draft of this paper couldappreciate the debt lowe to Gail Jefferson. She suggested points of direction and

It follows from my very brief outline of this anthropological andethnographic literature on teasing that when Loudon refers to the contextin which teasing occurs, and in terms of which the social control functionof teasing is to be understood, he means the social structural context. Sothat the sources of tension or the shortcomings and inadequacies whichgenerate this form of social control (see also Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 109)exist independently of actual instances of teases. This involves a kind ofpsychodynamic transference of preexisting hostilities onto pieces ofinteraction, where even if it could be shown that such a transference wastaking place, it could not account for the systematics which have beenidentified in this paper associated with WHERE in conversation teasing isdone, and HOW IT IS ACCOMPLISHED. That is, it has been shown here thatteasing is not freely occurring in conversation but occurs in a certainSEQUENTIAL context, post-utterances by the tease recipient, in which theyhave been doing one of a limited class ofactivities (complaining, extolling,bragging, etc.) - and moreover somewhat immoderate versions of thoseactions (going on about, playing innocent, outraged complaining, etc.).This is a different kind ofcontext than the sort envisaged by Loudon, andone which suggests a different kind of social control function for teasingthan he describes. Inasmuch as the sequential context in which teasesoccur is typically one in which the recipient has gone on extollingsomething or someone, has gone on complaining, has been self-pitying,has played the innocent, and so forth, and the subsequent tease canconvey some scepticism with what recipient has said, then teasing may beconsidered a mild and indirect form of reproof for a mild kind oftransgression. Whatever psychodynamic hostilities may be being transferred, the LOCALLY OCCASIONED OPPORTUNITIES for teases are minorconversational transgressions in the current talk: if teasing has a socialcontrol function it is interactionally, not structurally, generated. And ofcourse like any social control mechanism, it tends to meet with resistanceby those whom an attempt is being made to control, a resistance whichtakes the form of po-faced responses to teases.

Received 20 January 1986Revised version received10 July 1986

Notes

University of York

substantive ideas and drew to my attention many of the data extracts cited below. Partof Jefferson's generosity is that she never calls in such debts. I am grateful also toCharles and Marjorie Goodwin for making available to me video recordings fromwhich some of the instances discussed below are taken. Correspondence address:Department of Sociology, York University, Heslington, York YOI 5DD, England.

2. For analyses of not laughing at what is offered as humor in other interactional/sequential environments than that considered here, see Jefferson (1979,1984, 1985); Jeffersonet al. (1984); also Emerson (1969).

3. Several people have had trouble with the expression 'po-faced'. Its colloquial meaningis given in the Oxford dictionary as 'solemn-faced, humourless': and the word 'po' is anAnglicized form of the French 'pot', referring to chamber pot. The etymologicalconnection between a chamber pot and being po-faced is puzzling, Wittgenstein'stheory of resemblances notwithstanding. Some people hypothesize that there is a sensein which to be po-faced is to assume a stony or glazed expression, chamber pots alsobeing glazed and stony. My own theory - well, it's my wife's - is suggested bycollections of chamber pots in some English country houses, notably the collection inNewby Hall, Yorkshire. A fashion in the late 18th century was to paint an open eye onthe bottom inside of chamber pots. In later more sophisticated versions, a whole facewas painted, wearing an understandably sour-faced - and hence humorless expression of distaste.

4. The data extracts in this paper are simplified versions (in standard orthography) oftranscriptions using the conventions currently employed within conversation analysis,as developed by Gail Jefferson. For a glossary of these conventions, see Atkinson andHeritage (1984: ix-xvi).

5. Laughing here refers to audible particles of explosive breathiness produced either ontheir own, as in heh heh heh, or in the productionof other components of an utterance.Such particles often cooccur with speaker using a hearably smiley voice, as the visitordoes in extract (2):while a smiley voice can be heard on the tape, at present we do nothave a way of transcribing that. Furthermore, in some of the cases of teasing in faceto-face interactions for which there is a video recording, it appears that recipients maysmile without using a smiley voice: and they may smile either before or while giving aserious response to the tease. So the absence of transcribable laughter particles doesnot mean, in face-to-face interactions at least, that recipients have not otherwisedisplayed their recognition of teasing, for example through smiling. Because a videorecording was not made of some of the face-to-face interactions cited here, theproportion of overt displays of recognizing the teases may be greater than a third ofthe cases.

6. Oil repeating as a standard format for marking accordance with prior speaker, seeJefferson (1985:31).

7. I have only found three such cases in a corpus of approximately 50 instances of teasing.8. His wife's, Myra's, responses are different, consisting of agreements ('Yeah' and 'Yeah

that's probably right') done without any mirth. Myra thereby minimally goes alongwith the tease, but not with its humor.

9. For an analysis of some other kinds of interactional work done through extremeversions, see Pomerantz (1986). _

10. In some extracts subsequent versions of the same tease occur, sometimes plainlygenerated by speaker's recognition that recipient did not understand they are beingteased. This happens for example in extracts (5) and (14). There are also multipleversions of the tease in (6) and (22), after recipient has displayedhaving recognized theinitial tease: and in some other cases, notably (10) and (12), recipients' initial responses

252 P. Drew

are ambiguous with respect to whether they recognize they are being teased. But in allsuch cases, subsequent versions of the teases became successivelymore obvious - thatis, more exaggerated.

II. In the only exceptions, (7), (13), and (15), this adjacency applies but for someintervening laughter.

12. The exceptions are cases (I) and (7). Both of these involve teases which are SECONDS toprior remarks (quips) already made to the recipient, so that the teases exploit andfollow up those prior humorous remarks.

13. See also extracts (7) and (15); there is also an element of complaining in extracts (10)and (20).

14. For the case of self-deprecation, see (3); the admission of laziness occurs in (8).15. Although Gene at first responds to this teasing characterization by laughing, as shown

in this fragment, he subsequently rejects it, 'No:t qui:te' and 'No I'm not like tha:t': sothat this is another instance of the type in the continuum illustrated by fragments (3)and (4).

16. Harvey Sacks made frequent reference in his work to the analytic and reflexiveconnections between membership categories and normal activities. While his ideasabout these connections were stated most formally in Sacks (1972), they were beingdeveloped together with, and as an integral part of, his investigations into conversational sequencing in his earliest recorded lectures (Sacks 1964).

17. The only exceptions unable to be incorporated into the following schema are (14) and(18), the latter being an instance of a play on words, a rather distinctive form of teasing.

References

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Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: politeness phenomenon.In E. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness, 56-289. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Emerson, J. P. (1969). Negotiating the serious import of humour. Sociometry 32, 169-181.Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (1971). Sociolinguistics. In J. A. Fishman (ed.), Advances in the Sociology

of Language, 15-92. The Hague: Mouton.Jefferson, G. (1979) . .A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/decli

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--{1985). An exercise in the transcription and analysis of laughter. In T. van Dijk (ed.),Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 25-34. London: Academic Press.

-, Sacks, H., and Schegloff, E. (1984). On laughter in pursuit of intimacy. Working Paper,International Centre for Semiotics and Linguistics, Paper No. 135. Urbino: University ofUrbino. (A more extended version of this paper is to appear in G. Button and J. Lee [eds.]Talk and Social Organisation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.)

Loudon, J. B. (1970). Teasing and socialisation on Tristan da Cunha. In P. Mayer (ed.),Socialization: The Approachfrom Social Anthropology, 293-332. London: Tavistock.


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--{1972). On the analysability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.),Directions in Sociolinguistics, 325-345. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Schegloff, E. (1980). Preliminaries to preliminaries: 'Can I ask you a question?' SociologicalInquiry 50, 104-152.

--{forthcoming). Between macro and micro: contexts and other connections. In J. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch, and N. Smelser (eds.), The Micro-Macro Link, Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press.

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Sykes, A. J. M. (1966). Joking relationships in an industrial setting. American Anthropologist68, 188-193.

drew po faced receiptsocr

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