Introducing English Linguistics

party is doing:
<$A> <#> Sweetie frumptions <,,> <#> This is kinda open <,,>
<$B> <#> Yep <,,> <#> How was work
 <#> CLOSET
<$A> <#> I’m so tired <,,>
<$B> <#> Tired
<$A> <#> It was word <#> It was okay I left my bag
there <,,> <#> I left my bag and all my money and all my things
<,,>
Because A is returning from work, B asks how work was. While opening a
closet door and (probably) hanging up her jacket, A replies that she is
“tired.” This leads to a discussion of what happened to A at work. In many
conversations, this section will be more perfunctory, with one person say-
ing something like How’s everything? and the other replying Fine. As was
noted in Chapter 3, these utterances are not necessarily literal: the first
speaker most likely does not want to know how the second speaker actu-
ally feels. But such utterances are expected at this juncture in a sponta-
neous dialogue, and speakers invariably make them without much
thought, largely because they are instances of phatic communication: lan-
guage whose function is to establish social bonds between speakers rather
than to convey meaningful linguistic information.
A telephone call, another type of spontaneous dialogue, has a different
kind of opening, largely because such conversations are distanced, and
people making phone calls need to insure at the start of the conversation
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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that they reach the party to whom they wish to speak. The opening of a
telephone conversation is therefore one instance of what Schegloff (2002:
333) refers to as a summons–answer sequence: a ringing phone literally
“summons” someone to engage in a conversation.
Exactly how the callee responds to the summons is very dependent upon
the formality of the call and the extent to which the caller and callee rec-
ognize each other’s voices. In the example below, the callee answers the
phone and opens the conversation with the word Hello, the most common
way that a phone call starts. The caller then greets the callee. At this junc-
ture, the caller could have identified himself (Hi Sean, this is Justin), but does
not do so, probably because he anticipates (correctly in this case) that the
callee will recognize his voice.
<$A> <#> Hello
<$B> <#> Hi Sean
<$A> <#> Hello Justin
<$B> <#> You all right
<$A> <#> Yeah
<$B> <#> Good good
(ICE-GB:S1A-100 73–78)
The conversation then proceeds as any spontaneous dialogue would.
In the next example, instead of saying Hello, the callee opens the conver-
sation by giving his name. The two callers then greet each other, with the
caller not identifying himself, since the callee obviously recognizes his voice.
<$A> <#> Bill Lewis here
<$B> <#> Hi
<$A> <#> Hi <#> How’s things
<$B> <#> OK
(ICE-GB:S1A-096 001–5)
While it is possible in British English to open a phone call by giving one’s
name, the use of Hello is more common in American English.
Other structures are employed in more formal contexts where neither