Journal
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 557-577Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/josl.12474
Keywords
complaints; conversation analysis; co-residence; hair salon; later life; membership categorisation analysis
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Funding
- Arts and Humanities Research Council
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This paper examines a series of complaints produced within four successive encounters, revealing how the complainant implicitly implicates her daughter as a culpable figure. By analyzing the detailed articulation of complaints, it sheds light on the complexity of familial relations constructed discursively by the complainant. This study contributes to understanding the ambivalence of co-residence arrangements in later life and provides insights for addressing methodological issues associated with implicitly designed complaints.
Many studies of complaints-in-interaction have examined long sequences. This paper, by contrast, scrutinises a series of complaints produced within the same participation framework across four successive encounters. The data comprise audio-recorded talk between an older woman (the complainant) and her stylist in a hair salon. Drawing on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I show how the complainant recurrently, but implicitly, implicates her near-co-resident adult daughter as a culpable figure in her complaints. I argue that it is the longitudinal nature of the data that enables this identification of the daughter as the recurrent underlying target. The paper thereby contributes to studies of complaining-in-interaction. It also shows how we might address some of the methodological issues associated with implicitly designed complaints. Furthermore, I argue that through the detail of the way she designs her articulation of her troubles-as complaints, but with the culpability of her daughter often very implicit-the complainant discursively constructs the complexity of her familial relations and living situation. This paper thereby also contributes to sociolinguistic studies of social ageing by offering insights into some of the lived ambivalence of co-residence arrangements in later life.
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