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world presented as of interest to the group as a whole. These topics included
for instance good and bad experiences of holidays, visits to restaurants, or
public service encounters. Additional topics based around unique but
newsworthy experiences could also be drawn upon as resources for pursuit of
reportable talk; And finally 'Biographicals' were those topics in and through
which participants presented some aspect of their personal lives to be shared
with the rest of the group. For example health issues, job plans, or personal
projects such as home decorating were included under this heading.
Although these topic categories can be regarded as nicely encapsulating
salient and frequently drawn upon topic in both sociable milieu, differences
emerged in terms of the second of the two characteristics of sociable topic
development that I want to consider here, namely, how participants generally
aligned to the activity of sociable conversational topic development.
As I noted at the beginning of Chapter 2, on first participating in German
sociable gatherings, I was struck by, not so much what got talked about, but
how it was talked about. For example, I initially observed that almost any
statement or proposition could be legitimately taken up as a basis for topic
development. Once taken up, the topic could then be retained as a
conversational resource over quite extended periods. The nature of the
discussion could be quite intense, and lead to a necessity to take a stand and
open oneself up to the possibility of having it knocked down. It was the German
preparedness to topicalise and talk extensively about anything in the general
manner described above that caused my initial conversational assimilation
problem (Cf. similar observations made by Schiffrin 1984 in Jewish sociability).
During my early participation in German sociable gatherings, I once found
myself listening with some disbelief, as a conversation of several tens of
minutes was intensely debated arising out of a side comment made by myself of
'what should or should not be thrown on the compost heap'7. Conversely,
candidate topics not to be taken up were frequently met with slight pauses,
followed by "Hm:: ", then another slightly longer pause to effectively signal that
topic would not be further developed. This leaves the speaker essentially -and
the interaction itself - temporarily out on a conversational limb until another
candidate topic worthy of discussion is proffered by somebody. In general then,
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