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Notes to Chapter 5
1 Due to the nature of the methodology employed (see Chapter 4), recordings of the greeting
phases were not systematically made. As a result, recordings of verbal interaction during these
phases was in large not collected verbatim. The discussion of the these phases then is based
on a mixture of participant observation notes and recollections by both myself and Elke. As
greeting phases constitute a peripheral concern here, I would hope that such a method would
be admissible without undermining the validity of the thesis.
2 Hosting or'proxy-hosting' appeared to be much more salient in German gatherings, both
during greeting phases, and throughout the main phase of the gathering. It appears that
German hosts displayed much more commitment to the role of host than the English who, by
and large, seemed to display a much more ambivalent attitude to this role.
3 Immediately following extended stays in Germany, upon entering English sociable gatherings,
I have often experienced pulling myself back from the brink of offering a 'sociable hand'.
4 On the question of whether or not follow up calls were actually made, I make this statement
based on my own experience of both English and German milieus.
5 Generally, I found that 1 minute of talk required at least 10 minutes of transcription time.
Extrapolate this to around 25 hours of data that was transcribeable, and the task of transcribing
all data is proved an impossibility.
6 See Tannen (1984), and more recently Straehle (1997) who, in dealing with similar sized
corpora of conversation, note that constructing an outline of topics in any given conversation
provides a convenient way of '"... get[ting] a handle on the data" when one is confronted with
massive amounts of it' (Shuy 1981, cited in Straehle 1997., p. 1 10).
7 Alongside these linguistic and non-lexical differences was the fact that German
conversationalists also displayed this state of heightened attentiveness by non-verbal means
such as direct eye contact and fixed gaze, but again with minimal gestural recognition of
agreement or disagreement.
8 See Straehle (1997) who, in presenting similar findings in comparing US-English - German
conversation, refers to such tendencies as'topic diving' and lopic surfing'.
9 What this implies is that some topic types per se are skewed towards either solidaric (i. e.
'when we were kids) or autonomous (i. e. What I have to report as part of my personal
experience / knowledge) expression. I can not expand on this proposition here however, but
future research into topics as vehicles for solidaric or individuated expression might consider the
skewness of topic proposition.
10 Of course, the distinction implied here is not a sudden reality shift from one to the other. On
approaching sociable gatherings, one often feels temporarily displaced, in a sort of in between
world, between what the concrete reality one has just left behind, and the sociable reality one is
about to enter.
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