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particular speakers to the point where it was difficult for that participant - at
least at that particular moment in the talk - to be unproblematically
accommodated solidarically. Similarly, I argued that too much positive
alignment might leave participants in a state where they felt their conversational
autonomy to be threatened, finding it difficult to negatively align. However, due
to the locally managed nature of sociable conversation, I suggested that
participants may work to avoid such breaches or employ remedial strategies to
restore equilibrium.
In this chapter I aim to demonstrate how these alignments contingencies
can be seen to be equilibrically being played out in actual conversational
episodes in both English and German sociable gatherings. In terms of the
immediately preceding chapter (Chapter 5), the discussion and analysis shall
focus on what were cast as sociable episodes, that is instances of extended
conversational interaction between two or more persons focusing on a common
topic (theme; issue; event) which stands apart from the preceding or following
talk and in which participants appear to be collectively and reciprocatively
interacting. Whereas however in the previous chapter I limited my analysis to
topic choice and general alignment to topic handling, here I shall focus more
closely on both positive and negative alignment practices as they were
conceptualised in Chapter 3.
Although I have posited the sociable self as central to an understanding
of facework as alignment, particularly in terms of cross-cultural variation (see
Chapter 2), 1 will at this point in the study refrain from applying and developing
the concept of the self per se (see Chapter 8). The aim here will be primarily to
move beyond the theoretical propositions advanced in chapter three to
demonstrate how alignment practices can be evidenced by considering actual
conversation as it is played out within sociable episodes in both milieu. In order
to do this I shall consider alignment in terms of what are manifest as
conversational claims.
In order to aid in the explication of the particular approach to facework in
sociable episodes employed here, I shall begin by presenting a basic notation
system for marking transcript data for various alignment practices. This notation
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