Download (23MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

important facet of 'working consensus', 'institutionalised talk' etc. in English
sociable gatherings.
Having addressed the English data to be included in this particular
chapter, I now want to move on to consider the German data, employing the
same conceptual language and theoretical framework advanced over the
preceding pages.
8.2.2 German Alignment of Sociable Selves
The sociable episodes that I wish to consider drawn from my German
de!
ta are firstly 'Internationale Arbeitslosigkeit' ['International Unemployment]
and secondly 'Studieren als Hobby' [Studying as Hobby']. The transcript of
,a
each episode will be presented initially in the original German followed by an
English translation for each episode. As I noted earlier, all translations were
carried out by my wife Elke who is a German national but also bilingual (i. e. a
level of competence in the English spoken language comparable to a native
English speaker - see Chapter 4 for more details of the methodology
employed in the translation process). As with the English data presented in
8.2.1,1 am positing these data as characteristic of German sociable
conversation, and representative of much of my own body of German
conversational data. This is based again on my own experiences of
participation within German sociable episodes, but also reflects Elke's own
experiences and observations. In this sense, the data here enjoy a double-
corroboration and validation as being representative of a predominant part of
German sociable conversational style.
Similar to the English data, shall treat each episode separately
although overlap between the two episodes in terms of topic handling and
development, and selves mobilised will be apparent.
Let us begin then by turning to the first of the two excerpts,
'Internationale Arbeitslosigkeit'
260