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preceding comments regarding sociable selfhood to hold, we might state that,
in each cultural milieu, although different sociable selves are mobilised and
aligned qua players and images (Goffman 1967; 1967), in terms of the self as
conversational construal, each participants in each sociable milieu can be
seen to be individuating and communing - or expanding and contracting - in
and through their alignment practices.
In terms of what we are now able to say about these differences being
interpretable within the context of the facework as alignment approach, what
the preceding analysis has clearly demonstrated is that English and German
sociable conversations display both positive and negative alignment across
and within sociable episodes. Such alignment is directly contingent on the
mobilisation of normatively available sociable selves in each culture. The
expressive nature of each of these selves though is subject to cross-cultural
variation. It is variation at the level of such normatively available and routinely
mobilised conversational selves both as conversational players and
conversational images that results in what is manifest conversationally as
differences in sociable style.
8.4 Conclusion
I began this chapter by discussing the conversational capacity of the
self to both expand to include the experiences, viewpoints and definitions of
other selves, and contract to become a conversational entity characterised by
more unique and individuated experiences, viewpoints and definitions - what I
referred to as the self as 'conversational-construal' (8.1 ). The aim of this
treatment of the self was to illustrate that the self in conversation can variously
enjoy either positively or negatively skewed status, dependant on the
alignment context of talk. Conversationally, this was shown to be manifest in
the conversational claims of participants as sociable players or sociable
images. Following this, I moved on to consider in some detail transcribed and
translated examples of sociable conversation (8.2), drawn from four different
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