Introduction

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Chapter 6

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Among bilingual speakers, language choice is a social activity and a membership categorization device (Gafaranga 2001, 2005).

The central theoretical concept of membership categories is central for the analyses in this paper. Initiated by Sacks (1974b, 1995), the following rules apply in doing Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA):

1. Inevitability

The categorization of participants happens unavoidably, regardless of whether the person in question feels as if he/she belongs to the category.

2. Two-set-classes

The generation of one category causes the generation of another category.

3. Self- and other-categorization

Categories can be made relevant for self or other(s).

There is an endless number of membership categories. A person can, for example, belong to the categories male, painter, speaker of English, learner of German, father, uncle, son – and all of this at the same time. Sacks notes:

"Each of these categories could apply to the same person. And it's perfectly obvious that Members do use one set's categories for some statements and another set's categories for other statements. If we're going to describe Member's activities, and the way they produce activities and see activities and organize their knowledge about them, then we're going to have to find out how they go about choosing among the available sets of categories for grasping some event." (Sacks 1995 (LC1): 41)

In other words, as one perspective on social identity, MCA shows that identity is not something people are, but ‘‘something they do’’ (Widdicombe, 1998: 191). "Identities are negotiated in and through social interaction, are interactionally accomplished objects"

(Gafaranga 2001:1915). Sacks' "very central machinery of social organization’’ (Sacks 1995(LC1): 40) shows that instead of an external device that interactants carry with them in an unchangeable manner, social identity is constructed in interaction. This is done for self and others, as analysis reveals:

"Terms from membership categorization devices are mostly used as resources for identifying, describing, formulating, etc., persons […]. These are empirical findings; they are not so by definition or stipulation". (Schegloff 2007: 456)

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Thus, social identities are resources that people use in order to accomplish specific interactional activities.

Concerning the coherence between multilingualism and membership categories, it seems obvious that a person's multilingualism can be made relevant in interaction as a category – or not. Wagner (1998) states:

“[…] since membership is a sociological category, non-nativeness can not be used […] without delivering proof that non-nativeness also is a relevant, sociological category. Seen as mere non-natives, the participants [of a particular Second Language Acquisition study] seem to act in a socially empty room.” (Wagner 1998: 108)

It seems evident from experience that, in order to achieve intersubjectivity with others, neither unblemished grammatical structures nor flawless vocabulary is required – not even first-language-users speak that way. The category 'Foreign Language User' is thus not at all times relevant in interaction. Linguistic identity is, though, a social identity:

"As a consequence, the issue of relating the social structure and the conversational structure in language alternation is dissolved. The conversational structure, an activity, is inseparable from the social structure.

The social structure ‘occasions’ the conversational structure. In turn, it is through the conversational structure that the social structure is established."

(Gafaranga 2005: 294)

Concerning the institutionality of the data, some theoretical features play a prominent role in the analysis. Institutional interaction shows particular constraints the participants orient to, which are due to the special environment. Drew und Heritage (1992: 22) name three features which characterize institutional interaction:

• Goal orientation: At least one of the participants is oriented to "some core goal, task or identity (or set of them) conventionally associated with the institution in question"

• Special constraints: There are "particular constraints on what one or both of the participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand."

• Inferential frameworks: Frameworks "that are particular to specific institutional contexts."

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These institutional frameworks play a decisive role for the data analyzed in so far as that the organizational position of each participant has influence on the individual rights and obligations of the interactants. These are realized through interactional activities and thus produce local identities. The connection between local identities and the design of interactional activities has been described by Raymond & Heritage (2006). They show how ownership and epistemic responsibilities are realized in interaction:

"By looking at how persons manage the rights and responsibilities of identities – the territories of ownership and accountability that are partly constitutive of how identities are sustained as identities – we are witnessing a set of resources through which identities get made relevant and consequential in particular episodes of interaction." (Raymond & Heritage 2006: 700)

By epistemic authorities, Heritage & Raymond 2005) refer to

"[P]articipants’ […] management of rights and responsibilities related to knowledge and information. For example, conversationalists treat one another as possessing privileged access to their own experiences and as having specific rights to narrate them (Pomerantz 1980; Sacks 1984); [e.g.] patients offer medical diagnoses to physicians only under relatively particular circumstances (Gill 1998 […]). In each of these cases, the distribution of rights and responsibilities regarding what participants can accountably know, how they know it, whether they have rights to describe it, and in what terms is directly implicated in organized practices of speaking." (Heritage & Raymond 2005: 16)

The present study further substantiates this phenomena by showing examples of how participants activate and implement epistemic authorities through their interactional activities in an institutional multilingual setting. In regards to the interrelatedness of multilingualism, social local identities and institutional interaction Drew and Heritage (1992) state

"In each case, considerations of social identity and task reconfigure the interpretative 'valence' that may be attached to particular actions in institutional contexts by comparison to how they are normally understood in ordinary conversation. Still more tangled and complex interpretative issues arise in interactions […] where participants to an institutional interaction […]

do not share common cultural or linguistic resources." (Drew & Heritage 1992: 24f)

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These "tangled and complex […] issues" are at the core of this study. It provides an analysis of multilingualism in an institutional context (further examples of this in Torras & Gafaranga 2002, Kurhila 2004) and shows the local social consequences on identity work in an institutional environment.

Prior research has demonstrated that multilingual settings provide rich resources for identity work in (institutional) interaction. This paper goes beyond looking at language alternation and/or orientation to multilingualism in institutional talk and its relevance for local identities. It studies how multilingualism as a members' category is made relevant in creating laughables and laughter. The interactional consequences of laughter are analyzed in multilingual talk-in-interaction by examining sequences in which the laughable is clearly connected to multilingualism. This connection, as the paper reveals, builds a crucial resource for identity work.

Laughter has been shown to constitute a central resource in doing identity work (Jefferson 1984b, Jefferson et al. 1987, Glenn 2003b). It shapes participation and plays an important role for participants when orienting to work-relevant identities (Haakana, 1999, Dannerer 2002, Markaki et al., forthcoming, chapter 5 this study). Constituting an adjacency pair (Jefferson 1979), laughter can be managed in a sequence that includes or excludes co-present participants by affiliating or disaffiliating with it (O'Donnel-Trujillo 1983). By laughing, participants can activate or challenge identity-building activities, and even infringe on social norms (Coser 1960). "Laughter, then, may not always be a matter of flooding out, to be accounted for as something that happens to a speaker such that he can't help lau:gh, but can be managed as an interactional resource, as a systematic activity […]." (Jefferson 1985:34).

This study contributes to the analysis of laughter as an interactional resource by looking at laughter in a multilingual, institutional setting.

Using Conversation Analysis (CA) ⁴³ the paper compares and contrasts three cases of laughter in which the participants make their orientation to multilingualism apparent and use it as a resource in order to do identity work. The comparisons are drawn under the analytic foci (1) orientation to multilingualism as a vehicle, (2) multilingualism as a resource for orientation to local identities in business meetings, and (3) laughter. All three cases show similarities in

43 For an overview on CA and its methodology cf. Drew 2004, Heritage & Goodwin 1990, Silverman 1998. For a detailed study of the CA approach to bilingual interaction, see Wei 2002.

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regard to the following: (a) the laughable is connected to multilingualism, (b) the laughter has influence on group interaction and group constellation, and (c) the participants infringe on local social rules through laughing.

Also, in all cases participants employ multilingualism as a resource for doing identity work in terms of epistemic authorities (Raymond & Heritage 2006) and thus claim or disclaim territory of ownership and accountability.

The first case demonstrates how the interactants of the business meetings orient to language preference in the meetings and how they bring about local identities with the according epistemic authorities (Raymond and Heritage, 2006). The second segment shows a participant's effort to build an affiliation by making the membership category 'Foreign Language User' relevant for herself and for the person highest in hierarchy. This attempt to construct an in-group proves to be challengeable by the other team members. In the third data example, participants make a trouble source publicly accessible as a laughable by exhibiting its implicit inappropriateness, and thereby create closeness (Jefferson et al. 1987).

To achieve this, the local identity of the trouble source's producer as a 'Foreign Language User' is made relevant.