Abstract
The present investigation studies buying and selling encounters in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. It is a conversation-analytic study that shows aspects of the institutional character of these interactions, their overall organisation and sequential structure. It suggests that the core sequential structure of these encounters consists of two base adjacency pairs, buying (requesting–giving a product) and selling (requesting–giving money). In particular, the analysis describes the preparatory characteristics of the pre-expansions that precede the product request formulations, the linguistic composition and sequential positioning of request formulations, the insertions of the buying adjacency pair and the sequencing of the commercial exchange which is described as the climax of the institutional event. The designs of the first pair part of the selling adjacency pair and the product request formulations are presented as clear instances of the referential framework or common ground shared by seller and customer.
Keywords
… the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring to prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.
Introduction
The present investigation follows the conversation-analytic paradigm that regards the interactional contexts and their participants’ identities as phenomena generated and defined, turn by turn, by the interactants themselves. That is, in interaction, while speakers register their mutual understanding they also show the type of activity they are doing and the identities they are playing for that specific activity context. By revisiting the Wittgensteinian concept of language game, Levinson (1979) introduced the term activity type, which refers to any activity that can be culturally identified and whose participants have, for that activity, specific goals and social roles or identities. Levinson’s concept relates to the daily social interactions that have a professional or work-related character, that is, interactions that occur when people carry out their jobs, for example the interactions between a doctor and their patients, a teacher and their students, an interviewer and an interviewee, or the interactions between a seller and their buyers in a shop. The latter are the type of interactions this article is concerned about.
Levinson also mentions that each type of activity has its own structural and chronological order. For example, the structure of commercial interactional encounters could consist of the customer arriving to the shop and the seller welcoming him or her, then the customer ordering some products and the seller dealing with the order, followed by the customer and the seller interchanging products and money and closing the encounter. Levinson’s activity type concept highlights the fact that in each activity, and in its parts, participants orient to the achievement of their particular goals, for example in commercial encounters, participants orient to request or to offer a product, to get the best price possible, to sell the best product, and so on. Each activity and its parts set certain restrictions which correspond to the participants’ social and interactional behaviour expected to occur in the activity. For instance, it is most likely that someone who enters the shop will request and/or buy something and that the person in charge of the shop will know the price of a product when he or she is asked about it.
The study of institutional talk – as work-related interactions are referred to in the conversation-analytic paradigm (Drew and Heritage, 1992) – is the methodological framework of the present investigation. The analysis that follows is based on 25 hours of video recordings of buying and selling interactions in a fruit and vegetable shop in Toluca, Mexico. Apart from fruit and vegetables, the shop also sells other types of products such as chicken, some grains, canned food, dried goods and herbs. The shopkeepers, or sellers, are four men between 22 and 31 years old, and although they are Otomi speakers (a Mexican indigenous language), all the interactions they have with their customers are in Mexican Spanish. The goal of the analysis is to show the institutional character of buying and selling interactions and their sequential structure. Before doing so, a word on previous research is in order.
Previous studies
Flores Farfán (1984, 2003) investigates buying and selling interactions in an Otomi market in Mexico. He identifies the structure of this type of encounter and proposes that it consists of four stages: product exhibition, valuation of the product, negotiation (i.e. buying prospects and price negotiation) and success or failure of the business transaction. Gutiérrez-Rivas and Steffanell (2012) describe the negotiation strategies used by palanqueras sellers in the process of buying and selling in Barranquilla, Colombia. The authors highlight the relevance of the type of product being negotiated in the commercial encounter. Both studies are framed within Hamel’s description of interactional patterns (Hamel, 1982, builds on some theoretical concepts of Hymes’ 1972 ethnography of communication); both Flores Farfán and Gutiérrez-Rivas and Steffanell mention some conversation-analytic concepts (e.g. adjacency pair, the turn taking system) but do not apply the paradigm in their analysis. Among the studies based on English language and with a conversation-analytic focus are Clark et al. (1994, 2003), who describe the buying and selling negotiations conducted by phone. They focus on how the buyer’s affiliation signs have an impact on the result of the encounter. Much more recently, Fox and Heinemann (2015) show the methods used by customers to request service in a shoe repair shop.
The institutional character of buying and selling interactions
Institutional talk is a restricted form of mundane interaction (Heritage, 1998, 2013). The line that divides institutional and mundane interaction is sometimes difficult to be drawn; this is because in institutional interactions speakers sometimes abandon the institutional context and move to a more mundane one (Schegloff, 1999). For example, a news interview, which is thought of as consisting of questions and answers, can become a hostile confrontation much more similar to a mundane verbal fight between two people (e.g. (Schegloff, 1988 [1989]; Vázquez Carranza, 2008). Similarly, in commercial encounters buyers and sellers can abandon the commercial transaction and start having a conversation not related at all to the business at hand.
Drew and Heritage (1992) build on Levinson’s concept of activity types and identify three characteristics of institutional talk: (1) participants’ orientation to the achievement of specific goals – these goals, or objectives, are related to their institutional identities which are displayed in interaction; (2) there are restrictions with respect to participants’ contributions in each institutional context; and (3) each institutional context has its own specific procedures and inferential frameworks. Heritage and Greatbatch (1991) argue that the particular interactional practices of each type of institutional talk tailor a unique ‘fingerprint’ (pp. 95–96). The present investigation aims at showing the fingerprint of the buying and selling encounters. I will show some instances of the institutional character of these commercial interactions using the three characteristics outlined by Drew and Heritage.
Orientation to specific goals
The main goal of the customer (hereafter C) and the seller (hereafter S) is to achieve the exchange of products (i.e. some fruit and/or vegetables) for money. They orient to this action from the beginning of the interaction as the following examples show (please see Appendix 1 for the transcription conventions): in extract (1), the C follows her greeting with a query about the product’s availability in the shop; in excerpt (2), as soon as the C arrives to the shop, the S asks her what product he can offer her:
The main goal of these interactions is the commercial exchange; however, the participants’ have their own goals that correspond to their interactional identities. On the one hand, for instance, the C aims at getting the best product; in example (3) the C registers this interest by asking the S if the papaya is in good conditions (lines 07 and 09):
On the other hand, the S aims at offering a good service and at selling good quality products. In extract (4), the S, at line 21, registers this commitment:
Interactional restrictions
The commercial interaction has restrictions on the participants’ actions. That is, the S and the C interventions may be only related to the actions expected from the display of their particular roles (e.g. the S will not ask the C for the price of a product, nor will the C sell a product to the S). The sequential trajectory of the event is also limited – the interaction ends after the commercial exchange has occurred, as in example (5), lines 14–17:
Processes and inferential frameworks
The particular processes and inferential frameworks (Goffman, 1974) have to do with the shared knowledge or common ground (Tomasello, 2008) that participants have, of the expected cultural behaviour (linguistic and paralinguistic) of a selling and buying encounter. This knowledge helps the participants to assign meaning to the social actions involved in the interactional context. For example, the C is the one who requests a product, perhaps assesses it, asks for its price and pays for it, etc. The S is expected to supply the products, and should know about the prices, how to use the scale with which he weighs the products, and should know about the products – that is, know, for example, about chicken anatomy, etc.
Heritage (2013) points out that research on institutional talk has focused mainly on identifying the characteristics that make institutional talk ‘institutional’, that is, what the particular characteristics are of each type of institutional talk; for instance, the particular practices of court room interactions (e.g. Atkinson and Drew, 1979), news interviews (e.g. Clayman and Heritage, 2002), emergency calls (e.g. to the police, Zimmerman, 1984; to a suicide prevention centre, Sacks, 1992), doctor–patient encounters (e.g. Heath, 1986), and so on. Heritage also points out six lines of enquiry into institutional talk research: (1) turn-taking organisation, (2) turn design, (3) structural organisation of interaction, (4) sequential organisation, (5) lexical choice and (6) epistemic and other forms of asymmetry. The present investigation will focus on numbers 2, 3 and 4 of these lines of enquiry.
In the following sections I present the structural and sequential organisation of the selling and buying interaction in the fruit and vegetable shop.
The overall structure of buying and selling interactions
One of the main contributions of the conversation-analytic paradigm has been the identification of structural aspects of interaction; for example, from its origins, conversation-analytic research pointed out the practices speakers use to open and close conversations (e.g. Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973) or to change the topic of conversation (e.g. Button and Casey, 1985). However, naturally occurring interactions vary; for instance, commonly, in mundane conversations there are no pre-established topics and the actions that are carried on depend entirely on the speakers themselves rather than on an institutional context they mutually create as, for example, in a news interview.
Perhaps the universal structural parts of institutional interactions are opening and closing. These two components have been described as part of the organisation of the institutional talk types described so far in the literature (e.g. news interviews, Clayman and Heritage, 2002; emergency calls, Zimmerman, 1984, 1992; medical consultations, Heath, 1986). In the following, I show the general structural parts of the selling and buying encounters which of course include an opening and a closing element.
Opening: This is the first contact the C and the S have after the C arrives at the shop. A greetings sequence is a common start to the interaction, and it could be initiated by either of the participants. There are times, however, when there is not a greeting sequence; the interaction starts with a question which could be the C enquiring about a product (e.g. ¿Tiene elotes? ‘Have you got corn cobs?’) or by the S enquiring about what product the C will ask for (e.g. ¿Qué va a ser? ‘What can I offer you?’).
The request and its execution: At this stage, the C says or shows what she or he is buying. As the example from Table 1 illustrates, the request can be a combination of behavioural (e.g. the C takes a papaya, line 08) and linguistic elements (e.g. me da ésta ‘Give me this one’, line 07). There are other actions that accompany the request, for example the evaluation of the product, the confirmation of the request and the execution of the request. The compliance with the request consists of a variety of actions the S does to fulfil the C’s request, for instance cutting pieces of chicken, weighing the product, putting the product in a bag, and so on. At the end of this stage, the S may ask if there is anything else the C would like to buy (the S says for instance, ¿Sería todo?/¿Algo más? ‘Is that’s all?/ Anything else?’) or the C may initiate another sequence that works as a preamble to one more request as line 13 in Table 1.
General structure of selling and buying interactions in a fruit and vegetable shop.
The commercial exchange: This stage is the climax of this type of institutional interaction – it is when the S and C exchange money for products. The actions that occur in this stage have to do with money. In the data, it is common practice that the S announces the amount to be paid, for instance at line 17 in Table 1. This action may be preceded by the S doing a mathematical operation, that is, adding up the prices of all the products the C is buying. When the S announces the amount to be paid, the C may already have the money in her or his hand ready to pay or count the money before paying. The S may give change to the C if the latter does not pay the exact amount.
Closing: The last stage of the interaction comes right after the commercial exchange has taken place. The closing begins with a thanking sequence which is initiated by the C (with Gracias ‘Thank you’), and is completed by the S (with Sí ‘Yes’ or Para servirle ‘At your service’ and the like). Before or while the C leaves the shop, both participants may carry out a goodbye sequence (e.g. Adios ‘Bye’, Hasta luego ‘See you later’).
From the description of the different stages of the buying and selling interaction, it is clear that the encounter is framed within two main actions: requesting and executing the request. These two actions are at the core of the commercial exchange. In the following section of the analysis, I will show in detail the organisation of these core actions and the actions that surround them. To do that I apply the conversation-analytic premise that interactions are organised in sequences of actions.
The sequential structure of the buying–selling interaction
In interaction, the actions carried out through the turn taking system (Sacks et al., 1974) are composed by general patterns called sequences (Schegloff, 2007). The adjacency pair – the basic unit of sequential analysis – consists of two turns produced by different speakers, one after the other, with a particular relationship between them: both turns are actions that generally come together, for example question–answer, greeting–greeting, invitation–acceptance/refusal, offer–acceptance/refusal, ‘see you later’–‘bye’ in a goodbye sequence and so on.
Figure 1 shows that both activities, buying and selling, consist of a request–execution adjacency pair. That is, the buying adjacency pair consists of a product request and its execution (i.e. a product is requested and given), and the selling adjacency pair consists of a price announcement, which works as a request for money, and the execution of the money request (i.e. money is requested and given). Both adjacency pairs are the sequential core or base of the whole institutional interaction; the second part of both adjacency pairs (i.e. the execution parts) make up the commercial exchange. In excerpt (8) the two base adjacency pairs of the buying and selling sequence are indicated:
Sequential core of the buying–selling interaction.
The first pair part of the buying adjacency pair (FPP
Schegloff (2007) mentioned that many of the sequences in interaction show expansions of their base adjacency pair parts. These expansions are also adjacency pairs and go before or after a base part as shown in Figure 2.
Base adjacency pair with expansions (Schegloff, 2007: 26).
In what follows, I will show the expansions that surround the base pair parts of the buying and selling adjacency pairs and the linguistic and interactional characteristics of the product requests and the commercial exchange.
Pre-expansion of the buying adjacency pair
Pre-expansions or pre-sequences work as a preamble for a base action, in this case for the FPPb of the buying adjacency pair, that is, the request of a product. The data shows that pre-expansions of the buying adjacency pair are question–answer adjacency pairs (FPPpre and SPPpre) with which the C enquires about the price of the product as shows in excerpt (09), lines 04 and 05, and/or whether the product is in stock in the shop as excerpt (10), lines 03 and 04, illustrates. The pre-expansions are followed by the request for the product. An important characteristic of a pre-expansion is that it shows the conditions needed for the production of the FPPb (i.e. the request of the product). For instance, in excerpt (11) the FPPb was not produced because there were no strawberries in the shop.
The pre-expansions show that from the beginning of the encounter, as mentioned before, both participants orient to the institutional character of the interaction, that is, from the start C and S orient to the production of a request formulation. In the following section I will examine the latter.
Request formulation (or the FPP of the buying adjacency pair)
In contrast to pre-expansions of request sequences in mundane conversations (see Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006), the pre-expansions described here do not have a dispreferred design (see Goodwin and Heritage, 1990; Pomerantz and Heritage, 2013), that is, their design does not show that requesting is a disaffiliative action (destructive of social solidarity). Pre-expansions in the buying and selling interactional context show that requesting is a preferred social action. That is, both speakers’ interventions demonstrate that requesting is favourable for the development of their institutional tasks: buying and selling. The following analysis of request formulations focuses on their position in the sequence and their linguistic composition.
Sequential position
As shown in the previous section, a request formulation may occur after a pre-expansion; however, this is not always the case. Request formulations may occur as well without a pre-expansion – instead they are preceded by a greetings sequence, as shown in excerpts (12) and (13):
A request formulation may be also produced after a request formulation pursuit, that is, after the S asks for a request from the C. As shown in excerpts (14) and (15), after a greeting sequence the S asks the C what she or he wants to buy:
A request formulation pursuit may be followed by a request formulation (as in the previous examples) or by a pre-expansion as in example (16), line 03. In the latter case, the conditions needed for the production of the request are not met, that is, the S does not have the product the C wants line 06). However, the S, at line 08, launches another request formulation pursuit which, in this case, is successful:
To sum up, in the data analysed, a request formulation has three sequential positions: (1) after a pre-expansion, (2) after a greeting adjacency pair and (3) after a request formulation pursuit. In the following subsection, I turn to the linguistic characteristics of request formulations.
Request formulation’s composition
The designs of request formulation turns have the verbs dar (‘to give’) and querer (‘to want’) as their syntactic core. Dar is used in its imperative form with the first person singular and indirect object pronoun me, that is, dame, as shown in excerpt (17). Dar is also used in its second person singular present indicative form, in both social deictic versions: Me das and Me da (excerpts (18) and (19) respectively). In these two last examples, the turn design includes interrogative intonation and politeness markers such as por favor (‘please’); both elements mitigate the requesting action. Another element used in conjunction with por favor to mitigate the request is the adverb sí (‘yes’) (excerpt (20)).
With regard to querer, it is used in its first person singular present indicative form, that is, quiero (‘I want’) (excerpts (21) and (22)). For obvious reasons these turns do not show interrogative intonation, some of them do include a politeness marker (i.e. please) as in excerpt (23). The verb is followed by its indirect object whose structure may be a money quantity (e.g. 15 pesos) or a weight measure (e.g. two kilos) and the name of the product (e.g. 15 pesos of chopped vegetables):
A request formulation turn unit may be followed by increments of the request, that is, the C lists other products. This could be done in a series of turns in which the S receipts the requests and asks for further detail, as in excerpt (24) (I will look at this type of sequence in the following section), or the increments can appear in the same turn. They are added with the conjunction y (‘and’) (excerpt (25)).
Request formulations are not composed of linguistic elements only. Examples of this are the following excerpts where the request formulations have both linguistic and behavioural actions. In both excerpts the physical action of giving a product to the S is accompanied by a linguistic production: in excerpt (26) the pronoun esto (‘this’) comes after the physical behaviour, and in excerpt (27) the physical action follows an increment of the request:
In the design of request formulations, one can identify examples of the inferential framework that S and C share about the institutional context. Here, I refer to the meanings that are implicit in the design of the requests. In the data, no request formulation or request formulation pursuit with the word comprar (‘to buy’) was found, for example Quiero comprar . . . (‘I want to buy …’) or ¿Qué va a comprar? (‘What are you going to buy?’). As shown before, the C uses the verbs querer (want) and dar (‘give’) followed by the quantity and name of a product, and the S uses dar in his request pursuit – their designs implicitly indicate that the C will buy something. When the C’s request design only includes a numerical unit without a specific monetary (i.e. peso) or mass unit (e.g. kilo, half a kilo, etc.), the shared knowledge both participants have about fruit and vegetables allows them to carry on with the interaction without the missing information. For example, in excerpt (23) earlier, the request formulation Quiero cinco de epazote (‘I want five of epazote’) is not ambiguous if both participants share the knowledge that epazote is a plant that is not sold per kilo or by piece but by little bouquets that vary in price. So when the C requests cinco de epazote (‘five of epazote’), the number refers to a five peso epazote bouquet and not to five kilos of epazote or five epazotes. Something similar occurs in excerpt (17), where the C requests medio de papa (‘half of potato’), which refers to half a kilo of potatoes. The request formulation in excerpt (21), Quiero quince pesos de verdura (‘I want fifteen pesos of vegetables’), particularly refers to chopped vegetables, not to a set of intact vegetables whose price is 15 pesos. These are examples of how in institutional contexts participants economise in language since they share the institutional inferential framework or common ground.
Insert expansions of the buying adjacency pair
After the production of the request formulation, the S may initiate an insert expansion which can either ask for confirmation of the C’s request (i.e. initiate repair) or ask for further details about the request: excerpts (28) and (29) are examples of these, respectively:
After the C produces her or his request formulation, she or he may also initiate an insert expansion. The C may ask about the quality of the product she or he is taking (excerpt (30)), or may add further detail to their request (excerpt (31)):
Insert expansions focus on the particularities of the C’s request, these particularities are paramount for the achievement of both participants’ institutional goals. The request execution follows or accompanies an insert expansion – the S indicates when the former reaches completion by launching a question such as the one at line 26 in excerpt (32). The question can prompt another request or not. If there is not another request, the S delivers the first part of the selling adjacency pair, like the one at line 28 in the example. In the following section I examine the selling adjacency pair and the commercial exchange.
The selling adjacency pair and the commercial exchange
The first pair part of the selling adjacency pair has a dual function: it announces the price to be paid and implicitly requests the payment, that is, the informing makes paying the next relevant action. The announcement is a number that can be accompanied by the currency and the name of a product (see excerpts (33) and (34)). Excerpt (32) earlier shows that before the S produces the announcement, the S may sum up out loud the prices of the different products the C is buying.
After the production of the announcement there are different types of insert sequences that may happen, all of which have to do with operational details that precede the commercial exchange. For instance, the C may request confirmation of the informed quantity, as line 32 of excerpt (34) shows. Or/and the S may ask how the C wants the goods to be packed, as in line 05 in excerpt (35):
The commercial exchange, as mentioned before, is the climax of this type of institutional interaction because it is the moment where both conversationalists’ goals are achieved. That is, the C gets a product, or various products, that she or he has paid for and the S gets the money from the goods that he has sold. This culminating moment is made of both the second pair part of the buying adjacency pair – that is, giving the requested product to the C, and the second pair part of the selling adjacency pair that is, giving the requested money to the S. Line 08 in excerpt (35) illustrates this. After the commercial exchange, the interactional event moves to closure, which is done with a goodbye and thanks sequence. In excerpt (35) the C thanks the S, who in the next turn receipts it and initiates a goodbye sequence (lines 09 and 10).
It is possible that the S has to give change to the C after the latter has paid. In this case, the change giving may be composed only by physical movements; that is, the S, after receiving the money, looks for change behind the counter and when he gets it gives the money to the C. There are times when the change giving comes along with an announcement of the quantity being given as line 18 in excerpt (36).
Conclusion
Buying and selling are language games or activity types that always come together, and the present analytic exercise is an instance of how these social actions are carried out in a particular cultural and linguistic context. In general, this study has shown the institutional character of buying–selling interactions in a Mexican fruit and vegetables shop, and has particularly focused on the global and sequential structure of these events. The broad structure of buying–selling encounters consists of four stages: opening, request and execution, commercial exchange and closing. The sequential analysis points out that this interactional event is based on two adjacency pairs, buying and selling, whose second parts constitute the climax of the encounter: the commercial exchange.
By looking at the position and composition of its sequence parts, that is, base adjacency pairs and their expansions, it is possible to illustrate the institutional goal orientation both participants have and the referential framework they share for this type of institutional talk. I would like to highlight the fact that the analysis has shown the core actions of this event, that is, the whole encounter is based on the social actions of requesting and giving, which in turn are the components of the institutional activities of buying and selling.
I consider that the referential framework or common ground shared by the speakers is evident in the composition and work of the second pair part of the selling adjacency pair, that is, the request of payment. It has the ‘shape’ of an announcement, and it works as such, but what the C does next shows that it is also understood as a request of payment or/and the next action which is expected to happen in that particular sequential context.
The analysis has exposed how the buying–selling process is a systematic and structured interactional achievement, and by describing its structure I have tried to define its interactional ‘fingerprint’, that is, the social and interactional characteristics that distinguish this particular institutional context from ordinary conversation and other institutional frameworks.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Verónica Villafaña Rojas, Pauline Moore and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on various drafts of this paper. I also extend my gratitude to the members of the Language and Social Interaction Research Group at Essex University and to the attendees to the presentation of this research at the Seminario Permantente de Lingüística Antropológica at CIESAS for their constructive contributions. Les agradezco mucho a Ramón, Migue, Beto y Dani por permitirme estudiar sus interacciones sociales en su chamba.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Scholarship from the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT), Mexico.