“Ese que…hacía cuánto no podía decirte” [“It’s just that… for how long she’s not been able to tell you”]: Relational accounts in negotiations of responsibility during family talk in Spanish
Attributions and negotiations of blame involve various interactional practices (e.g, accusations, denials, accounts) that are contingent on the interactants’ identities (e.g., mother-daughter) and reflect their dynamic and multilayered co-construction of the social order. To negotiate blame, members draw on and construct the moral order as “an essentially metamorphic logic” (Jayyusi, 1991, p. 244) that allows for a degree of flexibility and change depending on relevant (oftentimes relational) categories. This is most effectively accomplished through the design of accounts (Sterponi, 2003, 2009). While much research has focused on sequential aspects of accounts as markers of dispreferredness (Robinson, 2016), the inference-rich nature of tacit (relational) categorisations (Sacks, 1995) and their potential to unground how members co-construct the common-sense workings of the moral order remains underexplored. Drawing on interactional pragmatics and MCA, this paper explores how Spanish-speaking members of transnational families ultimately accomplish absolution of responsibility via relational accounts (i.e., justifications that appeal to mother-daughter or husband-wife category-bound rights and responsibilities, for example). This case study focuses on the negotiation emerging from two simultaneous breaches of the sequential and deontic layers of the moral order – i.e., implementing an action in overlap with the current speaker, thereby disrupting progressivity (Schegloff, 2001) and non-complying with a mother’s sanction, respectively. The fragment shows that through the account “it’s just that imagine for how long she has not been able to tell you not to do that” participants implicitly orient to the omnirelevant relational category ‘mother-daughter’ as a warrant for the implementation of an overlapping action when a moral breach calls for sanctioning as a category-bound responsibility/right. The study provides evidence of cases where the relational layer takes precedence and is used as a trump card that absolves an accountable party from responsibility. This detailed analysis of category-implicative actions contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how members navigate accountability and shape the moral order.
References
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