Matoesian

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Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

Gregory M. Matoesian and James R. Coldren, JR Discourse Society 2002 13: 469 DOI: 10.1177/0957926502013004454 The online version of this article can be found at: http://das.sagepub.com/content/13/4/469
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A RT I C L E
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Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

Discourse & Society Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 13(4): 469493 [0957-9265 (200207) 13:4; 469493; 024454]
G R E G O RY M . M A T O E S I A N A N D JA M E S R . C O L D R E N J R
U N I V E R S I T Y O F I L L I N O I S AT C H I C A G O
A B S T R A C T . Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientic inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus group interview designed to help evaluate communitypolicing outcomes. We begin by discussing the linguistic ideologies of focus groups and show how these presuppositions shape the interaction among focus group moderator, members of the evaluation team and community interviewees. The remaining parts of the article demonstrate how a communicative misalignment emerges in the production and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal activities a state of crosstalk with stark consequences for the assessment of legal change. By focusing on the interpenetration of language and the body in the contextualization of meaning, we outline an approach that allows researchers to track the elusive, yet crucial, relationship between legal process and outcome. KEY WORDS:
contextualization cues, direct speech, focus groups, identity, language and body movement, transposition
Introduction
Despite the massive growth in the criminal justice system, many researchers claim that citizens have lost condence in the ritualistic bureaucracies of justice administration and become disillusioned with the traditional crime control function of police, courts and corrections (Bazemore, 2000; Clear and Karp, 1999; Greene, 2000).1 In response, community justice has developed as one of the most signicant indeed some say revolutionary instances of legal change in the USA (and many other western countries), specically designed to restore public
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Discourse & Society 13(4)
condence in the justice system by incorporating the community as an integral component of the criminal law.2 In essence, community justice emphasizes a shift from crime control to quality of communal life and in doing so complements formal mechanisms of social control: citizens make a signicant difference by lowering crime rates and making safer communities. Of course, the most celebrated and clearly dened form of community justice is community policing (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). Although analytic conceptualizations of community policing differ across localities, organizations and theoretical frameworks, most researchers agree that it involves the following: decentralization of authority for crime and social disorder problem-solving, policecommunity partnerships and equality in decision-making, use of scientic models to identify, implement and assess crime-solving activities, training for both police and community members, and, most relevant for the analytic focus of this chapter, evaluation of training (Rosenbaum, 1994). In more substantive terms, community policing involves a shift from the professional style of policing, which emphasizes quick response times and motorized patrols, to partnerships between the police and community, and these include neighborhood watch groups, police interaction with community members and involvement in neighborhood functions, increased ofcer visibility via foot patrols, merchant organizing, to mention but a few. In contrast to the communal isolation of police in the USA, community policing emphasizes police sensitivity to the needs of the community. Some challenge whether community policing represents an innovative change in American policing and claim instead that it is merely a federal grant program with poorly dened and conicting purposes (Kennedy and Moore, 1995). In a more radical or Foucauldian vein, community policing may constitute just a new rationality of governance a new disciplinary technique of social control that provides gatekeepers of the criminal justice system with more legitimate techniques for regulating problem populations (a point we return to in the conclusion). Yet other researchers and practitioners of the American justice system claim that something different is happening in American policing (Bazemore, 2000; Clear and Karp, 1999: 15). In any event, that President Clinton and the United States Congress have budgeted 1.3 billion dollars for community policing in FY 2001 and that the majority of American police departments have adapted a community-policing approach are indications of a major trend in this particular style of policing.3 Of course, given such a large expenditure of public funds, the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of community policing represents a central research program in itself, and such assessments are typically mandated by funding agencies and thus included in the design of the program. On the more orthodox dimension of evaluation, quantitative researchers have focused on the instrumental outcomes of community-policing practices, such as reduction in quantiable indicators of crime and social disorder (e.g. calls for service or crime reported), and have gathered surveys on fear of crime or satisfaction with police. On the
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qualitative side, evaluation researchers have examined the effectiveness of training development and delivery for the police and community through focus group interviews (asking, for example, Was the training successful?) an important and increasingly frequent research tool in the evaluation of social and criminal justice programs.4 This research examines the focus group interview as an evaluation tool. But we offer a rather novel approach to the use of this research method in the realm of legal studies. We analyze the interpenetration of language use and other communicative modalities, such as bodily motion, gaze and gesture, in the focus group interview and the relevance such communicative practices possess for the evaluation of legal change and social policy initiatives an evaluation role rarely (if ever) bequeathed to interactional practices. We show how an analysis of a brief snippet of communicative action can add a breadth of insight and depth of microcosmic detail to the evaluation of legal outcome, evaluations typically severed from the interactional work of production. We investigate the discursive and interactional processes through which evaluators assess the outcome of new legal mandates. Rather than take-for-granted the interactional work en route to evaluation outcome, we turn the interactional process into a topic in its own right and track the delicate, yet tenuous, relationship between process and outcome in the concrete details of situated practices: in the law in action. We analyze the interactional practices of the focus group interview prior to those practices being domesticated into the applied aims of the evaluation report and translated into public policy. The rst section provides an overview and critique of focus group interviews and the linguistic ideologies underpinning their use. In the next section, we introduce the data and analyze the relevance of a spate of crosstalk in the focus group and beyond, paying particular attention to ne-grained production and coordination between poetic discourse, such as parallelism, reported speech and intonation, and bodily conduct, such as gaze, gesture and movement. We examine how such multimodal communicative practices mutually elaborate one another in allusive, emergent fashion to index social identity, construct moral footing and shape epistemological stance. The nal section builds on Gumperz notion of contextualization cues to consider how differences in group membership and institutional relevancies may generate the misunderstanding between focus group participants and members of the evaluation team, an interactional outcome with stark consequences for evaluation of legal policy.
Focus groups
Focus group interviews are group discussions about a given topic selected by a moderator (Kitzinger, 1994). The open-ended questions of focus groups add qualitative depth and understanding to the participants perspective information typically absent in the standardized, closed questionnaires characteristic of survey research. According to one researcher, in focus groups You talk to
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people, and you report what they said (Morgan, 1998: 7) (our emphasis). Of special interest here: focus groups represent a major technique for gathering data on the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and legal policy initiatives, that is, for evaluating the outcomes of legal change (Morgan, 1996: 1323; Patton, 1987: 136). As Morgan (1998: 15) notes: Discussions in focus groups can give you insight into how and why you got the outcome that you did . . . whether a project is a success or a failure. Most relevant to the ensuing analysis, the community-policing program examined in this study employs focus groups, along with orthodox quantitative techniques, as a research tool for evaluating training success or failure (as we will see, for example, Was the Programs training successful? or What did you get out of the training?).5 Although focus groups indeed differ from survey research and other interview techniques, they still share a crucial feature. Focus groups, like other types of interviews, incorporate a narrow preoccupation with the referential content of talk, a preoccupation with the decontextualization and recontextualization of discourse in the practical form of an evaluation summary. As Myers (1998: 106) states in his critique: The aim of the focus group is to reduce raw data to a few digestible ndings by doing a content analysis by choosing sample passages. Such a literal and narrow focus on surface meaning, however, foregrounds referential content over the more indexical functions of language and other communicative modalities, which are tacitly conveyed through poetics features, bodily motions and prosody, and excludes an interest in the more allusive dimensions of constructing meaning in context. Moreover, Silverstein (1981), Briggs (1986) and other linguists have discovered that it is precisely the referential transmission of topical content talk that corresponds to extralinguistic reality that is most available to conscious awareness, whereas more contextually situated features resist discursive reection and remain taken-for-granted in the process. As Briggs (1986: 42) mentions: Most of what goes on in the speech event is indexical not referential. Traditional analyses of focus group interviews bleach the poetic, prosodic, and nonverbal aspects of language from analytic consideration, ignore how they may interact in communicative performance, and thus omit their relevance in the evaluation report. Just as important, to focus on topic talk presupposes that we know what topics are, that they can be detected and tracked, and that something called a topic is relevant to what the participants are doing here and now that talk on a topic is relevant to the organization of interaction. But people engage in any number of activities when they talk, and talk on or about a topic is only one of them. In a more extended vein, focus groups operate via the intersection of several linguistic ideologies commonsense beliefs about language use for their mutual intelligibility as a rational, authorized and legitimate form of scientic knowledge: the stability (and ofcially authorized view) of context, the unilateral ow of information, and, as mentioned, the referential function of language.6 Focus group researchers view context as a stable or preformed entity rather than an emergent and dynamic contextualization process unfolding on a moment-by-
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moment basis in the very linguistic details of its realization. Directly germane to this point, they proceed under the assumption that because the focus group moderator and members of the evaluation team ofcially authorize the relevance of a specic speech event and frame the topic in an explicit way, interviewees will honor or continuously honor the same discursive designations (Briggs, 1986). Focus group researchers assume a passive interviewer who passively and neutrally reports what is said, who merely elicits pregiven opinions or information from interviewees. More accurately, however, the focus group interview, like other interviews and conversations more generally, constitutes a co-constructed and mutually shaped dialog between active interviewer and interviewees (Duranti, 1986; Goodwin, 1986; Holstein and Gubrium, 1997). As mentioned above, focus group researchers presume the relevance of referential transmission of information and neglect the situated co-construction and co-contextualization of meaning the indexical functions of language. Needless to say, the interpenetration of these ideologies plays a vital role in shaping the production and reception of talk, not only in the focus group interview itself, but also in the subsequent assessment of that talk by the evaluation team.7 Using a focus group discussion designed to assess the effectiveness of legal change, this article analyzes the interactional practices or raw data of focus groups prior to objectication of those practices in the evaluation summary. We describe the use of language and other semiotic resources en route to evaluation ndings. Building on the insights of Maynard and Schaeffers (2000) study of survey research, we explore the interaction constituting the data that feed into the evaluation report and track the processoutcome relationship in legal evaluation. In so doing, we investigate the tacit interpretive work and contextualization cues that enable the production of objective evaluation ndings on law and legal change. Moving beyond what Briggs (1986) refers to as the objectivist ideologies underpinning interview regimes, we show how the interpenetration of communicative modalities and interpretive frames convey allusive, yet crucial, meanings about law and how signicant insight about both focus group methodology and legal policy may emerge from an in-depth glimpse of these semiotic resources in the constitution of cultural identity. Although this may doubtless seem an abstract proposition to most researchers, perhaps better handled through more orthodox techniques of evaluating legal change, we argue in the next section that such issues nd their primordial locus in the microcosmic details of situated activities.
Language and bodily conduct in the focus group

Before turning to our analysis, we provide a brief overview of the specic community-policing program that is the focus of interest, which we simply refer to as the CPP. The CPP is a US Department of Justice, Ofce of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)-funded institute with the goal of developing, implementing and evaluating new community-policing programs. It is a collaborative
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effort among 12 different police, community and educational organizations in a large metropolitan area. It develops new educational and training materials in community policing, provides training to local communities and evaluates the success of that training. Of particular relevance for our analysis, evaluation of training represents a built-in area of speciality in the CPP, consisting of surveys, interviews and focus groups. For the ethnographically minded, all focus group sessions are audio-videotaped with a single camera. One other note of relevance here; the focus group participants below come from a small community in the Midwest of the USA, whereas the moderator and members of the evaluation team come from a very large metropolitan area. The ensuing example occurs in a community focus group discussion in which the moderator (M), a member of the CPP and evaluation team, has asked several members of the community what they had gotten out of the training.8
Community Members A, B, & C are Sitting in a Circle with the Focus Group Moderator (M) 9 10 01 A: See I- I think again there- theres where my frustration level came up 02 to he:::re ((gesturing with nger across forehead)) (at that police station) 03 (0.3) when you were talkin about neighborhood watches and what 04 have you::: (.) and again (.) Ive not been that involved so to me 05 I was the outsider looking in. (0.8) And the rst time (at the 06 police station) they say (.) [Well we have (.) [four hundred and= [((Gaze center [((Gaze left 45 to Moderator)) to B)) 07 = [seventy[six [neighborhood watches [((Gaze right [((Gaze right [((Gaze center 45 to M)) 45 to C)) 45 to M)) [((Left arm cock)) [((Lateral head jerk)) [((Downward right hand baton or rhythmic beat)) 08 [And we got- (0.5)= [((Left arm relaxes)) [((Midway interrupted downward hand baton or beat)) 09 = Im like (.) Well yeah but it hasnt reduced any cri:::me. (0.7) 10 It hasnt- I mean how effective has it bee::n. (.) 11 [So- so why are you telling me that neighborhood watches are the way to go and= [((Open Palms Display . . . . . . )) 12 = it works. (1.0) 13 [It hasnt done anything. (.) [Why do you treat that as a success.= [((Open Palms Recoil [((Open Palms Recoil with Shoulder Shrug)) with Shoulder Shrug)) 14 = (.) I mean thats where I came from. Then they said, 15 You dont seem to understa:::nd. 16 (0.5) I said, Maybe I dont. I dont understand (0.9) 17 how you could have that effective type sys- system in practice and 18 e(hhh)verything continues to gro:::w (.) 19 in::: a negative way. (.) ((I mean) Maybe Im wrong. 20 M: So you had this conversation with the police department? With the
Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct 21 neighborhood watch ofcers? 22 A: Its not the police department. Again nobodys going to sit down and identify what the problem is to talk about it. Police cant be everywhere every day . . .
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We rst encountered this example during a CPP evaluation session in which the focus group moderator and several members of the evaluation team were discussing the success of CPP training in this particular community, and they based their impressions on responses to the moderators questions. While viewing the above segment on audio-videotape, members of the evaluation team mentioned that community participants did not get the training and failed to display an adequate understanding of training materials in their focus group responses, especially when compared with the police, who exhibited a much more professional discourse in their discussion groups.11 A representative token of this lack of discursive competence and the interactional locus for such a negative evaluations in this instance occurred in line 22 above. Speaker A failed to respond to Ms query in line 20 about the identity of the participants in the conversation: So you had this conversation with the police department. With the neighborhood watch ofcers? Speaker As off topic response in line 22 appears to ignore the relevance of Ms rather simple and direct question concerning the identity of his interlocutors, and this results in a state of miscommunication between A and M, which members of the evaluation team attribute to a misunderstanding and, more generally, lack of discursive competence on the part of A. This is a token instance in which community members in contrast to the police went off on a tangent and failed to display a sense of expertise in their talk, which would have indexed their orientation to CPP training materials and the discourse of community policing. Now understanding, misunderstanding and miscommunication are indeed complex phenomena. Even so, it appears on the face of it that A has misunderstood or, even worse, ignored Ms question. Consequently, we have access to realtime evaluative indices of the communitys response to CPP training and how this translates, in this instance, into a negative assessment of training outcome (or, at least more modestly, how it contributes to that assessment). Among other recommendations, the nal evaluation report concluded that community groups needed more training and that community policing trainers needed to engage the community groups more. Still more specically, members of the CPP evaluation team mentioned that: You came out of this focus group not feeling good. We didnt think it was a success.12 But has A misunderstood or simply ignored the question? Has he been uncooperative or rude in not answering in the topically appropriate way? Has he gone off on a tangent? Indeed, has he displayed a felt level of incompetence in relation to CPP training? Or is it just possible instead that M and members of the evaluation team have misunderstood what A was doing in his utterance on lines 0119, resulting in a state of crosstalk, a form of interactional trouble that mediates evaluation outcome?13 We would like to explore this last possibility, this other
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reading of the exchange. We begin with a detailed blow-by-blow consideration of As narrative beginning on line 01, and then turn to a more theoretical discussion concerning how the linguistic, stylistic and nonverbal features of the narrative could have been misinterpreted by both M, in the historical conversation, and the evaluation team, in their subsequent viewing of that conversation.
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In lines 12, speaker A employs a deictic hand gesture (or gestural deictic) gesturing with his forenger across the forehead that is perfectly synchronized with the spatial adverb (he::re). In so doing, he rst indicates his inner feelings (frustrated) about some forthcoming problem through the utterance and second notes the degree of that problems seriousness with the embodied reference, a dynamic interplay of talk and gesture. He next mentions the locale of the complaint (at that police station), while still withholding information about the precise nature of the complainable. In line 3, he continues to contextualize his utterance, building suspense in the process, and situates its relevance relative to the moderators question in an expressive repetition with continuative or iterative coordination, with the past progressive in the rst component and zero complements in the nal two components (the second consisting of the set-marking tag, the third consisting of the recurrence adverb): When you were talking about neighborhood watches + and what have you + and again. In the ensuing part of the utterance, A hedges his forthcoming remarks by stating, rst, that he has not been that involved, a claim which provides margin for error, and, second, that he is an outsider looking in, an epistemological cliche which instructs the moderator and other participants to view his forthcoming observations and comments as objective. And most importantly, this metaphoric idiom projects an insider/outsider (Becker, 1963) hierarchical template for evaluative work in As narrative.14 As we will see, it constructs group boundary, shapes social identity and marks epistemological difference in the evaluation of criminal justice programs.
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In line 6, speaker A initiates the source of this frustration, and he does so through the form of a direct quote (rather than represent it some other way), with the quotative complement in the historical present tense (say) and the reported speaker in the third person plural (they). Consequently, he provides no clear referent for the reported speaker. They could refer to the police, members of the community, neighborhood watch ofcers, people present at the police station, or some combination of these. Or it could be doing something else, an issue we return to shortly. For the moment, let us consider the reported clause: Well we have four hundred and seventy six neighborhood watches. And we got-. There is something strikingly nimble about turn-initial Well in the quoted utterance. Whereas the use of Well after the quotative verb in the reporting clause indeed operates as a response marker and helps launch the upcoming talk as reported speech (Schriffrin, 1987: 125), it functions here as a special type of intertextual response marker, and this
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is indicated by its placement in the reported clause (marked via prosody and the slight pause after say).15 It contextualizes the quoted speakers turn as part of a litany of bragging or one-upmanship talk, as a sequel to a prior spate of inated discourse (in much the same way that the following exchange functions with two six-year-old females: First Girl: Im smarter than you; Second Girl: Well Im prettier than you.).16 Specically, it shows that speaker A is going to take an evaluative stance or footing different not just from the reported speaker(s) they but from those people or groups involved with they, in a type of they versus we or outsider versus insider oppositional format. In this case, it points to an insider (boasting) identity and contrasts this with a more judicious and objective outsider stance. Following Becker (in a reversal from his original depiction), it creates an invidious comparison between community outsiders, who are in an epistemologically privileged position relative to program evaluation, and professional insiders, who are methodologically locked in a quantitative iron cage. That is to say, discourse marker Well does considerable evaluative work for speaker A by displaying his moral identity and by shaping an oppositional stance in the dialog. The reported clause reveals a litany-in-progress in response to some unspecied recipient(s), to other insiders, but that litany gets cut-off before the second item in the list comes to completion (And we got-).17 Although we do not know to what the second item or succeeding items in the litany refer, we do know from the form of the dialog that a bragging or one-upmanship sequence in concert with other projected yet unnamed participants at the meeting is underway. This cutoff in the self-repair, although not an interruption in the technical sense, still appears to project a kind of dialogic or virtual interruption, and in the process A reveals just enough to show the audience that an inated discourse is in progress.18 As demonstration of quoted speech is also rich in prosodic information, specically prosodic hyperbolism, which consists of an exaggerated form of creaky or laryngealized voicing. Speaker A shifts to a much lower (or mock) pitch register, with lower volume and staccato tempo, and deploys this nonnatural prosody (a different or nonnatural voice range) to contextualize a mimic of the reported speaker and thus to create a shift in interpretive frame. By prosodically quoting speech through this pulsating vibration in the vocal chords, speaker A sarcastically marks an occasion relevant identity for the quoted speaker, and he does so to display a disafliative stance relative to the insider position on neighborhood watches. Speaker A not only produces a parodic animation of the reported speakers voice but also synchronizes that voice with a densely organized array of exaggerated body movements, gestures and gaze over the course of the quote: directly quoted speech superimposed over directly quoted body motion. We can thus witness in vivid detail not only how direct speech interacts with prosodic and paralinguistic features, but also how it is coordinated with nonverbal action to create a mimetic rendition of the other speakers identity and to supply affective
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animation to the insiders voice how bodily conduct works in concert with talk to produce a moral footing in the narrative. Let us consider this process in more detail. Speaker A brings his bodily orientation and gaze into a systematic alignment with each recipient. There is a protrusion of the neck and head toward each recipient, as the rest of his torso below the neck remains oriented toward M. At Well we have A gazes directly at M and begins an exaggerated eyebrow raise (sustained over the course of the number) to mark a sense of excitement on the part of the quoted speaker. At four hundred he shifts gaze left forty-ve degrees to participant B, and at seventy he gazes back to M. At precisely this moment, he cocks his left arm (bent at the elbow, as if to throw a punch) and delivers a downward right hand baton that continues into his gaze right forty-ve degrees to participant C. After completing the number, A shifts gaze back to M (and the home position), relaxes his left arm, which had remained in a cocked or springed position, and interrupts a downward right hand baton at precisely the cut-off on got- in line 08, once again displaying a perfectly synchronized coordination between verbal and nonverbal movements in the stream of speech. At this point he also relaxes the raised and sustained eyebrow ash and tensed facial display, which had been superimposed over the course of the number. Thus, through a mutual elaboration of verbal and nonverbal action over the course of the direct quote, speaker A signals a realignment and reconguration of participation frameworks organized, rst, to constitute a common focus of attention in current discourse and, second, to mark the here-and-now from the historical speech event. We can now see that As slow tempo staccato oration allows his gestural and bodily orientation to synchronize with his speech (and vice versa), a dynamic display of gesture segmenting talk and talk segmenting gestural and bodily conduct, an ingenuous display of dynamic bodily actions superimposed over the course of a dynamic verbal demonstration. In terms of moral identity, A deploys this gaze conguration an orientation toward each successive recipient in a forty-ve degree staccato (or lateral jerked) movement (that maintains the alignment of the body below the neck toward the moderator while gaze is directed toward each recipient) to demonstrate for the current participation framework the swollen discourse of insiders at neighborhood watch meetings.19 Notice, in this regard, how gesture inception marks the number as signicant, and this shows how gaze in conjunction with other bodily motions intersects with speech and prosody to designate moral footing and construct interpretive authority in the narrative a heightened engagement with the audience during delivery of the number.20 In theoretical terms, what is most ingenuous about As narrative is this. It represents a multilayered intertextual conguration consisting of intricately transposed contexts. According to Hanks (1996: 212), Transposition applies specically to cases like quotation, where a speaker signals that a portion of his current speech is anchored elsewhere. It is the global capacity of speech to create new contexts on the stage of the present.21 It applies to communicative practices, such as quotation, marked prosody, tense variation and (as seen here) nonverbal
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action, in which the speaker imports historical moments of discourse into the current moment of speaking. Moreover, as Shoaps (1999: 399) notes, speakers employ transpositions to enact a point of view or convey a persuasive evaluative stance tacitly through discursive form rather than mention it explicitly. In this regard, As utterance in lines 68 displaces the indexical ground of the utterance by implicating a multitude of ongoing or nested dialogs (and an issue we consider later, these contexts can be imagined or hypothetical), multiple shifts in spatiotemporal location, and multiple participant frameworks, which are marked both linguistically and through bodily motions and gesticulation devices. In this case, the current utterance is anchored in historical context to accomplish strategic goals for the speaker of the narrative. This process unfolds as follows: (i) A is talking in the current here and now with the moderator and other community members in the focus group; (ii) the direct quote of the other speaker designates the relevance of historical context; (iii) features of the direct quote, including prosodic contextualization, paralinguistic voice quality and bodily motions, create a level of affective intensity that instructs the current audience how to evaluate As interlocutor; (iv) turn-initial Well in the quoted utterance adds another layering of transposition a much more allusive one by signaling that the reported speech occurs within a boasting participation frame. Put another way, A is depicting or typifying insiders in a one-upmanship ritual, and it appears that he has just entered this contest to deliver a dissenting riposte in a more practical, objective voice.22 Transposed Well signals multiple layers of context, projects a distinct structure of participation among speaker, hearers and relevant Others, and invokes sociocultural knowledge of considerable strategic import. Here we can chart in dynamic detail how the participation points of the different protagonists can be interactively positioned and interpretively tracked in all their intertextual, transpositional complexity; and (v) much more speculatively, speaker A may be signaling an allusive evaluation of the current context through historical discourse and thus be reexively projecting another here and now context and participation framework in a densely layered intertextual lamination, consisting of an affective interaction between reported speech and nonverbally reported bodily conduct. As this happens, he creates an interstitial transpositional space between the immediate speech event and the implicated dialogs occurring in the direct quote (see Haviland, 1996). He projects a historical context that recongures the current contextual situation and thus generates a secondary, more allusive yet real time speech event to criticize the CPP and moderator of the focus group (who are insiders also); the historical situation reexively recongures the current context by adding another implicated dialog going on here and now for strategic purposes. As a result, we can witness not just the community (and perhaps) moderator against insiders at the police station but the community against the CPP (including the moderator) insiders in a backto-the-present participation framework. Speakers not only mobilize current speech as a discursive resource to signal historical context; those historically contexts, once transposed, can recongure the current speech event and respective
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participation frameworks as well. A related yet crucial point we return to later: Is the evaluation teams negative assessment of the community group a response to this subtle critique of CPP training and evaluation methods?
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In line 09, speaker A becomes one of the central gures in the historical narrative. He becomes a protagonist with the just quoted insiders, and we can witness several noticeable, indeed dynamic, transformations, as A shifts from quoting the Other to quoting his own words in the historical dialog at the police station. First, A introduces his self-quote with the be+like quotative complementizer (Im like), which is also in the historical present tense, and the choice of this verb form (instead of say) is an important discursive option. Like in conjunction with the stative verb is an ambiguous or referentially opaque quotative complementizer. Although it can refer to actually spoken discourse, it may also mark the forthcoming speech in the reported clause as an impression of mood, a dramatization of inner speech or thought, which may or may not have been lexically realized during the reported speech event (Blyth et al., 1990; Ferrara and Bell, 1995; Romaine and Lange, 1991). Whereas say is semantically bleached and fosters the impression of providing an accurate wording of reported speech, like modulates the speakers commitment to accurate wording and creates a marked stylistic effect in the discourse. Especially when combined with the historical present, it heightens the performance value of the narrative, captures the intense tone of the prior speech, and conveys an affective epistemological stance toward the position of the reported speaker(s) (Blyth et al., 1990; Ferrara and Bell, 1995; Romaine and Lange, 1991).23 It is a multifunctional discursive resource, and may signal to the audience in conjunction with other indexical signs that this is what I would have said if I had been in a state of talk. According to Romaine and Lange (1991: 263): it indicates something that could have been said or thought without implying the commitment that say does; it hedges the speakers commitment to what was said and blurs the distinction between speech and thought.24 Second, when A quotes his own words, he not only shifts into a normal pitch register and voice quality but returns to natural bodily motions also. And he does so to recontextualize and foreground the voice of the Other and the ideological oppositions embodied in the dialog. In fact, the markedly contrasting prosody and bodily motions attributed to the insider voice (on lines 68) become even more normatively prominent as we see A quote his own words in a natural voice range and with natural restrained gaze and bodily motions. Still more specically, speaker A highlights the insideroutsider opposition through an open palm display over the course of lines 1112 and two open palm recoils on line 13, each delicately coordinated with a shoulder shrug (as if pleading for common sense and/or eliciting agreement). In this latter instance, A brings the sides of his open palms together for a fraction of a second and then springs them apart in a lateral motion. In so doing, he demonstrates the
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moderate and practical stance of his own outsider criteria for evaluating neighborhood watches compared to the vaunted insider position.25 Speaker A mobilizes multiple semiotic resources to display a dynamic, oppositional footing toward the quoted materials and deploys the body in concert with prosody and stylistic elements to coordinate cultural identity and evaluative stance. His voice and body movements (from both the historical and current speech respectively) appear normal, reasonable and naturally restrained, and this functions as an iconic representation of his reasonable and practical expectations about community policing. The insiders voice and body movements, by contrast, appear exaggerated and unnatural, and this functions as a indexical icon of the unreasonable position of insiders.26 Specically, notice how the markedly contrasting prosody on the direct quote in line 06 intersects iconically with the markedly contrasting bodily motions, inserting a conguration of semiotic resources into the stream of speech. In just this way, the body in concert with talk functions as an interactively organized participation eld for the projection of oppositional stance and institutional identity. Indeed, gestures and bodily motions may do quite more than make meaning more precise or signal proposition content (what Kendon, 2000, refers to as the propositional function of gestures). They conduct moral evaluation work of considerable magnitude as well. And third, As response begins with the hesitation marker Well, follows with the weak agreement token Yeah, and continues with the marked contrastive but to signal a strong forthcoming disagreement with the prior speakers position. On lines 913, the disagreement is realized through a densely layered form of parallelism and repetition: It hasnt reduced any cri:::me + It hasnt- + It hasnt done anything.27 Notice in particular the repetition of anaphoric it and the contracted hasnt frame over the course of the parallel structure, with the summary formulation (It hasnt done anything) being withheld and placed between the why parallel questions on lines 1113: Why are you telling me and why do you treat that . . .? Notice here too that the cut-off and virtual deep intrusion in It hasnt on line 10 mirrors the cut-off and projected intrusion of the prior speakers direct quote in line 08 (and we got-). In both cases, the cut-offs occur on the second item in a projected yet partially aborted litany. Speaker A indicates the end of his reported speech rst with the discourse marker I mean on line 14 and second with the explicit marking of epistemic stance (through the Wh-complement with the past tense verb thats where I came from) to recontextualize and foreground his evaluative footing, revealing the end of historical speech and thus displaying the relevant participation frameworks in the intertextual dialog. In line 15 he reports the insider response to his complaint on line 13.
LINES
1518
In line 15, the quoted insiders once again in the third person They accuse A of an unelaborated misunderstanding (you dont seem to understand). A responds in a direct quote with the turn initial epistemic adverbial Maybe I dont, and this weak
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agreement is partially repeated in his I dont understand. However, this second statement of understanding (or lack of ) is more than a mere repeat from both the other speakers and his quoted speech. After a short pause, speaker A resumes with a grammatically tted resumption an inter and intra resumptive repetition in the dialog which transforms his putative misunderstanding into an extended disagreement with the quoted insiders and an extended criticism of neighborhood watches: I dont understand how you could have that effective type system and e(hhh)verything. . .).28 Still and with much greater precision, A produces a hedged minimal agreement, appears to partially repeat that assessment, and then, after a short pause, transforms the putative misunderstanding into a grammatically tted disagreement, a disagreement expanded through the I dont understand how you could . . . resumptive clause. This process recalibrates the attributed misunderstanding into As incredulity about how insiders could claim success for policing programs based on mere quantitative claims. In this case, it appears that the quoted insiders have attributed the cause of As misunderstanding to his parochial method of evaluation. Although A minimally agrees with that assessment, he subsequently turns the tables on his protagonists by re-emphasizing his own evaluative perspective. By not specifying or elaborating the quoted Others sense of understanding A can deploy a repeat of their speech as a discursive resource for poetically foregrounding his own evaluative position in the here-andnow, his own understanding of legal policy. To add a further evaluative component into the quoted dialog, speaker A inserts a marked laughter exhale into the indenite pronoun e(hhh)verything to create an iconic representation of the interlocutors position as not only impractical but ludicrous. The embedded plosive particle marks the program as implausible. Speaker A closes the narrative through the discourse marker I mean and the epistemic adverbial Maybe Im wrong, and he does so to contextualize the shift from quoted speech in the historical narrative to a metapragmatic commentary for the current speech event; the shift distinguishes historical speech from current discourse and realigns the relevant participation frames for each. Notice too that the hedge and discourse marker are noticeably lower in volume and tempo, and this shift in pitch register further anchors the respective participant frames in the intertextual scenario.
Contextualization cues and crosstalk

Precisely how do the aforementioned features of dialog relate to miscommunication between speaker A, on the one hand, and the moderator and members of the evaluation team on the other hand? How did M and members of the evaluation team possibly misunderstand As narrative? Gumperz (1982) discusses what happens when the interpretation of contextualization cues diverges between speaker and recipient. Contextualization cues refer to communicative mechanisms through which speakers signal and listeners interpret the cultural
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presuppositions of a given utterance how speakers enact context, signal who they are and what they are doing on a moment-by-moment basis through prosody, tempo, pitch, grammar, hesitation, code-switching, nonverbal elements and stylistic components. They represent the indexical grounds for channeling indirect inferences: tacit (not overtly lexicalized) signaling mechanisms rarely available to conscious reection on the part of conversationalists. According to Gumperz, discourse involves not only the production of grammatically correct speech, but also the communicative frames through which participants signal and understand utterances. However, when contextualization cues are misunderstood or when listeners fail to detect their function or when they are neglected or overlooked, often because of cultural differences or differences in group membership, a state of crosstalk or miscommunication may emerge.29 Gumperz demonstrates that such misunderstandings are typically attributed not to mere linguistic error but to the speakers intent or attitude (for example, being uncooperative, rude, ignorant, incompetent, etc.) (see also Erickson and Schultz, 1982). Differences in cultural or subcultural membership and institutional relevancies may predispose participants to contextualize speech events and the interpretive norms associated with these events in different ways and thus to reach different interpretations of the speakers utterance. Scollon and Scollon (1995: 12) put it this way:
Where any two people differ in group membership . . . each will nd it more difcult to draw inferences about what the other person means.
And later in the same work (1995: 73) they note:

The interpretative process is called interactive intelligence, the innate human capacity to draw inferences from ambiguous information . . . This process seems to work very successfully when conversationalists share common histories, culture, etc. Problems are encountered . . . when participants hold different assumptions because of membership in different groups.
Communicative and interpretive diversity stems from the socialization of individuals into different social networks with group-specic cultural and discursive practices (Gumperz, 1982). Applying Gumperz insights to the discourse of focus groups, we note that because of the focus group preoccupation with meaning as reference, the explicit transmission of informational or propositional content, researchers may ignore the more allusive aspects of meaning in narrative performance. Because of their predisposition to focus narrowly on the surface topic of talk, evaluators and moderators may not readily appreciate how discourse functions as a dynamically unfolding, interactively organized process of contextualization, and it is precisely these contextualizing features that are not readily accommodated by the evaluation summary. Just as important, focus groups attempt to isolate talk on a topic from other potentially relevant communicative modalities (prosody, paralinguistic elements and nonverbal action) in the ongoing stream of speech. As we have
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seen, an exclusive focus on topic talk ignores the function of the body as it intersects with speech in the contextualization of socially embodied action. Moreover, focus groups embody an individualistic ideology that underpins interview regimes more generally, in which meaning construction is rarely envisioned as a joint, co-constructed activity between interviewer and interviewee but as a passive or asymmetrical exchange.30 This may leave the moderator and evaluation team predisposed to interpret utterances in terms of the practical exigencies of the focus group speech event, in terms of explicitly dened issues, topics and identities, and insensitive to the contextualization of speech events, activities and identities relevant to community participants. As mentioned previously, speakers do a lot of things when they talk and focus on something called a topic is only one of them. They do more than display their opinions on a topic for the moderator and evaluation team. They may design their talk as a strategic ideological performance rather than a factual report. And when speakers do offer opinions they do not usually state what they mean explicitly but often do so in a highly poetic and implicit fashion, especially if they are producing allusive criticisms of the moderator and/or CPP evaluation team in face-to-face interaction. Bearing these points in mind, the evaluation teams predisposition to interpret talk along factual report lines, as conveying exact information, and its commitment to topical relevance may generate a state of miscommunication with community participants, who may be predisposed to produce and interpret utterances more as a storytelling performance.31 Seen theoretically, because of differences in group membership and institutional relevancies, speaker A, on the one hand, and the moderator and the evaluation team, on the other hand, may contextualize different frames for the production and interpretation of discourse, a stylistic opposition in their talk. With reference to our data, is speaker A in lines 0119 referring to an actual conversation that occurred at the police station? Does As utterance on line 22 respond to the moderators topic? Is the moderators question on line 20 even relevant to what A was doing in his preceding narrative? Rather than attempt to identify the putative topic of talk and the relevance of a specic response to it, we would like to transform the analytic focus and proceed in a much different direction. If we reconsider several of the contextualization cues in As narrative, we can gain an appreciation that these index, to varying degrees of sweepingness, hypothetical or imaginary speech rather than literal report talk.32 Direct quotes, third person quotative frame, historical present, quotative complementizer be+like, prosodic/paralinguistic contextualization, exaggerated nonverbal movements, gaze and gesticulations, cut-offs in the stream of speech and gesture, and other communicative features signal that part of As narrative constituted a representation of inner speech or what he would have said had he been in a state of talk rather than a historically accurate intertextual representation. They transpose an imaginary conversation. Direct quotes, in particular, are not accurate references to the wording of historical speech but ways of constructing drama, emphasis meaning in the current speech situation. They accomplish interactional work in
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the here-and-now, and, as Myers (1999: 385) mentions, one important function of direct quotes in the focus group is to typify an utterance, to index it as a token of a larger repetitive type/class of utterances (not that they said this but this is what they always say). Just as germane, As precise representation of the number (four hundred and seventy six) without any accompanying accounting dysuencies (Hill, 1995: 1367) may serve not only to distance himself from the interlocutors stance, but also to signal a lack of personal responsibility for an accurate fact telling. As Hill mentions, accounting dysuencies constitute one technique to project a responsible self who attends to precise representation. This is not to say (nor is it meant to suggest) that these verbal and nonverbal features unequivocally project an imaginary dialog but that the multiplex interweaving of these indexical signs point to a ctive performance rather than literal report talk. What is As speech doing if not accurately depicting historical discourse? As speech is not so much a response to the moderators question or an accurate representation of historical fact as it is a performative critique of community policing in general and neighborhood watches in particular, a gemeinschaft metacritique of and proposal for program evaluation. Speaker A is contextualizing not only his own moral stance, but, more importantly, the communitys evaluative footing and cultural identity signaling indirect inferences about the communitys outsider status. And as we have seen, the outsider criteria for evaluating criminal justice programs, which stresses that the quality of outcome should evaluate the means, is quite at odds with the insider position, which (at least according to A) stresses the mere quantity of means. Indeed, As virtual interruption (or cut-off ) of his interlocutor on got- iconically represents his orientation to a moral order which disparages bragging about quantity. In a still related vein, the focus group moderator and members of the evaluation team might focus on the success of training, whereas community members may expect overall crime reduction or practical success (perhaps also indexing their stance as an active partner in the implementation of social control and decision making process). In this regard, you dont seem to understand on line 15 appears to align the quoted interlocutor with the moderator and members of the evaluation team viewing success not in practical but academic terms to question the pristine parochiality of As evaluative stance. For insiders, community training itself constitutes a major perhaps the major criteria for assessing legal outcome rather than outputs in terms of decreased criminality or increases in community satisfaction with the program.33 Countering this view, speaker A is not speaking on just his own behalf but is projecting the gemeinschaft voice of community through his utterances, lamenting loss of community control over the legal process. By the same token, his narrative captures more than the speech of the ostensive interlocutors; it projects the gesellschaft voice of bureaucratically oriented insiders, especially policing professionals (and perhaps those community members co-opted by them), and reects the general sentiments, standards and practices of this group. As discourse contextualizes an insider and outsider categorial opposition rather than
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accurately representing individual speakers: his point of view and inner thoughts as an outside observer in the current here-and-now rather than as an actual conversationalist in the historical speech event. His use of gaze, bodily motions and prosody over the course of the direct quote of his antagonist cues an interpretive frame that displays how insiders brag to each other during neighborhood watch meetings: an iconic representation of the group boasting ritual, an emotionally charged mimetic performance. In the concrete details of multimodal action, he demonstrates how insiders take an impractical position of bureaucratic imperialism in their evaluation methodology, in stark contrast to the communitys more practical stance. In this way, the discursive culture of community shapes and is shaped by the law in action. Of crucial import for the misunderstanding between speaker A, on the one hand, and the moderator and evaluation team, on the other hand: whereas A appears to be soliciting agreement for his assessment from the focus group, perhaps inviting other participants to afliate with his remarks, M expects a topical response to her query and thus requests a literal reference, which shows little appreciation for As narrative performance. Through this request for literal reference, the moderator threatens As face, and this threat would be even more pronounced were A to respond to Ms query. Although As response may indeed appear off on a tangent, his face would be seriously threatened and his storytelling performance signicantly compromised were he to embark on a metapragmatic discussion regarding the truthfulness of his tale. His response on line 22, however, does not so much ignore Ms query inasmuch as it displays that she misses the uptake of his prior turn, and in this sense it might function as a face-saving strategy and contextualization cue for indicating that his narrative should be interpreted differently that a different speech activity is in play. By the same token, M (recall she is a member of the CPP and member of the evaluation team) may have interpreted As narrative as a thinly veiled complaint directed at her and/or the CPP and responded to the literal force of his words as a challenge or counter-accusation. In this case, Ms request for a reference to the identity of the interlocutors imparts an epistemological lesson to speaker A, and may function to (re)socialize him to the relevant discourse identities and presuppositions of the focus group speech event. And there are doubtless other possibilities.
Conclusion
In an insightful critique of focus groups, Myers (1998: 196), mentioned that researchers need to focus on how something is said not just what on form not just content. Rather than consider the content of interviews as an unexplicated resource for conventional coding regimes, we have studied the interactional practices of focus groups prior to those practices being domesticated into the applied aims of the evaluation report and translated into objective research ndings.34 We have penetrated the elusive relationship between process and outcome in legal evaluation and sought to develop this relationship as a topic of empirical inquiry.
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More specically, we have witnessed the role of language and the body in the construction of socially embodied action, the mutual and simultaneous elaboration of language, prosody and bodily conduct the interpenetration of body poetics and verbal poetics in discursive action. The body not only contextualizes the interpretation of stylistic elements in talk (and vice versa), but also helps shape multiple messages for complex laminations of participation. Although typically ignored in interview settings, gestures and other bodily motions are not mere pictorial or emotional supplements to talk but reveal a moral dimension of social identity, participation framework and oppositional stance that is not conveyed (or conveyed fully) through talk alone (Kendon, 2000; McNeill, 1992). That focus groups effectively bleach such multimodal communicative practices from analytic consideration seriously compromises their attempt to evaluate the embodied meanings of community participants. Because the community may speak a different voice from the academic professionals who evaluate them and because they may not use a professional or academic register (and do not use forms of discourse to signal their professional identity but to index community membership), their words may stimulate misunderstanding in focus group interaction. Speaker A brings the rhythms and sentiments of gemeinschaft discourse to the focus group; the moderator and evaluation team bring the gesellschaft rationality of the legal order. As these differences collide and fuse in interactional performance, they generate the consequential crosstalk for legal outcome.35 Rather than take-for-granted these differences, we have explored the linguistic presuppositions and discursive technologies underpinning focus group interaction and how this may mediate the assessment of law and public policy. Yet this article has not only addressed the evaluation of legal outcome. Still more basically, it has addressed the interactional resources focus group participants employ to construct the situated intelligibility of legal evaluation how cultural identity work is constituted in the form of communicative practices. We have discussed how focus group participants may construct different conversational norms and expectations, especially as they orient to narrative performance rather than literal report talk, and how they engage a constellation of normative voices through verbal and nonverbal action. Rather than elicit how people perceive success or failure attitudinally, we have considered how assessments of community policing are embodied in the contextually situated and interactionally emergent conguration of discourse identities in both current and historical speech. By considering how something is said, we have witnessed how CPP evaluation practices may create the very hegemonic discourse that they sought at the outset to overcome. One of the ways in which one community dominates another is by creating standards of linguistic rationality, by determining the grounds for evaluating speech, and by losing sight of how it possesses the capacity to set legitimate standards of language use. Although appearing universal, these standards may belong to a particular speech community, not necessarily all communities (Bourdieu, 1991). As Foucault (2000) observed, new legal mandates, like
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community policing, involve the creation, implementation and evaluation of rational forms of governance. Although community policing is doubtless an important form of governmental rationality, the focus group interview designed to calculate the efcacy of community-policing socialization in the community is a scientic method of rational governance in its own right. That is, we have not sought to investigate, at least not directly, if the CPP imposes a new rationality of governance on citizens but how interview techniques and the culturally specic presuppositions embodied in them may impose an asymmetrical logic of linguistic rationality on the production and reception of utterances in legal evaluation (Bauman and Briggs, 2000). We have analyzed how focus group discourse becomes authorized and legitimated as an ofcial research language and thereby functions as a key source of power and critical element of legal engineering. On a more positive and substantive note, critical assessments of CPP must also consider that this organization has a reexive orientation to its own research, training and evaluation practices, and this orientation has shown that evaluation outcomes are not independent of the interpenetration of discursive devices and bodily motions that mediate the assessment of those outcomes. Just as importantly, when we shift our analytic gaze to envision how dynamic bodily actions intersect with talk to construct epistemological hierarchy, mark social boundary and index community identity, we foreground culture not as a pregiven or explanatory gloss severed from real time, on line experience but as embodied in the concrete details of emotionally charged performance. In the end, we should keep in mind that it is not just historical difference among the police, community and researchers or differences in decision-making that are crucial. It is just as important to stress that these groups may also construct different communicative cultures with different ideologies about the role of language in the world. Community policing is not just about policing. Because the community must be socialized, trained and evaluated through language, it is just as much about speech communities and the repertoire of verbal, nonverbal and ideological practices of these groups. If community policing is truly characterized by increased police sensitivity to the needs of the community, then it must also be sensitive to the discourse of community.
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
Thanks to Greg Myers for a very detailed and thoughtful critique. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Anthropology Interaction Lab at the University of Arizona. We are indebted to Jane Hill, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Linda Waugh, and their students for many insightful observations and suggestions.
NOTES
1. 2.
The US spends 100 billion dollars a year on ofcial criminal justice administration (Clear and Karp, 1999: 35). One of the leading practitioners in this area refers to community justice as the new discourse of public safety among western nations (Rosenbaum, in press).
Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct 3. In the last ve years the total is 6 billion dollars (US Dept of Justice, COPS Press Release on 14 February 2000). 4. This training occurs in workshops or classrooms, and teaches role switching, communication skills, leadership skills and so on. 5. The interviews consist of 36 participants and are 13 hours in length. 6. See Schieffelin et al. (1998) for more detailed denitions and discussions of linguistic ideology. 7. As we will see in the forthcoming data, the focus group interview is videotaped and the interaction is then assessed in a subsequent viewing session by members of the evaluation team. 8. And just subsequent to this question she asks Does everyone at this table go to community watch or had some type of community watch training? 9. Directly aligned above/below brackets indicate simultaneously occurring verbal and nonverbal action. 10. Although it would be helpful to represent the nonverbal behavior with still photographs alongside the transcripts, this is prohibited due to IRB restrictions. 11. During the evaluation workshop, members of the evaluation team (which included the moderator of the focus group and the authors of this article) had the opportunity to stop the tape at any moment and discuss the interaction. Here they stopped the tape and discussed the interactional trouble between the moderator and speaker A. 12. This referred to both the community groups response to training and their focus group performance. 13. Indeed, training and delivery of community policing in this community could be discontinued as a result. 14. For the unacquainted, Becker drew this distinction in reference to inter alia the cool jazz musicians who distinguish themselves from their square, outsider audience. 15. As many researchers have noted, Well often marks a shift in context or footing (Jucker, 1993; Schriffrin, 1985). 16. Going beyond Schiffrin (1985) and Jucker (1993), this shows that by contextualizing such an intricate lamination of participant role structures, Well may generate conversational coherence even in projected or implicated dialogs quite distant from the current participation frame. 17. The quoted speaker of And we got- is not necessarily the same quoted speaker as in the prior clause. In this regard notice the shift from we have in the rst quoted clause to And we got- in the second aborted quoted clause. 18. Ungrammatical got may also do moral work in this case also. 19. Schegloff (1998) refers to this bodily conguration as body torque. 20. By partitioning gaze alignment over the course of the direct quote of the number, A brings the audience into the here and now reality of the bragging ritual, a type of bodily rhythm superimposed over the rhythm of speech. Indeed, after the production of the number, A returns gaze back to the moderator for the duration of his narrative. 21. Likewise, Goffman (1981) employs the term lamination to refer to the multiple embedding of contexts and participation frameworks during the course of an utterance. 22. Given speaker As critique, it appears highly unlikely that he would be a recipient of Others remark because this would mark his involvement in the boasting ritual; rather it appears that some other participant(s) in the neighborhood watch meeting mentioned a specic number or some other item to which Other responds. 23. Blyth et al. (1990: 225) refer to it as a focus quotative that introduces important information, whereas Romaine and Lange (1991) refer to it as a footing shift (rather than signaling a verbatim reproduction).
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Discourse & Society 13(4) 24. Of course, all reported speech is as Tannen (1989) notes constructed speech. We are only stating here that be+like projects the accuracy value of reported speech to a different degree than other types of quotative frame. 25. This appears to be what Kendon (2000: 56) refers to as a lateral spread, which signals the speakers stance toward his/her utterance and therefore has a pragmatic function. 26. That is, pretentious verbal and nonverbal speech functions as an iconic representation of pretentious claims about neighborhood watches; whereas the more considered verbal and nonverbal speech functions as an iconic representation of practical expectations. Interestingly enough, A accomplishes his complaint about the oneupmanship ritual through a powerful form of one-upmanship. 27. Of special note here too is the repetition in upward intonation and vowel lengthening (or incredulity contour as Norma Mendoza-Denton tells me) on cri:::me on line 9 and bee::n on line 10, both in clause nal position. 28. Resumptive repetition (Matoesian, 1997) takes an element from a prior clause and repeats it in (or near) clause initial position in the subsequent clause as a rhythmically balanced continuation, and this process occurs both across and within speakers (or projected speakers). Here speaker A repeats I dont from the prior speakers You dont and then repeats I dont understand from this prior I dont. 29. That is to say, participants frame the speech event differently. 30. According to Myers and Macnaghten (1999: 181), this renders the interactional work of the moderator invisible. 31. See Trinch (2001) for a telling discussion of storytelling performance versus factual report telling in another legal setting. 32. Put simply and stipulatively, speaker As discourse may contain a blend of ctional and actual elements. 33. At a decision-making meeting to select criteria for measuring successful outcomes of the CPP, the Director and a community member clashed over precisely this issue. As a methodological aside, but not an inconsequential one for the study of talk-in-interaction, we base our observations on extensive ethnographic research with the CPP also. 34. Regarding interviews more generally, Holstein and Gubrium (1997: 111) note that although interviews are the most widely applied technique for conducting systematic social science inquiry, they are a neglected realm of social scientic research. (See also Briggs, 2001.) 35. An important caveat, especially for criminal justice and focus group professionals: Analyses of cross-cultural interaction that attempt to develop general descriptions that can be codied and applied to correct communicative asynchrony may well encounter serious difculties. Because the misinterpreted signaling mechanisms are not general but indexically embodied in situated performance, one would have difculty producing a decontextualized list of contextualization cues to resolve communicative difculties with training (a point we owe to Greg Myers).
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G R E G O RY M AT O E S I A N , PhD in Sociology and MA Linguistics, is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial (Oxford University Press, 2001). His main interest is in language, law and bodily conduct. A D D R E S S : Department of Criminal Justice (m/c 141), University of Illinois
Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct at Chicago, 1007 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL 606077140, USA. [email: matoesia@uic.edu]
JA M E S C H I P C O L D R E N J R holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago and is Director of the Center for Research in Law and Justice at University of Illinois at Chicago. His main interests are in community policing, corrections and evaluation research. His new book on corrections is in press. A D D R E S S : Center for Research in Law and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago, 921 West Van Buren Street, Suite # 230, Chicago, IL 69607, USA. [email: jchip@uic.edu]
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Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

Language and bodily conduct in focus group evaluations of legal policy

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Language and bodily conduct in the focus group

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Contextualization cues and crosstalk

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

And later in the same work (1995: 73) they note:

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

Matoesian and Coldren: Language and bodily conduct

Discourse & Society 13(4)

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