| Examining phenomena critical to sustaining everyday social life, this dissertation investigates how both previously acquainted and unacquainted parties open their face-to-face interactions. I use the methods of conversation analysis to examine video recorded naturally occurring encounters between English-speaking persons interacting in a wide variety of settings in the United States. The first research to identify the specific interactional practices with which parties constitute their face-to-face openings, this dissertation selects four of these practices for close inspection, showing how they are loci for parties' management of affiliation and social solidarity:;Co-present greetings—Elucidating the work involved in producing co-present greetings, I demonstrate that parties tailor their greetings specifically for current recipients. Analysis reveals that co-participants use the precise production features with which they deliver greetings to index familiarity (or lack thereof) and the state and character of their social relationships.;Introductions—I show how parties produce their introducing actions sensitive to social norms, making choices regarding how they launch introductions, how they manage formulating 'who' an introducible person 'is', and when they do introductions. Analysis reveals that: when a known-in-common person is present, parties treat mediator-initiated introductions as preferred over self-initiated introductions; when launching introductions, offers of identifying information are strongly preferred over requests; in formulating introducible persons, speakers carefully select from many possible name forms and social categories/identities; and parties hold themselves and others accountable for a display of remembering persons with whom they have worked through introductions.;Arriving parties doing 'how I'm coming here'—I show that parties use the sequences engendered by arrivers embodying and articulating a display of their arrival state to manage negative and positive face wants, thus maintaining their social relationships.;Pre-present parties' previous activity formulations—I demonstrate that pre-present parties summarize their previous activities to coordinate arrivers' entry into the turn-by-turn talk and provide arrivers the contextual resources they need to understand and participate in the ongoing interaction. |
