Practices of everyday telephone conversation closings: when the call does not close

Abstract

This paper studies everyday telephone conversation closings in the framework of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis. Through the contributions of Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and Button (1987; 1990), among others, it aims to show some practices used by participants to continue the call, even after first closing cue. The corpus is constituted by data of naturally occurring talk, recorded from a Brazilian family who lives in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, and evidences how the parties, in the Brazilian context, construct social relationships microsequentially. Thus, the study confirms the commonsense notion that finishing a conversation is a delicate issue for the participants, since they can use many practices to continue the conversation between the pre-closing first pair part “ok” and the closing second pair part “bye”. Key words: conversation analysis, telephone everyday conversation, closings.</strong