Education Commons^™

Arriving: Expanding The Personal State Sequence, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

When arriving to a social encounter, how and when can a person show how s/he is doing/feeling? This article answers this question, examining personal state sequences in copresent openings of casual (residential) and institutional (parent-teacher) encounters. Describing a regular way participants constitute—and move to expand—these sequences, this research shows how arrivers display a nonneutral (e.g., negative, humorous, positive) personal state by both (1) deploying interactionally timed stance-marking embodiments that enact a nonneutral state, and (2) invoking a selected previous activity/experience positioned as precipitating that nonneutral state. Data demonstrate that arrivers time their nonneutral personal state displays calibrated to their understanding …