Calling just to keep in touch: regular and habitualised telephone calls as an environment for small talk

Abstract

This chapter aims to investigate how, when either mother or daughter telephones the other, they constitute the call as being one of their regular scheduled weekly 'keeping in touch' calls. It focuses on how the participants construct the context as being one in which the conversation will consist of that kind of small talk through which they stay in touch and keep up to date with each other's lives. There is ample documentation in the literature of the ways in which certain speaker identities, relationships, interpersonal relations, institutional identities and so forth are accomplished or made interactionally salient through the ways participants manage the openings of conversations. The openings of weekly calls to keep in touch are reduced, in comparison with the canonical form identified by Schegloff, principally through the ways in which identification and recognition are managed.