Formulations

One way to examine talk in interaction during computer activity by young children is to examine their formulations: that is, what children formulate through talk about what is going on during their use of computers.

Formulations, according to its definition applied in conversation analysis, was first used by Harvey Sachs in his lecture materials. For example: Sacks referred to the possibility of using “group therapy session” to formulate “what’s taking place” (Sacks, 1995, p. 515) in the therapy data he was analysing. In relation to this concept, Sacks made the observation that participants also occasionally formulated the sessions as such. He posed the questions “When, Why? And with what kind of consequences?” (Sacks, 1995, p. 515). Sacks follows the questions with consideration of issues in relation to social scientists:

“Running along with that is, of course, an issue which we should like to get into position to raise and deal with: Have we any special right to assign name-formulations to the actions, upon, say, occasions when they are not generally assigned by participants? Can we construct rules for doing formulating – generally, and then for doing specific formulating, i.e., saying it’s a ‘group therapy session,’ for example. What does that hold for?” (Sacks, 1995, p. 515)

Sacks makes a nice (CA) point about the use of formulations. It is that people don’t just “do formulations” (Sacks, 1995, p. 516); they are used to do something:

“At any rate, in each case that a formulation of a setting, or an identity, is done, there’s something that has some line of consequences, and some analysable basis for participants, which can be one differentiated from another possible formulation ,and also from not doing it at all.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 516)

Sacks discusses the use of “indicator terms” to consider how people are able to not provide formulations of setting. Indicator terms encompass words such as as ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘there’, ‘later’, ‘soon’, ‘this’, ‘that’ and so on. He considers some of their properties. For example, they are reference terms. Another property is that a second use of a term in a sentence may have a different referent from its first use in a sentence said by another. Sacks uses these two sentences to illustrate: “I went to the movies”. “I stayed home.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 517). To return, to the group therapy session –Sacks shows how ‘here’ might be used to refer to the group-therapy session without formulating it as the group therapy session.
“So, there are ways in which the spatial indicators involve time and the temporal indicators invoke space as well.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 519)

To illustrate this claim, Sacks uses “You were hysterical last week” where participants in the group therapy session mean specifically “Not last week, but for the two hours we met, and in this place.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 519).

Sacks suggests that looking at a chain of indicators may show something about the usage of the indicator terms i.e. “Given their sheer abstractness, if any set of terms could be capable of invoking the sheer fact of the setting without the specification of the setting, it would usually be these.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 520).
So, overall the discussion of the use of indicator terms shows how members go about doing “something” without having to formulate what that something is. The indicator terms are integral to that because they refer to those things, require shared understandings of them, and stand for the actual formulation of them.

Sacks addresses the problematic nature of formulating setting (for example): “we’ll never get a stable formulation in which these things stand one to one – and if they had to stand one to one, there would be an enormous mess.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 521). [This is an interesting comment because Sacks is in a way alluding to context as some would have it, and pointing out the problems with it (and researchers’ conceptualizations of it.

Here’s a nice quote that Sacks uses in relation to why not formulating setting is a useful thing:

“Again, then, what I want to be able to is that there can be ways of invoking the fact of a setting, and a bunch of its features – whatever the features are of settings – without any specifications of which formulation of setting, which formulation of participants, being involved.” (Sacks, 1995, p. 521)