Scopes of recipiency: An organization of responses to informings

This paper is concerned with the organization of responses to informings. Using Conversation Analysis, it will show that different receipting practices, including both embodied and vocal ones, display differences in scope in response to informings. With these differences in scope, recipients of informings can signal to the informing party that they receipted either the just preceding part of the informing or the entire informing. The positions of these practices follow a typology of four dimensions: embodied vs. vocal, token vs. phrasal, semantically empty vs. semantically filled and rising vs. falling intonation. When an informing is receipted by different practices of these pairs, the first type will be used for small-scope recipiency while the second type will be used for large scope. This organization of receipting practices illustrates how participants in informing sequences can negotiate the completeness of the informing and the state of informedness of the recipient.