Script Formulations

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Abstract
A qualitative analysis of conversational extracts is presented, in which participants formulate the nature of actions and events as "scripted" (typical or routine) or exceptional. Such formulations are shown to be interactionally occasioned and rhetorically oriented constructions of events. The perceptual-realist assumptions of cognitive script theory are questioned. Discourse theory ispreferredfor its capacity to acknowledge thepsychological reality of script-based understandings, while dealing with the empirical details of spontaneous event descriptions. Events may be descriptively offered as singular items, as instances of general patterns, as exceptions, or as generalized patterns themselves. Formulating events as instances of, or exceptions to, scripted patterns attends to issues of accountability and is used to construct the dispositional character of actors. The analysis focuses on the precise event details invoked in spontaneous talk, the construction of events as scripted or otherwise, and the ways in which such event reportings perform actions in their own right.

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