Retro-Sequence in Human Interaction
Yoshihito IZAWA (Keio University)
Human beings cannot not communicate with each other. In the course of any communicativeactivity, even if one does not intend to communicate, every aspect of behavior inevitably
conveys a great deal of information, and the receiver inevitably interprets it, correctly or not.
Based on the impossibility of not communicating, it is possible to describe the human being
as a communication-oriented animal. When it comes to our communication, however, it isobviously impossible to directly understand what others think. The central question here is
this: What enables us human beings to communicate successfully? With a background like
that, this study will place language in the center of discussion and shed some light on thebasic mechanism of human communication, to express more precisely, human interaction. In
particular, this study attempts to reconsider the theoretical framework of the inference model,
which is the refined communication model in the realm of cognitive pragmatics, and topropose that retro-sequence1 proposed by Schegloff (2007) is important to elaborate thepragmatic theory on linguistic performance.
Intuitively speaking, what we call communication is a social activity of a combined
effort of at least two participants, but if there is no partner to receive the information, then theactivity remains private. In such a sense, human communication requires joint-activities. On
this point, it is worth rethinking the necessity of preceded intention, and therefore this paper
focuses on the theoretical framework by Goffman (1963). He introduces the term interaction,
dividing it into two subcategories: focused interaction and unfocused interaction. The former
is typically face-to-face communication, in which at least two participants share the same goal
and coordinate their activities to achieve it. Contrastively, in the case of unfocused interaction,
two or more participants never share the center of attention. This sort of interaction, forexample, can be observed in a train. It often happens that the people co-present in the sameplace and time, even though they are aware of one another, rarely interact with each other. In
such a situation, however, it is certain that the participants perceive a great deal of informationfrom the external environment and adjust their own activities accordingly. In this respect,what is of great importance is that we human beings are agents who continuously search forpossible information and adjust the behavior on the basis of perceived resources, even if there
is no preceding communicative goal.
1 According to Schegloff‟s 2007 volume, there is a sequential structure that is overtly different from the adjacency pair. This thesis placesemphasis on a construction referred to as a retro-sequence, which encourages us to rethink the inference model and the essence of humaninteraction. The general property of a retro-sequence can be described in the following way:
These are sequences activated from their second position, which invoke what can be called a source/outcome relationship…..Their“firstness” follows their outcome, though their occurrence preceded it. These are sequences launched from their second position.
(Schegloff 2007: 217)

The same holds true for language: In the interpersonal situation, such possible
resources without participants‟ intention can trigger the formation of mutual communication.
For instance, the following is the extracted interactional activities which are worthy of ourcareful attention:
STEV:
SHER:
STEV:
SHER:

The Doctor Dreadful drink lab.
The who what?
The Doctor Dreadful drink lab.
(slightly laughing) The Doctor Dreadful drink lab.
(SBC058 Swingin’ Kid: 1.290-3)

In the process of this verbal interaction, Sheri perceives the difficulty in interpreting or
hearing „Doctor Dreadful drink lab‟, whose difficulty Steven never intends to convey.
Through producing the second sentence, Sheri introduces a new joint attentional frame with agoal of facilitating the interactional field. It is clear that the participant frames the precedingutterance as a shared object, and at this point, the preceding utterance is first regarded by thesender as a problem which may lead to the communicative inexpediency. Without theretrospective assessment, human interaction is definitely not fruitful. Following thisperspective, the utterance which triggers the retrospective interaction can be expressed as an„interactional device‟.
This study thus attempts to analyze our communication from the viewpoint of
unfocused interaction, using the computerized corpora such as Santa Barbara Corpus of
Spoken American English (SBCSAE), with the view to enhancing the validity of theoreticalframework. At the same time, the generalized system of retro-sequence is discussed on thebasis of joint attentional frame by Tomasello (2003). It is clear that the sender‟s intention is
not indispensable to human interaction if we are to take the retro-sequential structure intoaccount. The theoretical framework of the inference model is definitely plausible; however,there also exist the interactional sequences constructed retrospectively – that is to say,unrelated to the sender‟s preceding intention. Through this study, what emerges is a new mapof a still underexplored terrain: the retrospective mechanism of human interaction.
References
Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization ofGathering. New York: The Free Press.
Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation
Analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language
Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.