Goffman and the notion of footing (1981, 1986)

Following the Conversation Analytic tradition, Goffman (1981) brought up the term footing in illustrating the alignment that speakers take up to themselves and other

co-participants during the production of an utterance. Based on his definition, footing can be summarized as the “participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self” (1981:128). He suggested that during the course of multi-party interaction, participants might constantly change their footings, and these changes are considered as a persistent feature of natural talk. He further pointed out that storytelling within the conversational context provides a clear example to illustrate participants’ frequent change and negotiation of footings. Since during the telling of a tale in natural interaction, speakers are “likely to break narrative frame at strategic junctures” to “recap for new listeners, to provide encouragement to listeners, to wait for the punch line, or gratuitous characterizations of various protagonists in the tale, or to backtrack to make a correction for any felt failure to sustain narrative requirements such as contextual detail, proper temporal sequencing, dramatic build-up, and so forth” (Goffman 1981:152). The speaker who does the narration therefore, must often shift between, and simultaneously take up multiple footings, or embed one

footing within another, which often results in a multi-layered “one man show”

(Goffman 1986:547). As suggested, the “change in footing is very commonly language-linked; or if not, at least can be figured through paralinguistic markers of language, or nonverbal devices like gestures, visual back-channel cues, the gaze shift or even the facial expression” (Goffman 1981:128).

In recognizing the dynamic nature of footing in that footing might frequently shift, Goffman offered an important framework of participation that is central to the

dialogic organization of human language and breaks the roles of ‘speaker’ and

‘hearer’ into a set of distinctive capacities. For the ‘speaker’, a complex set of

different entities are distinguished within a single strip of reported speech, including three distinctive roles—animator, principal, and author. Animator refers to the party whose voice is actually being used to produce the speech, or the “sounding box”

(1981:144) in Goffman’s term. Principal refers to the party who is socially responsible for having performed the action carried out in events described in the original utterance of the talk, and could be said to be the character in the scene of the original talk. Author of the talk refers to the party who constructed the phrase said, rather than the current storyteller. These three roles are constructed as different voices arising in the production of a given reported speech, which speakers often use in storytelling within conversational contexts. Goffman further noted that the talk of speakers in everyday conversation can encompass an entire theater, and that speakers very often embed one footing within another. Likewise, the notion of ‘hearer’ is also divided into several role capacities, including official participants, eavesdroppers,

over-hearers, bystanders, and audiences. In brief, Goffman provided a powerful

model for systematically analyzing the complex theater of different kinds of

‘speakers’ that can co-exist within a single strip of reported speech in a story, and

separated different role capacities that could all be generalized as ‘hearers’.

While the notion of footing and the framework developed by Goffman shed light on the complex lamination of different role capacities that could arise from structurally the same utterance in narratives within conversational contexts, several questions have been subject to criticism. First, while the notion of ‘speaker’ is decomposed into a laminated structure encompassing different kinds of entities, the notion of ‘hearer’ has been criticized as not being distinguished in an equivalent fashion. Even though several categories concerning hearers have also been brought up, they are treated as “structurally simple and undifferentiated” (Goodwin 2006:26). The different kinds of ‘hearers’ are mainly categorized in a static fashion which does not seem to be built through the interactive participation within the ongoing course of the description of the action. Unlike as in the case for ‘speakers’, it is hard to find structurally different ‘hearers’ within a single utterance.

Second, Goffman seems to have provided only a typology of participants, and the precise role that language and other non-verbal resources play in the speaker’s representations of particular footings is vague. In other words, Goffman did not apply a systematic framework to discuss how footings can be manifested through linguistic devices or other semiotic signs, with the result that there is no linguistic support for

his analysis. What language or other paralinguistic, and even non-verbal resources could be used to represent certain kinds of footings is not investigated.

Following the Conversation Analytic tradition, Goffman discussed footing in conversational contexts to see how different voices might arise in reported speech in storytellings within conversations, and moreover, how multiple footings might possibly be shifted between or simultaneously taken up within a single utterance. His study is insightful in pointing out that footing, to be studied in narratives within conversations, is not a static notion where only one voice can be found within a single strip of reported speech. Different speaker roles could arise, shift between, or even be embedded one within the other during the course of storytelling within conversations.

Indeed, the notion of viewpoint, which is concerned the speakers’ perspective on the things they talk about, is exactly what Goffman has termed as footing. As different

footings are possible, different viewpoints could also arise as speakers talk about

different events within conversations.