“I can’t take it anymore!”: the production of narrative accounts in emergency phone calls to the police in Brazil (190)

Abstract

By means of the analysis of two hundred telephone emergency calls between callers and call takers at a police service (190), this study, taking a qualitative perspective of talk-in-interactionin institutional contexts (Drew; Heritage, 1992) and of Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) (Sacks, 1992; Sell; Ostermann, 2009), investigates the participants’ co-construction of narrative accounts while negotiating the service to be provided. Following De Fina (2009), we assume that narratives are not coherent and ordered packages, carefully organized in terms of timing and chronology. On the contrary, we take the stance that each narrative is locally and sequentially co-constructed during the interaction. From this perspective, interlocutors do not merely orient to the narrative as a discursive unit, but also to what is being done by means of such narrative (Schegloff, 1997). Our data imparts callers’ sequential orientation to the production of certain membership categories when describing their own actions and their violators’. Such categorization process reveals both (1) an antagonistic relationship between callers and violators and (2) shared knowledge of the morally loaded events (Bergmann, 1998). These two factors guarantee the dispatch of a police car.

Key words: membership categorization analysis (mca), narrative accounts, emergency calls, talk in interaction, institutional talk.