In any case, both speakers’ and recipients’ methods are inevitably informed by broad sociocultural considerations, and especially ageist stereotypes and expectations. The pay-offs might be different, but each time, the relevance of any age identity ultimately rests with the participants to a situated interaction, who may either ratify or resist it through their interactional moves. Depending on the interactional circumstances, the elderly and middle-aged members employ various methods in their attempt to construct an age identity: they claim, denounce or change membership in the categories of old/middle-aged/older person and the accompanying activities/attributes bound to them they tell or refuse to tell their chronological age they embark on age related troubles-telling and storytelling. Within this theoretical framework, identity is seen as indexical and occasioned, rather than as being a person’s essence. The ethnomethodological perspective is further supplemented by Communication Accommodation Theory (Coupland, Coupland and Giles 1991), which has also concerned itself with the study of identity and ageing, as well as the concept of ‘face’ (Brown and Levinson 1987), which is equivalent to the conversation analytic notion of ‘preference’. It tells the story of the mysterious Vianne Rocher, who arrives in the traditional and strait-laced French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, where she opens a chocolate shop that quickly becomes a focal point for resistance to the village priest, Francis Reynaud. Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) and, especially, Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1992), to analyze authentic conversational data culled from both everyday encounters and television programmes. Chocolat is a 1999 novel by the British writer Joanne Harris. It combines two strands of the Ethnomethodological study of talk-in-interaction (Garfinkel 1967), i.e. This dissertation examines the methodic construction of the social identity old person in everyday talk. Thessaloniki: Enyalio Foundation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2011.

Chocolat by Joanne Harris