But-prefacing for Refocusing in Public Questioning and Answering

In grammatical terms, but is a coordinating conjunction that joins similar constituents, such as two nouns or two independent clauses. In doing so, it can mark two contrastive ideas (as in, Mary is hard-working, but John is lazy) (Fraser, 1996; Halliday & Hasan, 1976) or a denial of expectation (as in, John is smart, but he is not hard-working) (Blakemore, 1989, 2000, 2002; Lakoff, 1971). But has also been discussed as a discourse marker—to use Bolden’s (2006) description, a set of little words that do big work in discourse. In the context of talk-in-interaction, discourse markers can be seen as tokens that “rise above” their semantic or referential meaning to “take on complex interactional duties” (Waring, 2003, p. 416). Recent studies within a conversation analytic (CA) framework have examined these interactional duties in various contexts. Among these are Bolden’s (2006, 2009) work on so-prefacing for resuming a momentarily interrupted course of action, Park’s (2010) work on anyway as a sequence-closing device, and Waring’s (2012) work on now-prefacing for doing disaffiliation. In this study, we aim to build on and extend this work by examining a special use of but in interactions in which those doing the questioning and answering are accountable for producing talk that is relevant to a third party—an overhearing (Goffman, 1981) audience. We also draw on Schiffrin’s (1987) classic study of discourse markers, which includes discussion of but as a point-making device. Based on data collected from sociolinguistic interviews, Schiffrin (1987) found that but was employed by speakers to return to a prior concern that had been interrupted, misunderstood, and/or challenged in the context of telling a story or building an argument (as in, But that isn’t the point, the point is...). Building on Schiffrin’s (1987) observation that but can mark contrastive actions, our focus is to examine but-prefacing as a practice in public discourse.