Targeting and double accountabilities of action in interaction

Abstract This study documents the mechanism by which a speaker accomplishes targeting the current turn at an unselected recipient; it does so by reference to what we will call participants’ differential relationships to a referent . Several video recordings of Japanese ordinary conversations are examined with the methodology of conversation analysis. The findings show that the differential relationships are resources for generating double accountabilities of action; the targeted turn implements one action for the selected recipient and another for the target recipient. The use of differential relationships also provides publicly witnessable grounds for the distribution of turn-allocation techniques. We argue that targeting is a rich domain in which turn allocation and the accountability of action intersect.