Place and membership categorization in a Hawaiian language radio show

Abstract

Recent articles by prominent scholars of discourse and interaction have renewed the debate over the relationship between membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA). Many consider CA and MCA as mutually informing, and that is the position I take in this paper. MCA has been conducted mainly with monolingual data, but in this study I examine Hawaiian language media talk by multilingual speakers. Place formulation is often intertwined with membership categorization, and I investigate how place is used to categorize people. Taking an MCA approach, I analyze the stories co-constructed by a radio show’s host, guest, and callers, all of whom speak predominantly in Hawaiian but occasionally switch into English. The goals of the paper are twofold: (1) to illustrate the procedural consequentiality of initiating, maintaining, and terminating an “ultra-rich topic” (Sacks 1992: 75), that is, place; and (2) to show how place is used to do categorial work.