The Call-on-Hold as Conversational Resource

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how a call-on-hold is used to accomplish some delicate interactional work involving a talk-show host, a co-host, and a guest expert. In particular, it shows how a proscribed topic is reanimated. The caller herself plays a passive role; it is the call rather than the caller that is crucial. The call is used ‘subversively’, to create a false sense of what is going on. The paper aims to illuminate both some general properties of calls-on-hold and special functions of such calls as they occur on call-in talk shows. In order to understand how the call-on-hold is being used in the instance under consideration, it was necessary to examine call-openings as they occur on this show and, in particular, the common occurrence of the ‘second summons’, as well as a variety of other matters (e.g., story prefaces, self-interruption) of sequential import.