[opening]
Let us play with Sacks

[example]
{let's not characterize the setting}

Person X to Person Y
"let me tell you a joke"
"

[opening]
Saussure has been criticized by generations of sociolinguists (Hymes ; Goodwin) for not paying systematic attention to the processes of speaking that he repeatedly placed outside of the linguistics. The concern with speaking, that is with language in action or, more exactly, language in conversation can take us back to G.H. Mead, the "conversation of gesture" and tri-partite analysis of the establishment of meaning in a social field

[example]
{a graduate classroom during the 'question and answer' period}

Student to Professor:
"Could you give us an example of what Saussure meant when he talked about 'syntagmatic relationships'?

Professor to Student
"

[opening]
Too little attention is paid to Saussure's discussion of syntagmatic relationships (p. 122 ff.). And yet this is the bias through which time (and, in principle, interaction) enters structure. Indeed a focus on the syntagm reveals that structure requires time.

[example]

THE CAT ATE THE MOUSE

[coda]
In the production or reception of this sentence the whole (gestalt, meaning) is revealed in time. The gestalt is not available as such until all the pieces are in their place (thus the possibility of misfires, jokes, poetry, etc.).

Student to Professor
"Thank you."

[coda]
The status of the professor's response as, indeed, "an example" is in the hands of the student who asks, and, in a third step accepts practically the professor's statement as an example. In this sense meaning is an collective act, "joint accomplishment" of all those assembled and making the field. Meaning is not "in the head" of any of the participants. It is then easy to find instances when there are public disagreements about the meaning of an event, that is how to identify it for future action. One can then move to talk of meaning as being 'constructed', 'negotiated' and thus not given by any pre-existing organization of the setting (unless one collapses back into a mentalistic understanding of the need for "shared" codes if 'negotiations' are to proceed smoothly).

[but (toward a new opening)]
Interestingly, however, the most powerful voices in conversational analysis (the field that has arisen to pay systematic attention to speaking) have emphasized the structuring of multi-party conversational exchanges

Person Y to Person X:
"This is not a joke! This is a lecture!"

[coda]
Person Y refuses the proposed identification of the central set of utterances as 'a joke' and offers an alternative identification ("this is a lecture"). By doing so, he refers the whole sequence first to the opening utterance and how what it promised was not delivered and then to how the central utterances should have been introduced. Person Y, thus, indexes a formal structure that it is partially in the business of holding Person X accountable for. The issue here is not the sharing of a code (this may be an instance of teaching/learning what a 'joke' is, or a professor playing with the form for jokes and lectures for teaching about interaction and structure) but self-correction in an ensemble of persons who compose, for this purpose, a social field.

A joke, or a lecture, is thus a joint accomplishment that constructs or constitutes something for all participants--possibly through struggle and redirection--that will then stand as a token of the type. The "thing" itself, to the extent that it can be apprehended as a whole even before it is fully performed (as many musical melodies are that can be recognized after only a few initial notes) can thereby be understood as a perceptual gestalt socially constructed with available material.

Thus...