The construction of embarrassment in Mandarin conversation

Experiences of embarrassment recur in social life, and this study focuses on experiences that are oriented to by participants as embarrassing and examines how social members construct embarrassment in their tellings. Drawing on a dataset of approximately 41 h of audio recordings and adopting conversation analysis as its analytical approach, this study reveals that embarrassment might result from interactants’ category specific activities which are mismatched with the interactants’ local categories in the setting(s) of privacy exposure and/or privacy intrusion. Furthermore, tellers not only recurrently build the “tension” into their story to foreshadow something unexpected at story completion, but technically downplay their embarrassment through interactional resources. This article sheds light on what makes a telling recognisable as embarrassing in the moment-by-moment unfolding of an interaction.