Evaluation in the grammatic sense is then a problem of self reference, rather than its concrete presentation, in that to evaluate is to formulate how one can evaluate. This understanding is destroyed when we limit our conception of such self reference to the giving of reasons. To display self through evaluation is instead to make reference to the authoritativeness of a community in terms of which the performance of self becomes intelligible. Thus, evaluation must first settle the question of itself-of how it (evaluation) is to be understood -where this 'how' makes reference not to the way it is done, but to the auspices under which it is done. McHugh, Raffel, Foss and Blum 1974:85 Much to my surprise, my article "Rhythm in telephone closings" (1990), 1 which appeared in Human Studies 13, has provoked an angry response by Graham Button (1990a) (published in the same issue of the journal). In the article, I present some results of an empirical analysis of (German) telephone closings which demonstrates the interactional relevance of a layer of linguistic structuring not taken into account in previous conversation analytic work on this subject, i.e. rhythm and tempo. In particular, I argue that upcoming (possible) termination of a phone call is mutually signalled by participants' collaboration in achieving a more isochronous (more 'regular') rhythm and an increase of tempo (mainly by shortening the "cadence", i.e. the interval between adjacent beats in an isochronous pattern).
While this analysis of the rhythmic organization of phone closings is in many parts perfectly compatible with Schegloff's and Sacks' seminal paper , and is indeed indebted to it in more ways than