my account 

My Analysis, adapted from  http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018726718778093

At the beginning of the extract, a passer-by walks toward the magazine seller, who is selling the Big Issue on the high street of a busy city centre. The seller first 'pitches' his wares, saying 'hello, the Big Issue?' This is a 'sales pitch'. If the passer-by responded by saying 'it certainly is', it would be ironic. Moreover, it is a pitch which has the passer-by as its recipient. This has taken embodied work on behalf of the vendor. He turns, and casts his gaze towards the passer-by. His work is effective. She recognises herself as the recipient of the pitch and thus as someone who now faces a choice. He does this hundreds of times a day and there is an art to it.

The passer-by is now socially constrained. They have limited options. To avoid purchasing the magazine, they can either ignore the seller, decline the offer or produce an explanation of some kind. She does the latter. She raises both hands, and says 'no change'. Notice that she doesn't say 'no money'. There is an important difference. 'No change' implies she has a note of some denomination in the purse she is holding in her right hand. It also implies a certain level of affiliation, something like 'I would buy it if I had change, but I don't'. Her response preserves her as someone who would be willing to support the homeless, if only circumstances were different.

She is walking away rather than stopping. From her embodied conduct, it seems that having 'no change' is a deal breaker.

The seller has two options. He can infer that 'no change' is an indirect way of saying 'no thanks', which he could also infer from the fact that she is walking away. Alternatively, he can make sense of it literally, as a genuine expression of interest. While the first might arguably be the most affiliative response, the vendor also has to make a living. He takes the second option and says 'I've got change' (lines 5-6). 

The situation is now entirely changed, perhaps in a way the passer-by did not anticipate. If she does not stop and buy the magazine, her earlier response may seem disingenuous, because it implied an underlying willingness to buy the magazine, should the circumstances be different. Within a matter of seconds, the passer-by is thrust into a changed situation of choice. She stops, turns, and slowly walks toward the seller, opening her purse.

At this point we get to a potential deceit. When she opens her purse, it will reveal that she does have change and does not have a note. If she is going to buy the magazine, there is no way of hiding this. To purchase the magazine, she can only use coins and thereby reveal her earlier claim to be false. She is between a rock and a hard place. She can walk away and undermine herself completely, or purchase the magazine and reveal her claim to be false.

To reveal a lie, there is the question of knowledge, and thus intent. For it to be a lie, the author of the claim has to know it is false (Fallis, 2009: 33). If knowledge is at the heart of lying, then, at the level of practice, accusations of deceit hinge on people's ability to determine locally what speakers know, in this case about the contents of a purse. 

Returning to the extract, the passer-by finds a neat and artful way through the impasse. She looks in her purse and says 'oh, I have got some change'. That is, she discovers she has change, and you can only discover things you previously did not know. Her utterance is prefaced with the change of state token 'oh' (Heritage, 1984), which artfully expresses the sense that she now knows something that, only moments earlier, she did not. Through this response, the false claim is framed as a 'mistake' and not a 'lie'.

The vendor is now himself in a position of choice. Should he 'go along' with this? Perhaps unsurprisingly, he does. There is presumably no point in querying the morality of the passer-by at this stage, just as she is paying. While he could take a sceptical stance toward her account, he goes along with it, treating the 'discovery' as a newsworthy matter ('have you, okay'), not as an attempted cover-up.