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As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
This study deals with interpretation practices that speakers employ in order to (re)formulate what another person has said or implied. Analyzing interpretations in a public televised mediation that resembles a public debate, I show which kinds of interpretation practices that speakers adopt and how they differ depending the participants' roles. Systematically comparing all interpretations of the mediator vs. the opposing participants’, I argue that interpretations can be described as general practices with specific interactional effects, but that they are designed and exploited in different ways (i.e., for clarification and discourse-organization vs. self- and other-positioning and constructing arguments). I point out that speakers use meta-pragmatic accounts that support the interactional effects of their interpretations.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003, Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identification of argument roles. The overall pattern of results reveals two separate dimensions of cross-linguistic variation: (i) the presence vs. absence of an N400, which we attribute to cross-linguistic differences with regard to the sequence-dependence of the form-to-meaning mapping and (ii) the presence vs. absence of a late positivity, which we interpret as an instance of a categorisation-related late P300, and which is observable when the language under consideration allows for a binary well-formedness categorisation of reversal anomalies. We conclude that, rather than reflecting linguistic domains such as syntax and semantics, the late positivity vs. N400 distinction is better understood in terms of the strategies that serve to optimise the form-to-meaning mapping in a given language.
Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
In psychotherapy, therapists often formulate interpretations of clients' prior talk which are ‘unilateral’ in the sense that therapists index that they are themselves the author of an interpretive inference which may not be acceptable to the client. Based on 100 German-language recordings of brief psychodynamic psychotherapy (4 clients with 25 sessions each), we describe a multimodal practice of constructing extended multi-unit turns of delivering therapeutic interpretations. The practice includes gaze aversion until the main point of the interpretation is reached, perceptive and cognitive formulae, epistemic hedges, inserted accounts, parenthesis, self-repair, and self-reformulations. These design-features work together to index that the therapist produces an interpretation that can be heard as being tentative. The design of the therapists' turns reflexively indexes the expectation that the client might resist the interpretation; at the same time they are constructed to avoid resistance and to invite the client's self-exploration into new directions, often with a focus on emotions.
Scripted reality shows oscillate between fiction and nonfiction because based on a script they use amateur actors but also adopt the aesthetics of documentary-style reality television. Perception studies have proven that many viewers mistake the contents of such programs as everyday reality. An adequate framework to reveal these ambiguous relations needs to combine the product analysis with the additional analysis of the production aspects. That includes developing a categorization for (scripted) reality television, a combined analysis of the product and its production, and an analysis of the perception of scripted reality on television and through corresponding social media sites.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
This paper shows that the phenomenon of plesionymy deserves greater attention and needs to be approached outside its traditional framework, which considered it to be a subtype of synonymy (Cruse, 1986, 2002; Croft and Cruse, 2004). This view suggested that pairs of terms such as foggy–misty, fearless–brave exhibit significant shared semantic traits that are more salient than their differences. Differing properties were considered to be subordinate. These are sometimes contextually foregrounded resulting in occasional oppositeness. Corpus studies show that this view is a broad generalization. This study sheds new light on German plesionyms by employing a corpus-linguistic approach. In particular, terms designating gradable properties (e.g. kritisch–ernst ‘critical–serious’, sauber–rein ‘clean–unsoiled/immaculate’) at neighboring positions of gradable scales show variable behavior and do not show a stronger affinity for synonymy. The position taken is that a relation of synonymy and contrast are equally a matter of construal. Both types of semantic relations are part of the conceptual and lexical knowledge and subject to a cognitive principle. This work also examines how plesionym relations are realized in discourse. This article demonstrates that plesionyms are co-occurrences within typical lexico-syntactic sequences. Following Jones’ (2002) and Murphy’s (2006) observations, these patterns (e.g. nicht X, eher Y; mehr X als Y; etc.) have specific discourse functions and are evidence to account for a construction-based view.