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Der vorliegende Beitrag soll nun diese Diskussion um Sinn, Unsinn und Definition der Kategorie "Satz" als Grundeinheit der gesprochenen Sprache nicht fortsetzen. Ich will vielmehr kurz darlegen, in welcher Weise ein traditioneller Satzbegriff m.E. für die Analyse gesprochener Sprache relevant ist, und wie er sich zu gesprächsanalytischen Kategorien wie "Turn" und "Turnkonstruktionseinheit" verhält. Dies geschieht aber nur als Voraussetzung, um sodann die traditionelle Fragerichtung umzukehren: Anstatt zu fragen, warum in Gesprächen oft nicht-sentenzielle Strukturen vorkommen, gehe ich vom Befund aus, dass ein großer Teil von Turns aus nicht-sentenziellen Strukturen besteht und frage umgekehrt, wieso in Gesprächen überhaupt Sätze (im Sinne der eingangs gegebenen klassischen Definition) verwendet werden. Den Schlüssel zur Antwort suche ich dabei in der temporalen Struktur der Äußerungsproduktion und der Position, die Sätze in Bezug auf diese einnehmen.
Metadaten zu Gesprächen und den beteiligten Sprecher/-innen enthalten Informationen, die für die Beschreibung, Erschließung und Analyse von Korpora wichtig sind. Bisher werden sie jedoch in der Konversationsanalyse und der Interaktionalen Linguistik so gut wie nicht genutzt. Dieser Beitrag zeigt exemplarisch, wie Metadaten des Gesprächskorpus „Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch“ (FOLK) im Rahmen einer interaktionslinguistischen Untersuchung verwendet werden können, um Regularitäten der Verwendung einer untersuchten Gesprächspraktik zu identifizieren und ihren Zusammenhang mit den Eigenschaften von Aktivitäten und Sprecherrollen zu klären. In allgemeinerer Perspektive diskutiert der Beitrag, wie und an welchen Stellen einer interaktionslinguistischen Untersuchung Metadaten von Nutzen sein können und wie ihr Stellenwert im Rahmen dieser Methodologie kritisch reflektiert werden muss.
The paper studies how the German connectives "also" and "dann" are used as displays of understanding in talk-in-interaction. It is shown that the use of also at turn-beginnings in pre-front-field position is a routine practice to explicate implicit meanings of the prior turn of the partner, which is presented for confirmation. Also thus indexes that explicated meanings are taken to be intersubjective, i.e. part of the interlocutors’ common ground. Turn-initial dann(in front-field position), in contrast, is routinely used to (a) index the formulation of a unilateral inference from the partner’s prior turn which is not claimed to have already been communicated by the partner, and is (b) used to preface different kinds of next actions which are framed as being a consequence from the preceding action of the partner. Drawing on data from four genres of talkin- interaction (conversation, psychotherapy, doctor-patient interaction, broadcasted talk shows), the paper discusses how functions of also and dann are related to their positions concerning turn-construction and topological fields, prosodic design, collocations, sequential structures and participation frameworks of the interaction.
Lange Zeit waren in der Linguistik Grammatik und Interaktion inkompatible oder gar antonyme Begriffe. Grammatik meinte das Regelwerk zur Erzeugung wohlgeformter Aussagen, während Interaktion dagegen den Bereich des durch vielerlei psychische, soziale und andere Faktoren beeinträchtigten, fehlerhaften Sprechens bezeichnete, der von außer- oder bestenfalls randlinguistischem Interesse war. Vieles ist noch offen, und viele Fragen lassen sich erst heute mit neuer Klarheit stellen. Die in diesem Band versammelten Aufsätze geben einen Einblick in den aktuellen Forschungsstand zum Thema 'Grammatik und Interaktion'. Sie gehen zurück auf Vorträge der 11. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung, die vom 6. bis 8. April 2005 unter dem Rahmenthema 'Grammatik und Interaktion' am Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim stattfand.
Zur Einführung
(2017)
Zum Geleit
(2018)
Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick darüber, wie grundlegend Wissen als Vorausssetzung, Gegenstand und Produkt von Verständigungsprozessen für die Organisation von Gesprächen ist. Zunächst wird ein kognitivistischer Zugang zu Wissen mit einem sozialkonstruktivistischen kontrastiert. Es werden zum einen kommunikative Gattungen, die auf die Kommunikation von Wissen spezialisiert sind, dargestellt; zum anderen wird gezeigt, wie Wissen auch dann die Gestaltung der Interaktion bestimmt, wenn der primäre Gesprächszweck nicht in Wissensvermittlung besteht. Vier Dimensionen werden angesprochen: a) Das mit dem Adressaten geteilte Wissen (common ground) ist Grundlage des Adressatenzuschnitts von Äußerungen (recipient design); b)geteiltes Wissen wird in Verständigungsprozessen konstituiert; c) der relative epistemische Status der Gesprächspartner zueinander wird durch Praktiken des epistemic stance-taking verdeutlicht und bestimmt selbst die Interpretation von Äußerungsformaten; d) epistemischer Status, soziale Identität und Beziehungskonstitution sind durch moralische Anspruchs- und Erwartungsstrukturen eng miteinander verknüpft.
Wissen im Gespräch
(2018)
Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick darüber, wie grundlegend Wissen als Voraussetzung, Gegenstand und Produkt von Verständigungsprozessen für die Organisation von Gesprächen ist. Zunächst wird ein kognitivistischer Zugang zu Wissen mit einem sozialkonstruktivistischen kontrastiert. Es werden zum einen kommunikative Gattungen, die auf die Kommunikation von Wissen spezialisiert sind, dargestellt; zum anderen wird gezeigt, wie Wissen auch dann die Gestaltung der Interaktion bestimmt, wenn der primäre Gesprächszweck nicht in Wissensvermittlung besteht. Vier Dimensionen werden angesprochen: a) Das mit dem Adressaten geteilte Wissen (common ground) ist Grundlage des Adressatenzuschnitts von Äußerungen (recipient design); b) geteiltes Wissen wird in Verständigungsprozessen konstituiert; c) der relative epistemische Status der Gesprächspartner zueinander wird durch Praktiken des epistemic stance-taking verdeutlicht und bestimmt selbst die Interpretation von Äußerungsformaten; d) epistemischer Status, soziale Identität und Beziehungskonstitution sind eng miteinander durch moralische Anspruchs- und Erwartungsstrukturen verknüpft.
Wie ein Event zum Event wird
(2000)
Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient’s response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker’s embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.
Recipient design is a key constituent of intersubjectivity in interaction. Recipient design of turns is informed by prior knowledge about and shared experience with recipients. Designing turns in order to be maximally effective for the particular recipient(s) is crucial for accomplishing intersubjectively coordinated action. This paper reports on a specific pragmatic structure of recipient design, i.e. counter-factual recipient design, and how it impinges on intersubjectivity in interaction. Based on an analysis of video-recordings data from driving school lessons in German, two kinds of counterfactual recipient design of instructors' requests are distinguished: pedagogic and egocentric turn-design. Counterfactual, pedagogic turn-design is used strategically to diagnose student skills and to create opportunities for corrective instructions. Egocentric turn-design rests on private, non-shared knowledge of the instructor. Egocentrically designed turns imply expectations of how to comply with requests which cannot be recovered by the student and which lead to a breakdown of intersubjective cooperation. This paper identifies practices, sources and interactional consequences of these two kinds of counterfactual recipient design. In addition, the study enhances our understanding of recipient design in at least three ways. It shows that recipient design does not only concern referential and descriptive practices, but also the indexing intelligible projections of next actions; it highlights the productive, other-positioning effects of recipient design; it argues that recipient design should be analyzed in terms of temporally extended interactional trajectories, linking turn-constructional practices to interactional histories and consecutive trajectories of joint action.
Probleme der Semantik von Prädikaten psychischen Erlebens werden seit langem in Linguistik, Psychologie, Medizin und Sprachphilosophie diskutiert, sind aber bisher nur selten zum Gegenstand einer Untersuchung anhand authentischer Kommunikation über psychisches Erleben geworden. Anhand des Anamnesegesprächs Frau Trecker wird untersucht, welche Konzeptualisierung von Schmerzen Ärztin und Patientin kommunikativ realisieren. Dabei zeigt sich, daß die Ärztin Schmerzen als isolierbare Größen psychischen Empfindungserlebens exploriert, während die Patientin Schmerzen als kontextbezogenpraxisrelevante Phänomene, die sich in beobachtbaren Konsequenzen zeigen, darstellt. Die Studie zeigt, wie diese diskrepanten Semantiken von Schmerz zu Verständigungsproblemen führen und diskutiert sie im Zusammenhang medizinisch-professioneller Diagnosepraktiken und -ziele einerseits und der Selbstdarstellung von Frau Trecker als Patientin andererseits. Abschließend werden die methodischen Strategien, die in diesem Fall zur Rekonstruktion der kommunikativ zum Ausdruck gebrachten Semantiken von Schmerzen verwendet wurden, resümiert.
The paper discusses the range of findings and theoretical concepts on which a conversation analytic study of the constitution of meaning in interaction might draw. It focuses on research on problems of word-semantics and linguistic categorization in context which have been researched by cognitivists and conversation analysts. While cognitive studies have mainly dealt with semantic representation, syntactico-semantic composition and the impact of pragmatic and inferential factors on interpretation, discursive approaches have centered upon interactional processes and the uses and functions of categorization in talk-in-interaction. The article concludes with a discussion of the prospects and eventual benefits of a more intense combination of the cognitive and the discursive approach.
The paper discusses the range of findings and theoretical concepts on which a conversation analytic study of the constitution of meaning in interaction might draw. It focuses on research on problems of word-semantics and linguistic categorization in context which have been researched by cognitivists and conversation analysts. While cognitive studies have mainly dealt with semantic representation, syntactico-semantic composition and the impact of pragmatic and inferential factors on interpretation, discursive approaches have centered upon interactional processes and the uses and functions of categorization in talk-in-interaction. The article concludes with a discussion of the prospects and eventual benefits of a more intense combination of the cognitive and the discursive approach.
Die Charakterisierung und Bewertung von sowie die Abgrenzung gegenüber anderen sozialen Gruppen, wie z.B. erwachsenen Kontrollpersonen oder lebensstilistisch divergent orientierten Jugendlichen, bildet einen zentralen Gegenstand der Interaktion in peer-groups männlicher Jugendlicher: An der stilisierenden Repräsentation der Anderen gewinnt die eigene Gruppe ihr Profil ex negativo. In diesem Beitrag werden anhand von Aufnahmen natürlicher Gespräche Verfahren, mit denen Mitglieder einer peer-group männlicher Jugendlicher implizite Selbstdefmitionen durch Alteritätskonstruktionen vornehmen, rekonstruiert. Aufgrund der für die peer-group-Interaktion generell leitenden Orientierung an der Erzeugung von unterhaltsamem Wettbewerb tendiert die Repräsentation des Anderen zur stereotypisierenden Darstellung. Diese ist durch die selektive Darstellung von unangemessenem bis groteskem Verhalten der out-group, durch humoristische bis karikierende Überzeichnung und durch das kollektive expressive Auskosten der negativen Bewertung der Anderen gekennzeichnet. In dieser Form der Abgrenzung von Anderen erzeugt die Gruppe emotional involvierende Interaktionsereignisse, mit denen Gruppen-Konsens und -Kohäsion hergestellt und latent normativ-moralische Kollektiv-Orientierungen reproduziert werden, ohne dass jedoch damit eine explizite, verpflichtende Selbstdefinition der Gruppe verbunden wäre, die sich als potenziell konflikterzeugende Beschränkung der Handlungsspielräume der einzelnen Gruppenmitglieder auswirken könnte. Das Stereotypisieren fremder Identitäten bietet also eine Lösung für die prekäre Balance zwischen Zwängen und Verbindlichkeiten einer gemeinsamen Gruppen-Identität einerseits und dem Verlangen nach individuellen Freiräumen andererseits.
Im vorliegenden Artikel wird eine gemeinschaftliche Folgekommunikation über den Film "Angel Heart" anhand einer Diskussion einer Gruppe von Jugendlichen untersucht. Die Gruppenmitglieder (Sandra, Sonja, Andi und Michel) waren zum Zeitpunkt der Aufnahme 16 Jahre alt und verbrachten regelmäßig gemeinsam ihre Freizeit. Die Diskussion fand im Anschluss an die Rezeption des Films statt. Sie wurde vom Autor des vorliegenden Textes initiiert und geleitet, wobei versucht wurde, den Interessen der Jugendlichen und der sich zwischen ihnen entspinnenden Gesprächsdynamik zu folgen. Die Gruppendiskussion wurde konversationsanalytisch ausgewertet.
Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht aus interaktionslinguistischer Perspektive, wie Prinzipien deliberativer Demokratie in den Schlichtungsgesprächen zu Stuttgart 21 umgesetzt wurden. Wir konzentrieren uns dabei auf Interventionen, in denen der Schlichter Heiner Geißler die Wahrung von Verständlichkeit und Interessen der Bürger/-innen anmahnt, sowie Verletzungen der Wahrheitsnorm sanktioniert. Wir zeigen, wie Bürger/-innen sowie Normen und Werte rhetorisch als Ressource für das Einhalten von Verfahrensregeln genutzt werden, aber auch den Interessen des Schlichters selbst dienen. Dabei werden die Verfahrenswerte nicht immer einheitlich priorisiert. Die zugrunde liegende politische Diskussion wird zu Gunsten der Durchsetzung des Konstrukts ‚Faktenschlichtung‘ ausgeklammert.
Aus psychologischer Sicht wird Verstehen als ein kognitiver Prozess begriffen. Im Gegensatz dazu stellt der Aufsatz einen konversationsanalytischen Zugang zu Verstehen dar. Es wird rekonstruiert, wie Verstehen in Gesprächen durch verschiedene Verfahren der Verstehensdokumentation verdeutlicht und durch wechselseitig aufeinander bezogene Reaktionen ausgehandelt wird. Anhand von sechs Gesprächssequenzen wird eine linguistische Typologie von Verstehensdokumentationen in der Interaktion vorgestellt. Auf Basis der Fallanalysen werden grundlegende Eigenschaften von Verstehensdokumentationen sowie Aufgaben, die die Interaktionsteilnehmer bei der Produktion von und bei der Reaktion auf Verstehensdokumentationen bearbeiten, rekonstruiert. Dazu gehören: Identifikation des Bezugs von Verstehensdokumentationen, Interpretation des Verstehensgegenstands, Sicherung der Verständlichkeit und Legitimität (accountability) der Verstehensdokumentation, Herstellung des Bezugs der Verstehensdokumentation zu den praktischen Zwecken der laufenden Interaktion, Aushandlung intersubjektiven Verständnisses, rhetorische Nutzung von Verstehensdokumentationen und ihr indikativer Bezug auf Beteiligungsrollen und sozialstrukturelle Rahmen der Interaktion.
Verstehen im Gespräch
(2008)
Die Hermeneutik und die empirisch-psychologische Textrezeptionsforschung haben sich
damit befasst, wie Leser Texten Sinn zuschreiben. Sozialphilosophen (wie Weber, Schütz,
Mead, Habermas) sehen in Prozessen der symbolvermittelten Verständigung das alltagsweltliche
Fundament der sozialen Welt und der Möglichkeit gesellschaftlicher Integration.
Wie aber verhalten sich diese, aus der Textanalyse und der zeichen-und sozialtheoretischen
Reflexion entstandenen Konzeptionen des Verstehens zum alltagsweltlichen Verstehen im
Gespräch? Ist hier eigentlich vorn gleichen Vorgang die Rede? Sind mentalistische, noemalive
und leserbezogene Konzepte des Verstehens brauchbar für die Analyse beobachtbarer
Prozesse der Herstellung von Intersubjektivität in Gesprächen?
Dieser Aufsatz umreißt zunächst kurz den wissenschaftlichen Diskussionskontext, innerhalb
dessen Verstehen zum Gegenstand geworden ist (1). Kontrastiv dazu werden die
Prämissen einer Untersuchung von Verstehen in Gesprächen bestimmt, die sich aus den
spezifischen Situationsparametern mündlicher Interaktion ergeben (2). Den Hauptleil der
Abhandlung bildet der Aufweis der elementaren sequenziellen Organisationsform und
typischer sprachlicher Manifeslationen der Dokumentation und der Verhandlung von Verstehen
im Gespräch {3). Abschließend werden einige allgemeine Eigenschaften resümiert,
die die Dokumentation von Verstehen in Gesprächen auszuzeichnen scheinen (4).
This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patients reported repeated experiences of parental violence. The article focuses on extracts from two interviews, which provide for a maximal contrast concerning the practices of telling experiences of violence and which are ‘clear cases’ of the practices that are characteristic of the whole corpus. The main differences between the different ways of telling concern:
• With respect to the ascription of guilt and responsibility, parental violence is portrayed as legitimate pedagogic action versus as being evil-minded and guilty without rational justification.
• With respect to the process of the telling, we find narrative trajectories over which an initial vague gloss is increasingly unpacked by reports of highly violent actions versus narratives in which violence is overtly stated and morally ascribed from its very first mention.
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.
Während die Relevanz von Patientenerzählungen und therapeutischen Deutungen für den Therapieprozess viel diskutiert wird, wird den therapeutischen Fragen weniger Beachtung geschenkt. In diesem Artikel wird dafür argumentiert, therapeutische Fragen als potenziell veränderungsrelevante Verfahren der gemeinsamen Konstruktion von Erzählungen zu betrachten. Therapeutische Fragen sind maieutisch ausgerichtet, das heißt sie regen den Patienten an, von sich aus die Erzählung zu expandieren und dabei zu psychologisch relevanten Deutungen des Erzählten zu gelangen. Therapeuten scheinen in ihren Reaktionen auf Patientenerzählungen der Präferenzreihenfolge Produktion von Continuern (Fortsetzungssignalen) Schweigen Fragen Deuten zu folgen. Sie greifen also erst zur selbstproduzierten Deutung, wenn der Patient von sich aus keine produziert. Diese Präferenzreihenfolge der Therapeutenreaktionen reflektiert eine Präferenz für die Selbstdeutung des Patienten, die maieutisch, das heißt durch sokratisches Fragen, unterstützt wird.
As an Introduction to the Special Issue on "Formulation, generalization,
and abstraction in interaction,’’ this paper discusses key problems of a conversation
analytic (CA) approach to semantics in interaction. Prior research in CA and
Interactional Linguistics has only rarely dealt with issues of linguistic meaning in
interaction. It is argued that this is a consequence of limitations of sequential
analysis to capture meaning in interaction. While sequential analysis remains the
encompassing methodological framework, it is suggested that it needs to be complemented
by analyzing semantic relationships between choices of formulation in
the interaction, ethnography, and structural techniques of comparing selected
options with possible alternatives. The paper describes the methodological approach
taken to interactional semantics by the papers in the Special Issue, which analyse
practices of generalization and abstraction in interaction as they are accomplished
by formulations of prior versions of reference and description.
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.
Teilnehmende Beobachtung ist eine Forschungsstrategie, die sich darauf richtet, Interaktionsereignisse in ihren natürlichen Kontexten authentisch zu erfassen. Sie beruht auf den zentralen Annahmen qualitativer Methodologie (Denzin/Lincoln 1994; Flick 1995) und unterscheidet sich deshalb in mehreren Hinsichten von Beobachtungsverfahren in den empirischen Sozialwissenschaften: Statt externer Kategorisierung geschieht Verstehen aus der Teilhabe an der untersuchten Kultur; statt Hypothesen vorab zu entwickeln und anschließend empirisch zu testen, werden Forschungsfragen in derAuseinandersetzung mit dem Forschungsfeld entwickelt (Offenheitsprinzip); statt Variablenisolation und Bedingungsvariation als Prinzipien der Erkenntnisbildung geht es um die Rekonstruktion der Eigenstrukturiertheit kommunikativer Ereignisse; statt naturwissenschaftlicher Beobachtung und strikter Trennung von Subjekt und Objekt liegt teilnehmender Beobachtung ein Verständnis von Forschung als Kommunikation zugrunde.
In diesem Beitrag soll versucht werden, den Begriff „gesprochenes Standarddeutsch“ (vgl. a. Schneider 2011) aus Sicht der interaktionalen Linguistik (IL, Selting/Couper- Kuhlen 2000) zu beleuchten. Dies mag überraschen, denn „Standardsprache“ ist ein Begriff, der in der IL keine Rolle spielt. So sehr „Standardsprache“ in der Soziolinguistik ein umstrittenes Thema ist (vgl. Bex 1999, Milroy/Milroy 2005, Ammon 2005, Hundt 2010), so wenig ist er es in der IL. Daher gibt es auch keinen etablierten Zugang, keine etablierte Definition o. ä. aus IL-Sicht. Die Frage wird daher zunächst sein, ob und warum es auch für die IL nützlich sein kann, sich mit der Frage zu befassen, und vielleicht sogar notwendig ist, zu einem Begriff von „gesprochener Standardsprache“ zu gelangen. Allerdings müssen wir vorausschicken, dass dieser Beitrag keineswegs eine ausgearbeitete Lösung anbieten wird. Wir werden einige konzeptbezogene und methodische Überlegungen entwickeln, wie man den Begriff „Standard“ aus IL-Sicht als „Gebrauchsstandard“ fassen und einem so verstandenen Standard auf die Spur kommen kann.
Der Beitrag plädiert für eine Untersuchung der gesprochenen Sprache als integralem Bestandteil multimodaler Interaktionspraktiken. Das leibliche Handeln bildet die Infrastruktur für die Verwendung von Sprache, es schafft Bedingungen, Möglichkeiten und Motivationen für die Verwendung spezifischer sprachlicher Strukturen; umgekehrt wird es seinerseits durch sprachliches Handeln organisiert. Zunächst werden in dem Beitrag grundlegende Eigenschaften multimodaler Interaktion dargestellt: die Vielfalt der leiblichen Handlungsressourcen und ihre Koordination, Sequenzialität und Simultaneität von Aktivitäten, multimodale Beteiligung an der Interaktion, der Stellenwert von Raum, Objekten, Multiaktivität und Bewegung. Ebenso wird kurz auf die methodischen Grundlagen der Untersuchung eingegangen: Videoaufnahme und multimodale Transkription. An drei sprachlichen Phänomenbereichen wird dann exemplarisch gezeigt, wie sprachliche Praktiken durch ihr Zusammenspiel mit anderen leiblichen Ressourcen der Kommunikation geprägt sind. Im Einzelnen geht es um die Disambiguierung sprachlicher Praktiken durch ihre Koordination mit anderen Ressourcen, die Erweiterung sprachlicher Strukturen, die aufgrund von Rezipientenreaktionen simultan zur Turn-Produktion stattfindet, und die Verwendungen minimaler Referenzformen, die sich auf die multimodale Ko-Orientierung der Beteiligten stützt.
Social actions
(2021)
Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequential position of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse.
In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embodied demonstrations in contrast to verbal descriptions. For instance, to instruct an actress to act like a school girl a director can use depictive (he demonstrates the expected behavior) instead of descriptive (“can you act like a school girl”) means. Drawing on a corpus of 400 h video recordings of rehearsal interactions in three German professional theater productions, from which we selected 265 cases, we examine ways to instruct movement-based actions in theater rehearsals. Using a multimodally extended ethnomethodological-conversation analytical approach, we focus on the multimodal details that constitute demonstrations as complex action types. For the present article, we have chosen nine instances, through which we aim to illuminate (1) The difference in using embodied demonstrations versus verbal descriptions to instruct; (2) typical ways directors combine verbal descriptions with embodied demonstrations in their instructions. First, we ask what constitutes a demonstration and what it achieves in comparison to verbal descriptions. Using a typical case, we illustrate four characteristics of demonstrations that all of the cases we studied share. Demonstrations (1) are embedded in instructional activities; (2) show and do not tell; (3) are responded to by emulating what was shown; (4) are rhetorically shaped to convey the instruction's focus. However, none of the 265 demonstrations we investigated were produced without verbal descriptions. In a second step we therefore ask in which typical ways verbal descriptions accompany embodied demonstrations when directors instruct actors how to play a scene. We distinguish four basic types. Verbal descriptions can be used (1) to build the demonstration itself; (2) to delineate a demonstration verbally within an instruction; (3) to indicate positive (what should be done) and negative (what should be avoided) versions of demonstrations; (4) as an independent means to describe the instruction's focus in addition to the demonstration. Our study contributes to research on how embodied resources are used to create meaning and how they combine with and depend on verbal resources.
This contribution deals with right-dislocated complement clauses with the subordinating conjunction dass (‘that’) in German talk-in-interaction. The bi-clausal construction we analyze is as follows: The first clause, in which one argument is realized by the demonstrative pronoun das (‘this/that’), is syntactically and semantically complete; the reference of the pronoun is (re-)specified by adding a dass-complement clause after a point of possible completion (e.g., aber das hab ich nich MITbekommen. (0.32) dass es da so YOUtubevideos gab. (‘But I wasn’t aware of that. That there were videos about that on YouTube.’). The first clause always performs a backward-oriented action (e.g., an assessment) and the second clause (re-)specifies the propositional reference of the demonstrative, allowing for a (strategic) perspective shift. Based on a collection of 93 cases from everyday conversations and institutional interactions, we found that the construction is used close to the turn-beginning for referring to and (re-)specifying (parts of) another speaker’s prior turn; turn-internal uses tie together parts of a speaker’s multi-unit turn. The construction thus facilitates an incremental constitution of meaning and reference.
This paper shows how understanding in interaction is informed by temporality, and in particular, by the workings of retrospection. Understanding is a temporally extended, sequentially organized process. Temporality, namely, the sequential relationship of turn positions, equips participants with default mechanisms to display understandings and to expect such displays. These mechanisms require local management of turn-taking to be in order, i.e., the possibility and the expectation to respond locally and reciprocally to prior turns at talk. Sequential positions of turns in interaction provide an infrastructure for displaying understanding and accomplishing intersubjectivity. Linguistic practices specialized in displaying particular kinds of (not) understanding are adapted to the individual sequential positions with respect to an action-to-be-understood.
Dieses Lehrbuch führt in die theoretischen Grundlagen und praktischen Vorgehensweisen der Untersuchung von "narrativer Identität" anhand von autobiografischen Erzählinterviews ein. In den vergangenen Jahren ist "narrative Identität" zu einem Schlüsselkonzept der Identitätsforschung geworden: In der erzählerischenVergegenwärtigung des eigenen Lebens gewinnt das Subjekt ein biografisch begründetes Verhältnis zu sich selbst. Bislang fehlt es aber an einer gegenstandsangemessenen Methodik der Rekonstruktion narrativer Identitäten. Diese Lücke will der Band schließen. Zunächst werden neuere Erkenntnisse zum Erzählen und zur Konstitution von Identität im Erzählen dargestellt, vor allem unter Rückgriff auf die in Deutschland noch kaum rezipierten Theorien der narrativen und diskursiven Psychologie und der Konversations- und Diskursanalyse. Im Zentrum des Textes steht dann die didaktische Darstellung des Prozesses der Auswertung von narrativen Interviews mit vielenTranskriptbeispielen und die Diskussion einzelner Auswertungsstrategien und unterschiedlicher Ebenen der Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität.
Rejecting the validity of inferred attributions of incompetence in German talk-in-interaction
(2024)
This paper deals with pragmatic inference from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In particular, we examine a specific variety of inferences - the attribution of incompetence which Self constructs on the basis of Other's prior action, hearable as positioning Self as incompetent (e.g., instructions, offers of assistance, advice); this attribution of incompetence concerns Self's execution of some practical task. This inference is indexed in Self's response, which highlights Self's expertise, or competence concerning the task at hand. We focus on two recurrent types of such responses in our data: (i) accounting for competence through formulations of prior experience with carrying out a practical action and (ii) explicit claims of competence for accomplishing this action. We analyze the interactional environments in which these responses occur, the ways in which the two practices index Self's understanding of being positioned as incompetent and the interactional work they do. Finally, we discuss how through rejecting and inferred attribution of incompetence, Self implicitly seeks to restore their face and defend their autonomy as an agent, yet, without entering an explicit identity-negotiation. Findings rest on the analysis of 20 cases found in video-recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German from the corpus FOLK.
Praxis der Gesprächsanalyse
(1995)
Pragmatik revisited
(2015)
Die Pragmatik hat sich im Lauf der letzten 40 Jahre fest als linguistische Teildisziplin etabliert. Schon relativ früh hat sich ein Kanon von Fragestellungen und Konzepten herausgebildet, der den Gegenstandsbereich der Pragmatik z.B. in Lehrbüchern und Enzyklopädien ausmacht. Die kanonischen Gegenstände (v.a. Sprechakte, Implikaturen, Präsuppositionen und Deixis) sind über die Zeit erstaunlich stabil geblieben. Der Beitrag regt an, dieses Gegenstandsverständnis von ,Pragmatik‘ angesichts der Entwicklungen der Forschung in den letzten Dekaden zu überdenken. Folgende Fragen sind dabei leitend:
- Welche Konzepte und Eigenschaften des Gegenstandsbereichs haben sich in der empirischen Erforschung des sprachlichen Handelns im Kontext als grundlegend erwiesen, ohne bisher entsprechend als Grundkategorien des „Kanons“ der Pragmatik begriffen worden zu sein?
- Welche Konsequenzen haben die empirischen Forschungen der letzten Zeit für die Relevanz und das Verständnis der klassischen pragmatischen Themen und Konzepte?
Es wird dafür plädiert, vier Bestimmungsstücke des sprachlichen Handelns ins Zentrum der Auffassung von ,Pragmatik‘ zu stellen: Zeitlichkeit, Leiblichkeit, Sozialität und Epistemizität.
Pragmatics and grammar
(2011)
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings:
• Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting.
• In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self.
• Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior.
• Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.
Mock fiction is a genre of humorous, fictional narratives. It is pervasive in adolescents’ peer-group interaction. Building on a corpus of informal peer-group interaction among 14 to 17 year-old German adolescents, it is shown how mock fiction is used to sanction identity-claims of peer-group co-members that are taken to be inadequate by the teller of a mock fiction. Mock fiction exposes and ridicules those claims by fictional exaggeration. Mock fiction is an indirect, yet sometimes even highly abusive means for criticizing and negotiating identities and statuses of peer-group members. The analysis shows how mock fiction is collaboratively produced, how it is used to convey criticism and to negotiate social norms indirectly, and how, in addition, it allows for performative self-positioning of the tellers as skilled, entertaining tellers and socio-psychological diagnosticians.
Positioning
(2015)
Over the last two decades, “positioning” has become an established concept used to elucidate how identities are deployed and negotiated in narratives. This chapter first locates positioning in the larger field of research on identities and discourse. Commonalities and differences in conceptions of positioning are highlighted. In the following, the historical development of theoretical approaches to positioning and their methodological implications are reviewed in more detail. The article closes by taking up two current lines of debate concerning the future development of the concept of positioning.
In diesem Artikel wird aus einer konservationsanalytischer Perspektive untersucht, wie in der letzten Stunde der psychoanalytischen Behandlung »Amalie« die Aufgabe des Abschiednehmens interaktiv thematisiert und ausgehandelt wird. Anhand von drei zentralen Interaktionssequenzen wird rekonstruiert, wie die Patientin den Abschied systematisch de-thematisiert. Sie benutzt unterschiedliche Verfahren der Selbstpositioniernng und der Fremdpositionierung des Therapeuten zur Legitimierung ihrer Verweigerung der Bearbeitung und zur Negierung der Relevanz des Abschieds. Darüber hinaus löst sie die Aufgabe des Abschieds, indem sie ihn symbolisch aufhebt durch die Behauptung einer mentalen Verschmelzung mit dem Therapeuten, die den bevorstehenden Verlust der Realbeziehung irrelevant mache.
Schegloff (1996) has argued that grammars are “positionally-sensitive”, implying that the situated use and understanding of linguistic formats depends on their sequential position. Analyzing the German format Kannst du X? (corresponding to English Can you X?) based on 82 instances from a large corpus of talk-in-interaction (FOLK), this paper shows how different action-ascriptions to turns using the same format depend on various orders of context. We show that not only sequential position, but also epistemic status, interactional histories, multimodal conduct, and linguistic devices co-occurring in the same turn are decisive for the action implemented by the format. The range of actions performed with Kannst du X? and their close interpretive interrelationship suggest that they should not be viewed as a fixed inventory of context-dependent interpretations of the format. Rather, the format provides for a root-interpretation that can be adapted to local contextual contingencies, yielding situated action-ascriptions that depend on constraints created by contexts of use.
Playing with the voice of the other : stylized kanaksprak in conversations among German adolescents
(2007)
This paper attempts a critique of the notion of 'dialogue' in dialogue theory as espoused by Linell, Markova, and others building on Bakhtin’s writings. According to them, human communication, culture, language, and even cognition are dialogical in nature. This implies that these domains work by principles of other-orientation and interaction. In our paper, we reject accepting other-orientation as an a priori condition of every semiotic action. Instead, we claim that in order to be an empirically useful concept for the social sciences, it must be shown if and how observable action is other-oriented. This leads us to the following questions: how can we methodically account for other-orientation of semiotic action? Does other-orientation always imply interaction? Is every human expression oriented towards others? How does the other, as s/he is represented in semiotic action, relate to the properties which the other can be seen to exhibit as indexed by their observable behavior? We study these questions by asking how the orientation towards others becomes evident in different forms of communication. For this concern, we introduce ‘recipient design’, ‘positioning’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ as concepts which allow us to inquire how semiotic action both takes the other into account and, reflexively, shapes him/her as an addressee having certain properties. We then specifically focus on actions and situations in which other-orientation is particularly problematic, such as interactions with children, animals, machines, or communication with unknown recipients via mass media. These borderline cases are scrutinized in order to delineate both limits and constitutive properties of other-orientation. We show that there are varieties of meaningful actions which do not exhibit an orientation towards the other, which do not rest on (the possibility of) interaction with the other or which even disregard what their producer can be taken to know about the other. Available knowledge about the other may be ignored in order to reach interactional goals, e. g. in strategical interactions or for concerns of socialization. If semiotic action is otherorientated, its design depends on how the other is available to and matters for their producer. Other-orientation may build on shared biographical experiences with the other, knowledge about the other as an individual and close attention to their situated conduct. However, other-orientation may also rest on (stereo-)typification with respect to institutional roles or group membership. In any case, others as they are represented in semiotic action can never be just others-as-such, but only othersas-perceived-by-the-actor. We conclude that the strong emphasis which dialogue theories put on otherorientation obscures that other-orientation is neither universal in semiotic action, that it must be distinguished from an interactive relationship, and that the ways in which the other figures in semiotic actions is not homogeneous in any of its most general properties. Instead, there is a huge variation in the ways in which the other can be taken into account. Therefore close scrutiny of how the other precisely figures in a certain kind of semiotic action is needed in order to lend the concept of ‘other-orientation’ empirical substance and a definite sense.
Overtaking as an interactional achievement : video analyses of participants' practices in traffic
(2018)
In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interactional event. Our focus is on the accountable organisation and accomplishment of overtaking by road users in real-world traffic situations. Data and analysis are drawn from multiple research groups studying driving from an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. Building on multimodal and sequential analyses of video recordings of overtaking events, the article describes the shared practices which overtakers and overtaken parties use in displaying, recognizing and coordinating their manoeuvres. It examines the three sequential phases of an overtaking event: preparation and projection; the overtaking proper; the re-alignment post-phase including retrospective accounts and assessments. We identify how during each of these phases drivers and passengers organize intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle practices: driving and non-driving related talk between vehicle- occupants, the emerging spatiotemporal ecology of the road, and the driving actions of other road users. The data is derived from a two camera set-up recording the road ahead and car interior. The recordings are from three settings: daily commuting, driving lessons, race-car coaching. The events occur on a variety of road types (motorways, country roads, city streets, a race track, etc.), in six languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Swedish) and in seven countries (Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). From an exceptionally diverse collection of video data, the study of which is made possible thanks to the innovative collaboration of multiple researchers, the article exhibits the range of practical challenges and communicative skills involved in overtaking.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.
In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.
OKAY originates from English, but it is increasingly used across languages. This chapter presents data from 13 languages, illustrating the spectrum of possible uses of OKAY in responding and claiming understanding in contexts of informings. Drawing on a wide range of interaction types from both informal and institutional contexts, including those crucially involving embodied practices, we show how OKAY can be used to (i) claim sufficient understanding, (ii) mark understanding of the prior informing as preliminary or not complete, and (iii) index discrepancy of expectation.
This paper analyses one specific conversational practice of formulation
called ‘notionalization’. It consists in the transformation of a description by a prior
speaker into a categorization by the next speaker. Sequences of this kind are a
‘‘natural laboratory’’ for studying the differences between descriptions and categorizations
regarding their semantic, interactional, and rhetorical properties:
Descriptive/narrative versions are often vague and tentative, multi unit turns,
which are temporalized and episodic, offering a lot of contingent, situational,
and indexical detail.
Notionalizations turn them into condensed, abstract, timeless, and often
agentless categorizations expressed by a noun (phrase) within one turn
constructional unit (TCU).
Drawing on audio- and video-taped German data from various types of interaction,
the paper focuses on one particular practice of notionalization, the formulation
of purportedly common ground by TCUs prefaced with the connective also.
The paper discusses their turn-constructional and morphological properties, pointing
out affinities of notionalization with language for special purposes. Notionalizations
are used for reducing detail and for topical closure. They provide grounds for
emergent keywords, which can be reused to re-contextualize topical issues and
interactional histories efficiently. Notionalizations are powerful means for accomplishing
intersubjectivity while pursuing (sometimes one-sided) practical relevancies
at the same time. Their inevitably perspective design thus may lead to re-open
the issue they were deemed to settle. The paper closes with an outlook to other
practices of notionalization, pointing to dimensions of interactionally relevant
variation and commonalities.
This paper deals with a case study of a first visit of a person with hearing loss to her family doctor. In the first part of the paper, basic properties of doctor-patient interaction, which are also relevant for treatment of hearing loss, are outlined: the relevance of institutional conditions for interaction, asymmetries between the participants, goal-orientation, specific conditions of trust, and the relevance of the specific genre of doctor-patient interaction. The second part of the paper presents a case study, which focuses on three interactional phenomena: a) the negotiation of the hearing loss as an existential threat to the patient and her identity; b) the discrepancy of illness theories between doctor and patient; c) the collaborative work of negotiating an intersubjectively viable description of the experience of hearing loss.
Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht, wie Negationen in Gesprächen verwendet werden können, um Interpretationen des Sprecherhandelns durch den Partner zu beeinflussen und zu steuern. Zunächst werden die dafür benötigten theoretischen und methodischen Werkzeuge vorgestellt: die interaktionsanalytischen Konzepte des Adressatenzuschnitts und des common ground (CG), Grundzüge der Syntax und Semantik der Negation sowie ihre Funktionsweise als Verfahren zur Abwahl von Annahmen erster, zweiter und dritter Ordnung. Im empirischen Teil wird im Einzelnen gezeigt, wie Negationen genutzt werden, um im Gesprächsverlauf prospektiv und retrospektiv die Deutung von Sprecherhandlungen durch den Adressaten zu beschränken. Die interaktionalen Motivationen und die rhetorischen Potenziale des Einsatzes von Negationen zur Interpretationsrestriktion werden aufgezeigt. Die Analyse demonstriert die Notwendigkeit einer differenzierenden Sicht auf das Konzept des Adressatenzuschnitts.
Der Beitrag schlägt das Konzept der 'Positionierung' als Instrument zur empirischen Erforschung narrativer Identitäten auf der Basis von autobiographischen Erzählungen vor. Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass die Perspektive der Positionierung einen materialgestützten und materialadäquaten Zugang zu Prozessen der Identitätskonstitution in mündlichen Stegreiferzählungen bietet, da es die identitätsrelevanten darstellerischen wie performativen Handlungen von Erzählern zu rekonstruieren erlaubt. Dabei wird zwischen verschiedenen Ebenen und Bezügen unterschieden: Selbst- und Fremdpositionierungen, Positionierungen dargestellter Figuren innerhalb der Erzählzeit und von Erzähler und Zuhörern in der erzählten Zeit sowie die Relation zwischen erzählenden und erzähltem Ich. Diese Differenzierungen erlauben nicht nur eine detaillierte Rekonstruktion unterschiedlicher Facetten und Verfahren der Herstellung narrativer Identität, sie eröffnen auch psychologisch und soziologisch aufschlussreiche Einblicke in die Relationen zwischen Identitätsentwürfen auf den verschiedenen Ebenen.
Mündlich kommunizieren
(2004)
This paper analyses paramedic emergency interaction as multimodal multiactivity. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of emergency drills performed by professional paramedics during advanced training, the focus is on paramedics’ participation in multiple joint projects which become simultaneously relevant. Simultaneity and fast succession of multiactivity does not only characterise work on the team level, but also the work profile of the individual paramedic. Participants have to coordinate their own participation in more than one joint project intrapersonally. In the data studied, three patterns of allocating multimodal resources stood out as routine ways of coordinating participation in two simultaneous projects intrapersonally:
1. Talk and hearing vs. manual action monitored by gaze,
2. Talk and hearing vs. gazing (and pointing),
3. Manual action vs. gaze (and talk and hearing).
This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics has its origins in the International Conference on Conversation Analysis 10 (ICCA10), which took place in Mannheim (Germany) in July 2010. More than 650 scholars attended the conference, whose theme was ‘‘multimodal interaction’’. This volume includes papers based on the four plenary talks given at ICCA10 and four additional contributions related to the conference theme.
Multimediale Narration im Angesicht des Todes. Zeugnisse terminaler KrebspatientInnen im Internet
(2018)
Monitoring und Koordination als Voraussetzungen der multimodalen Konstitution von Interaktionsräumen
(2007)
Our study deals with early bodily responses to directives (requests and instructions, i.e., second pair parts [SPPs]) produced before the first pair part (FPP) is complete. We show how early bodily SPPs build on the properties of an emerging FPP. Our focus is on the successive incremental coordination of components of the FPP with components of the SPP. We show different kinds of micro-sequential relationships between FPP and SPP: successive specification of the SPP building on the resources that the FPP makes available, the readjustment or repair of the SPP in response to the emerging FPP, and reflexive micro sequential adaptions of the FPP to an early SPP. This article contributes to our understanding of the origins of projection in interaction and of the relationship between sequentially and simultaneity in interaction. Data are video-recordings from interaction in German.
This paper explores speakers’ notions of the situational appropriacy of linguistic variants. We conducted a web-based survey in which we collected ratings of the appropriacy of variants of linguistic variables in spoken German. A range of quantitative methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and various forms of visualization techniques) is applied in order to analyze metalinguistic awareness and the differences in the evaluation of written vs. spoken stimuli. First, our data show that speakers’ ratings of the appropriacy of linguistic variants vary reliably with two rough clusters representing formal and informal speech situations and genres. The findings confirm that speakers adhere to a notion of spoken standard German which takes genre and register-related variation into account. Secondly, our analysis reveals a written language bias: metalinguistic awareness is strongly influenced by the physical mode of the presentation of linguistic items (spoken vs. written).
Metalinguistic awareness of standard vs standard usage. The case of determiners in spoken German
(2015)
In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to convey generalizable lexical meanings of mostly technical terms. These terms are either unknown to requesters, or, in pedagogical contexts, requesters ask in order to check the addressee’s knowledge. Specifications, in contrast, clarify aspects of local speaker meanings of ordinary expressions (e.g., reference, participants in an event, standards applied to scalar expressions). Both definitions and specifications are recipient-designed with respect to the (presumed) knowledge of the addressee and tailored to the topical and practical relevancies of the current interaction. Both practices attest to the flexibility and situatedness of speakers’ semantic understandings and to the systematicity of using meta-semantic practices differentially for different kinds of semantic problems. Data are come from mundane and institutional interaction in German from the public corpus FOLK.
Meaning in interaction
(2024)
This editorial to the Special Issue on “Meaning in Interaction” introduces to the approach of Interactional Semantics, which has been developed over the last years within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It discusses how “meaning” is understood and approached in this framework and lays out that Interactional Semantics is interested in how participants clarify and negotiate the meanings of the expressions that they are using in social interaction. Commonalities and differences of this approach with other approaches to meaning are flagged, and the intellectual origins and precursors of Interactional Semantics are introduced. The contributions to the Special Issue are located in the larger field of research.
How do people’s interactional practices change over time? Can conversation analysis identify those changes, and if so, how? In this introductory article, we scrutinize the novel insights that can be gained from examining interactional practices over time and discuss the related methodological challenges for longitudinal CA. We first retrace CA’s interest in the temporality of social interaction and then review three lines of current CA work on change over time: developmental studies, studies of sociohistorical change, and studies of joint interactional histories. Existing work shows how the execution of locally coordinated actions and their meanings change over time; how prior actions inform future actions; and how resources, practices, and structures of joint action emerge over people’s repeated interactional encounters. We conclude by arguing that the empirical analysis of the microlevel organization of social interaction, which is the hallmark of CA, can elucidate the fine-grained situated interactional infrastructure that provides for the larger-scale social dynamics that have been of interest to other lines of research.
Using different constructions with the German item vcrstchcn (engl. understand), the current study addresses the relationship between lexical and constructional meaning. Construction grammar and cognitive grammar reject the theoretical distinction between (a semantic) lexicon and (a formal) syntax (e.g., Langacker: 2000). Instead, they take constructions to be the units of linguistic competence. It is claimed that constructions consist of form-meaning-pairings (e.g. Goldberg: 1995; Croft: 2001). From this view, it follows that formal variation should result in functional variation. Lexical items should therefore acquire different meanings depending on the constructions in which they occur. To test this claim, 300 instances of uses of the German lexical item verstehen in talk-in-interaction were inspected for the local meanings verstehen acquires in each case. The article compares the semantics of verstehen in two different constructions: The discourse marker verstehst du? (engl. do you understand?) and the negative construction [NP] nicht verstehen [COMP], The data show a poly- semic spectrum of meanings of verstehen, which is similar for both constructions. The precise local meaning of verstehen in most cases depends on pragmatic and discursive factors and is not provided for by the constructions themselves. There are, however, subtypes of the two constructions that satisfy the condition of being a form-meaning-pair. As a conclusion, some prospects for the conceptualization of different sources of meaning within a construction grammar approach are suggested.
Parmi les nombreuses contributions de Charles Goodwin à l’étude des interactions sociales, ses travaux sur les gestes de pointage (1986, 2003, 2007) et la vision professionnelle (1994) constituent un apport majeur. Forts de l’enseignement goodwinien, nous examinons le recours aux gestes de pointage lors des instructions de navigation observables dans des leçons de conduite. Nous décrivons quatre exécutions indexicales différentes des gestes de pointage employés pour indiquer un parcours à suivre : les gestes trajectoire, les gestes géométriques, schématiques et contrastifs. Les gestes trajectoire tracent une ligne dans l’espace, révélant ainsi une composante déictique et une composante iconique. Les gestes géométriques instaurent une relation vectorielle avec la configuration routière visible, alors que les gestes schématiques reposent sur une représentation sémiotique stylisée de l’environnement. Ni complètement géométriques, ni schématiques, les gestes contrastifs se basent sur une représentation oppositionnelle de l’espace ambiant. La mobilité des interactants, leur asymétrie épistémique, l’activité didactique, et la séquentialité de l’interaction contribuent à donner leur sens à ces gestes de pointage.
Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
Cet article étudie les définitions en contexte d’instructions dans les leçons d’auto-école. Les observations s’appuient sur un corpus de 70 heures de leçons enregistrées par vidéo en Allemagne. Le moniteur utilise des définitions pour introduire des nouvelles expressions techniques qui sont étroitement liées aux buts de l’apprentissage de conduite. Pour leur production, l’emploi des ressources multimodales est fondamental. La définition ostensive par pointage et une assertion existentielle (ça/ici c’est X) est complétée par des définitions descriptives et des démonstrations gestuelles du maniement des objets. L’objectif des actes de définition ici n’est pas de délivrer une définition de l’expression en soi, qui soit valable pour tous les contextes possibles, mais de produire une définition qui soit efficace dans le contexte pratique concerné. Les définitions donc sont plutôt fragmentées, indexicales et situées, et elles sont adaptées aux pré-connaissances de l’interlocuteur.
Konversationsanalyse: Elementare Interaktionsstrukturen am Beispiel der Bundespressekonferenz
(2014)
Der Beitrag stellt zunächst die drei grundlegenden methodischen Verfahren der Konversationsanalyse und der mittlerweile deren Vorgehen folgenden diskursiven Psychologie dar: die Transkription, die detaillierte Sequenzanalyse am Einzelfall und die (komparative) Analyse von Datenkollektionen. Nach einer Übersicht über grundlegende Befunde zur Organisation von Interaktionen wird auf drei psychologische Untersuchungsbereiche eingegangen: Die Konstitution von Identität in Gesprächen, die Rolle von Kognitionen in der sozialen Interaktion und die Erforschung von Psychotherapiegesprächen.