Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (115)
- Article (79)
- Book (10)
- Working Paper (2)
- Habilitation (1)
Keywords
- Konversationsanalyse (100)
- Deutsch (79)
- Interaktion (76)
- Gesprochene Sprache (26)
- conversation analysis (21)
- Interaktionsanalyse (17)
- Pragmatik (15)
- Multimodalität (13)
- Verstehen (13)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (11)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (43)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (33)
- Postprint (31)
- Ahead of Print (2)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (49)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (41)
- Verlags-Lektorat (5)
- (Verlags-)Lektorat (1)
- Veröffentlichungsversion (1)
Publisher
- Benjamins (19)
- de Gruyter (19)
- Stauffenburg (16)
- Elsevier (11)
- De Gruyter (10)
- Verlag für Gesprächsforschung (10)
- Springer (8)
- Verl. für Gesprächsforschung (8)
- Narr (7)
- Lang (5)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hintergrund: Die digitale Transformation prägt gesellschaftliche Systeme weltweit. Digital Health umfasst verschiedene Bereiche, wie z. B. die Verfügbarkeit und Auswertung von Daten, die Möglichkeit der Vernetzung innerhalb der eigenen Berufs- oder Betroffenengruppe und die Art, wie Patient*innen, Angehörige und Behandler*innen miteinander kommunizieren.
Ziel der Arbeit: Digital Health wird mit ihren Auswirkungen auf die Beziehung und die Kommunikation zwischen Patient*innen, Angehörigen und Behandler*innen beleuchtet. Veränderungen, die bereits erkennbar sind, werden beschrieben und Perspektiven aufgezeigt.
Methoden: Das Thema wird aus sozialphilosophischer, sprachwissenschaftlicher und ärztlicher Perspektive in folgenden Bereichen exploriert: digitale vs. analoge Kommunikation, Narration vs. Datensammeln, Internet und soziale Medien als Informationsquelle, Raum für Identitätsbildung und Veränderung der Interaktion von Patient*innen, Angehörigen und Behandler*innen.
Ergebnisse: Die Erweiterung der Interaktion zwischen Patient*innen und Ärzt*innen auf digitale und Präsenzformate sowie die asynchrone und synchrone Kommunikation erhöhen die Komplexität, aber auch die Flexibilität. Die Fokussierung auf „objektive“ Daten kann den Blick auf die Person mit ihrer individuellen Biografie beeinträchtigen, während digitale Räume die Möglichkeiten zur Identitätsbildung aufseiten der Patient*innen und für die Interaktion deutlich erweitern.
Diskussion: Bereits jetzt zeigen sich Vorteile der Digitalisierung (z. B. besseres Selbstmanagement) und Nachteile (Fokussierung auf Daten statt auf die Person). Für den kinder- und jugendärztlichen Bereich bestehen die Notwendigkeiten, professionelle kommunikative Kompetenzen und professionelle Gesundheitskompetenz zu erweitern sowie die Organisation seiner Versorgungseinrichtungen weiterzuentwickeln.
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.
Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the experienced qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations.
Dieses Buch stellt die Gesprächsanalyse als Methodik zur Erforschung linguistischer Fragestellungen dar. Ihr Ziel ist die umfassende Analyse sprachlicher Phänomene in ihren formalen, funktionalen und kontextuellen Dimensionen. Grundlegende Eigenschaften der verbalen Interaktion werden zunächst auf ihre sprachtheoretischen Konsequenzen befragt. Sodann werden aus ihnen methodologische Prinzipien für die Erhebung und Analyse von Gesprächskorpora entwickelt. Das methodische Vorgehen wird an einer grammatischen und einer semantischen Fragestellung demonstriert. Untersucht werden freie Infinitivkonstruktionen im gesprochenen Deutsch und die Effekte von Kontrastierungsaktivitäten auf die Semantik von Ausdrücken im Gespräch. Theoretische Basis bildet hier die Integration der Gesprächsanalyse mit der construction grammar und der kognitiven Linguistik.
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.
Der Beitrag illustriert die Nutzung des Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) für interaktionslinguistische Fragestellungen anhand einer exemplarischen Studie. Zunächst werden die Stratifikation (Datenkomposition) des Korpus, das zugrundeliegende Datenmodell und dessen Annotationsebenen sowie Typen von Untersuchungsinteressen vorgestellt, für die das Korpus nutzbar ist. Im Hauptteil wird Schritt für Schritt anhand einer Studie zur Verwendung des Formats was heißt X in der sozialen Interaktion gezeigt, wie mit FOLK relevante Daten gefunden und analysiert werden können. Abschließend weisen wir auf einige Vorsichtsmaßnahmen bei der Benutzung des Korpus hin.
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.
While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.
Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Instruieren in kreativen Settings – wie Vorgaben der Regie durch Schauspielende ausgestaltet werden
(2021)
Instruktionen sind darauf angelegt, ein festgelegtes Ergebnis zu erzielen, v.a. in instrumentellen Arbeitskontexten oder Lehr-Lern-Settings. In kreativen Settings dagegen existieren häufig keine klar definierten Lerninhalte. Das Endprodukt und der Weg dorthin werden vielmehr bewusst offen gehalten, um Kreativität zu ermöglichen. Trotzdem machen Instruktionen auch in kreativen Settings einen Großteil der Äußerungen aus. Wir zeigen an zwei typischen Fällen aus Theaterproben, wie Instruktionen in kreativen Settings Neues hervorzubringen vermögen. Regisseur*innen arbeiten mit relativ offenen Rahmeninstruktionen, die von Schauspielenden in Folgehandlungen auszugestalten sind. Instruierte Handlungen haben so ein hohes Potenzial an Eigeninitiative und liefern die Grundlage für Regisseur*innen, um Aspekte des vorgängigen Spiels der Schauspieler*innen affirmativ aufzugreifen, die sie selbst zuvor so nicht instruiert haben. Diese Selektionen der Regie greifen einen Teil des dargebotenen Schauspiels auf und machen es für das zukünftige Handeln verbindlich. Unsere Studie untersucht, wie Instruktionen Folgehandeln evozieren, auf das sie selbst wiederum aufbauen. Grundlage ist ein Korpus von 800 Stunden Videoaufnahmen von Theaterproben.
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.
Taking the use of the esthetic term wabi sabi (Japanese compound noun) in a series of German- and English-language theater rehearsals as an example, this article studies the emergence of shared meanings and uses of an expression over an interactional history. We track how shared understandings and uses of wabi sabi develop over the course of a series of theater rehearsals. We focus on the practices by which understandings of wabi sabi are displayed, adopted, and negotiated. We discuss complexities and intransparencies of the manifestation of common ground in multiparty interactions and its relationship to the emergence of routine uses of the expression. Data are in English and German with English translation.
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.
Our paper examines how bodily behavior contributes to the local meaning of OKAY. We explore the interplay between OKAY as response to informings and narratives and accompanying multimodal resources in German multi-party interaction. Based on informal and institutional conversations, we describe three different uses of OKAY with falling intonation and the recurrent multimodal patterns that are associated with them and that can be characterized as ‘multimodal gestalts’. We show that: 1. OKAY as a claim to sufficient understanding is typically accompanied by upward nodding; 2. OKAY after change-of-state tokens exhibits a recurrent pattern of up- and downward nodding with distinctive timing; and 3. OKAY closing larger activities is associated with gaze-aversion from the prior speaker.
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.
In this chapter, we overview the specificity of comparisons made within the perspective of Conversation Analysis (CA), and we position them in relation to other fields. We introduce the analytical mentality, methodology, and procedures of CA, and we show how we used it for the analysis of OKAY in this volume.
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.
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.
This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct. In this introductory article, we discuss the role of temporality and sequentiality in social interaction, specifically focusing on projective and anticipatory mechanisms and the interplay between multiple semiotic resources, which are crucial for making early responses possible.
Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of acting, which is based on “imagining with the body,” and how the imaginary elements of the technique are “brought into existence” in the language of the instructions. By tracking shifts in the instructor’s use of the key expressions invisible/imaginary/inner body or movement through a series of exercises, we demonstrate how they are increasingly treated as real and perceivable bodily conduct. The analyses focus on the instructor’s attribution of factual and agentive properties to these expressions, and the changes that these properties undergo over the series of instructions. This case demonstrates the significance of longitudinal processes for the establishment of shared meaning in social interaction. The study thereby contributes to the field of interactional semantics and to longitudinal studies of social interaction.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Interaktive Emergenz und Stabilisierung. Zur Entstehung kollektiver Kreativität in Theaterproben
(2020)
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.
Interaktionale Semantik
(2020)
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.
Kultur ist nicht nur zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Geisteswissenschaften geworden, sondern wird auch entterminologisiert als Alltagsbegriff benutzt. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie der Ausdruck Kultur (einschließlich Derivationen und Komposita) in der mündlichen Interaktion verwendet wird. Auf Basis von 82 Instanzen im Korpus FOLK des IDS Mannheim wurde festgestellt, dass der Ausdruck von SprecherInnen in zumeist semiformellen bis formellen Interaktionstypen benutzt wird. Es findet sich ein breites Spektrum unterschiedlicher, teils ineinander übergehender Bedeutungen, welches dem der wissenschaftlichen Literatur der Kulturtheorie ähnlich ist. Dabei lassen sich jeweils relevante Kernbedeutungen identifizieren, mit denen mehr oder weniger vage assoziierte Bedeutungen verbunden sind. Kultur zeigt sich als kontroverser Begriff: Die Referenz von Kultur, die Wertung und seine Relevanz als Erklärungsressource sind häufig umstritten.
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.
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.
This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found.
1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic code and other mutually shared expectations.
2. Intersubjective solutions emerge step by step by mutual responsive-anticipatory adaptation of driving decisions.
3. Intersubjectivity can be accomplished by explicit interactive negotiation of passages.
4. Coordination problems can be solved without relying on intersubjectivity by unilateral, responsive-anticipatory adaptation to others’ behaviors.
This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages - Flemish, French, German, and Italian - it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
Multimediale Narration im Angesicht des Todes. Zeugnisse terminaler KrebspatientInnen im Internet
(2018)
This paper studies how the turn-design of a highly recurrent type of action changes over time. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of German driving lessons, we consider one type of instructions and analyze how the same instructional action is produced by the same speaker (the instructor) for the same addressee (the student) in consecutive trials of a learning task. We found that instructions become increasingly shorter, indexical and syntactically less complex; interactional sequences become more condensed and activities designed to secure mutual understanding become rarer. This study shows how larger temporal frameworks of interpersonal interactional histories which range beyond the interactional sequence impinge on the recipient-design of turns and the deployment of multimodal resources in situ.
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.
Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht Ausbildungsinteraktionen in zwei beruflichen Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen für Flüchtlinge. Solche Maßnahmen werden seit 2015 verstärkt angeboten, um die Geflüchteten möglichst umfassend und zügig auf eine Arbeitsaufnahme in Deutschland vorzubereiten. Im Kontext einer ethnografischen Studie untersuchen wir mit Methoden der multimodalen Interaktionsanalyse, a) wie in Anleitungsgesprächen Verständigungsprobleme zwischen deutschen Anleitern und auszubildenden Flüchtlingen entstehen und b) welche sprachlich-kommunikativen Praktiken zu ihrer Bearbeitung eingesetzt werden. Dabei lassen sich ebenso gelungene wie Probleme erzeugende Kommunikationspraktiken feststellen. Da die meisten Geflüchteten zu Beginn der untersuchten Maßnahmen noch keine Integrationskurse besucht hatten und nur über wenige Deutschkenntnisse verfügten, liegt der primäre Fokus der Analyse auf der Beteiligungsweise der Ausbilder, betrachtet diese aber im sequenziellen Kontext der Interaktionsbeteiligung der auszubildenden Flüchtlinge. Die Untersuchung beruht auf 22 Stunden Videoaufnahmen praktischer Ausbildungen.
Deutschland sieht sich in den nächsten Jahren vor enorme Herausforderungen gestellt. Mit der Fluchtmigration von knapp 1,5 Millionen Menschen alleine zwischen den Jahren 2014 und 2017 stehen nahezu in jedem gesellschaftlichen Bereich, und hier insbesondere in den Sektoren Bildung und Arbeit, große Integrationsaufgaben an. Steven Vertovec (2015), der Leiter des Max-Planck-Instituts zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften, bezeichnet die Fluchtmigration von 2015 auch deshalb als die „zweite Wende“ für Deutschland, die das Land nachhaltig verändern wird. Nach seiner Einschätzung sind die erwartbaren gesellschaftlichen Transformationen von solch einer Größenordnung, dass die Formulierung „seit der Flüchtlingskrise“ eine ebenso geläufige Redewendung sein wird wie die Formulierung „seit der Wende“. Um diese gegenwärtigen Migrations- und Integrationsprozesse von Anfang an dokumentieren und analysieren zu können, wurde am Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) zu Beginn des Jahres 2016 das Projekt „Deutsch im Beruf: Die sprachlich-kommunikative Integration von Flüchtlingen“ gestartet, dessen erste Ergebnisse das vorliegende Themenheft präsentiert.
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.
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.
Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.
This paper argues that conversation analysis has largely neglected the fact that meaning in interaction relies on inferences to a high degree. Participants treat each other as cognitive agents, who imply and infer meanings, which are often consequential for interactional progression. Based on the study of audio- and video-recordings from German talk-in-interaction, the paper argues that inferences matter to social interaction in at least three ways. They can be explicitly formulated; they can be (conventionally) indexed, but not formulated; or they may be neither indexed nor formulated yet would be needed for the correct understanding of a turn. The last variety of inferences usually remain tacit, but are needed for smooth interactional progression. Inferences in this case become an observable discursive phenomenon if misunderstandings are treated by the explication of correct (accepted) and wrong (unaccepted) inferences. The understanding of referential terms, analepsis, and ellipsis regularly rely on inferences. Formulations, third-position repairs, and fourth-position explications of erroneous inferences are practices of explicating inferences. There are conventional linguistic means like discourse markers, connectives, and response particles that index specific kinds of inferences. These practices belong to a larger class of inferential practices, which play an important role for indexing and accomplishing intersubjectivity in talk in interaction.
Zum Geleit
(2018)
Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives
(2018)
Building on а corpus of 70 hours of German driving lessons, this paper studies the use of declaratives vs. imperatives for instruction. It shows how these linguistic resources are adapted to different praxeological, temporal and participant-related environments. Declaratives are used for first instructions, task-setting and post- trial discussions. They exhibit complex syntax and do not call for immediate compliance. Their high degree of explicitness conveys how the action is to be carried out. Imperative instructions overwhelmingly correct ongoing actions of students or respond to their failure to produce expected actions. They exhibit minimal argument structure. They are reminders which presuppose that the student monitors the scene and can perform the action unproblematically. They index that requests have to be complied with immediately or even urgently.
Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “dine of commitment”. We present four points on this dine: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit ICH WEIß NICHT und der Frage danach, ob einige der Verwendungen als Diskursmarker bezeichnet werden können oder nicht. Es wird zunächst ein Überblick über die Kriterien gegeben, die in der interaktionalen Linguistik für die Diskursmarkerdefinition diskutiert wurden. Dabei wird versucht, definitorische Kriterien von empirischen Befunden abzugrenzen. Es folgt eine Analyse verschiedener Verwendungen von ICH WEIß NICHT. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf Verwendungen als epistemischer und pragmatischer Marker, die sowohl mit prospektiver Orientierung als auch mit retrospektiver Orientierung vorkommen. Abschließend wird der Unterschied zwischen definitorischen und empirischen Kriterien für die Diskursmarkerdefinition systematisiert. Auf dieser Basis argumentieren wir dafür, dass alle Verwendungen von ICH WEIß NICHT, die diskursfunktionale Eigenschaften haben und syntaktisch desintegriert sind, Diskursmarkerverwendungen sind. Einige davon sind prototypischer, während andere Fälle eher marginal sind, da sie einige Merkmale, die die meisten Diskursmarker kennzeichnen, nicht aufweisen.
Zur Einführung
(2017)
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.
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.
The paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
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).
Der vorliegende Beitrag erkundet den Zusammenhang zwischen der Komplexität politischer Argumentationsprozesse und der Diversifikation der Semantik von Schlüsselwörtern, deren Bedeutung im Argumentationsprozess umkämpft und in zahlreichen Facetten entfaltet widAdegenstand der Untersuchung ist die Verwendung von „Ökologie" in den Schlichtungsgesprächen zum Bahnprojekt Stuttgart 21. Im Unterscheid zu bisher vorliegenden Analysen zu semantischen Kämpfen geht es weniger darum, wie ein Ausdruck von einer Partei im Gegensatz zu anderen semantisiert wird. Es wird vielmehr gezeigt, wie semantische Diversifizierung und Ambiguität von „Ökologie" im expertischen Argumentationsprozess entstehen und welche kommunikativen Effekte dies für die Möglichkeit der Bürgerbeteiligung mit sich bringt. Es werden drei Praktiken identifiziert, mit denen die Interaktionsteilnehmer selbst auf semantische Diversifizierung und Ambiguität reagieren und versuchen, den Ausdruck eindeutig interpretierbar und die Quaestio entscheidbar zu machen: Strategieunterstellungen, Popularisierungen und Populismus. Die Interaktionsanalysen zeigen dabei, dass diese Praktiken selbst die Problematik, die sie lösen sollen, reproduzieren.
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.
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.
Der Beitrag widmet sich der Frage, nach welchen Einheiten das Sprechen in der Interaktion auf der ‚mittleren Ebene‘ strukturiert ist. Die Diskussion geht aus von für die gesprochene Sprache typischen bzw. spezifischen Phänomenen, die Kriterien normgrammatisch vollständiger Sätze zuwider laufen, wie z. B. Ellipsen, Expansionen und Diskursmarkern. Anschließend werden die in der Literatur der vergangenen etwa 40 Jahre theoretisch entwickelten und empirisch untersuchten Einheitenkonzepte diskutiert und im Hinblick auf ihre Leistungsfähigkeit zur Beschreibung und Erklärung nicht-normgrammatischer Phänomene evaluiert.
Metalinguistic awareness of standard vs standard usage. The case of determiners in spoken German
(2015)
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.
Using instances of conversations of among German adolescents, this paper aims at an empirical, conversation analytic reconstruction of interactional procedures by which participants accomplish locally relevant meanings of words. Object of the study is the evaluative adjective assi, which is a common item of German adolescents' slang. Evaluative adjectives are said to be either polysemous or underspecified in meaning. The paper shows how interactionalists accomplish local meanings of the item by using it in certain sequential environments (story prefaces, comments and conclusions) which are related to genres of moral entertainment (e.g. gossip, fictitious stories). Locally relevant features of word-meaning (such as affective meaning, lexical opposition, exclusion of semantic features) are specified in more detail by interactionalists as they use specialized practices (such as expressive enactments, contrasting, blocking implications) which are realized by specific linguistic means (such as paraverbal strategies, negation, disjunctive connectives).
Using instances of conversations of among German adolescents, this paper aims at an empirical, conversation analytic reconstruction of interactional procedures by which participants accomplish locally relevant meanings of words. Object of the study is the evaluative adjective assi, which is a common item of German adolescents' slang. Evaluative adjectives are said to be either polysemous or underspecified in meaning. The paper shows how interactionalists accomplish local meanings of the item by using it in certain sequential environments (story prefaces, comments and conclusions) which are related to genres of moral entertainment (e.g. gossip, fictitious stories). Locally relevant features of word-meaning (such as affective meaning, lexical opposition, exclusion of semantic features) are specified in more detail by interactionalists as they use specialized practices (such as expressive enactments, contrasting, blocking implications) which are realized by specific linguistic means (such as paraverbal strategies, negation, disjunctive connectives).
be-deuten: Vorwort
(2002)
Pragmatics and grammar
(2011)
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.
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.
Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit einer speziellen Praktik, mit der Dolmetscher anstelle einer wortgetreuen Übertragung als interaktionsstrukturierende Agenten im Dienste einer besseren Verständigung der primären Gesprächsteilnehmer aktiv werden. Untersucht wird, wie Dolmetscher Schlüsselwörter kreieren, die komplexe Sachverhalte effizient bündeln und auf einen Begriff bringen.
In linguistischen Untersuchungen erscheint sprachliche Raumreferenz gemeinhin als eine Aktivität, die notwendig ist, um dem Hörer/Leser die räumliche Lokalisierung von Objekten zu ermöglichen. In diesem Beitrag wollen wir zeigen, dass die sprachliche und kinesische Konstitution von Raum in der multimodalen Interaktion eine flexible kommunikative Ressource ist, die auch unabhängig von solchen Referenz-identifizierenden Erfordernissen eingesetzt werden kann. Anhand der Videoaufnahme einer Lehr-Lern-Interaktion zeigen wir, wie die sprachliche und körperlich enaktierende Konstitution eines imaginären Raums eingesetzt wird, um eine komplexe Sachverhaltsdarstellung auf einen spezifischen Adressaten und dessen Verständnisprobleme zuzuschneiden. Im Zentrum der Datenanalyse steht zum einen die Rekonstruktion der interaktionsstrukturellen Einbettung der Raumkonstitution, die verdeutlicht, dass sie als Verfahren kommunikativ verwendet wird, weil andere Verfahren der Vermittlung abstrakter Sachverhalte bereits gescheitert sind. Zum anderen zeigen wir, wie sprachliche und kinesische Aktivitäten der Akteure systematisch bei der multimodalen Raumkonstitution zusammenwirken und wie durch sie vier unterschiedliche Dimensionen von Raum in der Interaktion (objektiv-physikalischer Raum, Interaktionsraum, individueller Verhaltensraum und imaginärer Raum) organisiert und aufeinander bezogen werden. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die sozialsymbolische Kodierung von Räumen und die Überblendung verschiedener Dimensionen von „Raum“ als rekurrente Phänomene in der multimodalen Raumkonstitution eingesetzt werden.
Wie ein Event zum Event wird
(2000)
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.
The authors establish a phenomenological perspective on the temporal constitution of experience and action. Retrospection and projection (i.e. backward as well as forward orientation of everyday action), sequentiality and the sequential organization of activities as well as simultaneity (i.e. participants’ simultaneous coordination) are introduced as key concepts of a temporalized approach to interaction. These concepts are used to capture that every action is produced as an inter-linked step in the succession of adjacent actions, being sensitive to the precise moment where it is produced. The adoption of a holistic, multimodal and praxeological perspective additionally shows that action in interaction is organized according to several temporal orders simultaneously in operation. Each multimodal resource used in interaction has its own temporal properties.