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This manual introduces a conversation analytically informed coding scheme for episodes involving the direct social sanctioning of problem behavior in informal social interaction which was developed in the project Norms, Rules, and Morality across Languages (NoRM-aL) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language. It outlines the background for its development, delimits the phenomena to which the coding scheme can be applied and provides instructions for its use.
The scheme asks for basic information about the recording and the participants involved in the episode, before taking stock of different features of the sanctioning episode as a whole. This is followed by sets of specific coding questions about the sanctioning move itself (such as its timing and composition) and the reaction it engenders. The coding enables researchers to get a bird’s eye view on recurrent features of such episodes in larger quantities of data and allows for comparisons across different languages and informal settings.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. “It’s not allowed to do this”). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction.” The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.
We examine moments in social interaction in which a person formulates what another thinks or believes. Such formulations of belief constitute a practice with specifiable contexts and consequences. Belief formulations treat aspects of the other person's prior conduct as accountable on the basis that it provided a new angle on a topic, or otherwise made a surprising contribution within an ongoing course of actions. The practice of belief formulations subjectivizes the content that the other articulated and thereby topicalizes it, mobilizing commitment to that position, an account, or further elaboration. We describe how the practice can be put to work in different activity contexts: sometimes it is designed to undermine the other's position as a subjective 'mere belief', at other times it serves to mobilize further topic talk. Throughout, belief formulations show themselves to be a method by which we get to know ourselves and each other as mental agents.
This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Polish use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Polish, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of Polish with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.