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It is a ubiquitous phenomenon of everyday interaction that participants confront their co-participants for behaviour that they assess as undesirable or in some other way untoward. In a set of video data of informal interaction from the PECII corpus (Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction), cases of such sanctions have been collected in English, German, Italian and Polish data. This study presents work in progress and focuses on interrogatively formatted sanctions, in particular on non-polar interrogatives. It has already been shown that interrogatives can do much more than ask questions (Huddleston 1994). They can also function as directives (Lindström et al. 2017) or, more specifically, as requests (Curl/Drew 2008), as invitations (Margutti/Galatolo 2018) or reproaches (Klattenberg 2021), among others. What makes them interesting for cross-linguistic comparison is that the four languages that are considered provide different morphological and (morpho-)syntactical ressources for the realization of interrogative phrases. For example, German provides the option of building in the modal particle denn that reveals a previous lack of clarity and obliges the co-participant(s) to deliver the missing information (Deppermann 2009). Of course, the other three languages have modal particles, too (e.g. allora in Italian or though in English), but they do not seem to convey the same semantic and interactional qualities as denn. From an interactional point of view, one could think that interrogatives are a typical and effective way of solliciting accounts, since formally they open up a conditionally relevant space for an answer or a
reaction. But as the data shows, this does not guarantee that they are actually responded to. Another relevant aspect in the context of sanctions is that the interrogative format seems to carry a certain ‚openness‘ that might be seen as a mitigating effect and thus provides an interesting point of comparison with other mitigating devices. This study uses the methods of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. It is based on a collection of 148 interrogative sanctions (out of which 84 are non-polar interrogatives) covering the four languages. I draw on coded data from roughly 1000 cases to get a first overall idea of how the interrogative format might differ from other formats, and how it might interrelate with specific features – for example, if subsequently an account is delivered. Going more into depth, the interrogative sanctions will then be analyzed with respect to their formal design (e.g. polar questions vs. content questions vs. tag questions, Rossano 2010; Hayano 2013) and to their pragmatic implications. I also analyze reactions to such sanctions – both formally (cf. Enfield et al. 2019, 279) and, again, from an interactional perspective (e.g. acceptance/compliance vs. challenging/defiance; Kent 2012; Cekaite 2020). A more detailed zooming in on the sequential unfolding of some particularly interesting
instances of sanctioning interrogatives will make the picture complete.
Interactants who encounter co-participant conduct which they find to be socio-normatively problematic or troublesome are faced with a range of choices. First and foremost, this includes the issue of whether to directly address it, or to simply ‘let it pass’ (at least for now) (Emerson/Messinger 1977). In the case of the former, the issue then becomes how to address it. Across the various ways in which participants can pragmatically engage with what they perceive to be transgressive or untoward behavior (e.g., Pomerantz 1978; Schegloff 1988b; Dersley/Wootton 2000; Günthner 2000; Bolden/Robinson 2011; Potter/Hepburn 2020; see also Rodriguez 2022), they sometimes meta-pragmatically formulate the co-participant’s doings in terms of specific actions. Such action descriptions are necessarily selective (Sacks 1963; Schegloff 1972, 1988a; Sidnell/Barnes 2013): They foreground certain aspects of the co-participant’s conduct, while backgrounding others, and thus contribute to publically construeing the formulated conduct in particular ways (Jayyusi 1993), viz. as socio-normatively problematic, transgressive or untoward, and interactionally accountable (Robinson 2016; Sidnell 2017).
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.
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.