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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.
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.
Fragen, meist mit systemisch-lösungsorientiertem Hintergrund, gelten im Coaching als Königsweg für den Erfolg. Entsprechend ist eine große Anzahl an Publikationen entstanden, die diese zentrale Intervention in den Blick nehmen. In dieser Praxisliteratur werden Fragen dabei oftmals rezeptartig nach Typus, Funktion und möglichen Anwendungskontexten wie etwa Phasen geordnet sowie anhand dekontextualisierter Beispiele beschrieben. Fragen, die in Praxis- und Lehrbuchsammlungen aufgenommen wurden, sind aus der Theorie hergeleitet und in der Praxis erprobt. Allerdings finden sich in dieser Literatur auch empirisch nicht haltbare Aussagen wie etwa die negative Bewertung geschlossener Fragen. Außerdem stellt ihre dekontextualisierte Darstellungsform insbesondere für unerfahrene Coaches eine Herausforderung bei der Umsetzung ins konkrete Coaching-Handeln dar: Fragen sind immer eingebettet in einen Kontext und müssen auf die Anwesenden, die jeweilige kommunikative Interaktion mit ihnen sowie die lokale sequenzielle Struktur des Gesprächs übersetzt werden. Die wissenschaftliche Überprüfung, wie diese Fragensammlungen im Coaching (erfolgreich) ein- und umgesetzt werden, ist dabei insgesamt noch ganz am Anfang. Der vorliegende Beitrag berichtet von einem aktuellen interdisziplinären Forschungsprojekt, das Fragen in den empirischen Blick nimmt und dabei einen Übergang von Eminenz zur Evidenz ermöglicht. Der Beitrag liefert auch Ideen und Anregungen für Coaches, diese Übersetzungsarbeit zu leisten.
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.
In this contribution we analyse how mobile device users in face-to-face communication jointly negotiate the boundaries and action spaces between digital and non-digital, shared and individual, public and private. Instead of conceptualising digital and face-to-face, i. e., non-digital, communication as separate, more recent research emphasises that social practices relying on mobile devices increasingly connect physical and virtual communicative spaces. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate the situated use of mobile devices and media in social interaction. Excerpts from videotaped everyday conversations illustrate how participants frame their smartphone use in the presence of others, such as when looking at digital pictures, or when recording voice messages. A detailed analysis of verbal and embodied conduct shows how participants negotiate and interpret the connection or separation of digital and non-digital activities and possible forms of participation within these. (Digital) publicness or privacy are therefore to be understood as an interactive accomplishment.
Rules of behavior are fundamental to human sociality. Whether on the road, at the dinner table, or during a game, people monitor one another’s behavior for conformity to rules and may take action to rectify violations. In this study, we examine two ways in which rules are enforced during games: instructions and reminders. Building on prior research, we identify instructions as actions produced to rectify violations based on another’s lack of knowledge of the relevant rule; knowledge that the instruction is designed to impart. In contrast to this, the actions we refer to as reminders are designed to enforce rules presupposing the transgressor’s competence and treating the violation as the result of forgetfulness or oversight. We show that instructing and reminding actions differ in turn design, sequential development, the epistemic stances taken by transgressors and enforcers, and in how the action affects the progressivity of the interaction. Data are in German and Italian from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (PECII).
In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.
In 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.
We present a collection of (currently) about 5.500 commands directed to voice-controlled virtual assistants (VAs) by sixteen initial users of a VA system in their homes. The collection comprises recordings captured by the VA itself and with a conditional voice recorder (CVR) selectively capturing recordings including the VA-directed commands plus some surrounding context. Next to a description of the collection, we present initial findings on the patterns of use of the VA systems during the first weeks after installation, including usage timing, the development of usage frequency, distributions of sentence structures across commands, and (the development of) command success rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the applied collection-specific recording approach and describe potential research questions that can be investigated in the future, based on the collection, as well as the merit of combining quantitative corpus linguistic approaches with qualitative in-depth analyses of single cases.
This article investigates mundane photo taking practices with personal mobile devices in the co-presence of others, as well as “divergent” self-initiated smartphone use, thereby exploring the impact of everyday technologies on social interaction. Utilizing multimodal conversation analysis, we examined sequences in which young adults take pictures of food and drinks in restaurants and cafés. Although everyday interactions are abundant in opportunities for accomplishing food photography as a side activity, our data show that taking pictures is also often prioritized over other activities. Through a detailed sequential analysis of video recordings and dynamic screen captures of mobile devices, we illustrate how photographers orient to the momentary opportunities for and relevance of photo taking, that is, how they systematically organize their photographing with respect to the ongoing social encounter and the (projected) changes in the material environment. We investigate how the participants multimodally negotiate the “mainness” and “sideness” (Mondada, 2014) of situated food photography and describe some particular features of participants’ conduct in moments of mundane multiactivity.
The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics is an online resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki page. Encyclopedias and glossaries are widespread across various fields and methods, and serve as immensely valuable resources. Given the extent to which the EMCA/IL community has expanded over the years—both terminologically as well as geographically—we hope that this encyclopedia of terminology will be well received by students and practitioners of CA and IL across the globe.
Allusion
(2023)
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.
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.
Theater rehearsals are (usually) confronted with the problem of having to transform a written text into an audio-visual, situated and temporal performance. Our contribution focuses on the emergence and stabilization of a gestural form as a solution for embodying a certain aesthetic concept which is derived from the script. This process involves instructions and negotiations, making the process of stabilization publicly and thus intersubjectively accessible. As scenes are repeatedly rehearsed, rehearsals are perspicuous settings for tracking interactional histories. Based on videotaped professional theatre interactions in Germany, we focus on consecutive instances of rehearsing the same scene and trace the interactional history of a particular gesture. This gesture is used by the director to instruct the actors to play a particular aspect of a scene adopting a certain aesthetic concept. Stabilization requires the emergence of shared knowledge. We will show the practices by which shared knowledge is established over time during the rehearsal process and, in turn, how the accumulation of knowledge contributes to a change in the interactional practices themselves. Specifically, we show how a gesture emerges in the process of developing and embodying an aesthetic concept, and how this gesture eventually becomes a sign that refers to and evokes accumulated knowledge. At the same time, we show how this accumulated knowledge changes the instructional activities in the rehearsal process. Our study contributes to the overall understanding of knowledge accumulation in interaction in general and in theater rehearsals in particular. At the same time, it is devoted to the central importance of gestures in theater, which are both a means and a product of theatrical staging.
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.
This study investigates other-initiated repair and its embodied dimension in casual English as lingua franca (ELF) conversations, thereby contributing to the further understanding of multimodal repair practices in social interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we focus on two types of restricted other-initiation of repair (OIR): partial repeats preceded or followed by the question word what (i.e., what X?/X what?) and copular interrogative clauses (i.e., what is X). Partial repeats with what produced with rising final intonation are consistently accompanied by a head poke and treated as relating to troubles in hearing, with the repair usually consisting of a repeat. In contrast to these partial repeats, copular interrogative clauses are produced with downward final intonation and accompanied by face-related embodied conduct. The what is X OIRs primarily target code-switched lexical items, the understanding of which is critical for maintaining the repair initiator’s involvement in the ongoing sequence. This study also contributes some general reflections on the possible complexity of OIR and repair practices from a multimodal perspective.
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.
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.
Our everyday lives in any social community are shaped by rules (e.g., Roughley 2019; Schmidt/Rakoczy 2019). Rules (in a broad sense) are interactionally negotiated, monitored, enforced, and serve as an ‘orientation value‘ in social life. If someone‘s behavior is treated as norm-violating or problematic in certain way, it may be therefore confronted. Confronting interlocutors can immediately stop, modify, or retrospectively reprimand the misconduct of others in a moralizing manner. Such confrontations of a problem behavior occur commonly in informal interactions. On the basis of our corpus, specifically in informal interactions at the table, I observed that, for example, in Polish, German and British English, direct confrontations occur on average at least once every three minutes. Participants design these actions in a variety of ways, but like everything in interaction, the design is not arbitrary (Sacks 1984; Enfield/Sidnell 2019). A recurrent feature of such turns is connecting misconduct to some more general concepts. It is evident from the data that e.g. speakers of German and Polish use ‘generally valid statements’ in problematic moments (cf. Küttner/Vatanen/Zinken 2022) to reach the closure of the problem sequence, also specifically dealing there with distribution of deontic and epistemic rights (Rogowska in prep.). I ask, when and for what purpose generality, that is, abstracting from a concrete behaviour, is used as a tool while confronting others. The focus is on sequential and linguistic features of abstracting in confronting moments in language comparison. What are the methods to achieve abstraction: i) defocusing the confronted, specific agent (cf. Zinken et al. 2021; Siewierska 2008), e.g. nur derjenige der dran ist der darf die bedingungen für den handel stellen (only the one whose turn it is may set the conditions for the trade); using ii) extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), e.g. na siostrę zawsze można liczyć (you can always count on a sister); iii) referring to stable character traits, e.g. Matylda bardzo chetne by podala. (.) Ona jest taka skora do pomocy (Matylda would be very happy to pass (it to you). (.) She is so eager to help); or iv) broader categorizing of the given referent, e.g. do not build (.) do do not build do not build swastikas (when a) German guy is filming us? Sometimes, even several locus of abstraction are combined in the same turn. Can we identify language-specific and cross-linguistic patterns? What are the interactional consequences: enforcing a compliant behavior in the future, eliciting an apology or cognitively simplifying complex problems? From a comparative perspective, I ask whether going beyond the here-and-now while confronting others is a practice that unites speakers across languages and is thus a human cognitive strategy to display normativity. This ongoing study is based on new comparable data from four European languages from informal interaction during activities around the table (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. in prep.). The phenomenon was coded systematically in each of the four languages as part of a larger, quantitatively oriented study with different questions (Küttner et al. submitted). In the talk, I will show exemplarily Polish and German evidence. I use the methods of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Imo/Lanwer 2019).
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.
Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.
Within a rapidly digitalising society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, particularly amongst older adults who acquire these skills later in life. This paper focuses on participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. Using video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilise their teachers’ assistance when encountering problems with their smartphones, laptops or tablets. Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or mobile devices to obtain assistance. Utilising multimodal conversation analysis, we describe two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their connection to this educational setting and digital devices.
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.
Spontan kreierte Okkasionalismen sind rekurrenter Bestandteil verbaler Interaktionen. Vor dem Hintergrund, dass die Bedeutung von Okkasionalismen nicht konventionalisiert und damit potenziell unbekannt ist, untersucht der vorliegende Beitrag aus gesprächsanalytischer Perspektive die Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen die Bedeutung okkasioneller Ausdrücke in Folgeäußerungen selbstinitiiert oder fremdinitiiert erklärt wird und wann dies nicht der Fall ist. Es zeigt sich, dass die überwältigende Mehrheit der 1.068 analysierten Okkasionalismen aus verschiedenen Gründen kein Verstehensproblem darstellt. Wird die Bedeutung eines Okkasionalismus dennoch selbstinitiiert erklärt, dient dies oft anderen Zwecken als der Verstehenssicherung. Wird dagegen die Bedeutung eines nicht problemlos erschließbaren Okkasionalismus nicht unmittelbar selbstinitiiert erläutert, dient der ‚rätselhafte‘ Ausdruck als interaktive Ressource dazu, Rezipient/-innen neugierig zu machen, Nachfragen zu elizitieren und damit Folgeäußerungen zu lizenzieren.
Der Beitrag präsentiert Ergebnisse des Projekts „Deutsch im Beruf: Die sprachlich-kommunikative Integration der Flüchtlinge“, das am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) durchgeführt wird. Im ersten Teil wird auf die zweistufige Sprachstandserhebung in den allgemeinen Integrationskursen eingegangen, die zusammen mit dem Goethe-Institut umgesetzt wurde. Bei der ersten Erhebung zu Beginn der Kurse wurden mit einer Tabletumfrage die Sozialdaten und Sprachenbiografien der Teilnehmenden erhoben. Bei der zweiten Erhebung am Ende der gleichen Kurse ging es darum, mit Hilfe der Analyse von Sprachaufnahmen das erreichte mündliche Kompetenzniveau der Teilnehmenden zu ermitteln. Im zweiten Teil des Beitrags stellen wir Ergebnisse unserer ethnografisch-gesprächsanalytischen Feldstudien vor, die wir in verschiedenen Arbeitskontexten wie Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen, duale Berufsausbildung und betriebliche Praktika durchgeführt haben. In Bezug auf die zentralen Fragen zu gegenseitiger Verständigung und der Sprachvermittlung am Arbeitsplatz konnten wir im Rahmen unserer Ethnografien drei prototypische Praktiken feststellen, auf die wir näher eingehen: a) „kaum Verständnissicherung und Sprachvermittlung“, b) „ad-hoc Verständnissicherung und Sprachvermittlung“ und c) „systematische Verständnissicherung und Sprachvermittlung“. Des Weiteren fokussieren wir im letzten Teil des Beitrags die Ergebnisse unserer ethnografischen Langzeitstudie zu Betriebspraktika von studierenden Geflüchteten. Anhand der Untersuchung von Reparaturen zeigt sich hier die Entwicklung der interaktionalen Kompetenz eines L2-Sprechers, die mit einer zunehmenden kommunikativen Integration in Teamgesprächen einhergeht.
Die Jahrestagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Linguistische Pragmatik e. V. hat auch in diesem Jahr pandemiebedingt online stattgefunden. Dem diesjährigen Tagungsthema „Pragmatik multimodal“ bot dieses Online-Setting daher eine besonders interessante Umgebung, da einige Vorträge Aspekte genau solcher Interaktionsrahmen näher beleuchten sollten. Aber nicht nur angesichts der immer noch fortschreitenden Digitalisierung hat sich der multimodale Betrachtungswinkel auch in anderen linguistischen Disziplinen zunehmend etabliert: So beschäftigen sich unter anderem die Text- und Diskursanalyse (u. a. Bucher 2011; Klug 2016; Mayr 2016), die Interaktionslinguistik (u. a. Hausendorf et al. 2016), die Kognitionslinguistik (u. a. Zima/Brône 2015; Spieß 2016) oder auch die Grammatikforschung (u. a. Fricke 2012; Schoonjans 2018) mit multimodalen Phänomenen im Rahmen ihrer je eigenen Erkenntnisinteressen. Um die Vielfalt dieser Erkenntnisinteressen, der diversen Ausprägungen des Phänomenbereichs und der methodischen Ansätze zur angemessenen Begegnung dieser Komplexität zu präsentieren und miteinander ins Gespräch zu bringen, haben Lars Bülow, Susanne Kabatnik, Marie-Luis Merten und Robert Mroczynski als Organisationsteam zu dieser Tagung eingeladen. Die thematische Bandbreite der Vorträge sollte dabei eine ausgewogene Grundlage bieten, um aktuelle Tendenzen und Herausforderungen einer pragmatisch fokussierten Erforschung multimodaler Kommunikation zu diskutieren und damit zur Verortung der linguistischen Pragmatik im Kontext anderer linguistischer Teildisziplinen beizutragen. Entsprechend veranschaulichten manche Vorträge eine eher disziplinspezifische Perspektive, andere stellten Überlegungen zu eher integrierenden Ansätzen vor.
Widerstand als psychoanalytisches Konzept beschreibt die Ambivalenz von Psychotherapiepatient*innen gegenüber dem therapeutischen Veränderungsprozess. Während der*die Patient*in sich mit dem Wunsch, bestimmte Veränderungen zu erzielen, auf die Therapie einlässt, stellen sich diesem Wunsch unbewusste Kräfte entgegen, die versuchen, den Status quo aufrechtzuerhalten. Hintergrund ist die Annahme, dass Widerstand eine Schutzfunktion darstellt, um schmerzhafte Affekte abzuwehren, die integraler Bestandteil eines psychotherapeutischen Prozesses sind. Therapeut*innen sehen sich vor der Aufgabe, Widerstandsphänomene als solche zu erkennen, deren Funktion zu verstehen und einen gemeinsamen Verstehensprozess mit dem*der Patient*in zu ermöglichen. Eine gesprächsanalytische Untersuchung von Widerstand und dessen kommunikativer Bearbeitung bietet eine wertvolle Ergänzung zur psychotherapeutischen Betrachtungsweise. Ein bislang in der Literatur wenig beachtetes Widerstandsphänomen ist Verbosität, womit gemeinhin ausufernde, unfokussierte Erzählungen gemeint sind. Aufbauend auf der bisher einzigen gesprächsanalytischen Untersuchung zu Verbosität als Widerstandsphänomen von Fenner, Spranz-Fogasy und Montan (2022) ist das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit, herauszuarbeiten, wie Widerstandsmanagement bei Verbosität verwendet wird. Dafür werden zwei Fallbeispiele gesprächsanalytisch untersucht. Diese stammen aus einem Korpus 34 videographierter ambulanter psychodynamischer Therapiesitzungen. Anhand des ersten Fallbeispiels wird deutlich, dass Verbosität als Widerstandsphänomen nicht nur patient*innenseitig geäußert wird, sondern gemeinsam mit dem*der Therapeut*in interaktiv hergestellt und forciert werden kann. Das zweite Beispiel zeigt, wie Widerstandsmanagement zu einer Auflösung des Widerstands führen kann. Die Analysen verdeutlichen zum einen auch, dass der psychoanalytische Widerstandsbegriff aus gesprächsanalytischer Sicht kritisch zu betrachten ist und zum anderen, dass beide Disziplinen nicht unbedingt zu den gleichen Ergebnissen kommen.
Die Vernetzung von Computern bewirkt die Entstehung eines Netzes aus Texten und, als Folge davon, sozialen Netzen von Nutzern dieser Texte als Schreibern und Lesern. Netzwerke sprachlicher Objekte gab und gibt es zwar auch ohne Digitalisierung und Vernetzung, jedoch weniger umfangreich und wesentlich schwerer, möglicherweise gar nicht in großer Menge analysierbar. Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit den verschiedenen Typen sprachlicher Netzwerke: Textgeweben, Interaktionsnetzwerken und sozialen Netzwerken. Es werden zentrale Begrifflichkeiten der Netzwerkanalyse erläutert und anhand von Beispielen gezeigt, wie sprachliche Kommunikation auf der Grundlage der Methoden der Netzwerkanalyse aus einer anderen, neuen Perspektive betrachtet werden kann.
This article examines how the most frequent imperative forms of the verb to show in German (zeig mal) and Czech (ukaž) are deployed in object-centred sequences. Specifically, it focuses on smartphone-based showing activities as these were the main sequential environments of show imperatives in the datasets investigated. In both languages, the imperative form does not merely aim to elicit a responsive action from the smartphone holder (such as making the device available) but projects an individual course of action from the requester’s side in the form of an immediate visual inspection of the digital content. This inspection is carried out as part of a joint course of action, allowing the recipient to provide a more detailed response to a prior action. Therefore, this specific imperative form is proven to be cross-linguistically suited to technology-mediated inspection sequences.
This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of “response” and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows that answer-nods rely on mutual gaze and that affirmative head nods may co-occur with other facial expressions (e.g., eye blinks). By replying with a silent head nod, respondents may complete an unfolding adjacency pair without claiming speakership, thereby enabling the questioner to extend their turn-in-progress. Alternatively, respondents may expand their answer-nod with talk, in which case silent nodding may contribute to organizing the smooth transition of turns-at-talk. Head nods produced while a question is unfolding are described as a microsequential phenomenon that may affect the questioner’s turn-in-progress. Data are in French and Italian.
This article explores the relation between word order and response latency, focusing on responses to question-word questions. Qualitative (multimodal) and quantitative analyses of naturally occurring conversations in French—where question-words can occur in initial, medial, or final position within the question—show that variation in word order affects the timing of responses. It is argued that this is so because word order provides a differential basis for action ascription, creating different temporal opportunities for projecting the recipient’s next relevant action. The frequent occurrence of early responses to questions with an initial question-word, in particular, stresses the importance of the recognition point of an action under way for response timing and shows respondents’ pervasive orientation to sequential progressivity. Findings highlight how lexico-syntactic trajectories of emergent turns, prior talk and actions, material and bodily features of interaction, and participants’ shared expectations conspire in shaping the time-courses of action ascription and action projection.
In this article, we provide longitudinal evidence for the progressive routinization of a grammatical construction used for social coordination purposes in a highly specialized activity context: task-oriented video-mediated interactions. We focus on the methodic ways in which, over the course of 4 years, a second language speaker and initially novice to such interactions coordinates the transition between interacting with her coparticipants and consulting her own screen, which suspends talk, without creating trouble due to halts in progressivity. Initially drawing on diverse resources, she increasingly resorts to the use of a prospective alert constructed around the verb to check (e.g., “I will check”), which eventually routinizes in the lexically specific form “let me check” as a highly context- and activity-bound social action format. We discuss how such change over the participant’s video-mediated interactional history contributes to our understanding of social coordination in video-mediated interaction and of participants’ recalibrating their grammar-for-interaction while adapting to new situations, languages, or media. Data are in English.
This study documents change over time and across proficiency levels in French second-language (L2) speakers’ practices for initiating complaints. Prior research has shown that speakers typically initiate complaints in a stepwise manner that indexes the contingent, moral, and delicate nature of the activity. Although elementary speakers in my data often launch complaint sequences in a straightforward way, they sometimes embodiedly foreshadow verbal expressions of negative stance or delay negative talk through brief positively valenced prefaces. More advanced speakers in part rely on the same initiation practices as elementary speakers. In addition, they recurrently use extensive prefatory work that accounts for and legitimizes the upcoming complaint, and they regularly initiate complaints jointly with coparticipants through a progressive escalation of negative stance expressions. I document interactional resources involved in this change and discuss the findings in terms of speakers’ development of L2 interactional competence. Data are in French with English translations.
The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages—Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin—in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our cross-linguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turn-constructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less language-dependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.
Focusing on request sequences, this article explores dynamics of projection and anticipation, enabling participants to produce early responses to requests. In particular, the analyses highlight the importance of multimodal formatting and the specific temporalities of multiple multimodal resources for the emergence of projections and the possibility to anticipate an ongoing action. Moreover, the analyses pinpoint the relevance of the local ecology and the praxeological context for the participants, enabling them to anticipate the next relevant action. These features characterizing the temporality of multimodal Gestalts, the relevance of the local ecology, and the details of the praxeological context make it possible for participants to produce very early responses and also to accomplish an action even before it has been actually requested.
There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in some cases, coproduction, of particular actions. In this article, we focus on specialized forms of embodied, institutional activity and focus in particular on simultaneity and the ways in which bodily action enables the progressive formation and reformation of an activity in the light of the (co)participants’ emerging contributions. We address how the routine structure of particular tasks enables participants to anticipate, prepare for, and even initiate actions in advance of the relevant activity and in turn, how participants may seek to ameliorate the interactional import of potentially premature action. The articles explores the interplay of technical practice and interactional organization and points to the distinctive character of embodied action in understanding anticipation and coordination in complex forms of institutional interaction.
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.
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.
As part of our project "German at Work: The Linguistic and Communicative Integration of Refugees" at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (Mannheim, Germany), we are conducting several ethnographic field studies to investigate the integration process of refugees into various professional fields. The guiding questions are which linguistic and communicative problems arise in workplace interactions between refugees and their colleagues and with which communicative practices the participants ensure mutual understanding. In the present article, we further focus on the question whether and how the professional trainers use the work interactions as opportunities for language mediation and which practices they use.
Playing videogames is a popular social activity; people play videogames in different places, on different media, in different situations, alone or with partners, online or offline. Unsurprisingly, they thereby share space (physically or virtually) with other playing or non-playing people. The special issue investigates through different contexts and settings how non-players become participants of the gaming interaction and how players and non-players co-construct presence. The introduction provides a problem-related context for the individual contributions and then briefly presents them.
The term “pivot” usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot’s action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
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.
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.
Mobile live video streaming with smartphones is an everyday media practice in which the participants are in a specific multimodal constellation and streamers and viewers have access to various semiotic resources for interactionally establishing alignment. Based on the multimodal sequence analysis of a concise episode of a journalist's livestream coverage of a political event on the streaming platform Periscope, I will address the question of how participation and involvement in live video streams are achieved and organised by the participants. I will show that hosts in the media practice of live video streaming act in an interaction-dominant manner and involve the viewers in the situation through asymmetrical participation coordination via footing shifts.
This study builds on a large body of work on the use of linguistic forms for requests in social interaction. Using Conversation Analysis / Interactional Linguistics, this study explores the use of two recurrent linguistic formats for requesting in spoken German – simple interrogatives ('do you do ..?') and kannst du VP? ('can you do..?') interrogatives. Based on a corpus of video-recorded, naturally occurring data of mundane data, this study demonstrates one of the interactional factors that is relevant for the choice between alternative interrogative request formats in spoken German – recipient's embodied availability before and during the request initiation. It is shown that simple interrogatives are used to request an action from a recipient who is either available or involved in their own project, which, however, does not have to be suspended or interrupted for the compliance with the request. In contrast, kannst du VP? interrogatives occur in environments in which the recipient is already engaged in a project that must be suspended in order to grant the request.
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.
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.