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Audio-based interpreting (by telephone or comparable devices) has lately become a widespread communicative practice in multilingual encounters, especially as a consequence of the refugee crisis. Despite the growing need for location-independent assistance, its linguistic-communicative requiremehts have hardly been explored. The central question posed by this paper is therefore: How do the participants in interpreter-mediated counselling sessions conducted via the telephone compensate for the lack of the co-presence and which strategies are (preferably) employed when determining turn-taking in such exceptional circumstances?
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.
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.
Obwohl Smartphones und andere mobile Endgeräte mittlerweile ein fester Bestandteil unseres Alltags sind, betonen öffentliche und wissenschaftliche Diskurse immer noch bevorzugt mögliche negative Auswirkungen ihres Gebrauchs auf Gesundheit und Kommunikationsverhalten. Dieser Beitrag skizziert einen anderen Ansatz zur Analyse alltäglichen Technologiegebrauchs, indem er zunächst auf Studien aus der angewandten Linguistik und insbesondere der interaktionalen Forschung eingeht, die sich auf dessen öffentliche Beobachtbarkeit, Mobilität und Ubiquität konzentrieren. Anhand zweier Auszüge aus videoaufgezeichneten Interaktionen wird dann aufgezeigt, wie eine multimodale und sequentielle Analyse dazu beitragen kann, Technologiegebrauch als eine routinemäßige und geordnete soziale Praktik zu verstehen, die nicht mit sozialem, kooperativem Handeln in Widerspruch steht oder dieses gefährdet. Ein detaillierter Blick auf situierten Smartphonegebrauch in informellen und institutionellen Face-to-Face-Settings lenkt die analytische Aufmerksamkeit weg von einer generisch positiven oder negativen Bewertung der Technologie hin zu verschiedenen interaktionalen Phänomenen, die mit ihrer Handhabung und Erkundung in Zusammenhang stehen. Es wird abschließend argumentiert, dass diese Art von mikroanalytischem Ansatz zu einer facettenreichen und objektiveren Perspektive auf die situierte Nutzung mobiler Geräte beitragen kann.
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.
Im Beitrag werden drei sprachwissenschaftliche Zugänge zu Diagnosen vorgestellt: In der Gesprächsanalyse wird die Diagnoseherstellung in der mündlichen Arzt-Patienten-Interaktion beleuchtet. Diagnosen entstehen kollaborativ,indem Gesprächsphasen durchlaufen und charakteristische Handlungen in bestimmten Äußerungsformaten vollzogen werden. Im Blickpunkt der Text- und Kommunikationsgeschichte steht hingegen das schriftsprachliche Handeln. Das Herstellen einer Diagnose erfordert hier die nachträgliche Bearbeitung vorgängiger mündlicher Interaktionen gemäß einer etablierten Textsorte: dem Erhebungsbogen. Von diesen Formen der Diagnoseherstellung unterscheidet sich, wie ein diskurslinguistischer Zugriff zeigt, die massenmediale Faktizitätsherstellung in Diskursen wie dem Impfdiskurs, die auch für ein medizinisches Laienpublikum relevant sind. Mit dem Beitrag soll nicht nur deutlich gemacht werden, in welchengem Zusammenhang mündliche Interaktion und schriftliche Fixierung stehen, sondern auch betont werden, dass das massenmedial vermittelte medizinische Lai*innen in relative Expert*innen verwandeln kann.
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.
This paper investigates situations in French videogame interactions where non-players who share the same physical space as players, participate in the gaming activities as spectators. Through a detailed multimodal and sequential analysis, we show that being a spectator is a local achievement of all co-present participants - players and non-players.
This study analyzes how participants playing VR games construct co-presence and shared gameplay. The analysis focuses on instances of play where one person is wearing the VR equipment, and other participants are located nearby without the ability to directly interact with the game. We first show how the active player using the VR equipment draws on talk and embodied activity to signal their presence in the shared physical environment, while simultaneously conducting actions in the virtual space, and thus creates spaces for the other participants to take part in gameplay. Second, we describe how other participants draw on the contextual configurations of the moment in displaying co-presence and position themselves as active and consequential co-players. The analysis demonstrates how gameplay can be communicatively constructed even in situations where the participants have differential rights and possibilities to act and influence the game.
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.
In so-called Let’s Plays, video gaming is presented and verbally commented by Let’s Players on the internet for an audience. When only watched but not played, the most attractive features of video games, immersion and interactivity, get lost – at least for the internet audience. We assume that the accompanying reactions (transmitted via a so-called facecam) and verbal comments of Let’s Players on their game for an audience contribute to an embodiment of their avatars which makes watching a video game more attractive. Following an ethnomethodological conversation analytical (EMCA) approach, our paper focusses on two practices of embodying avatars. A first practice is that Let’s Players verbally formulate their actions in the game. By that, they make their experiences and the 'actions' of avatars more transparent. Secondly, they produce response cries (Goffman) in reaction to game events. By that, they enhance the liveliness of their avatars. Both practices contribute to a co-construction of a specific kind of (tele-)presence.
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.
This study explores how ‘gatherings’ turn into ‘encounters’ in a virtual world (VW) context. Most communication technologies enable only focused encounters between distributed participants, but in VWs both gatherings and encounters can occur. We present close sequential analysis of moments when after a silent gathering, interaction among participants in a VW is gradually resumed, and also investigate the social actions in the verbal (re-)opening turns. Our findings show that like in face-to-face situations, also in VWs participants often use different types of embodied resources to achieve the transition, rather than rely on verbal means only. However, the transition process in VWs has distinctive characteristics compared to the one in face-to-face situations. We discuss how participants in a VW use virtually embodied pre-beginnings to display what we call encounter-readiness, instead of displaying lack of presence by avatar stillness. The data comprise 40 episodes of video-recorded team interactions in a VW.
In this paper we examine the composition and interactional deployment of suspended assessments in ordinary German conversation. We define suspended assessments as lexicosyntactically incomplete assessing TCUs that share a distinct cluster of prosodic-phonetic features which auditorily makes them come off as 'left hanging' rather than cut-off (e.g., Schegloff/Jefferson/Sacks 1977; Jasperson 2002) or trailing-off (e.g., Local/Kelly 1986; Walker 2012). Using CA/IL methodology (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018) and drawing on a large body of video-recorded face-to-face conversations, we highlight the verbal, vocal and bodily-visual resources participants use to render such unfinished assessing TCUs recognizably incomplete and identify six recurrent usage types. Overall, the suspension of assessing TCUs appears to either serve as a practice for circumventing the production of assessments that are interactionally inapposite, or as a practice for coping with local contingencies that render the very doing of an assessment problematic for the speaker. Data are in German with English translations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We reflect on the affordances and challenges of interactional data in the analysis of long-term institutional change. To this end we draw on our studies of direct encounters between journalists and politicians in news interviews and presidential news conferences and in particular the use of question design as a window into the evolution of journalistic norms and press-state relations over time and the causal antecedents of such change. All analyses that incorporate a concern with environing contexts of interactional change impose certain burdens of empirical demonstration on the researcher. Here we consider three analytic issues that arise in the kind of historical-institutional analysis we have been pursuing: (a) controlling for the situational context, (b) pinpointing the locus of change, and (c) validating indicators of change. Data are in English.
Based on longitudinal audiovisual data from family interactions, we focus on how young children between 1;08 and 2;10 report trouble they are encountering in their current activity using the response cry oh in combination with other lexical items (e.g., “oh fell off”) and bodily displays. While at a very young age the children remain focused on their activity and try to solve the problem independently, at an older age they start to systematically use gaze directed toward the parent and suspension of the current activity to enlist the adult’s assistance. We argue that these bodily displays are among the resources whose presence or absence constrains whether the report of trouble leads to the recruitment of assistance or not. Regarding the developmental implications, it seems that during their third year of life, young children expand their repertoire for dealing with trouble interactively. Data are in German with English translations.
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.
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.
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.
Die Studie untersucht therapeutische Strategien für den Umgang mit und das Management von Patientenwiderstand, der auf Lösungsorientierte Fragen in der Psychotherapie folgt. Patienten reagieren auf Lösungsorientierte Fragen regelmäßig dispräferiert. Die Therapeuten wiederum sollen therapeutisch relevantes Material elizitieren.
Mit Hilfe linguistisch-gesprächsanalytischer Methoden wird untersucht, wie Therapeuten im Anschluss an lösungsorientierte Anfragen mit dispräferierten Antworten umgehen. Das Widerstandsmanagement der Therapeuten umfasst dabei sowohl expansions- und reparaturinitiierende Reaktionen als auch Themenwechsel.
Untersucht werden 15 psychodiagnostische Erstgespräche nach der erweiterten Version der Operationalisierten Psychodynamischen Diagnostik (OPD-2), einem standardisierten und manualisierten diagnostischen Inventar, das die psychodynamischen Kräfte hinter den Erkrankungen der Patienten erfassen soll.
This study deals with interpretation practices that speakers employ in order to (re)formulate what another person has said or implied. Analyzing interpretations in a public televised mediation that resembles a public debate, I show which kinds of interpretation practices that speakers adopt and how they differ depending the participants' roles. Systematically comparing all interpretations of the mediator vs. the opposing participants’, I argue that interpretations can be described as general practices with specific interactional effects, but that they are designed and exploited in different ways (i.e., for clarification and discourse-organization vs. self- and other-positioning and constructing arguments). I point out that speakers use meta-pragmatic accounts that support the interactional effects of their interpretations.
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.
Der Beitrag widmet sich der Ausgestaltung von Instruktionen und Aufforderungen zum rückwärts Einparken im theoretischen und praktischen Fahrschulunterricht in Abhängigkeit von den Eigenschaften der jeweiligen Unterrichtssituation. Verglichen werden dazu Instruktionssequenzen aus drei Vermittlungstypen: 1. die Instruktion anhand einer software-gestützten Einparksimulation im Theorie-Unterricht, 2. die Instruktion anhand einer Modellautodemonstration im Fahrschulauto, und 3. der direkt angeschlossene erste praktische Übungsvorgang. Eine Untersuchung der grammatischen Ausgestaltung der Instruktionen und der verkörperten Handlungen zeigt eine besondere Funktion der Modellautodemonstration: Dieser Vermittlungstyp vereint Aspekte sowohl der Unterrichtssituation im Fahrschulraum als auch im fahrenden Auto. Die Orientierungspunkte am Modell werden mit denen des 'realen' Autos und seiner Umgebung verbunden. Dabei offenbart sich in den Instruktionen und Aufforderungen ein Kontinuum von Theorie und Praxis, dessen Ausprägungen maßgeblich von der (Ent-)Kopplung bezüglich der Anwendungssituation und der (Nicht-)Mobilität des Autos abhängen. Die Untersuchung zeigt, wie grammatische und multimodale Formen an ihren lokalen und situativen Kontext angepasst und interpretiert werden.
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.