Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (60)
- Part of a Book (8)
- Book (2)
- Part of Periodical (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Other (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (75) (remove)
Keywords
- Interaktion (75) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (53)
- Postprint (10)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (8)
- Ahead of Print (2)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (75) (remove)
Publisher
- Taylor & Francis (17)
- Elsevier (8)
- Benjamins (7)
- Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) (5)
- Springer Nature (4)
- Verlag für Gesprächsforschung (4)
- IDS-Verlag (3)
- Springer (3)
- de Gruyter (3)
- Frontiers Media SA (2)
Meaning in interaction
(2024)
This editorial to the Special Issue on “Meaning in Interaction” introduces to the approach of Interactional Semantics, which has been developed over the last years within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It discusses how “meaning” is understood and approached in this framework and lays out that Interactional Semantics is interested in how participants clarify and negotiate the meanings of the expressions that they are using in social interaction. Commonalities and differences of this approach with other approaches to meaning are flagged, and the intellectual origins and precursors of Interactional Semantics are introduced. The contributions to the Special Issue are located in the larger field of research.
Rejecting the validity of inferred attributions of incompetence in German talk-in-interaction
(2024)
This paper deals with pragmatic inference from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In particular, we examine a specific variety of inferences - the attribution of incompetence which Self constructs on the basis of Other's prior action, hearable as positioning Self as incompetent (e.g., instructions, offers of assistance, advice); this attribution of incompetence concerns Self's execution of some practical task. This inference is indexed in Self's response, which highlights Self's expertise, or competence concerning the task at hand. We focus on two recurrent types of such responses in our data: (i) accounting for competence through formulations of prior experience with carrying out a practical action and (ii) explicit claims of competence for accomplishing this action. We analyze the interactional environments in which these responses occur, the ways in which the two practices index Self's understanding of being positioned as incompetent and the interactional work they do. Finally, we discuss how through rejecting and inferred attribution of incompetence, Self implicitly seeks to restore their face and defend their autonomy as an agent, yet, without entering an explicit identity-negotiation. Findings rest on the analysis of 20 cases found in video-recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German from the corpus FOLK.
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).
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.
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.
This 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 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.
Allusion
(2023)
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.