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This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
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.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. “It’s not allowed to do this”). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction.” The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.
Directing, negotiating and planning: 'Aus Spiel' ('for play') in children's pretend joint play
(2021)
We are interested in how children organize joint pretend play. In this kind of play, children create an invented world by transforming matters of the real world into matters of a fictional world (e.g., pretending to be a 'giant' or treating a particular spatial area as a 'witch's kitchen'). Since there are no rules and no script, every next step in the game is an improvisation designed here and now. Children engaged in free play have equal rights to determine what should happen next. For that reason, they have to negotiate next steps. We are interested in a particular expression that children often use in joint play: aus Spaß/Spiel ('for fun' or 'for play', similar to 'let's pretend'). Based on a corpus of five hours of video recordings of two pairs of twins (the younger children are between 3 and 5 years old, the older ones are 8 years old), we show that children regularly use aus Spiel while playing as a method for shaping the activity. Inventing new events, children try to get their co-players to accept them and act accordingly. In that context, issues of (dis-)alignment and deontic rights become relevant. Here, we are interested in the interactional work that aus Spiel-('let's pretend')-turns do and how co-players respond.
This article makes an empirical and a methodological contribution to the comparative study of action. The empirical contribution is a comparative study of three distinct types of action regularly accomplished with the turn format du meinst x (“you mean/think x”) in German: candidate understandings, formulations of the other’s mind, and requests for a judgment. These empirical materials are the basis for a methodological exploration of different levels of researcher abstraction in the comparative study of action. Two levels are examined: the (coarser) level of conditionally relevant responses (what a response speaker must do to align with the action of the prior turn) and the (finer) level of “full alignment” (what a response speaker can do to align with the action of a prior turn). Both levels of abstraction provide empirically viable and analytically interesting descriptive concepts for the comparative study of action. Data are in German.
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.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.