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We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found.
1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic code and other mutually shared expectations.
2. Intersubjective solutions emerge step by step by mutual responsive-anticipatory adaptation of driving decisions.
3. Intersubjectivity can be accomplished by explicit interactive negotiation of passages.
4. Coordination problems can be solved without relying on intersubjectivity by unilateral, responsive-anticipatory adaptation to others’ behaviors.
This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages - Flemish, French, German, and Italian - it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
To date, little is known about prosodic accommodation and its conversational functions in instances of overlapping talk in conversation. A major conversational action that happens in overlap is turn competition. It is not known whether participants accommodate prosodic parameters locally in the overlapped turn (initialisation) or access a repertoire of prosodic patterns that refer to general prosodic parameter norms (normalisation) when competing for the turn in overlap. This paper investigates the initialisation and normalisation of fundamental frequency (f0) and assesses its role as a resource for turn competition in overlap. We drew instances of overlapping talk from a corpus of conversational multi-party interactions in British English. We annotated the overlaps on a competitiveness scale and categorised them by overlap onset position and conversational function. We automatically extracted f0 parameters from the speech signal and processed them into f0 accommodation features that represent the normalising or the initialising use of f0. Using decision tree classification we found that f0 accommodation is only relevant as a turn competitive resource in overlaps that start clearly before a speaker transition. In this turn context, we found that normalising and initialising f0 features can both be relevant turn competitive resources. Their deployment depends on the conversational function of overlap.