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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.
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.
The ubiquity of smartphones has been recognised within conversation analysis as having an impact on conversational structures and on the participants’ interactional involvement. However, most of the previous studies have relied exclusively on video recordings of overall encounters and have not systematically considered what is taking place on the device. Due to the personal nature of smartphones and their small displays, onscreen activities are of limited visibility and are thus potentially opaque for both the co-present participants (“participant opacity”) and the researchers (“analytical opacity”). While opacity can be an inherent feature of smartphones in general, analytical opacity might not be desirable for research purposes. This chapter discusses how a recording set-up consisting of static cameras, wearable cameras and dynamic screen captures allowed us to address the analytical opacity of mobile devices. Excerpts from multi-source video data of everyday encounters will illustrate how the combination of multiple perspectives can increase the visibility of interactional phenomena, reveal new analytical objects and improve analytical granularity. More specifically, these examples will emphasise the analytical advantages and challenges of a combined recording set-up with regard to smartphone use as multiactivity, the role of the affordances of the mobile device, and the prototypicality and “naturalness” of the recorded practices.
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.
Die Rolle der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation erweist sich in den Interviews aus dem Israelkorpus m. E. als besonders wichtig. Es wird von der Tatsache ausgegangen, dass es sich bei den Informanten um Personen mit besonders delikaten biographischen Hintergründen handele. Die Interviewerinnen müssen demzufolge mit der starken emotionalen Belastung rechnen, der die Interviewten während der Rekonstruktion ihrer Lebensgeschichte ausgesetzt sind. Ein sehr direkter Frage-Antwort-Stil könnte wegen dieser emotionalen Belastung als unangenehm empfunden werden. Der Einsatz von Verfahren antizipatorischer Verstehensdokumentation weist stattdessen m. E. eindeutig darauf hin, wie sich die Interviewerinnen offensichtlich um Empathie bemühen und im Sinne einer intersubjektiven Inreraktionskonstitution mit den Interviewten kooperieren. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es zu zeigen, wie solche Verfahren der antizipatorischen Verstehensdokumentation durch den systematischen Einsatz der Konnektoren und, also, dann realisiert werden können.
Meta-communicative practices are generally reflexive in a fairly obvious sense: Inasmuch as speakers use them to talk about or comment on earlier/subsequent talk, they use language self-reflexively. In this paper, we explore a practice that is reflexive not only in this meta-communicative sense but also in a sequential-interactional one: Prefacing a conversational turn with I was gonna say. We show that the I was gonna say-preface furnishes the following general semantic-pragmatic affordances: (1) It retroactively relates the speaker’s subsequent talk to preceding talk from a co-participant, (2) it embodies a claim to prior, now-preempted, communicative intent with regard to what their co-participant has (just) said/done, (3) it therefore displays its speaker’s orientation to the relevance or the appropriate placement of the action(s) done in their own subsequent talk at an earlier moment in the interaction, and (4) it reflexively re-invokes, or retrieves, this earlier moment as the relevant sequential context for their action(s). We then go on to illustrate how speakers draw on these sequentially reflexive affordances for managing recurrent interactional contingencies in specific sequential environments. The paper ends with a discussion of the role that reflexivity plays in and for the deployment of this practice.
The article addresses Solution-Oriented Questions (SOQs) as an interactional practice for relationship management in psychodiagnostic interviews. Therapeutic alliance results from the concordance of alignment, as willingness to cooperate regarding common goals, and of affiliation, as relationship based upon trust. SOQs particularly allow for both: They are situated at the end of a troublesome topic area, which is linked to low agency on the patient’s side, and they reveal understanding of and interest in the patient. Following the paradigm of Conversation Analysis and German Gesprächsanalyse this paper analyzes the design and functions of SOQs as a means for securing and enhancing the relationship in the process of therapy. Our data comprise 15 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics. The analyses refer to all SOQs found but will be illustrated by means of a single conversation.
Auch Linguist*innen, die gesprochene Sprache untersuchen, kommen schon seit längerem nicht mehr ohne digitale Infrastrukturen aus. Seit Beginn der Gesprochene-Sprache-Forschung werden Gespräche aufgezeichnet und anschließend transkribiert, da die flüchtigen, innerhalb von Bruchteilen von Sekunden stattfindenden Feinheiten des Gesprochenen paradoxerweise nur durch Verschriftung im Detail untersucht werden können. Diese Detailuntersuchungen beschränkten sich im vergangenen Jahrhundert meist auf wenige Einzelbelege für ein untersuchtes Phänomen. Das heißt, die Forschenden hatten den unmittelbaren Überblick über ihre Datenkollektionen und benötigten keine elaborierten digitalen Methoden zu deren Aufbereitung, Annotation und Analyse. Dies hat sich in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten stark geändert: Es wurden vermehrt gezielt große Datenmengen gesammelt, in Datenbanken organisiert und der Forschungsgemeinschaft zur Nutzung zur Verfügung gestellt. An erster Stelle muss hier das Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) genannt werden (vgl. Schmidt 2014). Dieses wird seit 2008 am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) aufgebaut und ist heute das größte Referenzkorpus für das gesprochene Deutsch.
Korpora gesprochener Sprache
(2022)
Korpora gesprochener Sprache bestehen aus Audio- oder Videoaufnahmen sprachlicher Produktionen, die über eine Transkription einer linguistischen Analyse zugänglich gemacht werden. Sie kommen zur Untersuchung unterschiedlichster sprachwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen unter anderem in der Gesprächsforschung, der Dialektologie und der Phonetik zum Einsatz. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die wichtigsten Eigenschaften von Korpora gesprochener Sprache und stellt einige Vertreter der verschiedenen Kategorien vor.
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.
Dieses Kapitel befasst sich mit dem Zusammenspiel von Raum und Interaktion und konzentriert sich auf die dynamischen Organisationsformen sozialer Handlungen unter Berücksichtigung verbaler und sichtbarer Ressourcen. Durch die Untersuchung eines spezifischen Settings – professionelle Interaktionen in einem Radiostudio – werden wir empirisch beschreiben und konzeptualisieren, wie ein gebauter bzw. stark architekturierter Raum im Rahmen institutioneller Praktiken genutzt und relevant gesetzt wird. So soll zu aktuellen Überlegungen zu Interaktionsraum und -architektur, zu Raum als Ressource sowie als materiellem Umfeld beigetragen werden. Unsere ethnomethodologische und konversationsanalytische Perspektive wird von aktuellen Debatten über den sogenannten spatial turn in der interaktionalen Forschung beeinflusst (Kap. 1.1). Auf Grundlage eines in einem Radiostudio erstellten Videokorpus (Kap. 1.2) wird zunächst die Verbindung zwischen einem architektonisch und technologisch komplexen Umfeld und dem interaktionalen Handeln der Teilnehmer skizziert (Kap. 2.1, Kap. 2.2). Es folgt die detaillierte Analyse eines Einzelfalls (Kap. 3), in dem die Radiomoderatoren einen Text für den nächsten Sendeabschnitt vorbereiten. Hier werden die räumlichen Charakteristika sichtbar, die bei der Arbeit nach und nach relevant gesetzt werden (Kap. 4).
Dieser Artikel analysiert am Beispiel eines Racletteessens unter Freunden, wie innerhalb einer langen Sequenz das Warten auf den Beginn des Essens strukturiert wird. Während der fast 50 Minuten, die zwischen der Ankunft der ersten Gäste sowie dem Beginn des Essens vergehen, orientieren sich die Teilnehmer auf unterschiedliche Weise zum Warten als Aktivität. Das sukzessive Eintreffen der Gäste führt jeweils zu Eröffnungssequenzen innerhalb dieser Wartezeit. Anhand von Auszügen dieser Zeitspanne verfolgt die Analyse, wie sich die Teilnehmer zu dieser Zeitlichkeit des Wartens und (Noch-nicht-)Beginnens orientieren und wie sie den Anfang des Essens gemeinsam konstruieren.
Drawing on naturalistic video and audio recordings of international meetings, and within the framework of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and interactional linguistics, this chapter studies how multilingual resources are mobilized in social interactions among professionals, how available linguistic and embodied resources are identified and used by the participants, which solutions are locally elaborated by them when they are confronted with various languages spoken but not shared among them, and which definition of multilingualism they adopt for all practical purposes. Focusing on the multilingual solutions emically elaborated in international professional meetings, we show that the participants orient to a double principle: on the one hand, they orient to the progressivity of the interaction, adopting all the possible resources that enable them to go on within the current activity; on the other hand, they orient to the intersubjectivity of the interaction, treating, preventing and repairing possible troubles and problems of understanding. Specific multilingual solutions can be adopted to keep this difficult balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity; they vary according to the settings, the competences at hand, the linguistic and embodied resources locally defined by the participants as publicly available, the multilingual resources treated as totally or partially shared, as transparent or opaque, and as needing repair or not. The paper begins by sketching the analytical framework, including the methodology and the data collected; it then presents some general findings, before offering an analysis of various ways in which participants keep the balance between progressivity and intersubjectivity in different multilingual interactional contexts.
Cette contribution discute différents enjeux dégagés lors d’une étude des pratiques professionnelles plurilingues : ces enjeux ont émergé d’une analyse menée collaborativement par deux équipes de chercheurs, à Lyon et à Paris, participant au projet européen DYLAN (6e programme cadre) et élaborant ensemble l’analyse empirique d’un extrait d’une réunion de travail, enregistrée dans le cadre d’une collaboration sur un même terrain. Cette analyse est l’occasion de thématiser de manière exemplaire un certain nombre de questions surgissant de l’étude des contacts des langues dans les contextes professionnels, concernant aussi bien les enjeux épistémologiques que l'engagement du chercheur sur le terrain.
Since Lerner coined the notion of delayed completion in 1989, this recurrent social practice of continuing one’s speaking turn while disregarding an intermediate co-participant’s utterance has not been investigated with regard to embodied displays and actions. A sequential approach to videotaped mundane conversations in German will explain the occurrence and use of delayed completions. First, especially in multi-party and multi-activity settings, delayed completions can result from reduced monitoring and coordinating activities. Second, recipients can use intra-turn response slots for more extended responsive actions than the current speaker initially projected, leading to delayed completion sequences. Finally, delayed completions are used for blocking possibly misaligned co-participant actions. The investigation of visible action illustrates that delayed completions are a basic practice for retrospectively managing co-participant response slots.
On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to laughter in international business meetings. More particularly, it deals with ways in which a person's name is correctly pronounced. Speakers and co-participants seem to orient towards ‘proper’ ways of vocalizing names and to consequent ‘variations’ or ‘deviations’ from them, making different ways of pronunciation available as a laughable. In making such pronunciation variations available, accountable and recognizable, participants reflexively establish as relevant the multilingual character of the activity, of the participants’ competences and of the setting; conversely, they exploit these multilingual features within specific social practices, leading to laughter.
Our analysis focuses on the contexts of action, the sequential environments and the interactional practices by which the uttering of a name becomes a ‘laughable’ and then a resource for an ethnic joke. Moreover, it explores the implications of transforming the pronunciation into a laughable in terms of the organization of the ongoing activity, changing participation frameworks and membership categorizations. In this sense, it highlights the flexible structure of groups and the way in which laughter reconfigures them through local affiliating and disaffiliating moves, and by making various national categories available and relevant.
Dropping out of overlap is a frequent practice for overlap resolution (Schegloff, 2000, Jefferson, 2004) in interaction, as it re-establishes the “one-at-a-time” principle of the turn-taking system (Sacks et al., 1974). While it is appropriate to analyze the practice of dropping out of overlap as a verbal and thus audible phenomenon, a close look at video data reveals that withdrawing from an action trajectory is also an embodied practice. Based on a fine-grained multimodal analysis (C. Goodwin, 1981, Mondada, 2007a, Mondada, 2007b) of videotaped interactions in French, this paper illustrates how overlapped speakers organize the momentary suspension of their action trajectory in visible ways. Indeed, participants do not instantly withdraw from their action trajectory when they stop talking. By using bodily resources, they are able to display continuous monitoring of the availability of their co-participants and of the next possible slot for resuming their suspended action. I therefore suggest analyzing the drop out of overlap as the first step of withdrawal, as definitive, embodied withdrawal can occur later, or, in case of resumption, not at all. Consequently, my paper analyzes withdrawal as a good example of strengthening the analytic concept of embodiment with regard to turn-taking practices in interaction.
As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der Analyse des Zusammenspiels sprachlich-hörbarer und sichtbar-kinesischer Praktiken, die beim alltäglichen Erzählen eingesetzt werden. Im Rahmen einer konversationsanalytisch basierten Untersuchung von Videoaufnahmen deutscher Alltagsgespräche wird die Bandbreite alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken in der face-to-face-Kommunikation aufgezeigt. Dies erfolgt exemplarisch anhand zweier Beispiele, in denen Einstieg, Ausgestaltung sowie Beendigung der Erzählung unter unterschiedlichen sequentiellen und multimodalen Bedingungen vollzogen werden. Die Untersuchung unterstreicht einerseits die Indexikalität alltäglicher narrativer Praktiken, andererseits die Notwendigkeit einer interaktionalen Narratologie, die diese Praktiken als Produkt sprachlicher, verkörperter und räumlicher Ressourcen sowie der Zusammenarbeit mehrerer Teilnehmer analysiert und konzeptualisiert.
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.
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.
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.
In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.
This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patients reported repeated experiences of parental violence. The article focuses on extracts from two interviews, which provide for a maximal contrast concerning the practices of telling experiences of violence and which are ‘clear cases’ of the practices that are characteristic of the whole corpus. The main differences between the different ways of telling concern:
• With respect to the ascription of guilt and responsibility, parental violence is portrayed as legitimate pedagogic action versus as being evil-minded and guilty without rational justification.
• With respect to the process of the telling, we find narrative trajectories over which an initial vague gloss is increasingly unpacked by reports of highly violent actions versus narratives in which violence is overtly stated and morally ascribed from its very first mention.
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
Der Beitrag stellt zunächst die drei grundlegenden methodischen Verfahren der Konversationsanalyse und der mittlerweile deren Vorgehen folgenden diskursiven Psychologie dar: die Transkription, die detaillierte Sequenzanalyse am Einzelfall und die (komparative) Analyse von Datenkollektionen. Nach einer Übersicht über grundlegende Befunde zur Organisation von Interaktionen wird auf drei psychologische Untersuchungsbereiche eingegangen: Die Konstitution von Identität in Gesprächen, die Rolle von Kognitionen in der sozialen Interaktion und die Erforschung von Psychotherapiegesprächen.
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.
How Do Speakers Define the Meaning of Expressions? The Case of German x heißt y (“x means y”)
(2020)
To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format x heißt y (“x means y”). When speakers use it to clarify technical terms or foreign words that are unfamiliar to co-participants, they often provide a situationally anchored definition that however is rather context-free and therefore transferable to future situations. When they explain common (but indexical, ambiguous, polysemous, or problematic) expressions instead, speakers always design their explanation strongly connected to the local context, building on situational circumstances. I argue that x heißt y definitions in interaction do not meet the requirements of scientific or philosophical definitions but that this is irrelevant for the situational exigencies speakers face.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.
The main point of this chapter is to demonstrate how a speaker’s concept of his/her professional role can be inferred from his/her perspectival work (perspective setting and relating different perspectives to one another) in professional encounters. Thereby some risks of complex perspectival work in discourse will become manifest which result - at one point in the talk - in perspectival inconsistency, revealing a deeply grounded social problem for the speaker. This will be examined in the framework of a rhetorical conversation analysis.
Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.
Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives
(2018)
Building on а corpus of 70 hours of German driving lessons, this paper studies the use of declaratives vs. imperatives for instruction. It shows how these linguistic resources are adapted to different praxeological, temporal and participant-related environments. Declaratives are used for first instructions, task-setting and post- trial discussions. They exhibit complex syntax and do not call for immediate compliance. Their high degree of explicitness conveys how the action is to be carried out. Imperative instructions overwhelmingly correct ongoing actions of students or respond to their failure to produce expected actions. They exhibit minimal argument structure. They are reminders which presuppose that the student monitors the scene and can perform the action unproblematically. They index that requests have to be complied with immediately or even urgently.
Theateraufführungen sind ohne Zuschauer nicht denkbar. Zugleich erweisen sich Proben aber als öffentlichkeitsabgeschirmte und intime Vorgänge, da eine (zu frühe) Orientierung an möglichen Publikums-Effekten den kreativen Prozess stört. Auf der Grundlage von über 30 Stunden Videoaufnahmen von Theaterproben zeige ich an ausgewählten Ausschnitten, wie Theatermachende sich sprachlich und körperlich im Probenprozess auf das Publikum beziehen, wie dies interaktiv realisiert wird und welche Rückschlüsse das auf die Weisen der Publikumskonstruktion im Kontext von Proben zulässt.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
The paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation and analysis of multimodality. Each of the tools has specific strengths so that a variety of different tools, working on the same data, can be desirable for project work. However this usually requires tedious conversion between formats. We propose a common exchange format for multimodal annotation, based on the annotation graph (AG) formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools. In the current version of this format the common denominator information can be reliably exchanged between the tools, and additional information can be stored in a standardized way.
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
Linguistic variation and linguistic virtuosity of young “Ghetto”-migrants in Mannheim, Germany
(2011)
In this paper, we provide an insight into the life world and social experiences of young Turkish migrants who are categorised by German society as “social problem cases”. Based on natural conversational data, we describe the communicative repertoire of one migrant adolescent and that of his friends. Our aims are (a) to isolate those linguistic features that convey the impression of “foreignness”, and stand out among other German speakers’ features, and (b) to analyse the variability in our informants’ discursive practices - i.e. code- or style-switching, as it is commonly referred to in the literature - in order to show how variation serves as a communicative resource. Our findings show that these adolescents’ remarkable linguistic proficiency and communicative competence contrast markedly to their low educational and professional status.
This paper analyses paramedic emergency interaction as multimodal multiactivity. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of emergency drills performed by professional paramedics during advanced training, the focus is on paramedics’ participation in multiple joint projects which become simultaneously relevant. Simultaneity and fast succession of multiactivity does not only characterise work on the team level, but also the work profile of the individual paramedic. Participants have to coordinate their own participation in more than one joint project intrapersonally. In the data studied, three patterns of allocating multimodal resources stood out as routine ways of coordinating participation in two simultaneous projects intrapersonally:
1. Talk and hearing vs. manual action monitored by gaze,
2. Talk and hearing vs. gazing (and pointing),
3. Manual action vs. gaze (and talk and hearing).
One major issue in the accomplishment of contrasts in conversation is lexical choice of items which carry the semantic Ioad of the two states of affair which are represented as being opposed to one another. These items or expressions are co-selected to be understood as being contrastively related to each other. In this paper, it is argued that the activity of contrasting itself provides them with a specific local opposite meaning which they would not obtain in other contexts. Practices of contrastingare thus seen as an example of conversational activities which creatively and systematically affect situated meanings. Basedon data from various genres, such as meetings, mediation sessions and conversations, the paper discusses two practices of contrasting, their sequential construction and their interpretative effects. It is concluded that the interpretative effects of conversational contrasting rest on the sequential deployment oflinguistic resources and on the cognitive procedures of frame-based interpretation and constructing a maximally contrastive interpretation for the co-selected expressions.
Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:
1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishment of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants’ common ground.
2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production of the upcoming turn is based.
3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous turn(s) with respect to the upcoming turn.
4. Project properties of turn-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties of the turn s/he is about to produce.
Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction of turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.