Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV (O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers emphasize their lack of knowledge or display reluctance to answer. In contrast, after variants without an object complement, in contrast, speakers display uncertainty about the truth of the following proposition or about its sufficiency as an answer. Thus, while uses with both subject and object tend to close a sequence or display lack of knowledge, responses without an object, in contrast, function as a prepositioned epistemic hedge or a pragmatic marker framing the following TCU. When ICH WEIß NICHT is used in response to a statement, it indexes disagreement (independently from all complementation patterns).
This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.
"Standard language" is a contested concept, ideologically, empirically and theoretically. This is particularly true for a language such as German, where the standardization of the spoken language was based on the written standard and was established with respect to a communicative situation, i.e. public speech on stage (Bühnenaussprache), which most speakers never come across. As a consequence, the norms of the oral standard exhibit many features which are infrequent in the everyday speech even of educated speakers. This paper discusses ways to arrive at a more realistic conception of (spoken) standard German, which will be termed "standard usage". It must be founded on empirical observations of speakers linguistic choices in everyday situations. Arguments in favor of a corpus-based notion of standard have to consider sociolinguistic, political, and didactic concerns. We report on the design of a large study of linguistic variation conducted at the Institute for the German Language (project "Variation in Spoken German", Variation des gesprochenen Deutsch) with the aim of arriving at a representative picture of "standard usage" in contemporary German. It systematically takes into account both diatopic variation covering the multi-national space in which German an official language, and diastratic variation in terms of varying degrees of formality. Results of the study of phonetic and morphosyntactic variation are discussed. At least for German, a corpus-based notion of "standard usage" inevitably includes some degree of pluralism concerning areal variation, and it needs to do justice to register-based variation as well.
In her overview, Margret Selting makes the case for the claim that dealing with authentic conversation necessarily lies at the heart of an interactionallinguistic approach to prosody (see Selting this volume, Section 3.3). However, collecting and transcribing corpora of authentic interaction is a time-consuming enterprise. This fact often severely restricts what the individual researcher is able to do in terms of analysis within the scope of his or her resources. Still, for dealing with many of the desiderata Margret Selting points out in Section 5 of her extensive overview, the use of larger corpora seems to be required. In this commenting paper, I want to argue that future progress in research on prosody in interaction will essentially rest on the availability and use of large public corpora. After reviewing arguments for and against the use of public corpora, I will discuss some upshots regarding corpus design and issues of transcription of public corpora.
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.