Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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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.
The following analysis explores the nature of everyday activities of people in economic leadership positions. It inquires as to the institutions and people they are in contact with, and the way they communicate with them. First, I will present existing studies in this field and the ethnographic procedure of this study. I will then describe the communicative activities of high-level personnel and their communication networks based on observations. These are then linked to their communicative tasks and types of interaction. Finally, I will discuss some characteristics of the communicative style.
This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics has its origins in the International Conference on Conversation Analysis 10 (ICCA10), which took place in Mannheim (Germany) in July 2010. More than 650 scholars attended the conference, whose theme was ‘‘multimodal interaction’’. This volume includes papers based on the four plenary talks given at ICCA10 and four additional contributions related to the conference theme.
The transition between phases of activities is a practical problem which participants in an interaction have to deal with routinely. In meetings, the sequence of phases of activity is often outlined by a written agenda. However, transitions still have to be accomplished by local interactional work of the participants. In a detailed conversation analytic case study based on video-data, it is shown how participants collaboratively accomplish an emergent interactional state of affairs (a break-like activity) which differs widely from the state of affairs which was projected by awritten agenda (the next presentation), although in doing so, the participants still show their continuous orientation to the agenda. The paper argues that the reconstruction of emergent developments in interaction calls for a multimodal analysis of interaction, because the fine-grained multimodal co-ordination of bodily and verbal resources provides for opportunities of sequentially motivated, relevant next actions. These, however, can amount to emergent activity sequences, which may be at odds with the activity types which are projected by an interactional agenda or expected on behalf of some institutional routine.
Based on German data from history-taking in doctor-patient interaction, the paper shows that the three basic syntactic types of questions (questions fronted by a question-word (w-questions), verb-first (V1) questions, and declarative questions) provide different opportunities for displaying understanding in medical interaction. Each syntactic questionformat is predominantly used in a different stage of topical sequences in history taking: w-questions presuppose less knowledge and are thus used to open up topical sequences; declarative questions are used to check already achieved understandings and to close topical sequences. Still, the expected scope of answers to yes/no-questions and to declarative questions is less restricted than previously thought. The paper focuses in detail on the doctors’ use of formulations as declarative questions, which are designed to make patients elaborate on already established topics, giving more details or accounting for a confirmation. Formulations often involve a shift to psychological aspects of the illness. Although patients confirm doctors’ empathetic formulations, they, however, regularly do not align with this shift, returning to the description of symptoms and to biomedical accounts instead. The study shows how displays of understanding are responded to not only in terms of correctness, but also (and more importantly) in terms of their relevance for further action.
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.