Open Access

According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, enacted self. In contrast to everyday interaction, psychotherapists regularly topicalize the performative self explicitly. In our paper, we study how therapists respond to clients' narratives by interpretations of the client's conduct, shifting from the autobiographical identity of the told self, which is the focus of the client's story, to the present performative self of the client. Drawing on video recordings from three psychodynamic therapies (tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Psychotherapie) with 25 sessions each, we will analyze in detail five extracts of therapists' shifts from the representational to the performative self. We highlight four findings: • Whereas, clients' narratives often serve to support identity claims in terms of personal psychological and moral characteristics, therapists rather tend to focus on clients' feelings, motives, current behavior, and ways of interacting. • In response to clients' stories, therapists first show empathy and confirm clients' accounts, before shifting to clients' performative self. • Therapists ground the shift to clients' performative self by references to clients' observable behavior. • Therapists do not simply expect affiliation with their views on clients' performative self. Rather, they use such shifts to promote the clients' self-exploration. Yet, if clients resist to explore their selves in more detail, therapists more explicitly ascribe motives and feelings that clients do not seem to be aware of. The shift in positioning levels thus seems to have a preparatory function for engendering therapeutic insights.

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.

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Polish use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Polish, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of Polish with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.

Die linguistische Fundierung des Praktikenkonzepts kann von der starken Stellung des Konzepts in der Literalitätsforschung profitieren. Hier spielt der Begriff seit Beginn der kontroversen Diskussion zu den „Konsequenzen der Lite- ralität“ ab Beginn der 1980er Jahre eine zentrale Rolle. Die Forschung zeigt, dass „literacy practices“ als institutionell und kontextuell gebundene Formen des schriftlichen Sprachgebrauchs die pragmatischen Transmissionsriemen für den Aufbau literaler Kompetenz sind. An drei empirischen Bereichen, dem Erwerb von Textsortenwissen vor Beginn des eigenen Schreibens (protoliteraler Erwerb), dem Erwerb von phonologischer Bewusstheit und von Prozeduren des Textreferierens (schulischer Erwerb) und schließlich dem Erwerb von intertextuellen Praktiken wissenschaftlichen Zitierens (wissenschaftlicher Erwerb) diskutiert der Beitrag exemplarisch Leistungsmöglichkeiten und Grenzen praktikentheoretischer Konzepte für die Erklärung des beobachtbaren Sprachlernens.