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Die Analyse prosodisch-phonetischer Ressourcen stand neben morpho-syntaktischen, lexiko-semantischen und diskurspragmatischen von Anfang an im Mittelpunkt interaktional-linguistischer Forschung. In den letzten Jahren sind darüber hinaus visuell wahrnehmbare Phänomene zunehmend Gegenstand interaktional-linguistischer Beschreibungen von Kommunikationssituationen geworden.
Der vorliegende Sammelband enthält neun Untersuchungen, die auf Korpora von Alltagsgesprächen oder institutionellen Interaktionssituationen (Unterricht und Parlamentsdebatten) in unterschiedlichen Sprachen (Deutsch, Englisch, Mandarin) beruhen. Die Beiträge zeigen, welchen Anteil unterschiedliche semiotische Ressourcen – interpretiert in ihrer holistischen Gestalt – an der Organisation sozialer Interaktionen haben. Der Band trägt somit dazu bei, die Rolle multimodaler Ressourcenbündel in ihrer Situiertheit, Prozesshaftigkeit und Kontextsensitivität für die Durchführung kommunikativer Aufgaben besser zu verstehen.
Our everyday lives in any social community are shaped by rules (e.g., Roughley 2019; Schmidt/Rakoczy 2019). Rules (in a broad sense) are interactionally negotiated, monitored, enforced, and serve as an ‘orientation value‘ in social life. If someone‘s behavior is treated as norm-violating or problematic in certain way, it may be therefore confronted. Confronting interlocutors can immediately stop, modify, or retrospectively reprimand the misconduct of others in a moralizing manner. Such confrontations of a problem behavior occur commonly in informal interactions. On the basis of our corpus, specifically in informal interactions at the table, I observed that, for example, in Polish, German and British English, direct confrontations occur on average at least once every three minutes. Participants design these actions in a variety of ways, but like everything in interaction, the design is not arbitrary (Sacks 1984; Enfield/Sidnell 2019). A recurrent feature of such turns is connecting misconduct to some more general concepts. It is evident from the data that e.g. speakers of German and Polish use ‘generally valid statements’ in problematic moments (cf. Küttner/Vatanen/Zinken 2022) to reach the closure of the problem sequence, also specifically dealing there with distribution of deontic and epistemic rights (Rogowska in prep.). I ask, when and for what purpose generality, that is, abstracting from a concrete behaviour, is used as a tool while confronting others. The focus is on sequential and linguistic features of abstracting in confronting moments in language comparison. What are the methods to achieve abstraction: i) defocusing the confronted, specific agent (cf. Zinken et al. 2021; Siewierska 2008), e.g. nur derjenige der dran ist der darf die bedingungen für den handel stellen (only the one whose turn it is may set the conditions for the trade); using ii) extreme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986), e.g. na siostrę zawsze można liczyć (you can always count on a sister); iii) referring to stable character traits, e.g. Matylda bardzo chetne by podala. (.) Ona jest taka skora do pomocy (Matylda would be very happy to pass (it to you). (.) She is so eager to help); or iv) broader categorizing of the given referent, e.g. do not build (.) do do not build do not build swastikas (when a) German guy is filming us? Sometimes, even several locus of abstraction are combined in the same turn. Can we identify language-specific and cross-linguistic patterns? What are the interactional consequences: enforcing a compliant behavior in the future, eliciting an apology or cognitively simplifying complex problems? From a comparative perspective, I ask whether going beyond the here-and-now while confronting others is a practice that unites speakers across languages and is thus a human cognitive strategy to display normativity. This ongoing study is based on new comparable data from four European languages from informal interaction during activities around the table (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. in prep.). The phenomenon was coded systematically in each of the four languages as part of a larger, quantitatively oriented study with different questions (Küttner et al. submitted). In the talk, I will show exemplarily Polish and German evidence. I use the methods of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell/Stivers (eds.) 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Imo/Lanwer 2019).
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 study investigates other-initiated repair and its embodied dimension in casual English as lingua franca (ELF) conversations, thereby contributing to the further understanding of multimodal repair practices in social interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we focus on two types of restricted other-initiation of repair (OIR): partial repeats preceded or followed by the question word what (i.e., what X?/X what?) and copular interrogative clauses (i.e., what is X). Partial repeats with what produced with rising final intonation are consistently accompanied by a head poke and treated as relating to troubles in hearing, with the repair usually consisting of a repeat. In contrast to these partial repeats, copular interrogative clauses are produced with downward final intonation and accompanied by face-related embodied conduct. The what is X OIRs primarily target code-switched lexical items, the understanding of which is critical for maintaining the repair initiator’s involvement in the ongoing sequence. This study also contributes some general reflections on the possible complexity of OIR and repair practices from a multimodal perspective.
In this chapter, we will investigate smartphone-based showing sequences in everyday social encounters, that is, moments in which a personal mobile device is used for presenting (audio-)visual content to co-present participants. Despite a growing interest in object-centred sequences and mundane technology use, detailed accounts of the sequential, multimodal, and material dimensions of showing sequences are lacking. Based on video data of social interactions in different languages and on the framework of multimodal interaction analysis, this chapter will explore the link between mobile device use and social practices. We will analyse how smartphone showers and their recipients coordinate the manipulation of a technological object with multiple courses of action, and reflect upon the fundamental complexity of this by-now routine joint activity.
This article investigates mundane photo taking practices with personal mobile devices in the co-presence of others, as well as “divergent” self-initiated smartphone use, thereby exploring the impact of everyday technologies on social interaction. Utilizing multimodal conversation analysis, we examined sequences in which young adults take pictures of food and drinks in restaurants and cafés. Although everyday interactions are abundant in opportunities for accomplishing food photography as a side activity, our data show that taking pictures is also often prioritized over other activities. Through a detailed sequential analysis of video recordings and dynamic screen captures of mobile devices, we illustrate how photographers orient to the momentary opportunities for and relevance of photo taking, that is, how they systematically organize their photographing with respect to the ongoing social encounter and the (projected) changes in the material environment. We investigate how the participants multimodally negotiate the “mainness” and “sideness” (Mondada, 2014) of situated food photography and describe some particular features of participants’ conduct in moments of mundane multiactivity.
In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.
Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the experienced qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations.
Within a rapidly digitalising society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, particularly amongst older adults who acquire these skills later in life. This paper focuses on participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. Using video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilise their teachers’ assistance when encountering problems with their smartphones, laptops or tablets. Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or mobile devices to obtain assistance. Utilising multimodal conversation analysis, we describe two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their connection to this educational setting and digital devices.
In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embodied demonstrations in contrast to verbal descriptions. For instance, to instruct an actress to act like a school girl a director can use depictive (he demonstrates the expected behavior) instead of descriptive (“can you act like a school girl”) means. Drawing on a corpus of 400 h video recordings of rehearsal interactions in three German professional theater productions, from which we selected 265 cases, we examine ways to instruct movement-based actions in theater rehearsals. Using a multimodally extended ethnomethodological-conversation analytical approach, we focus on the multimodal details that constitute demonstrations as complex action types. For the present article, we have chosen nine instances, through which we aim to illuminate (1) The difference in using embodied demonstrations versus verbal descriptions to instruct; (2) typical ways directors combine verbal descriptions with embodied demonstrations in their instructions. First, we ask what constitutes a demonstration and what it achieves in comparison to verbal descriptions. Using a typical case, we illustrate four characteristics of demonstrations that all of the cases we studied share. Demonstrations (1) are embedded in instructional activities; (2) show and do not tell; (3) are responded to by emulating what was shown; (4) are rhetorically shaped to convey the instruction's focus. However, none of the 265 demonstrations we investigated were produced without verbal descriptions. In a second step we therefore ask in which typical ways verbal descriptions accompany embodied demonstrations when directors instruct actors how to play a scene. We distinguish four basic types. Verbal descriptions can be used (1) to build the demonstration itself; (2) to delineate a demonstration verbally within an instruction; (3) to indicate positive (what should be done) and negative (what should be avoided) versions of demonstrations; (4) as an independent means to describe the instruction's focus in addition to the demonstration. Our study contributes to research on how embodied resources are used to create meaning and how they combine with and depend on verbal resources.