Actions in practice Clift, Rebecca; Raymond, Chase Wesley
Discourse studies,
02/2018, Letnik:
20, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Several of the contributions to the Lynch et al. Special issue make the claim that conversation-analytic research into epistemics is ‘routinely crafted at the expense of actual, produced and ...constitutive detail, and what that detail may show us’. Here, we seek to address the inappositeness of this critique by tracing precisely how it is that recognizable actions emerge from distinct practices of interaction. We begin by reviewing some of the foundational tenets of conversation-analytic theory and method – including the relationship between position and composition, and the making of collections – as these appear to be primary sources of confusion for many of the contributors to the Lynch et al. Special Issue. We then target some of the specific arguments presented in the Special Issue, including the alleged ‘over-hearer’s’ writing of metrics, the provision of socalled ‘alternative’ analyses and the supposed ‘crafting’ of generalizations in epistemics research. In addition, in light of Lynch’s more general assertion that conversation analysis (CA) has recently been experiencing a ‘rapprochement’ with what he disparagingly refers to as the ‘juggernaut’ of linguistics, we discuss the specific expertise that linguists have to offer in analyzing particular sorts of interactional detail. The article as a whole thus illustrates that, rather than being produced ‘at the expense of actual, produced and constitutive detail’, conversation-analytic findings – including its work in epistemics – are unambiguously anchored in such detail. We conclude by offering our comments as to the link between CA and linguistics more generally, arguing that this relationship has long proven to be – and indeed continues to be – a mutually beneficial one.
Eating together is a primordial social activity with robust normative expectations. This study examines a series of instances where appreciative elements about the food during a shared meal are ...treated as noticeably absent and where some of the participants are attributed to exhibit a negative stance towards the food, which furthermore is used as a resource for engaging in membership categorization.
Situated within the cognate approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study draws on video recordings of an integrated language and cooking workshop organized for immigrants in the French speaking part of Switzerland. The participants include a French teacher, two chefs and five immigrant women with various native languages. The detailed sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains how the participants treat gustatory features of eating as publicly available and accountable, and how the absence of evaluative elements contribute to the situated achievement of a plural “you” as a group that does not like “this” food. Ascribing (dis)taste for food on behalf of others, occasions accounts for just how to eat, showing the strong normative features that make up to the recognizability of sharing a meal as a competent member – including how sensorial experiences are evaluated and expressed. In this way, this study contributes to our understanding of the (non)ordinary features of eating together as a situated, embodied achievement and social institution that is built in and through interaction.
The present study contributes to a well-established line of applied linguistics research in educational contexts on how teachers can make connections between their students' out-of-school knowledge ...and experiences and what they learn in the classroom by examining a hitherto under-explored context, namely English-medium-instruction (EMI) mathematics classes in Hong Kong (HK). Adopting a translanguaging perspective, the study examines how fluid and dynamic meaning-making practices afford opportunities for teachers to bring the outside into the EMI classroom in order to support the students' learning of new academic knowledge. The data for the present paper is based on a linguistic ethnography project in a HK secondary school where EMI is practised. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is carried out on the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interview data analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings demonstrate how the teacher constructs a translanguaging space by integrating the students’ everyday life experience in an institutional learning space. It is argued that translanguaging thus helps to transform the EMI classroom into a lived experience, which in turn enhances content learning. The theoretical and pedagogical implications for EMI in other contexts are explored.
•Paper is based on a large corpus of ordinary conversation.•Paper gives the first quantitative treatment of the functions of well-prefacing.•Discriminates and evaluates three approaches to ...preference.•Offers a new ‘my side-my side’ function for well.•Offers an integrated family resemblance treatment of functions.
This paper presents evidence that the discourse particle well functions as a generalized procedural alert that the turn it prefaces will privilege its speaker's perspectives, interests or project relative to the expectations for action established in the prior turn or sequence. Using data from a corpus of 748 well-prefaced turns, a range of contexts that enrich and specify this function are identified including (i) responses to questions, (ii) topic shift and topic closure, and (iii) ‘my side’ corroborations of descriptions and judgments.
This paper presents EXMARaLDA, a system for the computer-assisted creation and analysis of spoken language corpora. The first part contains some general observations about technological and ...methodological requirements for doing corpus-based pragmatics. The second part explains the system’s architecture and gives an overview of its most important software components – a transcription editor, a corpus management tool and a corpus query tool. The last part presents some corpora which have been or are currently being compiled with the help of EXMARaLDA.
This study uses conversation analysis to investigate how drawings made by artists while explaining stage design for performing arts productions are organized through interactional practices to ...influence how the drawings are seen. When producing theatrical art, artists often draw pictures, such as of stage design elements or animations to be projected onto the stage, to share their ideas with others. The present study analyzes how participants visualize relationships between objects using drawing practices. The findings demonstrate that drawn pictures are differentially structured as preliminary and main in combination with speech, body movements, and the arrangement of tools. Furthermore, these practices of producing pictures can be used for the hierarchization of objects with respect to the distinction between the background and foreground. In addition, the findings show that seeing multilayered structures is linked to the construction of procedures for setting the stage.
Denne artikel præsenterer etnometodologisk konversationsanalyse (EMCA) som en tilgang til at studere arbejdslivspraksisser i realtid. Den tager udgangspunkt i den aktuelle diskussion af, hvordan et ...praksisteoretisk perspektiv kan informere arbejdslivsforskningen, men fokuserer på de metodologiske implikationer af dette perspektiv. Den introducerer de grundlæggende principper i EMCA, og den diskuterer de praktiske konsekvenser for produktionen og bearbejdningen af empirisk materiale. Den eksemplificerer de analytiske principper i EMCA med udgangspunkt i en analyse af organiseringen af arbejdstid i fleksibelt vidensarbejde, og den diskuterer de mulige begrænsninger ved EMCA som en tilgang til at studere arbejdslivspraksisser med udgangspunkt i en diskussion af kontekstbegrebet.
This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, ...at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of 'units' of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Swedish, with some crosslinguistic comparison.
This paper reviews some current trends characterizing the specific perspective of ethnomethodologically inspired conversation analysis on the situated organization of action. It also discusses ...contemporary challenges represented within this paradigm by the study of materiality and embodiment in social interaction. In order to further elaborate on the nexus between action, bodies, and materiality, I show on the basis of an empirical exemplary situation, how research on multimodality – that is, on the diversity of resources that participants mobilize to produce and understand social interaction as publicly intelligible action, including language, gesture, gaze, body postures, movements, and embodied manipulations of objects – can be further expanded by considering not only embodied resources for interacting but also embodied practices for sensing the world in an intersubjective way.
•The paper discusses current state of the art in multimodal CA.•Recent expansions of multimodal analysis concern the body in its entirety, materiality, and ecology.•Situated action shapes the relevant material aspects of objects in interaction.•Material features are not only talked about and seen, but also sensed.•Multimodality can be further expanded to consider multisensoriality.
Abstract
This paper presents a study of Arabic waḷḷāhi (lit. 'by God') and English really when they are used interactionally as newsmarks. The literature has claimed that the role of newsmarks in ...conversation is to treat prior talk as news, to open up a slot for further talk, to express doubt or disbelief, and to implement requests for confirmation. A close analysis of waḷḷāhi and really shows that they do not necessarily follow the patterns described by previous research. Instead, the data suggest that newsmarks primarily contribute to the construction of prior talk as remarkable, that is, tellable and noteworthy; and that some previously described functions are epiphenomenal of this more basic property. The data are recordings of naturally occurring everyday conversations in British English and Egyptian Arabic, with English translations.
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