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In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which are resolved when it is established that one member can provide more specific or up-to-date knowledge. This study not only contributes to understanding epistemic management practices in contexts where there is a high degree of shared knowledge, but also grounds the exploration of new insights into the ways in which the epistemics of referring to places appear to diverge from what has been described for referring to persons.

Reader engagement has often been explored from a metadiscourse perspective, but little research has been conducted on the variation in engagement across participants, especially readers. Based on data from a collection of 120 Chinese letters of advice from governments and hospitals produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a cross-interactant analysis of metadiscourse is conducted in this paper, and the interactants’ impacts on reader engagement are discussed. The findings reveal that (1) both governments and hospitals utilize engagement markers, boosters, attitude markers, and frame markers more than other types of metadiscourse items; (2) differences exist in the use of metadiscourse among the issuing agencies; (3) as reader identity varies from ingroup to outgroup membership, the probability of booster use by a hospital is higher than that by a government; and (4) the likelihood of using frame, transition and attitude markers is higher for governments than for hospitals. The paper concludes by discussing different communicative styles adopted by two agencies in a crisis context.

The constitutive role of discourse in asylum determination procedures cannot be underestimated. Legal decision-making in the domain of asylum and international protection is essentially discourse-based: spoken and written discourse form the main input for the (re)production and the assessment of asylum applications. As these proceedings can have a direct bearing on the lives of individual applicants, critical reflection and analysis of these discursive dynamics can be considered a core task for researchers in this area. But not a straightforward one. Issues of voice—in the Hymesian sense as the freedom of having one's voice heard—and linguistic-narrative inequality, are central to much of the data that we analyze in this field, but also apply to the impact of language research at policy level, where language is not given priority. We draw from our own experiences as ethnographic fieldworkers in the Belgian asylum and migration context to examine the dynamics of research design, access and dissemination of research findings. We argue for the strength of grassroots initiatives and public engagement in local organizations as fruitful arenas for developing a voice that can be heard locally, and, potentially, also having an impact higher up the institutional hierarchy.

This article demonstrates how the design and positioning of citizens' account solicitations in traffic stops (e.g., “What did I do?”) provide resources for citizens to show, and officers to see, their stance toward and willingness to align with the business of the encounter. With design, citizens use ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘neutral’, and ‘self-other’ formulations that allocate responsibility for the stop in ways that support or challenge the stop's legitimacy. With positioning, they show their willingness to align or not to the business of the encounter. Stance and alignment work interdependently with the account solicitation as a dispreferred initiating action (Robinson and Bolden, 2010) to enhance, or aggravate, its mitigated or unmitigated character, with consequences for citizens' experience of being policed. This research uses the method of conversation analysis and draws from a large collection of police dashboard camera videos from several American policing agencies in addition to several videos posted on Youtube.

This paper examines the ways in which the speech act of complaint is realised in social media contexts. To date, little attention has been devoted to the realisation of this speech act in online settings, despite the fact that such settings provide different affordances for complaining than many of their spoken and written counterparts. In the current study, we aim to make a step towards filling this knowledge gap by demonstrating that in online settings – in particular, social media – complaining can become very intensive and aggressive. This is because social media operates with features such as complex participation and multimodality, which allow users to reflect on each other's complaints in an increasingly aggressive escalatory manner, especially when these users are united by a joint cause. We deploy the concepts of ‘addressivity’ and ‘diachronicity’ to conceptualise those features of social media that boost complaint to become aggressive. As a case study, we investigate an online protest against the waste management policy of the Borough of Merton in London.

Negative social and environmental consequences caused by corporate activities (e.g., workplace incidents, oil spills, and product-related accidents) can significantly affect the success and survival of a business. When there is bad news to report, how will companies handle the information disclosure? This paper examines discursive strategies UK and Chinese Fortune 500 companies used for communicating negative aspects in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Based on 50 UK and 50 Chinese CSR reports, the study shows how companies legitimize the bad news via the strategies of Denial, Deflection, Mitigation and Admission. Two major differences were observed in the legitimation efforts made by Chinese and UK companies: i) almost all legitimation strategies were more frequently found in UK reports, and ii) UK reports mobilized a wider range of linguistic and rhetorical resources for realizing the strategies. The paper discusses the results by considering cultural, social, and organizational factors that may shape CSR discourse in the two countries. Findings add to the understanding of crisis communication and image repair strategies used by large corporations and the genre of CSR reporting in different cultures.

This paper investigates denial, a rapport-challenging speech act. It discusses the performance of denial in the review response genre – managerial responses addressing negative online comments made by dissatisfied customers. In this study, the speech act of denial is taken to be instantiated as Deny Problem, one of the moves constituting the review response genre. The moves were identified by qualitatively analysing a total of 2,577 managerial responses produced by hotels of different star-ratings (2-star to 5-star) with the aid of the software Nvivo 12. The Deny Problem move and its proximal discourse environment were analysed further to address three main broad areas of interest: the forms of denial, the functions performed by denial, the targets of denial, and the work, if any, done by the hotel management to mitigate the potential damage to rapport resulting from the performance of the rapport-challenging act. Our analysis suggests that denial, be they used alone or in series, can target the asserted information, the customer's rationality, the hotel's responsibility, and the seriousness of the problem. While discursive effort is usually made to repair the damaged rapport with the customers, rather unexpectedly, instances of further rapport challenge are found in the proximity of the denial.

This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework. Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.

This paper analyzes signs and written messages aimed at regulating people's behavior in public spaces. Based on a collection of more than 700 verbal and pictographic signs, the paper focuses on how the formulation of the directives reflect and construct the authors' deontic authority, how they account for the social legitimacy of the directive and how they seek to evoke the addressee's goodwill and cooperativeness. The analysis shows that the author's entitlement to perform the directive may be grounded in references to institutional authority, or that it may be manifested in the linguistic or pictographic expression itself, such as use of imperative mode, exclamation marks, or threats of sanctions. Entitlement may also be established by providing accounts for the legitimacy of the directive. These take the form of reference to rules and norms or information about benefits of the requested action to the recipients or third parties. Finally, the analysis shows how signs may seek to evoke positive attitudes in the addressee by creating affiliation or by using humor and poetic devices. By comparing with previous research on directives in conversation, the paper identifies request practices that are specific to this form of written communication.

We approach break taking at work as social activity and examine break closings as a type of transition from one activity to another. Using conversation analysis, we draw on video data from five work communities in Finnish institutions of higher education and focus on a linguistic practice that the participants frequently utilize in the break closings: accounts to end the break citing work obligations. Our data show that in addition to multimodally adjusting their leaving to the ongoing break activity, the participants may present the resumption of work as a necessary obligation and use this conventionalized practice to leave the company of others legitimately. Thus, they display their orientation to the significance of co-presence and social solidarity between colleagues and to the leave taking as a somewhat accountable action.

This study is part of an on-going 3-year research project which seeks to develop a thorough understanding of the review response genre – hotel management's responses to negative online reviews. As managing (which could be enhancing or damaging) rapport with dissatisfied customers who made the negative comments is regarded as a key component of managerial responses, the present paper specifically investigates the manager's degree of commitment to the act of enhancing and damaging rapport in the responses. The investigation is based on the premise that appealing to pathos is a meta strategy for managing rapport, making it logical and possible to evaluate the degree of commitment to managing rapport from a metadiscourse perspective. A total of 200 managerial responses given by 200 hotels of different star-ratings based in different parts of the world were analyzed by drawing upon genre theory and the metadiscourse construct. Results show that managers had a higher degree of commitment to enhancing rapport than challenging rapport with reviewers, suggesting that they valued a harmonious relationship with customers.

This article focuses on the discursive self-promotion of universities. It aims to investigate how universities make evaluations through linguistic resources that modulate the degree of attitudinal and experiential meaning expression in discourse. The study compares the use of Graduation resources (Martin and White, 2005) in the About Us texts of 160 top- and second-tier universities in China and America. Cross-country and cross-tier comparisons are made by determining the frequencies of the Graduation resources and performing a close analysis of the functions and features of these resources. Findings show that all 160 universities frequently use upscaled Graduation resources to amplify the positivity projected by existing attitudes and to invoke positive evaluations to realize the universities' pragmatic intent of self-promotion. While the top-tier Chinese universities forge the most authoritative institutional image and most distant relationship with readers, the second-tier American universities establish the least authoritative institutional image and closest relationship with their readers. These findings are discussed in light of various factors that co-constitute the ecologies of higher education.

There is by now a sizeable body of literature on the resources journalists have developed for doing adversarialness while maintaining a neutralistic stance. At the same time, as research shows, interviewees have also developed their own practices in order to ‘respond’ to journalists’ adversarial style of questioning. However, no attention has been paid to the fact that interviewees, too, tread the realm of journalists and ask questions. This paper examines politicians’ use of questions in TV interviews, within the framework of Conversation Analysis. Focusing on stand-alone questions and examining the sequential environment, participants’ epistemic rights, question design, and interviewers’ response, our analysis shows that such questions are primarily deployed as vehicles for challenging interviewer talk. Such questions occur in sequential environments that share the following features: a) interviewers make assertions/assumptions which convey their own personal view, and b) the assertions/assumptions target interviewees themselves rather than third parties. Interviewers’ turns, thus, establish a disaffiliative environment, with potentially damaging implications for politicians’ public image. By formulating their responses as questions, politicians get to challenge interviewer assertions/assumptions and, at the same time, hold them accountable by making relevant a response to that challenge.

Italian regions constitute distinct cultural and linguistic entities, each with their own language varieties. Address forms are reported to be used with different frequencies and connotations in the various regions, not only in local Italo-Romance dialects but also in regional varieties of Italian. As part of a large-scale study on address in Italy with a focus on restaurant encounters, this article investigates perceptions of address practices when individuals relocate to or simply visit other regions of Italy. Upon enquiring about regional differences in the ways waiters and customers address each other, it has emerged that: a) many speakers do perceive regional differences in address practices; b) being addressed by waiters with unexpected forms in interregional encounters can result in positive or negative reactions; and c) reflecting on the perceived pragmatic behaviour by waiters can sometimes lead speakers to formulate representations of regional cultures and identities. Regional pragmatic variation in Italian presents itself as a promising field of research, the results of which would improve our current knowledge of regional varieties of Italian and perceptions thereof.

Unlike micro-local studies on turn allocation, this study combines macro- and micro-local (Traverso, 2004) perspectives to explore turn allocation of the multi-participant medical-service-seeking 1 (MSS) party composed of the patient and his/her companion in accompanied medical consultations in China. Through both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the transcription of 20 audio recorded consultations in China, the talk distribution within the MSS party is examined in terms of the structural organization of a medical visit. Features of the talk distribution in different phases of the medical consultation and factors influencing turn allocation are explored. It is found that talk is not equally distributed within the MSS party, and all phases other than the opening and the closing witness a significant or marginally significant difference in talk contribution by the patient and the companion. Factors influencing turn allocation within the MSS party vary from phase to phase: epistemic gradient, sick-role-triggered activity transfer and coalition to offset power asymmetry are among the most important. The paper sheds light on the study of polylogue, enables cross-cultural comparisons of medical consultations, and has methodological implications for further studies of medical conversations.

Laughter and humour, as has been amply documented in workplace settings in New Zealand culture, are typically used as strategic devices, both to diffuse tension and to enhance relationships with colleagues. As Holmes and Marra (2004: 386-387) observed, “a good deal of the discourse in some workplaces is oriented to avoiding conflict, to minimizing the chances of a breakdown in workplace relationships, and to negotiating agreement”. Although the use of laughter in workplaces to serve such relational and tension diffusing purposes is not unusual, it is not commonly associated with Japanese culture and its business practices, and perhaps for this reason, it remains a poorly explored domain to date. This paper aims to address this gap and add to our existing understanding of Japanese business communication by exploring the nature and functions of the use of laughter in a Japanese context and to shed light on current business practices and how they relate to past research insights.

This paper reports on and discusses the way professionals use metadiscourse in an attempt to achieve persuasion through workplace emails. Drawing upon the interpersonal model of metadiscourse, a total of 659 workplace request emails collected from professional contexts in Hong Kong were analyzed. The type and abundance of the various metadiscourse categories used in this computer-mediated communication genre were first identified and then compared with those found in non-computed mediated ones that also aim to persuade others. The results suggest (1) email offers professionals a convenient channel to persuade colleagues to comply with requests by appealing to rationality, credibility and emotions; (2) persuasive attempts made via email differ from those made via other channels in terms of the pattern of use of metadiscourse; and (3) there may be a preferred pattern of use of persuasive strategies in different moves of the workplace request email genre.

Centres of tourism across the world are established by social practices performed by actors in the tourism industry, among which practices of im/politeness, as displayed in public signs and notices, can be seen as conveying particular configurations of interpersonal relations and contributing thus to the making of ‘linguascapes’. It is suggested that the ubiquitous public signage offers visitors a possibility to infer the norms and values to which their authors orientate themselves as well as a key to the study of the overarching societal politeness ethos. Our ethnographic study explores im/politeness practices carried out in the Strbske Pleso holiday resort, Slovakia's prime site of mountain tourism, using a corpus of its public regulatory signage in which directive speech acts of requesting and prohibiting are performed. The overall aim of the study is to explore how the manifestations of the key tension between homogenization and heterogenization within the current ‘geocultural globalization’ is resolved in place. We conclude that the patterns of regulatory discourse practices of the place emerge from the hybridity and amalgamation of globally-uniform and locally-endemic resources which are transculturally mobile and which are relocalized bidirectionally. The theoretical-methodological approaches used are the sociolinguistics of globalization, politeness as social practice, linguistic landscape, and geosemiotics and the key analytical tool is ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis.

The recent legislation enforcing male and female equality in the Indonesian workplace and the gradual increase of Indonesian women in leadership positions has generated religious debates treating gender equality as a Western hegemonic influence and a contradiction to Indonesia's cultural values. These sociopolitical changes have created new discourse practices which male and female leaders now need to negotiate. To address these novel gender and linguistic practices and extend the limited research on leadership discourse, this research investigated the manager's use of humour as a politeness strategy in Indonesian business meetings. Previous research identified the formal nature of business exchanges, the importance of hierarchy and respect for authority in the workplace. Using the discursive approach to politeness, the concept of relational practice and communities of practice, this paper examined male and female managers' deployment of humour in Indonesian meetings. The study revealed that both male and female managers widely adopted humour mainly to promote group solidarity and cohesiveness. Female managers also utilized humour as a device for mitigating their criticism of male staff, and asserting power and authority. The deployment of humour by both male and female managers to enhance collegiality reflects changes in workplace discourse and may be characteristic of Indonesia's modernization and the influence exerted by global forces.

With their increasing participation in globalised labour markets, users of English as a foreign language frequently face conflictive situations where their linguistic and work competence is severely called into question. This is the specific context of call centres in Guadalajara, Mexico, bilingual (Spanish–English) where agents often deal with United States callers. To interact within this globalised context, Mexican bilingual telephone operators need to accommodate to new discoursal patterns and access pragmatic resources to deal with perceived acts of impoliteness, disrespect and aggression. Triangulating self-reports from nine agents with three call centre supervisors, I examine key incidents involving rejection, racism and insults. I develop the concept of critical intercultural impoliteness as a way of understanding how operators actively try to overcome discrimination and a smothering sense of powerlessness.

This article studies how co-present workers can join in a co-present interaction they were not previously involved in, thus challenging initial participants' interactional preserve. It is based on ethnographically-informed analyses of video-recorded interactions in workplaces, in English as a lingua franca and in French. Potential joiners' recurrent embodied and verbal practices are identified and analyzed, showing regular methods associated with potential joiners' position relative to the F-formation, and different layouts typical of workplaces. Another set of findings bears on how potential joiners shape their move so as to account for joining in at that moment, to project a more or less extended participation, and to implement a collaborative project. Beyond the variety of projects the practice can serve, potential joiners' moves are systematically designed so as to demonstrate their contribution to the progression of work.

Service encounters at the counter are a social arena in which unacquainted people come to interact together, without a priori knowing the language of the other. In multilingual institutional settings, such as places where immigrants, mobile workers, cosmopolitan clients, and tourists gather to ask for services, this is a common configuration. These settings are exemplary for investigating how relevant linguistic resources are emergently discovered, negotiated, and established in the course of the interaction. Instead of supposing that shared linguistic resources are a necessary condition for social interaction to happen, the detailed analysis of these settings invites the researcher to study how participants orient to other available linguistic resources, identify and recognize them, and finally negotiate and select the appropriate and adjusted ones to progress within the encounter. Based on conversation analysis, the paper describes the opening of encounters as a locus where linguistic choices are guessed, checked, requested, and negotiated among participants. The main focus is on greetings, as a practice used to establish and possibly negotiate the language of the encounter. The data come from video recordings at two federal institutions in Switzerland – counters offering services at the border and at railway stations – considered exemplary sites for observing multilingual exchanges among customers and clerks.

The analysis in this paper draws from customer service calls to an electronic repair facility and systematically examines the interactional dynamics between customers and service representatives as they each manage to keep service complaints from becoming overt. This paper considers how the recognizability of a complainable matter can be used as leverage for achieving other types of interactional projects, such as gaining additional assistance or, for representatives, working to quickly close down the call before the customer has a chance to complain. By building upon Schegloff's (2005) observations regarding suppressing complaints in ordinary encounters, the analysis in this paper contributes to our understanding of the function of complaints within institutional encounters, with implications for understanding complaint management in service encounters.

This article analyzes multimodal genres of current online humanitarian discourse such as mission statements, annual reports and photo galleries to find how the construals of beneficiaries and humanitarian organizations align with the motives, values and emotional dispositions of prospective donors. The discursive reduction of distance between the donor and the beneficiary is likely to produce solicitation effects and enable self-legitimization. First, based on extant literature, the article develops a method to account for the pragmatic operations of textual ‘proximization’ and visually simulated ‘co-presence’ in humanitarian communication. Then it applies it to a sample of multimodal online messages issued by a prominent Polish humanitarian organization that distributes aid to communities in Africa or Asia. Analysis shows that Polish Humanitarian Action's mission statements and annual reports include strategic construals of space, quantity and transfer of aid that legitimize the organization's activities and their underlying axiological motivations. The texts also reproduce us/them differences to proximize the other that has been ‘Westernized.’ Meanwhile, the photo-galleries manufacture co-presence to enhance the axiological and affective investments in solidarity with the distant beneficiary. The case study offers a preliminary insight into alignment and distance-crossing maneuvers in online appeals that seek to project ‘proper distance’ between the donors and beneficiaries.

Researchers in ethnomethodology have found that accounts of action are not identical to actions themselves. This investigation uses video technology to examine the enactment of membership, distinct from the description of membership. This paper takes up this line of inquiry by examining the way in which in situations of team training, in the sport of powerlifting coming together for seeing-the-lift, gazing on a lifter for an extended period, is an affiliative act. Using video data from several different team training settings, in conjunction with Instagram posts, and drawing on the authors’ ethnography and experience in strength training settings, this paper demonstrates that the differing organization of accountabilities in seeing-the-lift highlight that in team settings watching exercise is a collective matter of membership in the team. Thereby this article highlights a practice of embodied action which enacts membership roles in a powerlifting setting.

Information about the quality of the accommodation services provided by hotels in different cities across the globe can now be conveniently obtained by accessing travelers’ reviews posted on various travel websites such as TripAdvisor, Orbitz, and Expedia. These reviews, especially negative ones, can have serious impact on the hotels concerned whose reputation and business are at stake. Hotel management thus needs to address negative comments with an effective response, termed review response genre in this study, to achieve service recovery. Drawing upon the construct of rapport as the analytical framework, this paper focuses particularly on the ways the review response genre serves this communicative purpose while responding to unjust negative comments. It is found that hotel management deals with such comments with denials of the problems mentioned in the comments and attempts to enhance rapport with the dissatisfied customers. The findings should be of practical significance to hotels and the practitioners responsible for writing review responses.

This study 1 explores social encounters in which ‘social mediators’ (SM) offer assistance to migrants and help them access social, legal and healthcare services in France. One recurrent activity in this context is the understanding and subsequent explanation of procedures for dealing with administrative paperwork, obtaining civil or legal rights, etc. Such activities may encompass several forms of mediation: firstly, providing information about the required documents or procedures to gain access to a public service; secondly, the reading and oral reformulation of any written documents migrants may have; thirdly, the oral translation of talk, provided by a lay interpreter 2 when participants do not speak a common language. Participants are thus called upon to construct an understanding of the required service and procedure. This is achieved by putting together the information offered by the migrant, the information found in the documents, and the social mediator's and interpreter's own knowledge and experience in dealing with the procedure or issue in question. The analysis specifically focuses on the organisation of participation and on the use of the users’ documents, which become the object of close inspection. It shows in detail that understanding the documents’ content and the procedure, and explaining them to the user is not a one-way process but rather a complex and multiparty enterprise. In this sense, the interpreter's activity is oriented to co-occurring activities. Our methodological framework includes conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis to analyse the data, drawn from a corpus of video-recorded encounters in a French social centre.

Prior studies on institutional interactions have identified the opening phase as an important topic of study ( Heritage and Robinson, 2006a , Heritage and Robinson, 2006b , Robinson, 1998 ). This article employs conversation analysis to investigate the opening phase of videotaped acute primary care consultations in Korea to identify a closing-implicative practice (eti-ka apha-se-yo? “Where does it hurt?”), which might be understood as being culturally specific. First, the article shows that the structure of openings in Korean primary care interaction consists of reducing activities as part of achieving an as-early-as-possible occasioning of the solicitation question. Second, after analyzing the sequential structure of the solicitation strategy that is most frequently employed, the article argues that the grammatical structure of this solicitation strategy and its pragmatic force limit the possible scope of patients’ responses to a minimal form (single TCU) describing the location (placement) of pain. The findings suggest that both the patient and doctor orient to the opening sequence as a path to history-taking by locating the primary problem. Implications of the finding for cross-cultural understandings of medical encounters are discussed.

This paper examines the work done by formulations in the service of pursuing solutions to disputes between neighbours in a community mediation setting. In particular, it shows how mediators formulate the talk of mediation clients – the parties in dispute – in a particular sequence of activities. Parties’ complaints are formulated by the mediator, often proposing common ground between them. Mediators ask ‘solution-focused questions’ (SFQs), which are treated in mediation training as a key method for effecting client-generated solutions to neighbour disputes. Drawing on a collection of 30 recorded mediation sessions between mediators and their clients, conversation analysis shows how formulations do more than (or do not necessarily) ‘summarize’ what clients have said. Rather, they do institutional work of various kinds, including reconstructing clients’ versions of events and initiating sequences in which decisions about change are accomplished. In other words, formulations are at the heart of the mediation process, in which mediators attempt to scaffold clients to come to an agreement about ways to move forward, without giving direct instruction or advice.

Maintaining, affirming, and re-establishing good relationships with others in political discourse by communicating involvement and concern are important for securing cooperation and acquiring power. This paper identifies and analyzes a group of speech acts that are utilized by public actors as solidarity-enhancing devices. On the basis of 605 utterances constructed around the Hebrew speech act verb Le-varech and its English equivalents (congratulate, welcome, praise, thank, greet, bless, and wish), I suggest an initial mapping of past-, present-, and future-oriented actions of solidarity performed in both national and international politics, point to their communicative and political functions on both personal and interactional levels, and conclude by delineating the political processes they initiate, maintain, or transform.

This study examines the social framework of screen-focused silence in institutional calls. Calls to insurance companies, social care centres and other institutions which keep computerised documentation are likely to entail moments when the call-taker has to focus on the screen at the expense of interacting with the caller. This study examines how the transitions are organised between human–human–screen interaction and human–screen interaction. The analysis shows that both call-taker and caller indicate clear agreement on the period when the call-taker will be temporarily out of contact, and that the latter delivers contextualisation cues at the beginning and end of the period of this screen-focused silence which contribute to a new set of expectations.

The author's final peer reviewed version can be found by following the URI link. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Given the small number of existing studies of face in intercultural settings and the increasing attention given to participant perspectives in face research, this paper explores the gains and losses of face as perceived by Chinese government officials during a three-week delegation visit to the United States of America. These perspectives were obtained from the group's spontaneous discussions during regular evening meetings when they reflected on the day's events. Several key features emerged from the discussions. Firstly, face enhancement was a primary goal for the visit – enhancement of their own face as a delegation, of the face of the Ministry they belonged to, as well as the face of their American hosts. Secondly, the delegates attempted to manage these face goals strategically. Thirdly, they spoke of face as a volatile image that could rise and fall sharply and yet endured across incidents, days and weeks. The paper reports on and discusses these participant perspectives in the light of recent theorizing on face.

Arab journalists and interviewers are often accused of taking a soft approach with officials and public figures on the government-controlled channels, addressing questions to them in an overly polite and cautious way. However, although some previous Arabic studies have pointed out that Arabic talk shows and interviews on the new independent channels have introduced new topics and expanded the limitations of several issues that were previously restricted in the state-owned sector, this shift needs to be investigated with empirical methods and compared to the practices used in Western media. After examining empirically the format of Arabic interviews, employing some methods from conversation analysis approach, the current paper found out that not only the content of these interviews has been expanded, but also the independent channels have provided a freer environment for their interviewers, allowing them to use higher levels of aggressiveness with officials and public figures. Their findings, however, did not reach the same level of aggressive questions that are found in some conversation analysis studies, conducted on Western journalistic questions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the micro-interactional co-construction of power within Spanish language concordant medical consultations in California involving a third party family member. Findings indicate the third party instigates code-switching to English on the part of medical providers, a language that the patient does not understand, rendering the patient a non-participant in the medical consultation. In these consultations involving a third party family member, monolingual Spanish-speaking patients are stripped of control in ways that are similar to other powerless groups in medical consultations. Implications include the need to further examine how micro-level interactions reproduce societal ideologies and shape policy on the ground.

This article investigates the practices of shared text production in multiparty meeting interaction. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis as a method, it aims at shedding light on how the activity of text production is locally brought into being through the interplay between verbal, embodied and material resources of the setting. The data come from a planning meeting, in which 20 project members and a facilitator construct a public statement concerning a city's customer services. The analysis focuses on two social actions through which shared text production is accomplished: (1) project members’ proposals concerning the textual changes and (2) the facilitator's proposal concerning the final entry in the text. Examining the sequential positioning and formation of these actions, the study shows how they intertwine with writing and thus enable a step-by-step evolvement of a written document in multiparty interaction. Moreover, the study demonstrates how they advance larger social processes by making the organizational identity of the project members visible and by establishing a shared will, needed for committing the participants to ongoing organizational change.

This article addresses informal interactions in offices by analyzing video recordings of naturally-occurring, unscheduled visits in offices. We focus on closings, and more particularly on the embodied resource of walking away by drawing heavily on a previous study. We show that fellow institutional members rely on a similar set of methods, types of walking away, to simultaneously close the encounter and achieve office work. During closings, parties are to elaborate the main features of their professional relationship and of the task at hand, and this is achieved through the interactional work to achieve closings. We also show embodied resources and the sequentiality of interaction play an important part in the production of deontic authority in office organizations.

This paper examines the speech act of disinvitations, the act of rescinding an invitation or an anticipated invitation. Naturally occurring, authentic disinvitations are analyzed to determine the structure of disinvitations providing a second-order analysis; online discussion posts concerning disinvitations provide first-order accounts of attitudes toward disinvitations, outcomes, and the conditions under which they can be performed. An additional online survey supplements the unsolicited data providing additional examples, disinvitation reconstructions, and reactions to and interpretations of disinvitations. First-order discussions characterize disinvitations as highly undesirable, and advice postings admonish would-be disinviters to avoid the act. Nevertheless, the meeting of certain speech community norms allows disinvitations to be performed appropriately with sufficient relational work.

Transactional or work-related discourse is highly valued in the workplace because of its obvious relevance to workplace objectives. However, relational or social talk plays an equally valuable role by contributing to good workplace relations (e.g., Fletcher, 1999 , Holmes and Stubbe, 2003 , Schnurr, 2005 ). The research literature indicates that humour makes a particularly important contribution in this area. Most research, however, has been conducted in English-speaking societies and/or Western countries. This article fills a gap in empirical cross-cultural studies, drawing on authentic Japanese workplace discourse. It reports a qualitative analysis of humour in Japanese and New Zealand business meetings, describing its manifestations and functions. The first section reviews the relevant literature and outlines the conceptual frameworks used for the analysis and the methodology adopted in the analysis. The results of the analysis are then discussed. The analysis indicates that (1) though humour serves as Relational Practice, its manifestations are distinctive in each CofP, and (2) meeting members enact Relational Practice through humour in ways that meet the underlying expectations of each CofP.

This paper explores threats as they appear in children's everyday dispute interactions. The main purpose is to extend understandings of children's interactions and disputes in order to show how young boys construct threats in pretend frames within a classroom peer dispute by drawing upon the resources of the video game world and a verbally constructed fight. The conceptual and methodological frameworks underpinning the analysis are conversation analysis and Goffman's concept of frame. The analysis focuses on one episode that illustrates how the boys, in the absence of the teacher, invoke, share and switch frames within the dispute. Using pretence, they posit threats and build attack strategies in a video game and in mass fight frames, even though they are in a classroom and unable to complete the threats at that moment. The analysis points out that the pretend threats are different to other sorts of threats and escalate the dispute sequence. Threats in the pretend frame, as in the video game frame, are also opportunities to bring activities outside school into the classroom. Hence, this study also looks at how video game playing is used as a resource when not playing. The implications for broader educational practices exemplify how language and social interaction function in children's peer interactions by uncovering the multifaceted aspects of peer culture, friendship and children's agentive roles in maintaining and creating social and moral order in different realities. peerReviewed

Research shows that rapport can be managed with such strategies as the textualization of speech acts, the use of phatic talk, the strategic blending of institutional, professional and personal discourses, the use of evaluative language, and the provision of grounders for requests. This paper reports on and discusses the way professionals in the workplace manage rapport by combining the last two strategies – the use of evaluative language in the construction of the discourse of grounders for requests made via Adopting a qualitative approach with Appraisal theory as the analytical framework, the analysis of a corpus of workplace request e-mails containing grounders shows that professionals relied on evaluative language in constructing the grounders for workplace request e-mails for rapport management. The findings should be able to (1) expand the existing literature on rapport and its management, (2) stimulate further research applying Appraisal theory to the analysis of rapport management and other aspects of pragmatics, and (3) enable professionals to enhance or maintain a harmonious relationship with others whom they make requests of.

The study examines the development of knowledge about Indonesian address terms by Australian study-abroad participants during a short summer course. It uses a multi-method approach, combining written pre- and post-tests, elicitation of oral comments on written test responses, regular interviews and regular diary-keeping tasks. The learners rapidly acquired new address terms for the vocative slot. However they developed only modest knowledge about terms for the pronoun slot, and showed low concern for conforming to those L2 norms. The study shows that substantial L2 pragmatics can be acquired during even short periods of study abroad. It shows how processes such as transfer of training and L1 transfer can work together to impede pragmatic development, and shows that study-abroad participants will often lack access to systematic efforts to socialize them regarding L2 pragmatic norms, and that a highly salient identity as a foreigner in the L2 culture setting can constrain study-abroad participants from adopting L2 pragmatic norms.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning corpus of studies that address institutional interaction and in particular language use and talk at work. The visible and material aspects of organisational conduct and the ways in which sequential organisation, turn transfer and turn design are accomplished in and through the multi-modal, embodied action and interaction, has received less attention. In this paper, we examine a particular form of institutional arrangement, an economic transaction, and examine the ways in which the event is brought to a satisfactory and legitimate conclusion by virtue of the strike of wooden hammer. We consider how the close of sale is foreshadowed by a sequence of action that project the hammer's strike whilst providing successive opportunities for interested parties to contribute to the proceedings. In particular, we explore the ways in which the sequential import of particular activities are differentiated, or established, in the course of their production, and sensitive to the participation or potential participation of certain individuals within the large multi-party gathering of an auction. We consider the implications of the use of this simple artefact for our understanding of language use and interaction in institutional environments and explore its substantive contribution to the analysis of economic behaviour and the operation of markets – in particular the highly contingent and interactional production of value and exchange.

International audience; Children's International Summer Villages (CISV) is an international organization that offers opportunities for children to learn that, despite national or cultural differences, they are members of the human community in an interdependent world. The most important CISV program of activities is the "Village", which is a four-week meeting including between 9 and 11 national delegations of 11- year-old children. Since 1951, several villages have been organized on five continents and have involved thousands of children. CISV villages place particular emphasis on children's self-realization, promoting children's sense of responsibility and their skills in planning and managing social contexts. In this article, we analyze adult-child interactions recorded at eight CISV villages in Italy during the summers of 2006 and 2007. A total of 412hours of adult-children interaction were recorded in the context of a research evaluating the concrete application of pedagogical concepts such as the promotion of active participation among children and the consideration of children's creativity. We analyze the organization of interactive sequences, adjacency pairs and projections of actions and reactions. Our analysis shows that, despite the emphasis on children's autonomy, specific interactional devices are used by the adults to maintain control over the trajectory and the "agenda" of the interactions.

This paper contributes to the study of the discursive back-region mechanisms underlying business news production by focusing on a novel type of online press conference, i.e. one which allows for both live attendance and participation through the Internet. Drawing on a single case study of a press conference of a Dutch government agency in the field of telecommunication hosted by the Dutch news agency ANP, this article sets out to demonstrate how, at the meso level of newsworker routines, the use of technology is meant to enhance both journalistic and industry analyst access. On closer scrutiny at the micro-level of verbal interaction, however, the hybrid participation framework combining online and live involvement is shown to seriously weaken the journalists’ interactional position. It is argued that, at the macro-level of dominance and asymmetry within and between institutions, this leads to a shift in the balance of power in favour of the news source, most prominently the government agency's PR officer ‘gatekeeping’ the press conference. Hence, the use of technology leads to less rather than more journalistic access. In contrast with orthodox critical work on the topic, my data suggest pragmatic reasons, rather than manipulative ones.

The present research critically examines the construction of multilingualism and the implementation of multilingual practices in response to the new demands posed to public services by the arrival to the city of Barcelona of migrants from various language and cultural backgrounds. An analysis of the various modes and modalities of multilingualism in a health clinic in the city of Barcelona reveals the ideologies behind the practices and it shows how the reproduction of a particular social and institutional order is accomplished in everyday routine interactions that take place. Following Giddens (1984) on the role of agency it is possible to observe how institutional measures to incorporate multilingualism produce unintended consequences for migrants who come into contact with the health system. Language and communication appear at the center of the tensions and conflicts that arise between social actors within the institution. Ethnographic fieldwork and various types of data show the contradictions of institutional thinking and agency as well as the outcomes.

Companies consider themselves ‘international’ when they operate in an international context. Many studies have analyzed communication in international contexts; few, however, have done so with a focus on how conversationalists in the international world of business orient themselves towards that context. This paper analyzes interactions between company representatives of different nationalities. It focuses on how businesspeople interact in an international context and categorize one another as members of different nations. The article also intends to show how the conversational partners categorize themselves as members of the international business world and ascribe importance to that membership in and through their coordinated actions in what the present author calls doing being ‘international’. One of the features of this phenomenon is an explicit statement to the effect that the companies represented by the speakers do business with several different countries. Another feature is that the identification by co-conversationalists of these business partners in different countries is not intended.