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As in most other languages, clicks in Hebrew are not phonemes but still occur very frequently in speech. This Interactional Linguistic study, based on a corpus of casual Hebrew conversation, explores clicks at discourse unit junctures – prefacing topics, sequences, and their parts. We argue that the function of such clicks is best understood through Goffman's notion of 'frame shifts,' signalling changes in footing. Some frame-shifting clicks are byproducts of swallowing and breathing; at the same time, we show that click use is regular in certain contexts and interactionally significant, and that such clicks qualify as discourse markers. The tension between being non-linguistic epiphenomena and having a syntactic status is what makes frame-shifting clicks 'liminal signs.' Finally, we hypothesize that frame-shifting clicks are explainable as the result of a reanalysis in specific bridging contexts, whereby clicks-as-byproducts are conventionalized into discourse markers. This process may explain why non-phonemic clicks are so widespread across the world, and it may serve as a starting point for describing the development of additional interactional functions of clicks. • Clicks appear in Hebrew regularly at discourse unit junctures. • Such clicks signal 'frame shifts': changes in speakers' interactional footing. • Some clicks are byproducts of breathing and swallowing. • Mouth-clearing clicks enter language through reanalysis into discourse markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together Goffman's (1974, 1981) notions of footing, lamination, and frames, Gordon's (2009) identification of different frame laminations, and Tannen's (1986, 2004, 2007) idea of constructed dialogue, I examine the complexity of footing dynamics where different footings interact with each other, creating "footing lamination", in cats mukbang. Cats mukbang is a Korean livestream where people watch stray cats eating, while communicating with each other through a text-based live chatroom. Footing lamination occurs as participants: 1) shift their footings with the use of exclamations like oh when cats show up (reframing) and when a cat successfully catches a fish (rekeying), 2) multimodally co-construct a joint footing through recruitments, made up of chat messages and the host's spoken and bodily actions, creating "constructed action", 3) embed one footing into another through pretend-play where people type not only as and to cats but also as sports commentators for a cat catching fish, and 4) humorously blend two simultaneous emotive footings when either a dog or cicada suddenly appears on the screen and breaks the general frame of cats mukbang. The study examines footing dynamics through four types of footing lamination, thus extending the literature on frame lamination within interactive online multimodal discourse. (199/200 words) • Footing lamination is another way to look at frame lamination. • Footing lamination appears when footings are linearly shifted; jointly and multimodally constructed; embedded; and blended. • Footing lamination captures and delineates interactional dynamics. • Constructed dialogue and constructed action are common strategies to laminate footings. • Cats mukbang serves as a type of online zoo where people have interactive encounters with cats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study documents the everyday bilingual practices of Mayan children, using Tzotzil Mayan and Spanish at play. It is based on a video-ethnography of bilingual peer language practices framed within larger research on language socialization in the everyday lives of Mayan children in the South of Mexico. The study examines how the children, whose first language is Tzotzil, staged bilingual scenarios through the use of parallel bilingual constructions (e.g., alignments, adjacency pairs, recycled discourse templates) in several domains of activity (e.g., broadcasting news of an earthquake, farewells, birthday parties, and commercial advertisements). Their bilingual ludic practices challenged regimented and conventional patterns and associations between language and activity domains. An analysis of the micro-interactional processes in the bilingual interactions (e.g., changes of footing, frame shifts, keying, and stances) reveals how children can invoke and reorder language scales and values. It is argued that language scales are neither neutral nor pre-established, but are rather the outcome of the dynamics of situated interaction. Findings demonstrate how the children's ludic creation of novel bilingual spaces reveals how peer language socialization in postcolonial contexts might contribute to rescaling, revaluing, and revitalizing native languages. • Diglossic bilingualism can be addressed with a scalar lens sensitive to both horizontal and vertical dimensions. • Tzotzil Mayan children's bilingual play may challenge regimented patterns and conventional associations between language and activity domains. • Bilingual practices located in micro-interactional processes (e.g., footing, frame, and stance) reveal how children can invoke, switch, or contest language scales and values. • Peer bilingual socialization has the potential of raising children's heritage language to a higher scale in the context of postcolonial language contact and shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how young immigrant children in multilingual playful activities with peers and adults engage with and explore heritage language forms (e.g., their features, social values and pragmatic uses), as well as transgress boundaries between different language varieties. It is argued that such ludic language practices – located and enacted within micro-interactional processes – in turn link to and contribute to macro-level socio-cultural values and tensions of languages. The selected data constitute a case study based on a video-ethnography of multilingual language practices in a preschool (for 3- to 6-year-olds) with a Swedish monolingual policy. It is found that the children's multilingual play involve the exploitation of heritage language and linguistic incongruities: it takes the shape of exaggerated repetitions, transformations of language forms (phonetic, morphological and syntactic features), various keying resources, i.e., affective (serious or ludic) and metalinguistic stances. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account young immigrant children's agency in creating new spaces (e.g., ludic or instructional activities) for heritage language forms and varieties as they are used for entertaining, rather than educational purposes. • Children's multilingual play involves the exploitation of heritage language and linguistic incongruities. • Children's ludic language practices link to macro-level socio-cultural linguistic values. • Rescaling of heritage languages is accomplished in children's micro-level interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants in interaction take various stances toward the content of their turns. For instance, in direct reported speech sequences, the footing ( Goffman, 1979 ) is changed as the speaker recycles one or more turns from a previous interaction. This article defines and describes Writing Aloud Voice (WAV) sequences – a specific change of footing used in hypothetical speech ( Haberland, 1986 ) for doing formulation. This research explores a collection of video recordings of student project group meetings and was analyzed with Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic methods. It demonstrates that WAV sequences consist of (1) a quotative construction projecting a change of footing (2) a WAV clause produced with a prosody resembling that of reading aloud, and (3) an exiting device constituting a return to the previous footing. WAV clauses contain numerous speech perturbations, and the article shows how these are used by speakers to demonstrate the ongoing work of formulating a potential text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the ‘microphone gaffe’ in the context of sports broadcast talk. This peculiar communicative event is characterized by the public mediation of live talk to media audiences without the speakers being aware that they are actually on air. Adopting a general pragmatic perspective, this paper analyses the microphone gaffe in terms of its specific participation framework and discusses its humorous potential. It is argued that the key element underlying these communicative situations consists of the momentary non-acknowledgement of the media audiences by the speakers. The audience, repositioned as non-participants, actually find themselves in the role of the ‘eavesdropper’ on a private conversation. On the production side of the communicative scheme, the mistaken belief in enjoying this momentary ‘private’ speech event is accompanied by a shift of footing, where the commentators’ institutional identities become replaced with their non-public personas, evidenced by forms of backstage talk that contrasts with their frontstage performance. This paper proposes that in case of microphone gaffes, humorous effect arises from the various incongruities between the actual and the presumed footings, as well as from the subsequent recontextualizations that enclose the original communicative act within an additional communicative level. The aim of the paper is to propose and elaborate a general theoretical framework for the analysis of unintended humour in media discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the discursive activities of the participants of a social media discussion triggered by Shanghai Metro's official “dress-code” warning to women passengers. Our primary data consists of a corpus of 541 messages collected from the comments on the warning message posted on the metro company's official microblog account. Drawing on the notions of face, frame and footing, we identify three prominent frames enacted by the participants of the discussion—campaigning, debating, and playing—and analyze how different groups and individuals have developed, changed, or disrupted the “SlutWalk” on China's Internet. We situate our analysis in the interactional, political, and social-economic context in China as well as the context of global feminist activism. Our findings suggest that, with the rise of capitalism in China, traditional patriarchal ideology has reinvented itself in part by appropriating the new communication technologies. Nevertheless, the increasing social media discussions have the potential of enlarging attention to discourses regarding sex and gender, mobilizing resources for the promotion of gender equity, and strengthening (trans)national feminist networks in the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on a language broker – a younger family member who performs lay interpreting for other family members. This paper examines three real-life interactions between a broker who relays speech from English-speakers to Macedonian-speaking family members. Adopting Goffman's notions of ‘footing’ and ‘participant roles’ that a speaker can assume, this paper examines how a broker engages with the conversational moves of others for him to assume the role of not only animator and author , but also principal . Transcribed speech shows evidence of features that are characteristic of interpreter speech: ‘relayed inter-lingual transfer’ and ‘recipient design’. At the same time, inter-lingual transfer is punctuated cyclically by responses and prompts from others to engage with the broker as a speaker in his own right. This paper shows a broker's positioning to the role of principal and how this is negotiated and re-negotiated in changes of footing in which the broker can assume this role and then relinquish it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Complaints are cautiously introduced by providing a preliminary in the reason for the call slot. [•] Forms of address and shifts in footing are mobilised to seek alignment/display misalignment and index face concerns. [•] Futile efforts to reach common ground led extended complaints embedded in story-telling. [•] The agent's resistance to accept the client's position led to accusations of lack of morality via the formulation of metapragmatic comments. [•] This is due to the delicate nature of complaints and standing business practices in this part of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Lebanese Arabic allows the use of optional 1st and 2nd person dative pronouns. These are pronouns embedded in sentences without being linked to any participant roles. Their task is to express a positive or negative attitude toward the events depicted in utterances. In this paper, I present examples of such pronouns as used in gossip constructions. I show that these pronouns allow the speaker to communicate changes of footing or participation roles as animator, author, and/or principal during a speech event. I also analyze them within Cognitive Grammar, suggesting that they allow the speaker to move the speech participants from the offstage region where they function as conceptualizers to the onstage region where they are conceptualized as attitude holders. By so doing, the speaker explicitly anchors the event of gossip construction to the attitudes of the speech participants. In this sense, the pronouns become cultural tools of social influence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Conversational recipe tellings are multi-unit turns with characteristic openings and closings. They are similar to narratives in several ways, but they are also like sets of instructions, and they tend to switch back and forth between the first person past tense of the former and the second person imperative of the latter at sequentially significant junctures. Recipe tellings routinely issue from narratives and segue into narratives in conversational interaction, requiring tellers to mark off the recipe portion in characteristic ways, including shifts in tense and person. In line with their status as sets of instructions for preparing food, recipe tellings constitute expert talk, presupposing shared background knowledge and interest, and containing technical vocabulary and references to ingredients, measurements, tools and procedures associated with specialized practices. Conversational recipe telling exploits conventions from written recipes: conversational recipe telling borrows its overall sequential order, presuppositions, vocabulary, measurements, and grammatical structures from written recipe texts. Recipe telling as shop talk among cognoscenti establishes individual identity and group membership, demonstrating shared practices and interests. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study investigates a Taiwanese bilingual speaker''s code-switching practices in three telephone conversations that she initiates, all of which involve a common communicative task considered highly face-threatening for both parties in the context of contemporary Taiwan. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, this study suggests that different backgrounds of the conversation participants, such as generation and place of residence, may influence the initiator''s pattern of code-switching. This study also illustrates that, while on the sequential level code-switching serves to organize the internal structure of the conversations, on the interactional level it can be used simultaneously with other linguistic strategies to negotiate interpersonal relationships in a face-threatening situation and is but one among a variety of resources circulating in the society available to bilingual speakers in performing various tasks in their daily interactions. This study further demonstrates how code-switching should be understood alongside notions such as footing (Goffman, 1981) and politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987), arguing that an adequate study of interactional code-switching should be situated within a larger study of linguistic practices and social interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The oral proficiency interview (OPI) is often used in the domain of business English as a criterion for access to overseas assignments and job promotions. Little, however, is known about variation in interaction style across interviewers, which motivates in this study a contrastive analysis of two oral proficiency interviews used for gatekeeping purposes. The two interviews were conducted with the same candidate three months apart, and provide a rare glimpse of contrastive interviewer strategies with a single candidate. The analysis examines evidence that the candidate backslid from an earlier successful interview to a categorically lower level of performance in the second interview. Analyses of the candidate''s differential establishment of footing in the interview, misalignments to the tone of the interviewer, and differential tendencies of the two interviewers to accommodate to the candidate are featured. Interviewer differences in proclivity to backchannel indicate how facilitative accommodation in scaffolding the interaction may influence the initial rating. The micro-analyses of interview discourse suggest that differences in interviewer style potentially lead to divergent outcomes in the two interviews. In spite of considerable variation in the interaction styles of the two interviewers, consistency in the outcomes of five repeated second ratings of the candidate''s performance suggest a rating system robust against even large differences in interviewer style. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a pragmatic study of polylogue in a commercial colloquium. Polylogue reveals distinct features not captured by Goffman''s participation framework and Levinson''s concept of target of utterances. The author argues that the importance of all these features lies in polylogue''s unidirectional information-floating context, which provides a set of latent standards for both linguistic expression and interpretation. It is proposed that the floating of information is essential in governing the structure of polylogue and participants’ roles. In similar situations, an interlocutor is necessary to perform the role of agent in order to maintain a smooth transmission of information, which is achieved by applying his/her pragmatic knowledge. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The skillful use of joking to achieve characterization, within the essentially male world of the recent American film, Sling Blade, is the focus of this paper. The elusive yet socially highly significant notion of ‘sense of humor’ is assumed to reveal itself in social practice through joking interaction. For an appropriate analysis of situated discursive practice, I take a broad interpretation of ‘joking’, within an interactional sociolinguistic framework, to indicate any shift of footing from ‘serious’ to ‘non-serious’, whether signalled proactively or retroactively in the interaction, whether taken up or not by other interlocutors. Characterization is achieved through different styles of joking, representing typifications of gender role behavior within the rural American Southern world of the film. Good ol’ boy Bill, the fix-it shop owner, uses typical solidarity joking, including ritualized joking associated with conversational routines, narrative jokes, and teasing or ‘ritual insult’ joking. Bigoted and abusive ‘redneck’ Doyle uses joking to express his own hostility, either in the form of sarcasm, or as a retroactive ‘cover’ for his intentionally insulting remarks. Vaughn, a gay man, uses irony as his main style, symbolic of his veiled gender identity. Karl and Frank, who have the most important emotional bond in the movie in the form of a friendship across generations, engage in the only joking which constitutes a true empathic connection. The main female character, Frank''s mother Linda, existing in an essentially male world in the screenplay, operates in a mode of seriousness, participating in joking only by responding as socially required. Her one ambiguous attempt at joking, as a social control move on Doyle, is ineffectual. A narrative dirty joke, first occurring among men at the fix-it shop, is used effectively for characterization when Karl later tries to tell it to Linda in the mistaken belief that it constitutes an appropriate way to be sociable. Billy Bob Thornton, a native of rural Arkansas in the American South, not only wrote and adapted the screenplay for the film (for which he won an Academy Award in 1996), but also directed the film, and portrayed the starring character. The joking styles are analyzed as aesthetic typifications which can be used in the service of characterization. The treatment of joking within pragmatic framework is critiqued, and a more comprehensive analysis is offered, one which combines the pragmalinguistic and the sociopragmatic. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article presents a framework for analyzing speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience. Building on Labov''s idea of evaluation, conversation analytic insights into narrative, Goffman''s notion of footing, and Bakhtin''s idea of voicing, I describe three role perspectives which speakers orchestrate in the performance of a narrative of personal experience: those of author, interlocutor, and character. I apply this framework to two tellings of the same event by the same speaker — one in which the speaker performs the story more from the perspective of a performed character, the other in which the speaker performs the story more from a current interlocutory position. I then demonstrate that this tripartite role distinction is salient for listeners, who described one of the tellings as revealing more about the speaker at the time of the original event, and the other telling as revealing more about the speaker at the time of the telling. Finally, I suggest how these role distinctions can be quantified, in order to describe the loading of each of the three roles within a narrative. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]