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This study investigates the workings of the phrase tte yuu ka used as a "repair preface" in the context of replacing one formulation with another. We show that the use of tte yuu ka in the operation of replacement self-repair instructs the recipient to hear the repair solution as an alternative that is better suited for whatever purpose the speaker may be pursuing at the moment than the trouble-source formulation, without necessarily rejecting the latter as incorrect or inappropriate. We also demonstrate how this feature of tte yuu ka is used as a resource to accomplish situated interactional work in talk-in-interaction in both ordinary and institutional settings. Data are Japanese with English translation, with a few excerpts of English data cited from published research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article targets action formation in multimodal sequences. It shows how nonpolar interrogatives in Estonian are used for noticing breaches in others’ embodied conduct, focusing onkes(“who”)-interrogatives. In contrast to information questions withkes, a “noticing of a breach” does not seek an informative answer, which would be an identification of the grammatical actor of the action depicted in the interrogative. The actor is instead the addressee of the turn, often called by name, and thus clear to everyone present. These “rhetorical”kes-interrogatives formulate a just-observed conduct as problematic, and attribute responsibility for it. Since they call for either a remedy of the (embodied) conduct or a contesting of the blame as the next action, noticing breaches marginally qualify as directive actions. At the same time, they do not explicitly provide any guidelines for the future. The study argues that to determine function in language, it is necessary to study grammatical structures in their temporally emerging and embodied activity contexts. The data are Estonian with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of the Danish change-of-state tokennåas it is used in polar Q(uestion)-A(nswer) sequences.Nåis more generally employed in Danish to register an informing, whether this informing was solicited by the producer ofnåor not. In polar Q-A sequences,nåis used to register solicited informings and here serves exclusively to receipt answers that counter the questioner’s expectations and that may thus require a redirection of action. I rely on both distributional and sequential evidence to illustrate this. First, in polar Q-A sequences wherenåis produced, answers that are nonconfirming and/or not type-conforming are overrepresented, when compared to polar Q-A sequences in general. Second, participants orient in additional ways to their expectations being countered in polar Q-A-nåsequences, for instance, by explicating why the answer was counter to their expectations or what consequences this will have for them. Data are in Danish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the use of syntactically incomplete utterances in talk-in-interaction as a resource for doing two sorts of inquiries: seeking information and initiating repair. The element inquired about is made relevant next, and typically given by the addressee, in the form of a completion fitted to the incomplete utterance. Using a vernacular term, the practice could be referred to as “asking a fill-in-the-blank question,” where syntactic structure is distributed across question and answer. It is shown how transition-relevance places can be set up in the absence of syntactic completion and how fill-in-the-blank questions thereby differ from other types of collaborative productions. The particular import and usefulness of incomplete utterances is demonstrated relative to other resources. The phenomenon shows that syntactic completion and turn completion need not coincide and illustrates how questions can constrain the form of answers through projection. Data are in French with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persons with dementia sometimes confabulate (that is, utter statements unaware of their falsity). This threatens the shared world that is normally presumed as the basis for communication. Coparticipants then have to choose between acquiescing in the confabulation, being noncommittal, or indeed correcting the speaker. In this conversation analytical case study of one individual with vascular dementia, I investigate how health-care personnel and volunteers deal with the problem. The data were extracted from a 30-hour video corpus of interactions between one confabulating person and, in total, eight other elderly individuals, three professional caregivers, and a volunteer at a Swedish-speaking day care center for the elderly in Finland. We see how care providers react to confabulations with a range of response practices along the continuum of acquiescence and noncommitment (but not into the more challenging area of correction). Data are in Finland-Swedish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws on video recordings of interaction in footbath volunteering, an activity that was performed at many emergency shelters after the Great East Japan Earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011. In this activity, volunteers massaged the evacuees’ hands while bathing their feet to provide them with a few moments of relaxation. It was important for the volunteers to engage in conversation with evacuees while performing this service. We explore ways of organizing these two subactivities performed in parallel (hand massaging/foot bathing and conversing), focusing on (a) practices for the production of utterances regarding the ongoing massaging, and (b) practices for compromising the progression of massaging. Based on these explorations, we propose that the two subactivities are organized as multidimensionally asymmetrical. Data are in Japanese with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a speaker refers to someone or something in talk-in-interaction, s/he may be doing more than simply referring with a reference form. This article examines a type of reference form, “name-quoting descriptor” (e.g., “person named X”), used in Japanese. I show that the name-quoting descriptor is used for claiming the referent’s “epistemic distance,” i.e., for claiming that the referent is not within the shared territory of knowledge between speaker and recipient, and thereby carries out several interactional tasks in addition to referring. This finding contributes to research on reference practices and epistemics. Data are in Japanese with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows how different phonetic productions of the same word pair perform different actions in conversation. The German words for “yes” and “but” share the same vowel at the word boundary:ja aber. Data from naturally occurring talk show that German speakers exploit this property of their language to differentiate betweenja aberandjaber.The phonetic distinction co-occurs with a distinction in how actions are formatted. Inja aberturns,japerforms a separate action, often as a second pair part, providing an elicited confirming response. The action initiated byaberis typically disaffiliative and done for the first time. In contrast,jaber-fronted turns are rarely second pair parts and perform one single disaffiliative action, which is a redoing of a previously accomplished or attempted action. The frequent occurrence ofjaberin the corpus suggests that the item is being used as a wordlike entity similar to a discourse marker. The findings reveal that for participants the local requirement to manage action boundaries is more relevant than linguistic word boundaries that may exist outside the interactional context. Data are in German with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the development of the language alternation practices of a bilingual child who is growing up with two languages: English, which she speaks with her father and older brother, and Italian, which she speaks with her mother. It reports on a microanalysis of the dyadic interactions between parent and child when the child was aged 18–24 months. The analyses focus on how and when parent and child attend to language alternation as they interact with each other in everyday contexts such as mealtimes, shared book reading, and play. The results of this study frame simultaneous bilingualism as a matter of the local situated concerns of the participants that can nonetheless have a developmental focus. The data are in Australian English and Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report identifies a distinct, and distinctly positioned, element of the repair segment—the repair preface—and focuses onor-prefacing to introduce the practice of repair prefacing and to develop an analysis of one preface type. Althoughor-prefaced repairs do substitute one formulation for another, theor-preface shows that the trouble source formulation is not being discarded altogether, thereby mitigating the reparative character of the repair operation. We also examine expandedor-prefaced repair segments for what they reveal about the partor-prefacing plays in repair. Additionally, and as part of our explication of repair prefacing, we show how some same-TCU repairs (with and withoutor-prefaces) can be mounted without progressivity-disrupting hitches or alerts. Data are in American and British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often claimed that parents’ talk to twins is less rich than talk to singletons and that this delays their language development. This case study suggests that talk to twins need not be impoverished. We identify highly sophisticated ways in which a mother responds to her 4-year-old twin children, both individually and jointly, as a way of ensuring an inclusive interactional environment. She uses gaze to demonstrate concurrent recipiency in response to simultaneous competition for attention from both children, and we see how the twins constantly monitor the ongoing interaction in order to appropriately position their own contributions to talk. In conclusion, we argue for the need to take twins’ interactional abilities into account when drawing linguistic comparisons between twins and singletons. Data are in Australian English. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conversation Analysis has come to be the dominant approach to the systematic study of social interaction. Mixed methods studies combining CA with quantitative methods have been utilized since the 1980s to test associations between interaction practices and sociodemographic variables, attitudinal variables, outcomes, and even factors such as the economy. However, any sort of formal coding risks a massive reduction and flattening of complex human behavior to simplistic codes. Thus, a question arises as to whether it is possible to make use of formal coding in a way that remains true to CA principles about the study of social interaction. In this article, I argue that the formal coding of interaction behavior is not necessarily antithetical to conversation analysis. Although formal coding of interaction is frequently a top-down process that is not grounded in CA, interaction coding can be done in ways that do not sacrifice a CA sensibility and that are true to CA principles. In this article I discuss the aspects of CA methods that form a natural basis for formal coding and then go on to contrast non-CA-grounded formal coding with CA-grounded formal coding. Finally, I review some of the limitations of mixed methods CA formal coding studies of interaction. Data are in American and British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies one embodied practice for implementing a recognizable action in interaction: what is here called “visible deflation.” This practice appears to embody a negative stance in response to a prior turn: one that is recognizable, and glossable, as “exasperation” in response to a prior turn. A number of instances of the practice captured in family interactions reveal how bodily resources are mobilized and organized with respect to the sequence of talk in which they are embedded; collectively they contribute to ongoing research in three domains: embodiment, the interactive construction of emotion, and family interaction. Data are in American and British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe intersubjective processes in communication between children who have unequal prerequisites for communication—in this case, between a hearing-impaired child with complex needs and an unimpaired classmate. The article shows how the interactants inhabit different social identities throughout the situation and how these identities influence the (a)symmetry of the different collaboratively constructed communicative activities. I argue that the concept of intersubjectivity needs to be broadened in order to understand, and describe, the participants’ interaction patterns. Data are in Norwegian and in English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines Korean speakers’ practice of initiating repair on the recipient’s talk with and without a subject or object particle and shows that the addition (or deletion) of the particle plays an important role in implementing the action of repair initiation. Initiating repair with a particle ordinarily serves as a harbinger of disagreement, surprise, or disbelief, while initiating repair without a particle functions as an understanding check. The study further suggests possible explanations for how and why the addition of the particle achieves the interactional work of performing a negatively valenced action in Korean. Data are in Korean with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant dilemma involved in communication in medical care is the interactional negotiation of “doctor’s side” versus “patient’s side” knowledge—two divergent, yet indispensible, understandings of sickness. The present study examines the ways in which language interpreters, as active coparticipants in the clinical encounter, can engage with these emergent territories of knowledge by reformulating how information is presented in the ongoing talk. Although related to the strategies used in language and culture brokering, the practices described here for epistemic brokering are distinct in that they redesign action types and stances, as well as initiate sequences, in the service of aligning with and satisfying the social, communicative, and medical objectives that exist on each side of the mediated interaction. It is argued that epistemic brokering practices are one means through which interpreters can accomplish—on a turn-by-turn basis—their various roles of codiagnostician, gatekeeper, patient advocate, etc., which previous research has identified. Data are in American English and in Central American dialects of Spanish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do people with aphasia express their emotions? This article uses a sample of video-recorded speech and language therapy sessions to see how patients make use of facial, vocal, and bodily expression. Analysis shows that their affect displays regularly co-occur with linguistic difficulties and efforts to repair them. The most common affect displays consist of frowning, laughing, smiling, and shifts in gaze or body posture. If the difficulties are prolonged, affect displays are intensified with lowered/raised voice quality, sighing, head shaking, and verbal exclamations. Both frowning and laughter display recognition of linguistic difficulties, thus turning the threatening display of linguistic incompetence into a display of competence and active management of the trouble. The therapists are neutral in displaying affect but reciprocate smiles and laughter. The way that patient and therapist manage their displays of affect are part of their management of their larger social identities. Data are in Finnish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we discuss the notion of a ‘conversation analytic intervention,’ focusing on the role of conversation analysis in the major stages of intervention research, epitomized by the randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for intervention in the medical sciences. These stages embrace development, feasibility and piloting, evaluation, and implementation. We describe how conversation analytic methods are used as part of the first two stages and how a conversation analytic skill base and sensibility must be deployed in managing the last two stages. Through a review of practical requirements for successful, externally-funded intervention research, we provide suggestions for how to maximize the potential for basic, conversation analytic research to eventuate in intervention. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on video analyses of 110 veterinary appointments in which pet-directedI knowreceipts were uttered by 15 veterinarians as responses to companion animals’ vocal and visible signals of distress. Patients’ distress was typically occasioned by medical activities constituting the appointment. The dual functions ofI knowas a claim of (a) prior knowledge of animals’ experiences and (b) shared feelings and affiliation with animals’ experiences made it an interactional resource for addressing client anxiety arising from the disalignment of animal patients with the goals of the appointment. Analysis of prosody, prefacing, the presence or absence of repeats, and postpositioned components demonstrated the flexibility of theI knowreceipt in modulating veterinarians’ stances toward their patients’ expressions of distress. Findings are discussed in relation to studies on the management of patient distress and pain in pediatric procedures and to previous research on clinician–patient empathy in veterinary medicine. Data are in Canadian English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants in interaction routinely orient to gaze, bodily comportment, and nonlexical vocalizations as salient for developing an analysis of the unfolding course of action. In this article, I address the respiratory phenomenon of sighing, the aim being to describe sighing as a situated practice that contributes to the achievement of particular actions in interaction. I report on the various actions sighs implement or construct and how their positioning and delivery informs participants’ understandings of their significance for interaction. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aphasia (an acquired language disorder) can cause significant problems with intersubjectivity (in the sense of people’s understanding of each other) during everyday conversation. On occasion, these problems go unresolved. Given that interaction and intersubjectivity are both realized sequentially, unresolved problems with intersubjectivity undermine the sequential bases for subsequent action. This study examines how the conversation partners of people with aphasia move on following unresolved problems with intersubjectivity. It analyzes interactions involving two people with aphasia and seven of their routine conversation partners. Conversation partners were found to move on by (a) contributing to the local course of action interrupted by the problematic talk or (b) contributing to a larger activity. These practices link current talk to uncompromised sequential structures, promoting the reestablishment of intersubjectivity but potentially limiting the agency of people with aphasia. Data are in Australian English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When studying how conversationalists assess mutual understanding, research has focused on one type of evidence: next-turn talk. This article identifies another, antecedent type of evidence involving how talk is produced by reference to repair-opportunity spaces that are systematically provided for by conversation’s generic organization of repair. As current speakers talk, recipients claim understandingex silentioon an action-by-action basis as they forgo each next repair-opportunity space—that is, as they ‘withhold’ talk at each next transition-relevance place. This conversation-analytic article supports its argument through an analysis of multi-action/TCU turns generally, and specifically when recipients initiate repair on such turns with: “What?” In these cases, people respond by repairing only the most proximate action in their prior turn, which indexes their understanding that people who initiated repair understood relatively distal actions. Data are drawn from naturally occurring, ordinary, telephone conversations between friends and family members. Data are in American and British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the methods of conversation analysis to examine how therapists draw attention to a client’s verbal or nonverbal affectual stance display and thus place the focus of talk on the client’s here-and-now experience. These therapist practices are referred to asnoticings. By investigating four different experiential-oriented therapeutic approaches (Emotion-Focused, Gestalt, Symbolic Experiential, and Narrative), we explore three ways in which therapist noticings manage the progressivity of talk: by facilitating, shifting, or manipulating/disrupting the activity in progress. We also found that therapists would put noticings to use with varying degrees of empathy and cooperativeness. Whereas empathically designed noticings would facilitate progressivity and cede epistemic authority to clients, nonempathic noticings would disrupt sequential progression and challenge the clients’ greater epistemic status pertaining to their domain of experience. Differences and similarities between therapy approaches with respect to how therapists deploy noticings are discussed. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the importance of describing form independently of function, especially for prosodic and phonetic forms. Form and function are often conflated by language-in-interaction researchers when they give descriptive labels to the sound of talk (e.g., “upgraded” pitch, “continuing” intonation), and that tempts researchers to see a given form as having a given function or practice—often one that is influenced by the descriptive label. I argue that we should discipline ourselves to keeping to a purely technical description of any form (practice); that will then make it possible unambiguously to show how that form contributes to a particular function (action), without presuming the relationship to be exclusive. Data are in American and British English. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyzes mothers’ versus fathers’ versions of events in three cases of audio-recorded child custody disputes in Sweden. We show how the parents use direct reported speech (including self-quotes) and reports of feelings as discursive devices for creating alternative versions with epistemic authority and credibility. Data are in Swedish and English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is in the vein of applied conversation analysis, dealing with a problem of declining participation rates for survey interviews. When calling a household to request participation in a survey, interviewers may ask for a preselected “sample person.” We first explore how interviewers design this request in a more or less presumptive way, depending on how and when they identify themselves. Secondly, we analyze different linguistic structures that embody degrees of entitlement. Thirdly, we examine greeting items for their degree of ceremoniousness and in terms of what work they do when not part of an explicit greeting sequence. We examine other features of asking to speak to another as well, including “please” and references to the sample person. Our strategy for analyzing survey interview data is to explore the design of “switchboard” requests in ordinary telephone calls. We relate our analysis to previous research that addresses whether the detailed practices for asking to speak to another matter for obtaining consent to do an interview. We draw implications for obtaining participation in the survey interview and other kinds of phone call solicitations. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In preventive health-care settings, professionals need to encourage clients to talk about their problems before they become critical. We use multimodal conversation analysis to demonstrate how public health nurses encourage parents to elaborate on their problems in a sample of preventive maternity and child health (MCH) clinics in Finland. The nurses topicalize the problem-relevant aspects of the parents’ problem-indicative talk by issuing a formulation of what the parent has just said (that is, by redescribing it in problem-related terms). This verbal practice is synchronized with a visual one—the nurse issues the formulation, receives the parent's response, and then gazes directly at them. This has the effect of prompting the parent to take up the problem and talk about it. We discuss the findings in relation to the institutional tasks in MCH care and to the role of gaze in constituting actions, such as formulations. Data are in Finnish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to Peter Auer's commentary, I revisit the question of phonetic form and interactional meaning as well as the question of what the aim of transcription actually is (or should be). What I advocate is a careful look at the ways in which our analyses link linguistic forms with actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While agreeing with Walker's (2014/this issue) appeal to keep form and function in linguistically-inclined conversation analysis separate, I argue that a discussion of what a transcript is and how it can be used is called for. The amount of detail included in a transcript can never be “exhaustive” (according to whatever standards) but is determined by the research question. Glosses are unavoidable for interactional details outside the research focus. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How might someone carry out an educational task by moving an object or by guiding another person in doing so? This article describes the practical work of a group of school students as they work through an object-based physics task. It analyzes a recurrent practice whereby one student influences another's embodied conduct, either by manually guiding an object (a weight, a moveable plank, and so on) or by guiding the hand of another student as they manipulate an object. We show how the practices of manual guiding involve a range of embodied and contextual resources. They serve to maintain and restore the progressivity of the task in two environments: corrective sequences and local projects involving interactional teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can very young children deploy laughter interactionally? Using data from video recordings of 52 interactions between six mothers and their young children, this article examines one particular kind of sequence in which interactionally ordered child laughter occurs. In that sequence, the young child commits some kind of potential transgression (e.g., breaking wind, standing on objects on the floor, or playing in a proscribed location). The child's mother then draws attention to the potential transgression in some way (e.g., by admonishing the child, requesting a change to the child's behavior, issuing a particular kind of child-directed gaze), thus treating the child's action as constituting a transgression. At some point following the potential transgression, the child laughs. What is shown is that even young children can fit their laughter to the ongoing interactional sequence. It is argued that the child's laughter provides for a display of affiliation from the mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occupy because it implies one knows less than the advice giver and indeed that one may be somehow at fault. Advice can be resisted, but choosing to do so seems to depend on what the interactional costs would be. We discuss the implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance as well as the way relationality more generally can be constituted in talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uses of formulation in cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were compared, by means of conversation analysis, using 53 audio-recorded sessions as data. Two formulation types were found in both approaches:highlighting formulations, which recycle the client's descriptions and recognize therapeutically dense material, andrephrasing formulations, which offer the therapist's version of the client's description and focus on subjective experiences. These formulations may be interactional bearers ofcommon factorsin psychotherapy. Two other formulation types were exclusive to one or another approach.Relocating formulations, found only in psychoanalysis, propose that the experiences in the client's narratives are connected to experiences at other times or places.Exaggerating formulations, found only in cognitive psychotherapy, exaggerate the client's talk by recasting it as something that is apparently implausible. The contrast between relocating and exaggerating formulations suggests that, despite recent theories in the two approaches being more compatible, interactional differences still exist between cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Respondents to questions have various ways to display their stance toward the question addressed to them. This article examines the practice of deploying the negative response tokeniyain turn-initial position in response towh-questions in Japanese talk-in-interaction. We show thatiya-prefacing serves as an alert to the questioner that the respondent finds some aspect of the preceding question problematic. Our findings contribute to a growing body of conversation analytic research on various turn-constructional practices that are used to problematize, resist, or sidestep the constraints imposed by preceding questions across different settings and in different languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions:drawing on shared responsibilityandenlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The findings shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition ofResearch on Language and Social Interactionfor the following free supplemental resource(s): subtitled video clips of the analysed object request sequences.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies a phenomenon called “the preference for remembering.” This is conversationalists’ orientation to their epistemic responsibilities to remember and to take into account things from the past that are relevant to the here-and-now interactional moment. The focus is on the Finnish particle clusterai nii(n)(“oh that's right”) that a speaker may use when they hear their recipient's answer to their question. Throughai nii(n), the speaker claims that she actually already had independent access to the information requested—but did not remember it until hearing the answer. The article will show that these claims of only-now-remembering are used as accounts for asking (what turn out to be) inapposite questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using conversation analysis, this article describes the use ofwell-prefacing in third position after a question-response sequence.Wellas a discourse marker has been examined extensively from various perspectives. In conversation analysis,wellis described as indexing “dispreferredness” (Pomerantz, 1984) and “unstraightforwardness” (Schegloff & Lerner, 2009) in second position (e.g., responses to assessments and questions). By examining American and British English conversations, the present study investigates the use ofwellin a previously unexamined sequential position, third position, and demonstrates that thewell: (a) retroactively marks the prior action (i.e., the question) as having been preliminary to the impending turn and (b) prospectively marks the impending turn as the reason for the question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an individual issues a question, an answer is normatively expected. If an answer is not produced, the questioner may pursue it. However, sometimes it is not the absence of an answer that is at issue but whether that answer is deemed adequate (i.e., fitted to the action and/or topical agenda set by the question). Broadcast interactions (e.g., news interviews, political debates) are a perspicuous environment for investigating sequences in which responses to questions are provided but not always treated as answers. This article investigates how pursuits of answers are designed and what they accomplish within such contexts. Three key elements of a pursuit's design are described: namely, its recognizability as a pursuit; its fittedness to the previous response; and its sanctioning implications. The analysis sheds light on a central means by which individuals can hold others accountable for responding and by which a specific form of trouble in question-answer sequences is repaired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production and reception of complaints in talk-in-interaction is shaped by a range of interactional contingencies, including matters of alignment and affiliation between the complainant and complaint recipient(s), and (in cases where the complainee is a person or people) considerations associated with the implications of moral failing on the part of complainees. In this article, I describe two complementary practices through which speakers orient to and manage the implications of their racial category membership when acting in the course of complaint sequences. The first of these practices involves speakers' use of self-deprecating self-categorizations, and the second involves affiliative ways of categorizing or referring to “racial others” (i.e., members of racial categories other than the speaker's own category). These practices serve as ways in which participants can manage the matters of self/other relations made relevant in the course of complaint sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How authentic is simulated, or role-played, interaction, of the kind produced in communication training contexts? The article addresses this question by comparing actual and role-played police investigative interviews. Both types of interviews were recorded by the police: real ones to fulfill British legal requirements and training ones to maximize the authenticity of the training experience. Interview openings were examined using conversation analysis. Officers must adhere to Police and Criminal Evidence Act (2008) guidelines, turning them into spoken actions. The analyses revealed that while, in gross terms, officers in real and simulated interviews opened interviews by formulating the same actions (e.g., identifying copresent parties), differences were observable in their design and organization. In simulations, actions were more elaborate or exaggerated; that is, they were made interactionally visible and “assessable.” Furthermore, some actions were only present in simulations. Implications for the efficacy of role-play methods for training and assessing communication are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physiotherapists often have to ask their clients to move in a certain way, and they sometimes accompany such instructions with explanations. It turns out that these practitioners have an interesting resource—they can design their explanation to bear either upon the exact movement currently in play or on a more general or future case. I show that they make this distinction largely by how they deploy explanatory connectives likebecause,so, and so on—and, counterintuitively, how theyomitsuch connectives. I finish by considering other datasets and discussing the pedagogical benefits, in any interaction, of being able to construct and convey different temporal domains that the account is meant to bear on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musicians commonly make use of vocalizations in order to represent, rather than describe, a melody or musical phrase. The present study considers the role these “semantically empty” vocalizations play in the situated activity of music instruction. Data from video recordings of a clarinetist and his instructor demonstrate that these vocal representations are used for two distinct actions: assessment and direction. In assessments, the vocalizations take the form of quotations; what was previously played is reenacted through voice and other embodied modalities to highlight and comment on facets of the performance. In direction, rather than quoting what has occurred previously, the vocalization is used to demonstrate how the music should be played, and so directs the recipient to make changes to his future performances. The study of how these vocalizations are used for these two actions reinforces the need for the continued study of multimodal communication practices as an interactional tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems in conversation with those who suffer from aphasia often result in long sequences of repair, hindering progress. This article identifies an aphasic speaker's creative adaptation of a familiar linguistic resource to try and get around the problem. He uses the lexical apologysorryas a resource to close down collaborative word searching and to move the conversation forward. The analysis shows how he mobilizes the linguistic properties of the word to render it interpretable by the coparticipant in the interaction. We also see how his use ofsorryto move the conversation on depends for its effect on epistemic authority—what both parties to the interaction know about the topic under discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pursuit of learnables in vocal master classes, masters frequently produce lengthy clusters of directives, while students and accompanists orient to early opportunities for putting directives into practice. Participants are therefore faced with a continuous necessity to negotiate whether a directive is to be put into practice “now” or “not now.” Accompanists typically initiate musical (re)performances and are therefore the first to respond to a master's instruction completion, often preempting it early on in a master's potentially final turn constructional unit. Master class participants have to coordinate two action types: masters orient to giving instructions through talk; students and pianists orient primarily to restarting the musical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Units in interaction are emergent real-time phenomena that can be accomplished by the coordinated deployment of language and the body. Focusing mostly on data from dance classes, this study looks at how incomplete syntax projects a continuation realized by the body and systematically accounts for clausal syntax that can incorporate an embodied demonstration. It is argued that the classic list of types of turn constructional units by Sacks et al. (1974) needs to be expanded with a syntactic-bodily one and that the syntax of embodied demonstrations has to be included in the grammatical description of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to conversation analytic understanding of openings in health-care consultations. It focuses on the case of optometry: a form of health-care practice in which an optometrist conducts checks of a patient's vision and eye health. Patients are advised to attend regularly for routine assessments and can also request a specific appointment at any time. Analysis of a corpus of 66 consultations shows what happens when the optometrist's opening question solicits the client's “problems” with their eyes. We find three types of patient response. Patients who have requested a specific appointment (most often) report a problem with their eyes and establish a problem-purpose encounter. Patients attending for a routinely timed appointment either report no problems and establish a routine-assessment purpose, or if they do have a problem, they delay reporting it or downplay it. We track through what happens subsequently. The findings have practical implications for diagnosis and treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research uses conversation analysis to explore a collection of extracts from telephone calls involving laughter as a response in a sequence characterized by complaining. In these instances, the laugh responses fail to align with the complaint in progress and are somewhat disaffiliative (in that they do not display the same stance as that taken by the complainant). However, they do not strongly disaffiliate; they do not, for example, overtly disagree with complaint-relevant assessments produced in prior turns. In this way, recipients of a complaint work to display a somewhat discordant stance to that of the teller, and to discourage further development of the topic in progress while maintaining social solidarity. Thus, the current research adds to the finding (see also Drew, 1987, and Jefferson, Sacks, & Schegloff, 1987) that laughter can be located somewhere in the middle of a continuum ranging from overt affiliation to disaffiliation (Glenn, 2003, ch. 6). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the social action of greeting in naturally occurring face-to-face interaction, paying special attention to how people prosodically produce their very first vocalized utterances. Close analysis of a corpus of 337 video recorded openings shows that participants recipient design greetings on the level of prosody, tailoring them to each addressee and thus hearably displaying a stance toward the current state and character of their social relationship. Documenting the discovery of a prosodic continuum along which parties fine-tune their greetings, this article elucidates two distinct clusters of prosodic features with which participants recurrently design their greetings. Analysis demonstrates that parties use each prosodic cluster to display a different stance toward encountering the addressed recipient, with prosodically “large” greetings displaying a positive stance of approval and prosodically “small” greetings displaying (no more than) a neutral stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypothetical questions (HQs) are a special class of conditional question that seek a response by proposing a “what-if” situation. It is not clear to what extent view testing HQs represent a generic conversational device that operates in a similar way across contexts. I conduct a comparative analysis of HQs across four different interactional settings: ordinary conversations, research interactions, broadcast news interviews, and doctor–patient consultations. I show that while the practice of using HQs to test recipients' views and commitments is generic, or context free, both the form and function of HQs and the precise way they run off in each case are attentive in their detail to the interactional demands and affordances of the setting. I suggest that in the future, both “applied” and “basic” conversation analysis (CA) might benefit from conducting comparative analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on situated requests, i.e., interactional turns, the aim of which is to have the recipient do something (e.g., hand a tissue, close a door). Requests in face-to-face interaction are produced in complex social-interactional and material settings, where the organization of participation and attention to other ongoing activities are contingencies to be dealt with. We show that participants' use of space, material objects, and the positioning of bodies in the prebeginnings of request turns (i.e., immediately before the verbal production of turns) are important means used in addressing such contingencies. The data are drawn from video recordings of casual face-to-face and in-car conversations in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]