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Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results showed that whilst institutional identities (e.g. those of the doctors, the local hospital or the Tumour Board) prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers' minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood educational centers (ECEC) are contexts where young children make their first contact with specific, culturally determined rules, practices, and values. Only a few studies have analyzed in-depth the practices through which the educators direct the children's action and attention while they are performing routine educational activities. By means of detailed transcription of educators-children conversations and Conversation Analytic methodology, this work examines a set of videorecorded interactions collected in one Italian ECE center ("nido"), particularly focusing on the verbal and multimodal resources employed by ECEC teachers as they manage episodes, where the children diverge from an expected course of action. Analyses reveal that the educators employ a variety of multimodal resources to orchestrate the child's attention and actions toward the desired course of activity, which open spaces where the child's agency, however more or less strongly reprimanded, is admitted and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates miscommunication in sequences of talk where an oncologist asks about patients' co-morbidities, that is, their other illnesses beyond cancer. Using conversation analysis, we examine ways in which the participants identify and manage two sources of miscommunication: a divergence in the doctor's and the patient's understandings about the scope of the question; and a divergence in the doctor's and the patient's (and sometimes their companion's) understandings about the matters that the question targets. Our findings have implications for practice, highlighting ways in which clinicians and patients can manage these sources of miscommunication. These include practices to retrospectively or pre-emptively manage ambiguities and to check the accuracy of patients' answers. Additionally, our study addresses some theoretical and methodological problems in the study of miscommunication. Our data consist of 25 video-recorded first consultations in an Italian hospital; the participants speak Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]