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Child mental health services are in rising demand, but increasingly overstretched and difficult for families to access. This article examines rhetorical techniques used by parents seeking a mental health diagnosis for their child. Using recordings of consultations from a child mental health clinic (UK) with 28 families, analysis focuses on the use of 'epistemic corroboration', a strategy by which third-party candidate diagnoses are reported to support the parents' case. That is, parents draw upon the expertise of non-present professional persons to strengthen their proposed diagnostic claims. Conversation analysis shows how this epistemic corroboration is reported by parents and received by mental health practitioners. Conclusions illustrate that mental health diagnosis for children is actively pursued by parents as they navigate labelling. This has implications for understanding the dilemmas created for families of possible medicalisation of their child to achieve the levels of support being sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interactional functions of the so-prefaced answer, when used by interviewees in news and other political discussion broadcasts. Using the methods of conversation analysis, based on a data corpus of recent broadcasts from British mainstream television, the analysis shows that the so-preface functions in a cluster of related ways within the question-answer discourse structure of the political news interview. Specifically, it is used to reset or reframe the prior question from a standpoint of epistemic authority, enabling the interviewee to answer on their terms rather than the interviewer's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers may use reported speech in a wide variety of ways, including in pursuit of dramatised or entertaining narratives. Drawing on data from the performative narrative context of a televised 'personal revelation' talk show, this article reveals a number of features of 'performed retellings' of narrative events, including their sequential placement, their differing prosodic characteristics, and the use of facial expression and other bodily behaviours during enunciation. In the context of the television talk show, it is proposed that these phenomena act as a vehicle for the management of a public self in the production of a delicate narrative. • Reveals new aspects of the relationship between narrative and embodiment in interaction. • Combines insights from Goffmanian sociology with conversation analysis. • Highlights the use of 'performed retelling' in managing delicacy in interaction. • Extends the analysis of talk and embodied behaviour in the context of performative narrative environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This article examines the uses of laughter in group supervision meetings for psychotherapeutic counsellors. Aims: Focusing on its production in the course of talk‐in‐interaction, we explore how laughter is used systematically to complete a range of group‐specific actions. Method: A set of group supervision sessions were drawn from a large corpus of recorded, naturally occurring counselling and group supervision meetings. Data were transcribed and analysed using the methods of Conversation Analysis. Results: More than simply a response to humour, laughter in group supervision is shown to be a complex phenomenon used to perform a range of actions. Three types of use are identified: laughter in re‐assigning "problems" to other parties; laughter in doing "being‐in‐charge" of the supervision discourse; and laughter in the negotiation of ethically or relationally "tricky business." Conclusion: The practical significance of our analysis is to raise awareness, for supervisors and counsellors, of how laughter can play a key role in the discursive organisation of relations between supervisors, supervisees and the practical work of counselling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background A comprehensive assessment is essential to contemporary practice in child and adolescent mental health. In addition to determining diagnosis and management, it is seen as important for clinical engagement and forming a therapeutic relationship. However, there has been little research on the processes which occur during this interaction, particularly in first assessments. Method Twenty-eight naturally occurring child mental health initial assessments were video recorded and subjected to the basic principles of the conversation analytic method. Results Several processes were identified in a typical child and adolescent mental health assessment. These included introductions, reasons for attendance, problem presentation, decision-making and session closure. Conclusions Initial assessments provide a platform for all future engagement with services and an understanding of the processes occurring within this setting is important for the eventual outcomes, particularly in respect to new ways of working such as the Choice and Partnership Approach ( CAPA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents a discussion piece on the theme of this Special Issue, which itself arose from a panel organised by the editors at the 2011 International Pragmatics Association conference in Manchester, England, at which I was kindly invited to act as the discussant. My aim is not to discuss or review the content of each individual article, but rather to provide some background context against which the arguments and findings of the contributions collectively can be highlighted. I will therefore make some comments on the thematic relationship between the analysis of language use and members’ participation in technologically mediated communicative environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as sociopolitical advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived 'neutral' role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer 'non-neutrality' is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters -- that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment -- and to matters of the substantive content of utterances -- that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines discourse practices surrounding children's participation, non-participation, and the 'moral order' of the family in the setting of family therapy consultations. The analysis focuses on two central issues. First, the relationship between therapists' questions, the speaker selection techniques built into those questions, and the responses produced by family members. Second, the relationship between turn-taking and the linguistic features of person deixis in disputes that emerge around children's orientation to implicit accusations in the talk of other participants about them. The findings reveal how a familial 'moral order' is often at the root of how children's competence as participants is managed by the parents, the therapist, and the children themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how impoliteness is viewed from the perspective of conversation analysis. Offering an alternative to sociolinguistic policies of establishing the linguistic features that characterize impolite speech acts, it explores the ways that members themselves orient to actions in interaction as impolite, i.e., “rude” and/or “insulting”. The analysis draws on data from a range of settings including ordinary conversation, small claims courts, counselling sessions and broadcast talk to examine how, in such interactional environments, insults or episodes of rudeness may be produced, reported and responded to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on a range of work analysing interactive properties of text-based technologically mediated communication (e.g. email, internet relay chat, text messaging) which has revealed its deeply interactive properties. Based on a corpus of 1250 SMS text messages, it examines in detail the sequential organization revealed in extended series of text exchanges. Adopting methods and findings from conversation analysis, the study looks at the internal construction of texts as interactive artefacts, focusing on the production of both single-unit and multi-unit messages, and analyses how participants construct exchanges that show both similarities and differences with sequential organization in verbal conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report an investigation of the sociolinguistic characteristics of simulated encounters (role plays) in medical education, focusing in particular on frame negotiation. The role played by context in influencing the nature of out-of-frame activity is noted through comparison with another published study of simulations (Linell and Thunqvist 2003). While in general sustaining a role-playing frame that involved an orientation to exact mimicry of clinical situations, the interactional work done to sustain this appearance of authenticity at certain moments was revealed by out-of-frame utterances. One participating doctor in particular used humor to exploit the ambiguous realism of the role-playing frame. The success of this doctor in acquiring and applying new communication behaviors problematizes the view that realism, achieved through mimicry, is solely responsible for the success of training interventions. The implications for studying other kinds of simulated encounters, including an outline for a program of research into the sociolinguistics of acting tasks in general, are outlined. Sociolinguistic researchers involved in observational studies of talk would benefit from adopting the view that role-played, rehearsed, and even scripted talk of the sort used in dramatic performance is a variety of naturally occurring data and therefore worthy of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arminen (2005) claims that two recent studies of mobile phone conversation (Hutchby and Barnett, 2005 and Arminen and Leinonen, forthcoming) come up with incommensurate findings. He relates this to two distinct approaches to the methodology of conversation analysis. In this reply I show that the two studies in question are not incommensurate and argue that Arminen's account is based on a partial description of the findings in Hutchby and Barnett (2005). I go on to show how the latter study presents an approach to the problematic relationship in CA between talk and extraneous contingencies that goes further than Arminen's own proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an investigation of the organization and structures of talk-in-interaction over mobile phone. The analysis is based upon naturally occurring data consisting of a corpus of calls recorded during everyday activities of a young adult. Using these data we reveal a range of sequential phenomena associated with mobile phone usage. Established conversation analytic work on landline telephone conversation is used in order to build a comparative analysis of how actions such as openings, caller-called identity management, and topic introduction are accomplished in mobile vs landline telephone conversation. We first show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk. Subsequently, focusing on those modifications that are identifiable in our data, we show how these are related to aspects of the communicative affordances of mobile phones, orientations to which are observable in the talk of participants in mobile phone conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews research on the organisation of children's talk. It outlines the range of disciplinary concerns that contribute to the study of children's talk, and focuses on a range of work which foregrounds linkages between children's talk, social interaction and wider social processes. Paying particular attention to studies in conversation analysis, the emphasis is on how talk in peer-group and in child-adult interaction contributes to various theoretical and practical interests in children and society. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discussions of sociological research based on the recording of interactional occasions, participants' awareness of the presence of recording devices is often deemed to have a detrimental effect on the 'authenticity' or 'naturalness' of the data collected. We propose an alternative approach to this issue by seeking to turn participants' observable orientations to the presence and relevance of recording devices into an analytic topic, and exploring the precise kinds of situated interactional work in which such orientations are involved. Drawing on a substantial data corpus from three distinct research settings, we analyse a range of interactional functions associated with participants' orientations to the fact of their talk being recorded, Instead of assuming that it will act as a constraint on the production of 'natural' talk, we show how the relevance of a recording device is negotiated and used in situ as a participants' matter and interactional resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the production of argumentative talk. Attention is focused on a particular device for 'being argumentative', in which a turn is constructed using the marker 'Oh' followed by a hearably ironical proposition. Analysis uncovers the structural aspects that contribute to that device's hearability as argumentative, and goes on to consider how an utterance deploying the device comes to be produced in terms of its surrounding, unfolding sequential context. The article thus addresses some distinctive resources available to disputants to construct their positions in the light of previous moves in the argument; and explores the way in which the sequential patterns of disputes themselves play a role in the making of arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses a study which criticized conversation analysis (CA) as unresponsive to the sociological agenda. Extent should CA be responsive to the criticisms; Importance of asking participants in a social scene show themselves to be oriented to power as a relevant phenomenon in the ongoing course of their interaction; Characteristic claims of CA; Discussion on the structural differences in forms and styles of turn-taking between institutional talk and mundane conversation.

Conversation analysts have argued that institutions do not define the kind of talk produced within them; rather participants' ways of designing their talk actually constructs the 'institutionality' of such settings. Previous research has focused mainly on sequential considerations. This article extends that research by drawing on Goffmanian ideas of frame attunement and footing. Focusing on opening sequences on a talk radio show, I trace the incremental process by which mutually ratified participation in an institutional encounter is accomplished as a temporally unfolding, conjoint activity. The first three seconds of each call see the participants embodying a series of footings as they come to establish their relevant institutional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an approach to exploring the ways in which power functions in institutional discourse. The principal aim of the article is to show how the play of power in discourse can be analysed from the fundamentally local, sequential perspective of conversation analysis. I argue that power is best seen as a shifting distribution of resources which enable some participants locally to achieve interactional effects not available to others. Using calls to a British talk radio show as a case study, I show how these resources are linked to the interactional and technological organization of participation in the setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]