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I explore some of the interconnections between inferences that participants make about one another’s (verbal) conduct, the implications they attribute to prior turns at talk, and the indirectness with which recipients may respond to enquiries - in short, the interconnections between inference, implication and indirectness. These are explored in the context of naturally occurring conversations (UK and US), from the methodological perspective of Conversation Analysis. Because inference has come to be associated closely with Grice’s concept of implicature, I begin by setting out my reasons for not following Grice’s path, preferring instead to revert to ‘implication’, namely the implication that a recipient finds in and attributes to a prior turn. My purpose here is to avoid the cognitive conceptualisation of speakers’ intentions that Grice supposed are associated with implicature. I argue that inference features in the understanding of and response to all turns at talk; it is not restricted to some special kind of utterance, as seems to be conveyed in Grice’s conceptualisation. The inferences that recipients make are evident in cases in which they respond not to what the prior speaker asked ‘literally,’ but to the inferred agenda of an enquiry. Moreover, recipients may respond indirectly to prior enquiries, thereby ‘side-stepping’ implications they attribute to those enquiries. In various ways, inference and indirection may on occasions be associated with practices for avoidance in conversation.

This paper introduces the DMC Corpus – a newly collected dataset of 150 mundane cell phone calls from Mainland China in Mandarin Chinese (audio and detailed transcripts) – which is now publicly available for use in research and teaching. In this report, we first describe the constitution and current contents of the DMC Corpus, as well as instructions for access. Additional calls will be added periodically to the Corpus, and so the quantitative overview presented here should be considered conservative. We then provide concrete examples of the sorts of phenomena that might be explored with these new data, underscoring how the Corpus offers researchers the ability to build systematic collections for analysis – no matter whether researchers prefer to begin with 'forms' (e.g., utterance-final particles), with 'functions' (e.g., complaining), and/or with the temporal organization of interaction itself (e.g., preference organization, repair). The paper concludes with an explicit call for increased research on Mandarin conversation, to which we hope the materials in the DMC Corpus will contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absent apologies--apologies that were expected but are not forthcoming--are quite frequently identified and commented on, for instance in the media. In this article we discuss two kinds of evidence that apologies can be "noticeably" absent for participants in ordinary interactions. The first kind is the delays that can occur in the progressivity in talk until an apology is forthcoming, particularly in cases where interlocutors are misaligned about culpability for a transgression. Such cases typically involve pursuit of an appropriate apology (admission) and an account for the other's (mis)conduct. The second kind of evidence is that where speakers fail to apologize for a putative transgression, their interlocutors can nevertheless treat the other's prior turn as" though it had been" an apology by absolving them of culpability in the standard way (e.g., "that's alright"). We show that such absolution can occur irrespective of whether culpability is admitted and an apology proffered.

We report the development and assessment of a novel coding framework in the context of research into neonatal end-of-life decision making conversations. Data comprised 27 formal conversations between doctors and parents of critically ill babies, recorded in two neonatal intensive care units. The coding framework was developed from a qualitative analysis of the recordings using the method of conversation analysis (CA). Codes underpinned by our qualitative analysis had in the main moderate to strong agreement (inter-rater reliability) between coders; three codes had lower agreement reflecting the use of euphemisms for death and disability. Coding these interactions confirmed the significance of the doctors' talk in terms of parental involvement in decision-making, whilst highlighting areas warranting further qualitative analysis. This quantifiable representation provides a novel outcome based on evidence that is internal to the conversation rather than influenced by other factors related to the baby's care or outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils' answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as "triadic dialogue", "monologic discourse", "recitation" and "Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences". Teacher evaluation has also been associated with pupils' low levels of participation. Explanations and solutions offered by prior research are mainly based on functional categories of actions, characterizing forms and functions of teacher questions and follow-up moves in IRE sequences. Using Conversation Analysis to investigate collections of positive evaluations in video-recorded lessons in two primary school classes, we propose an interactional explanation of the phenomenon and of its predominant use. We show that teachers systematically select the formats of their positive third-turn receipts not only to evaluate pupils' answers for their abstract truth value, but also with respect to the role of each question-answer in the whole activity. We demonstrate that, in this way, teachers convey judgements about the question within the activity; thus, adding a constitutive property to the pedagogic practice and providing students with interpretive resources for a common understanding of pedagogic goals and procedures.