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This paper examines explicit positive assessments (EPAs) in personal training, that is, the personal trainer’s positive evaluations of the client’s physical performance, including comments such as bra (‘good’). The data consist of video-recorded training-sessions in Swedish from Finland and Sweden. The methodological framework is interactional linguistics, and the study explores the actions that EPAs perform as well as their linguistic design and embodied and sequential environment. The main actions performed by EPAs in personal training include transitioning between activities, encouraging the client, and making positive evaluations. The personal trainer (PT) may vary the lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and embodied features of the EPA to emphasize any of these actions or a combination of them. Overall, EPAs are a central resource for fulfilling the institutional goals of personal training by guiding the clients through the training-program and motivating them. In addition to their use as feedback on actions in the present moment, EPAs also include forward-focusing aspects aimed at guiding clients’ future behavior. This paper examines explicit positive assessments (EPAs) in personal training, that is, the personal trainer's positive evaluations of the client's physical performance, including comments such as bra ('good'). The data consist of video-recorded training-sessions in Swedish from Finland and Sweden. The methodological framework is interactional linguistics, and the study explores the actions that EPAs perform as well as their linguistic design and embodied and sequential environment. The main actions performed by EPAs in personal training include transitioning between activities, encouraging the client, and making positive evaluations. The personal trainer (PT) may vary the lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and embodied features of the EPA to emphasize any of these actions or a combination of them. Overall, EPAs are a central resource for fulfilling the institutional goals of personal training by guiding the clients through the training-program and motivating them. In addition to their use as feedback on actions in the present moment, EPAs also include forward-focusing aspects aimed at guiding clients' future behavior. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää bra ’hyvä’ -palautevuorojen prosodisia piirteitä, pragmaattisia funktioita ja näiden yhteyksiä videoiduista vuorovaikutustilanteista henkilökohtaisessa valmennuksessa niin suomenruotsalaisessa kuin ruotsinruotsalaisessa kontekstissa. Teoreettinen ja metodologinen viitekehys on vuorovaikutuslingvistiikka ja variaatiopragmatiikka, ja aineistoa on tutkittu foneettisella ja sekventiaalisella analyysimetodilla. Tutkimus osoittaa, että bra on hieman tavallisempi ruotsinruotsalaisessa osa-aineistossa, mutta prosodiassa on dynaamisempia piirteitä suomenruotsalaisessa. Bra:n pragmaattiset funktiot koskevat enimmäkseen institutionaalisen rutiinin ylläpitämistä ja harjoitusten jäsentämistä, sekä pienemmässä määrin kehun antamista. Prosodia vaihtelee harjoitusposition ja mahdollisen kehuvan sävyn myötä., The aim of this study is to investigate prosody, pragmatic functions and their connections in feedback-turns consisting of bra ‘good’. The data are video-recorded personal training-sessions in Swedish, from Finland and Sweden. The theoretical and methodological framework consists of Interactional Linguistics and Variational Pragmatics. Data is analyzed with phonetic and sequential analyses. The results show that bra is somewhat more frequent in the Sweden Swedish data, while prosody is more dynamic in the Finland Swedish data. The pragmatic functions of bra are mainly to keep up the institutional routine and to structure the exercises, just to some extent to give praise. The prosody varies with its placement in exercise and possible nuance of praise., Syftet med undersökningen är att studera prosodiska drag, pragmatiska funktioner och sambandet mellan dessa hos uppföljningen bra i inspelningar av personlig träning på svenska i Finland och Sverige. Den teoretiska och metodologiska referensramen är interaktionell lingvistik och variationspragmatik. Metoderna utgörs av fonetisk och sekventiell analys. Undersökningen visar att bra är något mer frekvent i det sverigesvenska delmaterialet, men prosodin är mer dynamisk i det finlandssvenska. De pragmatiska funktionerna är i stor utsträckning att upprätthålla den institutionella rutinen och strukturera övningarna samt i liten utsträckning att ge beröm. Prosodin varierar med övningsfas och möjlig förekomst av beröm.

Negotiations about the body – a CA study of pain and effort in personal training and massage Even though physical pain and sensations are a common human experience, they are subjective, difficult or even impossible to express and share with others. In this study, we investigate expressions of pain during ongoing physical activity, here personal training and massage, and describe how the participants negotiate and make meaning of them in interaction. The data was extracted from a 14-hour corpus of Swedish-spoken interactions in preventive health care activities in Sweden and Finland. We demonstrate how participants create common understanding of the clients’ experienced pain by evaluating it in relation to the physical activity. Our results show that pain usually is treated as avoidable or as an indication of the need to correct the activity. In special cases, such as in cases of pain caused by prior sessions of physical training, the participants treat pain as acceptable. There are also cases where we see an orientation towards pain as a sign of accomplished effort, and therefore worth aiming at in this context. In our study, the body and performance of one of the participants are in focus of the physical activity, and also in focus of the verbal interaction. Interactional work is done by the experts and lay persons respectively to handle this socially delicate situation. The study contributes to the field of embodied interaction and provides new knowledge about preventive healthcare as a phenomenon in modern society.

This chapter investigates the formatting of instructions in physical training with personal trainers or physiotherapists. Instructions occur in multimodal activities where invitations to action, compliances with them, and accounts for them emerge through grammatical, prosodic and embodied resources. We identified a two-part pattern [directive & account] that accomplishes a complex structural and pragmatic unit in trainers’ instructions. The instructions are grammatically formed of consecutive clause combinations in which the directive part is a declarative or an imperative. These combinations emerge in interactive sequences and are a designed, rather than a contingent feature in the making of instructions. Nevertheless, there is variation in their sequential emergence and grammatical and prosodic composition, from tight packages to projected or expanded clause/action combinations.

This thesis is a qualitative investigation of how the Swedish verb "tänka" and the noun "tanke" are used in three radio phone-in counseling conversations (the words are comparable with, but not equivalent to, the English verb "think" and the "noun" thought). The aim of the study is to explore in detail what the participants talk about when they use these two words. The investigation focuses on two roles, referred to as the thinker and the thought, representing someone who is thinking and something that is thought. A systemic-functional analysis of the processes containing the words "tänka" and "tanke" shows that the thinker and the thought are engaged in an emergent interplay which can be described as a pattern of material, verbal and relational processes, rather than the expected mental processes. Furthermore, an activity analysis of these processes in terms of communicative projects shows that talking about the thinker and the thought contributes in a critical way to a successful outcome of the ongoing counseling activity. Following Harvey Sacks’ seminal article On doing “being ordinary” (1984), the study proposes that the uses of the words "tänka" and "tanke" support, grammatically and interactionally, an interpretation in which the speakers cooperatively are doing “being thinking”. The combined description of process types and communicative projects in languaging turns out to be a fruitful method for exploring the dialogical and dynamic aspects of human sense-making.

Samtalsanalysen skapades på 1960-talet av sociologer som ville utreda vilken systematik mänsklig interaktion uppvisar. Man frågade sig hur turer tilldelas och bildar större helheter i samtal. Fokus låg på sociala handlingar som att göra en inbjudan. Samtidigt fäste man uppmärksamhet vid att den språkliga utformningen både påverkar och påverkas av de handlingar som utförs. Det dröjde inte länge innan också språkvetare började intressera sig för den samtalsanalytiska metoden och de nya upptäcktsprocedurer som den möjliggjorde. Man insåg att samtalsspråkets strukturer inte kan analyseras och förklaras enbart med de grammatiska verktyg man varit van att använda. De verktygen hade skapats för att analysera skrivna texter eller konstruerade språkexempel. Samtal bygger i stället på en dialog där initiativ- och responshandlingar (t.ex. frågor och svar) varvas med varandra. Denna dialogiska dynamik sätter också sin prägel på språket och är en del av det talade språkets grammatik. Utgångspunkten för beskrivningen av samtalsspråkets strukturella egenskaper blev sålunda samtal som verksamhet. I det här kapitlet visas hur en interaktionell analys kan användas för att öka vår förståelse om samtalsspråkets grammatik. Non