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1773 results in Discourse analysis

Page 53 of 89

  • Chapter 3 - Repair

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 112-209

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Interaction normally proceeds apace, that is, it is not held up or halted for any particular reason: this is known as progressivity. But sometimes progressivity is compromised: due to our own or the other's lapse of attention we may fail to produce the next word or to hear what the other said. Or our tongue may slip and we come out with the wrong word. Spoken talk-in-interaction – once it is produced – is out there, for others to hear: there is no eraser. Occasions on which we wish to revise something we have just said, or do not hear or understand something that our interlocutor says, are typical and omnipresent in interaction. As Schegloff et al. (1977) have shown, the ways in which we remedy such everyday trouble in talk-ininteraction are highly organized: taken together they are known as the practices of “repair”. Yet not every “objective” mistake or error is repaired, and what gets repaired need not be a “real” mistake at all (see Schegloff 2007a:100).

    Repair is important for the maintenance of intersubjectivity: it enables speakers to accomplish, sustain, and defend mutual understanding in talk (Sidnell 2010:136). Schegloff et al. (1977) conceive of the repair system as a “selfrighting mechanism” that allows talk-in-interaction to keep itself going in the face of problems (see Schegloff 1992:1337ff.). Like the turn-taking mechanism, the repair mechanism is conceived of as being both context-free, i.e., so general that its basic organization will be relevant everywhere, and context-sensitive, i.e., adaptable to the particularities of specific contexts, situations, and languages.

    We will argue that repair is not only a sequential self-righting mechanism but also one that allows participants, for whatever purpose or contingency, to negotiate both the trouble source and the repair, often in a preferred order.

    Basic Terminology

    Most conversation analysts use the term repair to refer to “practices for dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, and understanding the talk in conversation” (Schegloff 2000c:207). Repair halts the progressivity of interaction so that participants can address, handle, and potentially resolve problems in producing talk themselves, or in hearing or understanding a co-participant's talk. All repairs, however small, break the continuity of talk and constitute a digression from the action being carried out. Repair is conceived of as an action that is implemented through an orderly organization of practices (2000c:207).

  • Chapter 4 - Action Formation and Ascription

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 210-311

  • Summary

    In this chapter we broach a further system of organization for the conduct of conversation, this time concerning the formation and ascription of actions through turns at talk. As in prior chapters, our focus will be on linguistic resources and their mobilization, primarily in ordinary conversation and across different languages.

    As participants take turns at talk, they implement social actions. It has been said that one of the most central concerns of recipients in interaction is to figure out “What is the speaker doing by that?” (Schegloff 1997a:506), “that” referring to the formal features of a just observed piece of verbal behavior. But it is equally crucial for speakers to know how to mobilize linguistic and other semiotic resources in order to be understood as carrying out a particular social action. How forms are assembled by speakers into configurations designed to be recognizable as implementing some particular action is what is known as action formation. How such forms are actually understood by recipients to be carrying out a particular action has been referred to as action ascription (Levinson 2013b). The following sections will first cover some preliminaries in the study of action formation and ascription, and then examine how language and linguistic structures are mobilized for the implementation of selected initiating actions and their responses, including questions (requests for information and confirmation); offers and requests for action; news deliveries and informings; and finally assessments, compliments, and selfdeprecations. In each case our discussion will be motivated by the current state of the art and will incorporate interactional linguistic findings from a variety of languages.

    Preliminaries

    The problem of action formation has been characterized by Schegloff in the following way:

    … how are the resources of the language, the body, the environment of the interaction, and position in the interaction fashioned into conformations designed to be, and to be recognized by recipients as, particular actions – actions like requesting, inviting, granting, complaining, agreeing, telling, noticing, rejecting, and so on – in a class of unknown size?

    (2007a:xiv)

  • Chapter 1 - What is Interactional Linguistics?

  • from Introduction
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 3-26

  • Summary

    Throughout much of the twentieth century, modern linguistics suffered from a written language bias (Linell 2005): the general thinking about language, as well as the descriptive concepts and categories developed for linguistic research, were tailored to language as it appears in writing. Interactional Linguistics, by contrast, grew out of an interest in spoken language and a desire to see it studied in its natural habitat: in social interaction. Interactional linguists took seriously the observation that “some of the most fundamental features of natural language are shaped in accordance with their home environment in co-present interaction, as adaptations to it, or as part of its very warp and weft” (Schegloff 1996b:54). They pursued this observation to its logical conclusion: namely, that as a consequence language must be analyzed in the home environment of co-present interaction. The idea was to apply the same empirical methods that had been so successful in revealing the structure and organization of everyday conversation, the methods of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, to explore the structure and organization of language as used in social interaction. From the cumulative results of such exploration, it was hoped, a new theory of language would emerge.

    Naturally, in order to explore language in its home environment, Interactional Linguistics needed and continues to need an appreciation of the structure and organization of interaction. For this, it is heavily indebted to Conversation Analysis, whose practitioners over the years have laid bare the structural underpinnings of coordinated interaction in social contexts. However, as the “founder” of Conversation Analysis, Harvey Sacks, explained early on, he was not interested in ordinary conversation because he had any “large interest in language,” but rather simply because it was easy to record and because these recordings could be listened to again and again (Sacks 1984:26). Conversation analysts are primarily interested in understanding how interaction works, in uncovering the mechanisms of, for example, how turns at talk are coordinated, how actions are constructed and recognized, and how they are made to cohere in sequences of interaction. Interactional linguists, by contrast, do have a “large interest” in language, because they believe that turns, actions, and sequences are accomplished and made interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources; consequently, they make the linguistic forms deployed by ordinary speakers in everyday and institutional encounters the focus of their attention.

  • Chapter 2 - Turn Construction and Turn Taking

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 31-111

  • Summary

    In contrast to monologues or institutionally regulated interaction, it is the local management and negotiation of turn exchange that is crucial for the organization of conversation. In conversation the issue of who takes a turn at what point in time is not predetermined, but is negotiated between the participants at the moment when it becomes relevant in the interaction. In general, there is a normative orientation to a next speaker taking the turn “on time”, i.e., not too early and not too late, with minimal overlap and minimal gap, after the prior speaker has ended his or her turn. Taking over the floor too early or too late can give rise to inferences concerning possible reasons for noticeably deviating from normative expectations. But how is it possible for turn taking to work so smoothly?

    The basic mechanism of turn taking was reconstructed in the seminal paper by Sacks et al. (1974). According to their model, turn taking is organized in two components:

  • i. a turn-constructional component, dealing with the construction of basic units called “turn-constructional units” (TCUs); and

  • ii. a turn-allocation component, dealing with the distribution of turns at the end of each TCU for the next such unit.

    • The system is described as abstract, i.e., context-free, and at the same time adaptable to all kinds of contingencies, thus context-sensitive, locally managed, and party-administered (for an overview see also Levinson 1983 and Sidnell 2010).

    In order to explain how smooth turn taking is possible, Sacks et al. assume that TCUs are projectable, i.e., their first possible completion point can be predicted by the recipient in advance of its occurrence. Such a possible completion point is referred to as a “transition-relevance place” (TRP) (Sacks et al. 1974:703). It is here that the rules of the turn-allocation component become relevant and result either in the transfer of speakership or in a continuation by the same speaker. According to this model, then, the continuation of the same speaker after a first TRP is an interactional achievement resulting from the fact that other participants have refrained from taking the turn themselves.

  • Part II - How are Linguistic Resources Deployed in Interaction?

  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 355-358

  • Summary

    Preface

    Before the reader embarks on the second part of this book, a word of caution is in order. As pointed out earlier, Interactional Linguistics advocates a cross-linguistic approach to the study of language in social interaction. Yet when examining linguistic resources and their use in interaction, how can we be sure we are talking about the same resource across languages? To take an example, the term clause in English has no satisfactory equivalent in German. If we try to compare an English clause to a German Satz (“sentence”), we will find ourselves comparing two very unlike entities. Moreover, the characteristics of clauses vary significantly across languages: whereas in English, clauses can be either finite or non-finite (Quirk et al. 1985:1120), the Finnish lause (“clause”) is by definition finite (Hakulinen et al. 2004:827). Branching out even further to include other non-Indo-European languages, what we know as, for example, a “relative clause” in English – i.e., a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and is introduced by a relative pronoun linking it to its antecedent – does not exist in Japanese, since Japanese places modifying clauses directly before the word they modify as adjective-like attributive verbs without a relative pronoun: tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person” (Kuno 1973). The crux of the matter then is that categories developed for the description of one language do not necessarily transfer to other languages, much less to all other languages.

    Language typologists have thought long and hard about this dilemma. Far from claiming that linguistic categories are universal, they would instead advocate comparing, for example, grammatical relations across languages in terms of comparative concepts: concepts that rely on very basic, general, even primitive notions that can be established independently of specific languages. The comparative concept of relative clause, for instance, might be described as “a clause that is used to narrow the reference of a referential phrase and in which the referent of the phrase plays a semantic role” (Haspelmath 2010:672). This understanding would make it possible to treat both (English) the man who came to dinner and (Japanese) tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person”4 as conceptually comparable. The label used to refer to them can be considered of secondary importance.

Page 53 of 89