Lists are a recurrent interactional pattern across languages, including Spanish. Despite their occasional study, one of their key components, generalized list completers, has been mentioned only in passing. The supposed preference for three-partedness has not been explored quantitatively either. Here, I begin to fill these gaps by exploring list-construction in Spanish. From a theoretical standpoint, I propose the categorization of generalized list completers into exhaustive and non-exhaustive. Practically, I focus on the generalized list completer y ya está (“and that’s it”) and its role in making lists three-parted. The present investigation sets out to contribute to the scarce investigation into lists, in general, and lists in Spanish, in particular, by accounting for the meaning conveyed by Spanish lists as a situated practice in interaction.

We draw on theorizing by Goffman on face (1967), framing (1974), and participation framework (1981) to demonstrate how one mother and father do parental and family facework as their young children exhibit what could be construed as “misbehavior” during a videorecording of a family mealtime that the mother, an English-language instructor, made and posted to her YouTube channel for the purposes of providing learners access to “real English conversation.” Our analysis shows how the parents communicate with their co-present young children as well as the YouTube viewers to present themselves as good parents, and the mother as a good language instructor, even though the family mealtime was, in the mother’s words, somewhat “hectic” and “chaotic.” We demonstrate how facework is achieved collaboratively through numerous strategies, including verbal accounting, repetition, laughter, smiles, gaze, hand and arm gestures, eyebrow movements, and on-screen text that is added post-recording. The study contributes to understanding how “private” family interactions are shaped into the “public” YouTube context; how facework is a joint, interactive process; and how parental and family identity presentation occurs in the context of one mother’s professional work (online language instruction).

Parents might deal with a child’s non-compliance to a directive by invoking a behaviour rule, for example, ‘We need to share’. While the design of such rules is to appear as normative or universal, children often find that in some situations where one rule might apply, some different rule is invoked as being operative this time in this situation. Children then, are not only exposed to the normative expectation of rules, but also that rules are contingent and situated, being invoked in situ and made operative within a locally applied hierarchy of context. Based on 36 hours of video-recording of parent-child interaction, our analysis draws on Ethnomethodology and Membership Categorisation Analysis to examine how children learn about rules as a contingent and situated practice and demonstrate their understanding and mastery of the rules of rules through negotiating the application of a particular rule in situ.

In response to the methodological challenge of scaling narrative analysis in discourse studies, this paper introduces an integrated framework that combines corpus linguistics (CL) and narrative analysis (NA) to detect narrative patterns across large textual datasets. This framework, termed Corpus-Based Narrative Analysis (CBNA), enables systematic identification and validation of abstract narrative templates (‘proto-narratives’) through corpus statistics and narrative theory. Drawing on Ricoeur’s concept of emplotment and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the method operationalises narrative structure through what we term proto-narratives: abstract, schema-like representations of recurring narrative trajectories. These are constructed using corpus-driven frequency, collocation, and concordance analyses and validated through qualitative analysis. This hybrid methodology provides a replicable procedure for uncovering dominant narrative forms and their institutional variation. We demonstrate this approach through a case study based on German political and media discourse on irregular migration, revealing dominant narrative forms—such as the migrant as a threat, victim, or burden—and how they differ across institutional contexts. Our method bridges the interpretive richness of narrative inquiry with the empirical scalability of corpus analysis. It offers a replicable, transparent model for narrative analysis at scale and provides new tools for tracing narrative convergence, divergence, and ideological framing across genres and contexts.

This paper explores how accounting practices involving holding-self-accountable and holding-other-accountable foreground tacit relational expectations contingent upon the affordances and constraints of “doing-family-at-a-distance.” Drawing on interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis (MCA), I examine how accounting practices surface the interlocutors’ multimodal evaluations of conduct (in)appropriateness vis-à-vis their relational expectations, entitlements and responsibilities, thereby implicitly operationalising membership in relational categories, including parent–migrant-adult-child and husband–wife. Through micro analyses of interactions between Spanish-speaking family members, I illustrate how interlocutors implicitly foreground and negotiate relational expectations tied to “doing transnational family,” such as visiting children overseas and “doing family transnationally” by pursuing aligning stances, thereby orienting to the relational relevance of sustaining stability within their relationships. The findings highlight accounting as a category-implicative action and a window into implied relational expectations consequential for how we interactionally accomplish “family” at a distance.