This study examines four interactional episodes between two sisters (aged 20 and 10) in a Chinese-Australian family, where one takes action to guan – to intervene in and manage – the other’s (mis)behaviour in the absence of their parents. Drawing on interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, this paper investigates (1) how the two sisters actively participate in guan sequences and (2) how their ongoing orientation to entitlements with respect to guan is displayed and negotiated in interaction. The analysis focuses on two relational accounting practices, through which the sisters attempt to legitimise either their guan practices or perceived problematic behaviour: (i) showing care for each other’s well-being and (ii) referring to the absent mother. In doing so, they (re)frame the behaviour intervention and management as driven by affection or as (dis)aligning with parental expectations, invoking affective entitlement or higher authority to solicit compliance or concession, although this does not always succeed.

Drawing on a combination of the analytical tools from interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, this paper explores a specific type of everyday family life – a sibling dispute, and how the ‘parent’ category is used as an interactional resource by parents and children during oppositional talk over sharing. The data comes from spontaneous video-recorded conversations in a Russian-speaking family living in Australia that includes two siblings, aged 2;10 and 5;7. The findings demonstrate how (1) children exploit the ‘parent’ category to mobilise support or denounce the other’s reportable transgression, and (2) parents intervene in the dispute and socialise children into sharing, gradually moving from suggestions and directives to a threat. This study contributes to our understanding of how sibling disputes unfold and how siblings construct their relationships.

From narrative research, we know how the past is reconstructed in narratives. But we also have consolidated forms of communication to talk about the future . These forms are discussed in this article as “projective genres.” First, the concept of communicative genres is presented, and its theoretical background and central concepts are explained. The empirical analysis shows which communicative means the anticipation of the future uses: tasks are distributed, action steps are defined, and responsibilities are assigned. Actors use modals verbs and when-then constructions to accomplish this. After the empirical analysis, the question is discussed of which specific communicative problems this way of speaking about the future solves: on the one hand, projective genres gradually reduce uncertainty; they anticipate and structure a future event. On the other hand, they provide certainty of action. Because projective genres typically appear as a series – the future plan of action is repeatedly addressed and thus kept relevant and current. The analysis is based on empirical data (audio and video recordings from everyday contexts); genre analysis and conversation analysis are used as a method.

This Special Issue brings together a collection of seven articles that aim to expand our understanding of relationship building and socialisation practices in family discourse with the key focus on the interactional accomplishment of “doing family.” Exploring video-recorded face-to-face, digitally-mediated and hybrid interactions, they examine a variety of family conversations – parent-child, sibling (brother-brother; sister-sister), married couples and in-laws – in different languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish), including some code-switching. The Special Issue also illustrates the use of the key discourse analytic approaches to interactional data analysis, ranging from interactional pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics to membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis.

Discursive psychologists have shown how food assessments serve a variety of functions during mealtime interactions. Anthropological studies attest to the cultural significance of food and eating practices as reported through interviews and ethnographies. This study extends these literatures by studying food assessment in small talk on a social media platform. The data comprised 53 posts selected from an extended discussion on Twitter of a traditional south Indian dish which provoked a furore of media responses. Conversation and discursive psychological analysis showed how the initial food assessment was warranted and challenged by mobilising category-related knowledge and entitlement. In addition, cultural categories and humour were used to dismiss the permissibility of making an assessment. We conclude that the cultural significance of a particular food and the entitlement to assess it are practically accomplished, and that online small talk provides a useful context to study how and thereby make a novel contribution to the literature.

In the tradition of Interactional Linguistics, we show how speakers make use of Predicate Nominal Constructions (PNCs) in American English conversation. We first provide a grammatical profile of PNCs as a highly frequent type of low-transitive clause in actual everyday use. We then bring evidence to show that, functionally, speakers use PNCs specifically to do two types of more semantic work (to identify or categorize a referent) and two types of more interactional work (to inform about or assess a referent). Finally, we examine the role PNCs play in the social activity of building a characterization.

This paper examines how a friendship group of four boys in a bilingual Spanish-English preschool classroom explore and exploit heterogeneous resources and social voices from community, family, school and media contexts in pretend play. Data are from a video-ethnography conducted at their preschool in California serving Mexican heritage families. Drawing on the frameworks of heteroglossia and language scaling, and multimodal conversation analysis, the analysis demonstrates how the children “scale up” Spanish at their preschool, which, though bilingual, is preparing children for English-only public school education. They do so through enacting powerful male social roles (Compadre, Pápi, Fruit Ninja gamers) while playing with linguistic boundaries through diverse linguistic practices. Through their stylistic performances, the children create peer solidarity, belonging, and hierarchy, as well as socialize heteroglossic practices for the peer group.

This study examines the social accountability of displaying to burn oneself during naturally occurring joint cooking activities. The sequential, multimodal analysis of responding actions to burn displays allows to discuss publicly available displays of perceptual experiences as related to social action. The study specifies three sequential trajectories following displays of heat-occasioned experiences, including (i) orienting to the unfortunate character of the event, (ii) orienting to issues of responsibility and (iii) questioning the validity of burn displays. The study shows that the question of what observable conduct is physiological and what is social is a members’ problem, including whether, how and to what extent the burn display is proportional to the object’s thermic features, and the sequential and moral implications that the burn display makes relevant. The study contributes to our understanding of retrosequences as a sequence organization that incorporates the relevance of sensorial practices in and for social interaction and of how an EMCA approach to the study of sociality can be particularly productive for further investigating the intricate relation between physiological experiences and the social accountability of action. The participants speak French, Swiss-German and German as first and second language.