Ongoing Talk Research Articles

Subliminal linguistic effects in dementia interaction

Subliminal linguistic effects occur when words or phrases that are overheard by an interlocutor become subconsciously assimilated into their ongoing talk. Such effects are a common feature of everyday interaction. Yet by their nature they are ephemeral, extremely difficult to capture empirically and have not previously been studied at the micro-interactional level. However, broader ethnographic observations made in dementia care settings appear to indicate that subliminal linguistic effects are operationalised differently in people who have dementia, when compared to those without cognitive problems. This exploratory study focuses on over 200 hours of naturalistic multiparty field recordings collected in two UK dementia care settings. It utilises conversation analysis (CA) to examine the reproduction of naturally occurring subliminal linguistic effects in the speech and communication patterns of people with dementia and provides the first systematic micro-analysis of the phenomenon. The position of subliminal linguistic effects in relation to existing sociolinguistic research on overhearing and repetition and the role that features such as intonational emphasis may play in generating subliminal cues are discussed. The study confirms that it is possible to capture examples of subliminal linguistic effects in naturalistic settings and that there are potentially a number of micro-interactional features associated with the phenomenon in dementia communication which could form the basis of a novel, non-intrusive measure of cognitive impairment.

The paradox of disengagement: Bodily displays of inattention in couple therapy

Using concepts developed by Goffman and the theory of inter-corporeality, this paper describes non-speaking spouses' responses to complaints made about them by the other spouse in the context of couple therapy first consultations. While the turn-taking system of couple therapy effectively precludes the possibility of a direct verbal response, non-speaking spouses often display bodily their disengagement from their spouse's talk. Using multimodal conversation analysis as the method, we show the repertoire of such disengagement behaviors and trace the moment-by-moment contexts in which they arise. While disengagement behaviors embody their producer's inattention to their spouse's talk, at the same time, they are, paradoxically, interactional moves produced in the presence of others, conveying their producer's negative stance to the ongoing talk. We argue that the timing of these disengagement practices involves anticipation of the direction of talk: non-speaking spouses display disengagement in moments when the speaking spouse's talk takes a direction toward an intensification of complaints about them.

Interactional practices to manage epistemic stances in online searches during a computer-mediated conversation-for-learning

Despite rising interests in the manifestations of second language (L2) interactional competence (IC) in online language learning activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017a, 2017b; González-Lloret, 2016), the intersection between epistemic and affective stancetaking in the online space remains largely unexplored. This paper examines how an intermediate-level learner jointly managed epistemics and affect with a tutor in a teleconference session designed as a conversation-for-learning. The analysis focuses on web search sequences occasioned by emergent asymmetries in the ongoing talk, and how the participants leveraged resources to negotiate knowledge positions and index emotions during online searches. Findings reveal that epistemic and affective stance management actions are a prominent aspect of online search sequences. For example, during an online search, the tutee demonstrates his L2 IC by citing and attributing responsibility to the source in response to epistemic primacy challenges. In the process, he also utilised affective resources such as laughter and a term of endearment to delicately manage disagreements. By focusing on the management of epistemic and affective stances, this study informs pedagogical decisions about the use of online searches in L2 learning activities.

Language and the Sensing Body: How Sensoriality Permeates Syntax in Interaction

This article explores the grammar-body interface by examining the intertwinement of embodied practices and turns at talk, wherethe sensing body permeates the ongoing syntax, in particular in activities in which the participants are engaged in talking about sensorial features while at the same time experiencing them, for instance in tasting sessions. So, the question tackled concerns how situated feelings, sensory experiences, and perceptive actions are embedded in the ongoing talk, and how they shape its emergent syntax, possibly affecting its smooth progressivity. The study shows how the choice of specific syntactic formats can be systematically related to the complex ecology of embodied actions, namely to publicly accountable ways of sensing material objects, to ways of showing and addressing an audience, and to visible ways of referring to standard documents normatively defining tasting descriptors. The syntactic formats described and their specific temporal realizations are thus deeply rooted in the local material ecology, in which they not only reproduce a normative model but reflexively express the senses with words and sensuously feel the words.

How Speakers Orient to the Notable Absence of Talk: A Conversation Analytic Perspective on Silence in Psychodynamic Therapy.

Silence has gained a prominent role in the field of psychotherapy because of its potential to facilitate a plethora of therapeutically beneficial processes within patients’ inner dynamics. This study examined the phenomenon from a conversation analytical perspective in order to investigate how silence emerges as an interactional accomplishment and how it attains interactional meaning by the speakers’ adjacent turns. We restricted our attention to one particular sequential context in which a patient’s turn comes to a point of possible completion and receives a continuer by the therapist upon which a substantial silence follows. The data collection consisted of 74 instances of such post-continuer silences. The analysis revealed that silence (1) can retroactively become part of a topic closure sequence, (2) can become shaped as an intra-topic silence, and (3) can be explicitly characterized as an activity in itself that is relevant for the therapy in process. Only in this last case, the absence of talk is actually treated as disruptive to the ongoing talk. Although silence is often seen as a therapeutic instrument that can be implemented intentionally and purposefully, our analysis demonstrated how it is co-constructed by speakers and indexically obtains meaning by adjacent turns of talk. In the ensuing turns, silence indeed shows to facilitate access to the patient’s subjective experience at unconscious levels.

Teacher smiles as an interactional and pedagogical resource in the classroom

In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, we pay attention to their temporal relationships to students’ preceding and subsequent facial expressions and the unfolding of on-going talk. We argue that smiling can index teachers’ affiliative and pedagogical responsiveness to troubles and competences implied by prior student actions. The analysis of selected data fragments shows how smiling is part of multimodal action packages through which teachers manage momentary action disalignments and restore a sense of students as competent actors. The findings contribute towards recent CA research on the embodied and interactional nature of teaching and learning by showing some ways in which smiling is a situated practice used for professional purposes.

Open Hand Prone as a resource in multimodal claims to interruption

AbstractThis paper examines the Open Hand Prone ‘vertical palm’ as a resource for participants in conversation for displaying their treatment of a co-participant’s – or their own – turn/action as interruptive. Through this practice participants can manage turn-taking by making it relevant for the co-participant to stop talking. The data for this study consist of video-recorded conversations in English and Finnish from domestic and institutional settings, as well as broadcast talk. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study shows that the gesture occurs in situations involving overlapping/competitive talk or incompatible embodied activities that somehow affect the progressivity of the ongoing talk. This paper complements previous research on gesture studies and interaction by investigating the function these gestures take in stopping/interrupting a co-participant’s turn-at-talk across multiple settings, and by studying how the gesture functions as a part of a practice which has direct social consequences on the local organization of turn-taking.

Is Parent–Adolescent Drug Talk Always Protective? Testing A New Scale of Drug Talk Styles in Relation to Adolescent Personal Norms, Parental Injunctive Norms, Substance Use Intentions, and Behaviors

ABSTRACTAccording to parent-offspring drug talk (PODT) model, the specificity of drug talk styles is identified by the timing and directness of communication about substance use between parent and adolescent (e.g., situated direct, ongoing direct, situated indirect, and ongoing indirect talk style). Given the limitation of the original, single item measure for drug talk styles with a categorical response option, the current study proposed a new scale of drug talk styles and tested its concurrent validity. Using cross-sectional survey data (N = 2,035), confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the factor structure of the scale. Consistent with PODT model, the analysis yielded support for a four-factor structure for the drug talk styles. Next, a path analysis was employed to validate the scale. The findings suggested that situated direct talk was positively related to personal anti-substance-use norms and parental anti-substance-use injunctive norms but negatively related to smoking intention, as well as alcohol use in the past 30 days. Ongoing direct talk, however, was found to be positively associated with alcohol and marijuana use in the past 30 days. Research implications and future directions are discussed.

Korean ‘Formality’ endings ‘-supnita/-supnikka’ and ‘-eyo’ in the negotiation of interactional identity in the news interview

What makes the rich verbal inflection system in Korean grammar even more tangled is the reported presence of formal and casual endings. Many scholars have traditionally categorized them in terms of formality or the level of deference and affection. This approach, however, has paid little attention to how Korean speakers actually ‘code-switch’ between the two forms in a rather dynamic manner at each turn at talk. More recent studies from a more functional perspective mainly focus on the speaker's side of the interaction. In this study, two separate episodes from a Korean news interview show were analyzed. I first transcribed the data following the conventions in Conversation Analysis, then marked all the endings employed in 1st pair part questions and 2nd pair part answers by who issued it, and in which pair part and with what local context it was issued. It has been argued that different languages employ different linguistic devices to project and reshape identities of the other(s) present in real-time interaction. My analyses show that in the Korean news interview, speakers use the two endings in a highly selective manner to achieve the interactional goal of negotiating the moment-by-moment identities of the listener through ongoing talk.

Patient-initiated additional concerns in general surgery visits

ObjectiveTo understand how and when patients initiate additional concerns in general surgery visits. Methods175 video-recorded visits of a general surgery practice in rural Texas were collected, coded, and analyzed using Conversation analysis. ResultsPatients initiated 377 additional concerns, with 2 or more concerns raised in 80 visits, and 1 concern raised in 37 visits. Three methods of initiation were identified: fitted-to-topic (66%), fitted-to-activity (14%), and disjunctive (20%). Sixty percent of patient-initiated concerns occurred i) before the physical examination, compared to 14% after the physical exam, and ii) in pre-operative visits. ConclusionsIn contrast to the research on acute, primary care visits, patients in general surgery visits do not wait to present “door knob concerns.” Instead, patients in general surgery visits are more likely to initiate concerns early in the visit. Patients most frequently find and create opportunities to introduce new concerns by fitting them to the ongoing talk or activity. Practice implicationsPhysicians should spend more time on the physical exam, as this phase creates a unique opportunity for patients to initiate concerns.

Pouvoir des rires: des interactions en face à face aux conversations par texto

This article focuses on the interactional achievement of laughter by providing an overview of the studies we carried out on various types of settings, including institutional interactions and text-based conversations. Using a conversation analytic approach (Sacks et al. 1974), we shed light on how participants finely and systematically mobilize laughter in order to jointly achieve specific social actions such as softening corrections, producing requests or managing topic trajectories. We also show that participants recurrently laugh so as to manage the interactional troubles emerging from the ongoing talk, both in institutional and online settings. By revealing to what extent participants manage to adapt their laughing procedures to the situational and technical contingencies of the interaction in which they are involved, this article aims to promote laughter as a central part of participant's interactional competences.

A sentence dispersed within a turn-at-talk

The aim of this study is to show that there is orderliness in a piece of talk that is extremely complex and, in so doing, to explore the grammatical construction of naturally occurring, and contingently produced, utterances in Japanese interaction. First, I distinguish between unit-completeness and turn-completeness. Second, I introduce the notion of response-opportunity places to indicate those places in which although the ongoing talk is still both unit- and turn-incomplete, responses may be produced. These places are systematically used as loci for initiating solutions to various possible interactional problems, such as problems of hearing and understanding. Third, I examine different practices through which the speaker returns to the incomplete turn-constructional unit. The orderliness of the target talk is the result of the speaker’s systematic use of these places and practices.

How Stories Get Launched in Korean EFL Learners’ Conversations

This study investigated how stories get launched in Korean EFL learners’ conversations. Adopting a conversation analytic approach, the study analyzed conversations taking place between nine dyads of adult EFL learners and examined instances of storytelling to identify story introducing practices. The analysis showed a single turn launch was the common practice for starting a story both coherent with and discrepant from the topic of the ongoing talk. Entry into conversations with a coherent story was accomplished via prefixed devices such as time referents (when, yesterday, one day, etc.) and conventional phrases (I heard and one of my). Notably, formulating an abstract statement was also employed to introduce a story consistent with the ongoing talk. For stories disfluent from the preceding talk, the learners adopted the disjunctive markers of actually and oh to signal the unexpectedness of their story entry. Additionally, a story preface sequence performed in two turns was adopted to introduce a story. However, the collaborative means of story preface assisted by interlocutors and stories initiated through three-stage turns were not found in the present study. Based on the findings of the study, implications for EFL learning and teaching are discussed.

Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. New York: NYU Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-479-83118-0 (Paperback). 240 Pages. $28.00.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2017 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Patrisia Macias-Rojas' book, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, provides rich insight into domestic border security in the Southern Arizona/Sonora region. With the escalation of immigration debates throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, the subsequent election of Donald Trump, and ongoing talk of building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, this is an especially timely and relevant book. It will therefore appeal both to lay audiences and to scholars working within a range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to American Studies, Criminology, Latina/o Studies, Political Science, Public Policy, and Sociology.Macias-Rojas is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley. She then spent seven years on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College before assuming her current position in 2015. MaciasRojas' background features previous work with the San Quentin Prison University Project and the American Bar Association in Chicago as well. She thanks several mentors and colleagues in her book's acknowledgments section, including high profile scholars such as Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo from the Racial Democracy, Crime & Justice network, Michael Burawoy, Loic Wacquant, John Hagan, Beth Richie, and Marjorie Zatz, among others. Her intellectual lineage is impressive, and it has prepared her well for undertaking publicly engaged scholarship.From Deportation to Prison is a heartfelt book. In her acknowledgments, Macias-Rojas shares a story about her long-time friend who was labeled as a gang member when he was a teenager. He was subsequently incarcerated for many of his teen and adult years, and he was then eventually deported around the time that she was completing her dissertation. Macias-Rojas had been corresponding with her friend for several years leading up to when this happened. She was clearly struck by this experience, which ultimately drove her to seek out a greater understanding of the crimmigration crisis that currently plagues the U.S.Within the book itself, Macias-Rojas strategically brings in her own experiences at times. She describes her work as an ethnography of migration enforcement in an Arizona/Sonora border town, and toward this end she recounts her own encounters with law enforcement while in the field. Her book is based on a decade of research that includes over 150 interviews, field work during the 2001-2005 period, archival work between 2007 and 2009, and additional field work in 2010. Among her interviewees were smugglers, NGO workers, and border patrol agents. She also visited migrant shelters 1-2 times each week (as well as several other sites) when she was in the field. Macias-Rojas' methodological approach and personal accounts ultimately humanize topics and groups of people that are more typically politicized, sensationalized, and misunderstood.From Deportation to Prison focuses on changes in domestic border security since the 1990s and new forms of criminalization that have resulted from these changes. Macias-Rojas notes that unauthorized migration into the U.S. was regarded as a civil offense for most of the twentieth century. It is only in more recent years that it has come to be considered a criminal act. She offers the intriguing observation that ports of entry were originally set up to facilitate cross cultural sharing and international commerce and were hence less centered on security when compared to today's border check points. …

Developing L2 interactional competence: increasing participation through self-selection in post-expansion sequences

Using longitudinal conversation analysis as a methodological framework, this study documents the development of second language (L2) interactional competence by focusing on a recurrent interactional practice observed in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. Through observing a novice L2 learner’s developing methods of participation in recurrent post-expansion sequences, the study aims to reveal the trajectory of how his interactional practices and use of interactional resources change over time. The data comes from four episodes of his second and third year of learning English. The analysis shows that the learner increases his interactional competence in terms of turn-taking strategies, use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources, and display of relevancy and appropriateness when taking self-selected turns. The development of L2 interactional competence is displayed through the learner’s increased ability to monitor the details of the ongoing talk and his appropriate use of interactional resources. The findings contribute to recent CA investigations into the developmental process of L2 interactional competence through detailed longitudinal analysis.

Showing objects in Skype video-mediated conversations: From showing gestures to showing sequences

This paper focuses on sequences in which participants show one another a personal object in video-mediated communication. First, it brings some order into the diversity of showing practices by making a distinction between ‘gestural showings’ in which the display of an object is a gestural contribution to ongoing talk, and ‘showing sequences’, in which the visual display of the object becomes the focus of the interaction, with different ‘gestalt contextures’ of talk and embodied conduct. Second, regarding showing sequences, it introduces a further and important distinction, between ‘informative showings’ which enact a recipient without relevant knowledge regarding the showable, and ‘evocative showings’, which enact instead a knowledgeable recipient. Finally, this systematic understanding of the organization of showing practices is used to account for the recurrent production of showing sequences involving personal objects (which index familiar and intimate territories) in video-mediated interpersonal conversations, and to show how such sequences can constitute a powerful resource to perform ‘intimacy-at-a-distance’.

Some interactional uses of syntactically incomplete turns in Mandarin conversation

In everyday conversation, sometimes a speaker may not complete his/her turn, and the recipients do not treat it as problematic. This paper investigates this type of syntactically incomplete turns (henceforth, SITs) in Mandarin conversation. Specifically, this study examines how SITs are used and constructed through multimodal resources in Mandarin face-to-face conversation. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and multimodal analysis, the present study examines 8 hours of everyday Mandarin face-to-face conversation. It shows that the SITs are situated in particular sequential environments and triggered by local contingencies. For example, they are used to accomplish socially and interactionally inappropriate actions and display sensitivity to the recipients’ disengagement from the ongoing talk and the current participation framework. Also, despite the syntactic incompleteness of the SITs, the prosodic and bodily-visual features involved in their production usually indicate possible turn completion.

Receipting information as newsworthy vs. responding to redirection: Finnish news particles aijaa and aha(a)

This paper compares two Finnish change-of-state tokens, aijaa and aha, that share the same basic epistemic meaning: they treat the prior talk as new information. It will be shown that they differ with respect to what status they assign to the prior informing in the larger activity context and the import of the informing for the particle speaker's project. That is, aijaa treats the prior informing as newsworthy and thus worthy of further discussion, whereas aha receives informings that redirect the on-going talk in a way that has consequences for the aha speaker's project and thus requires reorientation. The general aim of the paper is to identify relevant parameters for distinguishing between change-of-state tokens in a language that has an abundance of elements for this purpose.

“I thought I’d be safe there”: Pre-empting blame in the talk of women reporting rape

One routine “common sense” means of explaining sexual violence is the ideologically facilitated tendency to blame the victim, and previous research has identified patterns of victim-blaming in the talk of perpetrators of rape, and also in that of the professionals who deal with rape in their day-to-day work. This article focuses on the discursive resources drawn on in police interviews by rape victims themselves as they attempt to account for their own behaviour in relation to the attack. It identifies and describes points within interviewees’ talk where they produce “accounts” (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), and considers what these tell us about the participants’ shared understanding of what is relevant to the on-going talk. Occasions when there is evidence of a mis-match in the understanding of the participants will also be discussed. The analyses illustrate that for the accounts of interviewees to be heard as relevant, a number of prevalent and problematic themes of victim-blaming must be assumed. Interviewees anticipate and pre-empt implications that various aspects of their own behaviour contributed to their attack, and interviewers vary in the level of skill they display at negotiating these shared understandings.

VOCABULARY NEGOTIATION IN THE KFL CLASSROOM: LANGUAGE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES THROUGH INTERACTION

Using the micro-analytic framework of conversation analysis, this study demonstrates Korean language learners’ varying repair strategies when facing vocabulary production problems. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to explore the ways in which Korean L2 learners co-construct repair sequences for vocabulary negotiation and (2) to advance our understanding of how learning opportunities are created in Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) classroom interaction. The data analyzed for this study are drawn from approximately nineteen hours of Korean as a second language classroom conversations, involving seven students and a teacher. It specifically investigates the various organ-izations of repair by two different language proficiency levels: advanced and intermediate. Analysis of moment-by-moment classroom interaction reveals that advanced and intermediate learners show different preferences and utilize repair sequences in differing ways in order to negotiate target vocabulary with interactants. Participants in the interaction move back and forth between the ongoing talk and the repair sequence and collaboratively resolve their problems in ways that create opportunities for learning. The analysis of these practices of “vocabulary negotiation” adds to a body of work that shows how students participate in building their own learning opportunities.