Ordinary Conversation Research Articles

The performativity of leadership talk

Leadership-as-practice holds great promise for the re-theorisation of leadership in ways that reflect the dynamics of ongoing practice in the day-to-day realities of organising. However, in order to progress this agenda there is an urgent need to develop more dynamic theories and complementary methodologies that are better able to engage with the continuities of leadership practice. This paper responds to this need firstly by teasing out the conceptual implications of the practices/practice duality, differentiating between leadership as a set of practices, and leadership in the flow of practice. Then, drawing theoretical insights from Austin and Mead, the performative effects of turning points in the flow of ordinary conversation are examined in the context of the leadership talk of a senior management team. The paper makes contributions to both theory and methodology, which are elaborated empirically to show how different types of talk relate to different phases of leadership practice.

Using a patient decision aid for insulin initiation in patients with type 2 diabetes: a qualitative analysis of doctor–patient conversations in primary care consultations in Malaysia

ObjectiveTo investigate whether the use of apatient decision aid (PDA) for insulin initiation fulfils its purpose of facilitating patient-centred decision-making through identifying how doctors and patients interact when using the...

Acquiring Piaget’s Conservation Concept of Numbers, Lengths, and Liquids as Ordinary Play

Piaget’s influential research on the conservation concept has a wide-reaching impact even in modern-day settings. This study examines Piaget’s concept from a perspective that is different from those in existing studies. It focuses on improving the relationship between toddlers and tasks for the acquisition of the conservation concepts of number, length, and liquids. Given that new investigative tasks may be needed to clarify the stage and factors of acquisition, this study examines the possibility of acquisition of the conservation concept by 3-year-olds, with an improved task that is integrated into ordinary conversation and play. The treatment variable was the Piaget task as part of ordinary conversation and play, and the A-B design was adopted because withdrawal is naturally difficult. Results demonstrated the possibility of 3-year-olds’ acquisition of Piaget’s concept by familiarizing the toddler with the task. Such intervention through the incorporation of Piaget tasks into ordinary conversation or play had clear positive effects, contrary to the results of previous studies that dismiss a 3-year-old’s ability to understand the conservation concept.

Sequence recompletion: A practice for managing lapses in conversation

Conversational interaction occasionally lapses as topics become exhausted or as participants are left with no obvious thing to talk about next. In this article I look at episodes of ordinary conversation to examine how participants resolve issues of speakership and sequentiality in lapse environments. In particular, I examine one recurrent phenomenon—sequence recompletion—whereby participants bring to completion a sequence of talk that was already treated as complete. Using conversation analysis, I describe four methods for sequence recompletion: turn-exiting, action redoings, delayed replies, and post-sequence transitions. With this practice, participants use verbal and vocal resources to locally manage their participation framework when ending one course of action and potentially starting up a new one.

Pedagogical Functions of Sequences Organization of Talk in the EFL Classroom

Conversational sequences appear to be basically built around a basic pair of adjacent interactional actions; such as a question which makes an answer become relevant next. However, in contexts other than ordinary conversation, there are more complex features of sequential organization needed to be investigated especially those occurred in institutional contexts. This study applied CA to examine the interactional activities of teaching and learning in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in Thailand. The results show that teaching and learning are not planned but contingent activities, and that the pedagogical goal of developing language knowledge is mutually achieved in a micro-context of interaction between the teacher and students mostly in a form of coherent successive and extended elicitation and response sequences rather than series of separated courses of random action sequences. Furthermore, detailed pedagogical implications which manifest itself in the developing of these sequences of talk are uncovered in a turn-by-turn basis. This empirical study provides evidence that inform the teaching practices about how classroom talk should be managed successively in order to achieve pedagogical effectiveness.

Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers

All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of analogy. --David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding The other knows me merely by analogy--and that just is not knowing another mind! But I've already seen that nothing could be better than, could go beyond, analogy here! --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason IN PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS, WORDSWORTH CONSIDERS THE pleasure received from metrical language and ends up offering what is perhaps his most comprehensive but least original statement on aesthetic theory: I mean pleasure which mind derives from perception of in dissimilitude. This principle is great spring of activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. From this principle direction of sexual appetite, and all passions connected with it, take their origin: it is life of our ordinary conversation; and upon accuracy with which in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in are perceived, depend our and our feelings. (1) A commonplace of eighteenth-century aesthetics, as editors Jane Worthington Smyser and W. J. B. Owen note, Wordsworth's principle of similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude, reflects a basic concern with workings of analogical thought. (2) If analogy was understood broadly in eighteenth century as a resemblance between things with regard to some circumstances, (3) Wordsworth is interested here in how analogical resemblances are determined in first place, and in how they determine many facets of life: aesthetic experience, of course, but also mental activity, passions, morality, judgment, and intercourse in all senses. Approaching this passage with concerns of queer theory and poststructuralist ethics in mind, recent readers have argued that Wordsworth privileges certain notions of sameness and difference: first half of his chiastic formulation (similitude in dissimilitude) has been criticized as a heteronormative principle that puts forth sexual difference as a necessary condition for attraction, while latter half (dissimilitude in similitude) has been valorized for emphasizing importance of difference in context of ethical relations. (4) And yet crux of Wordsworth's formulation does not so much involve sameness and/or difference as the accuracy with which in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in are perceived. least when it comes to taste and moral feelings, everything, for Wordsworth, would seem to not upon whether one privileges sameness or difference, but upon one's ability to discern difference between a and a dissimilitude. Everything would seem to depend, in other words, upon possibility of even knowing difference between difference and sameness. Of course, by most accounts, epistemological limits of analogy are supposed to be old news at beginning of nineteenth century. At beginning of seventeenth writes Michel Foucault, thought ceases to move in element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer form of knowledge but rather occasion for error. (5) Students of Romanticism will likely understand break Foucault identifies in terms of a more gradual shift, whereby a system of analogical correspondences that structured Renaissance ontology breaks down across Enlightenment as analogy comes to be seen as a merely rhetorical device, rather than an organizing principle that unifies physical, moral, and spiritual realms. According to both Earl Wasserman and M. H. Abrams, for example, the last significant vestige of myth of an analogically ordered is found in eighteenth century, albeit in a greatly weakened form, after literal belief in a universe of divine types and correspondences, which had originally supported this structural trope, faded. …

DO IGNORANT ASSESSORS CASES POSE A CHALLENGE TO RELATIVISM ABOUT EPISTEMIC MODALS?

1.IntroductionOur ordinary conversations are filled with talk about what could or must be. For instance, in an iconic scene from On the Waterfront, the protagonist Terry bemoans his ruined boxing career. could have been a contender, he says, instead of a bum, which is what I am.1 Terry's regret is tied not only to the way things are but also to the way things might have been. As it was, Terry lost his chance at the title. However, had he not thrown a big fight, things might have turned out quite differently for him. Could and might, along with their duals, should and must, are modal terms: we use them to talk about what is possible and what is necessary. Terry's statement has to do with what is metaphysically possible. Although certain things are essential to Terry's nature, presumably being a bum is not. T here are other kinds of possibility besides metaphysical possibility. For instance, when a parent tells a child You must not lie, she is reminding the chi ld of what is morally necessary - that is, what is not possible given the constraints of morality.One particularly interesting type of modality is epistemic modality, which concerns what is possible given a body of knowledge or evidence. For instance, consider Luke and Max's conversation in (1).(1) Luke: What did you catch out on the lake?Max: I'm no expert, but it might be a rainbow trout.Luke: It can't be a rainbow trout. It is missing the pink streak down its side.Max: Oh, then I guess I was wrong.Cases involving epistemic modals, such as (1), present an interesting semantic challenge. In order to give a semantic treatment of epistemic modals, we must explain how informational states figure in the semantic representation of these terms. Recently, there have been several proposals for a semantic theory of epistemic modals.2 One major view - relativism -holds that claims involving epistemic modals are only true or false relative to epistemic agents or informational states. On this view, epistemic modals are quantifiers over epistemic possibilities, and the range of possibilities quantified over changes depending on knowledge is relevant. For now, we can think of epistemic possibilities as represented by epistemically possible worlds - worlds compatible with what is known.3 Formally, utterances containing epistemic modals express propositions (which we can think of as either sets of worlds or functions from worlds to truth values) that are evaluated for truth relative to a circumstance of evaluation (or index). The circumstance of evaluation includes a parameter i that represents an informational state that determines the range of the quantifier.Because informational states vary from person to person, an important question for the relativist to answer is whose knowledge is relevant? According to a basic version of relativism - call it speaker relativism - the truth of an epistemic modal claim depends upon what the speaker knows at the time of utterance. It is true just in case what the speaker knows at the time she utters the claim does not rule out the possibility in question. Relativist John MacFarlane claims that speaker relativism is inadequate. He argues that examples like (1) show that it cannot be the speaker's information that is relevant. If the speaker's evidence alone is relevant, then it would hardly be appropriate for Luke to contradict Max's claim, or for Max to retract it. After all, for all Max knew at the time he uttered the claim, the fish was a rainbow trout. Instead, MacFarlane suggests that the truth of epistemic modal claims depends on the informational state of the person assessing the claim. According to MacFarlane's view - call it assessor relativism - epistemic modal claims are assessment-sensitive in that their truth depends on what is known by the assessor at the time he or she assesses the claim. Hence, truth for epistemic modal claims varies with what MacFarlane calls the context of assessment4Examples such as (1) seem especially suited to support assessor relativism because, in this case, the assessor knows more than the speaker. …

The Location of Cultural Authenticity: Identifying the Real and the Fake in Urban Guizhou

This article examines notions of cultural identity and authenticity and how these notions are articulated in the small city of Kaili in Guizhou Province, an ethnically diverse region. Despite its urban status, Kaili has been branded by the local government as a yuanshengtai tourist destination. This Chinese term literally translates as “original ecology” but is used in ordinary conversation to denote a cultural authenticity in which people exist in quiet harmony with nature. Promotional literature uses the term to tout the ethnic cultural practices that mainly occur in the villages of Kaili’s municipal periphery. In contrast, many local urban inhabitants—although amenable to the promotion of Kaili as a tourist destination—have rejected the notion that the city itself could be considered culturally authentic, and proudly declare themselves “fake” ethnic minorities, as against the “genuine” ethnic people of surrounding villages. These small-city inhabitants have also defined themselves against big-city visitors by attributing to the visitors a naive fascination with cultural authenticity, while themselves remaining aloof from such practices. The cultural authenticity discourse in Kaili has thus facilitated a reordering of social and spatial hierarchies, as blase small-city residents define themselves against both culturally authentic rural people and authenticity-seeking big-city tourists. In analyzing this, the article draws out the broader implications regarding PRC notions of ethnicity, cultural practices, heritage, and identity.

Air traffic communications in routine and emergency contexts: A case study of Flight 1549 ‘miracle on the Hudson’

This paper is a conversation analytic investigation of Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications with U.S. Air Flight 1549 and other flights before, during, and after a critical emergency in which the plane (safely) landed in the Hudson River. While foundational conversation analytic research on air traffic communications has already been done, this method has not yet been systematically applied to air traffic communications during actual emergencies. This project will therefore fill a gap in previous research by analyzing ATC/plane interactions during an actual emergency and investigating whether routinized procedures alone are the most effective when emergency situations occur. I will show how routine interactional conventions in this work setting (e.g., the use of scripted talk and ‘positional’ grammar) help participants to maintain the safe flow of air traffic and to accommodate emergencies when they occur. I will show that during the critical emergency the ATCO and the pilot of Flight 1549 switched from a routinized (scripted) form of interaction to a conversational form of interaction, and at times to a ‘hybrid’ format which combined elements of routine ATC talk with elements of the speech exchange system of ordinary conversation.

Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Language. Donald S. Hair. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+301.

<i>Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Language</i>. Donald S. Hair. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+301.

Grindr casual hook-ups as interactional achievements

One pervasive use of the Grindr mobile application is the initiation and accomplishment of pseudonymous sexual encounters between gay strangers based on location awareness. Not only are such encounters oriented towards quasi-immediate sexual gratification, but they are collaboratively done so as to preclude repeat encounters and relational development, with the protagonists supposedly left unaffected emotionally, relationally and socially by their meeting. This creates a rather special – and analytically interesting – interactional dilemma when Grindr users initiate a social contact with potential partners, usually through the chat function integrated into the mobile app. This article describes the way Grindr users have developed a particular ‘linguistic ideology’, which casts ordinary conversation as an interactional activity that is performed between (potential) friends and enables relational development. As such, it is unsuitable for one-time sexual encounters, the production of which is a distinctive and accountable interactional accomplishment. This article analyzes the special interactional practices based on profile-matching sequences which Grindr users have developed to circumvent the relational affordances of electronic conversation. These practices constitute Grindr users as a particular form of speech community, adjusted both to their orientation towards initiating ‘purely’ sexual encounters and to the socio-material design of the Grindr mobile application.

Aha-moments in interaction: Indexing a change of state in Polish

This paper focuses on the change-of-state functions of aha in Polish. Drawing on the analysis of data from ordinary and institutional conversations the paper identifies systematic patterns in the token's prosodic realization and its sequential position, which allow for distinguishing three different kinds of change-of-state signaled by aha. It will be shown that (1) a relatively plain aha, produced as a third-positioned receipt to question–answer sequences, indicates a change in informedness, while a prosodically accentuated ↓a↑ha:::, (2) uttered in response to elicited or unelicited elaborations, indicates now-understanding, and (3) produced as a post-expansion to an already possibly closed sequence, indicates revelation.

Student Misconceptions and Vocabulary Mix-ups: Speech Science at the Nexus

Purpose The immediate purpose of this article is to describe how the meaning of terms used in the speech science classroom may conflict with different terminology used in ordinary conversation and in more specialized areas of practice. The ultimate aim is to enable teachers to head off these potential confusions when teaching speech science, and to consider such confusions when untangling wrong answers from students. Method Several examples of confusing terminology are discussed: Resonance, Constriction, Aspiration. Conclusion Students and teachers have a hard job of disentangling the terminology used in the communication disorders classroom. Teachers should be aware of these potential confusions and take steps to reduce or elucidate them.

Denigrating and being denigrated for a higher end: Constructing ordinary expertise through supportive and belligerent talk

This article explores the construction of ordinary expertise as a joint venture between experts and advisees in a Swedish makeover television show aired since 2006, Lyxfällan (Eng. The Luxury Trap). This show is also an exponent of belligerent broadcasting (Higgins et al., 2012) and circulates a discourse of consumption which promotes an individualistic consumer ideal.Drawing on methodological approaches from studies of broadcast talk as talk-in-interaction and multimodal discourse analysis, the article examines the ways in which performances by advisers, advisees and an unseen narrator are made to work together to construct ordinary expertise. The analysis reveals that Lyxfällan׳s construction of ordinary expertise heavily relies upon experts and advisees both following and breaking the general norms of ordinary conversations and the sociability of broadcast talk (Scannell, 1996), as well as the more specific conventions of the participation framework (Thornborrow, 2015) of exchanges between advisers and advisees. In following and breaking these norms and conventions, experts and advisees jointly construct ordinary expertise through the enactment of a dialectics of resistance and compliance, which in the end is tilted toward the advisers.

Never Say No... How the Brain Interprets the Pregnant Pause in Conversation.

In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers, and the like are more likely to occur with a delay–conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when relatively fast (300 ms after question offset) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard short dialogues contrasting in speed and valence of response while having their EEG recorded. We found that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’; however, this contrast disappeared in the delayed responses. 'No' responses, however, elicited a late frontal positivity both if they were fast and if they were delayed. We interpret these results as follows: a fast ‘no’ evoked an N400 because an immediate response is expected to be positive–this effect disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. However, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, in immediate response.

Du rapport entre la négation et l’impolitesse dans les Exchanges d’informations face a face en français

Dans cette contribution, nous nous proposons d’aborder la question de l’impolitesse linguistique en français dans le cadre de la conversation ordinaire et plus précisément dans l’échange d’informations. De par son caractère éminemment fonctionnel, l’échange d’informations constitue un lieu privilégié d’observation des rapports entre langue et culture. À travers une étude de mécanismes interactionnels (i.e. question-réponse), notamment de la séquence/réponse négative récurrente je ne sais pas moi, nous nous demanderons ce qui distingue cette construction-là de celle-ci je ne sais pas; pourquoi et dans quelles situations, ou à quel moment de l’interaction, le locuteur emploie celle-là plutôt que celle-ci ou vice-versa ? Quels sont les effets socio interactifs produits ? Qu’en ressort-il au niveau du profil du locuteur ? Les éléments de réponse que nous apporterons à ces questions s’appuient sur une approche théorique et méthodologique combinatoire des apports de la polyphonie linguistique, l’analyse conversationnelle, la grammaire des émotions et le concept d’impolitesse.

The Metaphysical Consequences of Counterfactual Skepticism

A series of recent arguments purport to show that most counterfactuals of the form if A had happened then C would have happened are not true. These arguments pose a challenge to those of us who think that counterfactual discourse is a useful part of ordinary conversation, of philosophical reasoning, and of scientific inquiry. Either we find a way to revise the semantics for counterfactuals in order to avoid these arguments, or we find a way to ensure that the relevant counterfactuals, while not true, are still assertible. I argue that regardless of which of these two strategies we choose, the natural ways of implementing these strategies all share a surprising consequence: they commit us to a particular metaphysical view about chance.

Talking about troubles in conversation

Introduction Talking About Troubles an Introduction. Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner & Anita Pomerantz Chapter 1 On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversation. Chapter 2 On 'Trouble-Premonitory' Response to Inquiry. Chapter 3 The Rejection of Advice: Managing the Problematic Convergence of a 'Troubles-Telling' and a 'Service Encounter'. Chapter 4 On The Interactional Unpackaging of a 'gloss'. Chapter 5 On the Organization of Laughter in Talk About Troubles. Chapter 6 On Stepwise Transition From Talk About a Trouble to Inappropriately Next-Positioned Matters.

The role of ordinary conversation and shared activity in the main effect between perceived support and affect

AbstractPeople with high perceived support have better mental health, but how this occurs is not well understood. We tested hypotheses from relational regulation theory that the main effect between perceived support and affect primarily reflects ordinary conversation and shared activity. In two studies (n = 193; n = 149), students rated three important network members and psychological reactions to each. In a third study (n = 72) strangers shared an activity in a round‐robin design. Affect was strongly determined by with who participants were interacting or thinking about. Perceived support, ordinary conversation, and shared activity were strongly linked, and each was related to high positive affect, low negative affect, perceived similarity, and few negative thoughts. Perceived support's link to affect emerged when strangers shared a brief activity. Thus, much of perceived support's main effect with affect could be explained as resulting from ordinary conversation and shared activity.

Preferred terminology for medical journals.

The purpose of medical journals is to disseminate information. This is achieved in a different manner than ordinary conversation. Conversation has the advantage over the virtual or printed page because the listener can immediately request clarification of any ambiguities. Common ambiguities in medical writing include words and phrases that are statistically incorrect, potentially inflammatory or logically flawed. Statistically incorrect words include association, average, incidence, prevalence, rate, significant and trend. Potentially inflammatory words and phrases include, ensure, failed, missed, suffering and standard of care. Logically flawed words and phrases include new, novel, many adjectives ending in -st, and gold standard. Relevant examples of correct and incorrect usage for this journal are given.