Source Of Trouble Research Articles

User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insisting

Moments of trouble and miscommunication occur regularly when users interact with virtual assistants like smart speakers. To add to the understanding of how users treat moments of trouble in everyday interactions with a virtual assistant (VA) in German, this paper reports on a conversation analytic study of practices that users deploy after a request to a VA has failed. The repair sequences that we analyse show users orienting to different trouble sources and employing a range of practices to resolve trouble, including repeating, altering their formulations and formulating related (new) requests. Most often, troubles are resolved after one instance of repair. Other repair sequences include several instances of repair and show more complex and diverse practices being employed. In some of these sequences, users ‘insist’ on their initial goal and/or strategy and do not always observably orient to the VA’s local reactions. In these cases, the interactional history with the VA and previously successful requests seem to play a role as well in the users’ local conduct.

Self-Repair in Tigrinya: Trouble Sources, Mechanisms and Solutions

This paper analyzes conversational self-repair, which refers to reconstructing problematic portions of a prior oral discourse by oneself, in Tigrinya. Tigrinya is a Northern Ethio-Eritrean-Semitic language spoken by the inhabitants of the Tigray regional state of Ethiopia and Eritrea. This article relies on recorded oral data from speakers of the Rayya Tigrinya variety, particularly inhabitants of Neksege located to the West of Maichew. A conversational analysis (CA) approach is used to analyze the trouble sources, mechanisms (initiators), and results of self-repair. The article shows that pronunciation problems emanating from dialectal variation or tongue slip, wrong word order including focus misplacement, missing constituents, perceived misunderstandings, and using (totally) wrong constituents are some of the trouble sources that push speakers to repair portions of a prior oral utterance. On top of that, cut-offs, particles, and lexemes (one verbal noun and some predicates) are identified as self-repair initiators. Though cut-offs do not indicate a self-repair, particles and predicates may sometimes indicate a self-repair. Finally, the article posits that expanding, replacing, re-ordering, aborting and restarting, and inserting are some of the solutions set for the repairable segments in the repaired portions of the oral discourse. The author recommends for further investigation repair in the process of language acquisition and learning, and the relationship between self-repair and the demographic features of participants.

The types of repairs, categories of repairs, repairs in doctor-patient communication, and repair strategies from the perspective of psycholinguistics

The nature of human spontaneous speech brings about speech errors and typical disfluencies such as hesitation, pause, silence, repetition, and repair. Recent studies in spoken dialects across many countries reported that speakers produce speech errors or unclear expressions in daily verbal communication. When speakers realize their utterances are erroneous or inappropriate, they frequently make pervasive, highly systematic, and measurable repairs in conversation. Some researchers claim that the repairs in conversation are ubiquitous. This occurrence reflects that individuals make great efforts to ensure their utterances are understandable and acceptable to the listeners. This also triggered the question of what role do speech repairs play in building mutual understanding and enhancing therapeutic relationships between doctors and patients during clinical interactions. Most of these studies have predominantly focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition, while limited studies have investigated repairs in clinical settings. Repair is a key mechanism for building mutual understanding in clinical interactions and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. Doctors and patients attempt to make their utterances understandable and acceptable to attain their purposes in the clinical encounter. Nevertheless, some studies do not describe the categories of repair strategies and the trouble source, while only limited research mentioned the types of repair. This gives no insights into the specific strategies and trouble sources in the communication. This study, therefore, sets out to review the types of repairs, categories of repairs, repairs in doctor-patient communication, and repair strategies in attempting to explain the repair mechanism that works in the communication setting between doctor-patient interactions from the perspective of epistemic, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and psycholinguistics.

Overexposed other-initiated repair in Mandarin conversation

When the non-trouble-source speaker initiates and even repairs the repairable, s/he might extend the other-initiation or other-correction segment by rejecting or commenting on the trouble source, thus overexposing the trouble source. This study investigates the overexposed other-initiated repair in Mandarin talk-in-interaction. Overexposed other-initiated repairs in Mandarin are executed in a boldfaced manner for a certain interactional reason, which the current research explores from the conversation analytic perspective. Repairables in the current study fall into either error-based or non-error-based ones. Furthermore, the repairables are taken by the interactants as either a common-sense blunder or a moral blunder. In addition, other overexposures reveal the nuanced relation between interactants and their respective epistemic stance in the local interactional environment

Reference repair in Korean conversation

This study examines, from a conversation-analytic perspective, the role of post-mortems following reference repair, whose organisational features exhibit the participants’ remedially motivated orientations towards managing their face and membership categories in accounting for a problematic reference. Post-mortems are predominantly organised as self-deprecating or other-supportive accounts, through which the troublesome character of a trouble source is downgraded, e.g., attributed to a momentary lapse. Their face-sensitive character is sometimes oriented via the repair-initiator’s abdication of correction, geared to pre-empting their generation, particularly when the repairable is an English word or its nativised version. In entertainment-oriented talk-shows, post-mortems, organised as mock-activities, are designedly promoted through exposed correction/reformulation. A case of problematic reference understanding is examined and accounted for as deriving from a tying-based mishearing, with the repair initiator being incorrectly primed to the trouble-source expression as continuative of the categorial flow of the preceding sequence, without recognising its sequence-organisational import in launching post-mortems.

Other-correction and epistemic imbalances in teacher–student interactions

Other-correction is a ubiquitous phenomenon in language, and has been extensively studied in conversation analysis and pragmatics. Nevertheless, the conditions of its occurrence still remain unclear. Based on Heritage’s theory of epistemics, the study unveils four distinct epistemic interaction patterns in which other-correction takes place, and endeavours to elucidate their associations with trouble sources, correction strategies, and correction positions. Empirical findings indicate that different epistemic interaction patterns of other-correction exhibit no discernible link with trouble sources, but manifest a statistically significant correlation with correction strategies and correction positions.

Closed paths in graphs vs. voting theory

Features of graphs that hinder finding closed paths with particular properties, as represented by the Traveling Salesperson Problem—TSP, are identified for three classes of graphs. Removing these terms leads to a companion graph with identical closed path properties that is easier to analyze. A surprise is that these troubling graph factors are precisely what is needed to analyze certain voting methods, while the companion graph’s terms are what cause voting theory complexities as manifested by Arrow’s Theorem. This means that the seemingly separate goals of analyzing closed paths in graphs and analyzing voting methods are complementary: components of data terms that assist in one of these areas are the source of troubles in the other. Consequences for standard decision methods are in Sects. 2.5, 3.7 and the companion paper (Saari in Theory Decis 91(3):377–402, 2021). The emphasis here is on paths in graphs; incomplete graphs are similarly handled.

Multimodality in third turn repetitions: Evaluation, mitigation, and the pursuit of responses in a Korean-as-foreign-language classroom

This conversation analysis (CA) study extends our understanding of the complexity of three turn instructional sequences by investigating the multimodal turn design of a teacher’s third turn repetitions (TTRs) and the actions accomplished in the third turn position as well as subsequent post-expansions. The videorecorded data are from an undergraduate Korean as a foreign language classroom at a large US university. The analysis reveals how a teacher coordinates resources such as language, prosody, gaze, gesture, body movements, and objects during and immediately following TTRs to mitigate negative evaluation, direct student attention to trouble sources, and intimate answers. The findings show that actions accomplished by talk, i.e. negative evaluation, and actions accomplished by multimodal resources like gaze, i.e. directing attention, may be undertaken simultaneously. The article contributes to understandings of teaching as complex and contingent interactional work by unpacking in fine-grained detail the moment-by-moment multimodal unfolding of pedagogical practice. We conclude by discussing implications for teacher preparation, namely the central role microanalysis of videorecorded classroom interaction should play.

Correcting Others in Other-Initiated Other-Repair Sequences

ABSTRACT Repair organization is a system of practices for dealing with problems of hearing, speaking, and understanding and a central mechanism for maintaining intersubjectivity in conversation. Among the different types of repair, other-initiated other-repair—that is, repair initiated and resolved by a recipient of a trouble source—is the least understood. In other-initiated other-repair sequences, an interactant self-selects to enact “other-correction” of some problematic aspect of another’s talk. What occasions other-correction? How are such corrections carried out? What is accomplished by correcting others? To answer these questions, I draw on a large dataset of ordinary conversational materials in the English and Russian languages and explore “practices and actions” of other-correction. I show how the activity of correcting others is shaped by participants’ orientations to positionality, intersubjectivity, and normativity. Data are in American/British English and Russian.

Эвфемизмы и дисфемизмы английского языка на тему физиологии женщины (беременность и роды)

This article aimed to study some common English euphemisms and dysphemisms on female physiology as exemplified by conception, pregnancy and childbirth, to describe the ways of creating such words and expressions, as well as to provide a sociocultural commentary on the euphemistic markers in contemporary English. The research is relevant due to the fact that euphemisms relating to female physiology have been studied rather superficially. Analysis from the viewpoint of rhyming slang represents a new and promising area in the field of euphemisms. The research methods are determined by the purpose and objectives of the study. The key method is descriptive, implemented using systematization, generalization and interpretation of language material. The linguistic methods include contextual analysis and semantic interpretation. The topic of women’s physiology is represented by expressions characterizing conception, contraception, pregnancy and childbirth that were selected from authoritative dictionaries of euphemisms and general and rhyming slang, as well as English-language fiction. The euphemisms were classified thematically (pregnancy as a special condition, pregnancy as an expectancy period, pregnancy with an emphasis on conception, pregnancy as an increase in the size of the belly, pregnancy as a source of trouble, and pregnancy as an accident). Techniques and means for creating euphemisms under study are presented. Rhyming slang, whose major function is euphemistic, is highlighted as a new promising sector of the functioning of euphemisms and dysphemisms referring to female physiology. The main points and conclusions of the article can be used when presenting the problems of euphemisms and dysphemisms in lectures and seminars on the theory of language, lexicology, stylistics, text interpretation, and intercultural communication.

On the division of labor in the maintenance of intersubjectivity: insights from the study of other-initiated repair in Vietnamese.

Few ideas have figured more centrally in the history of social theory than that of the division of labor. Here we ask whether conversational interaction, like other forms of social activity, exhibits a division of labor and, if so, what functions this serves and how it might be understood in relation to the theories of Marx and Durkheim. We begin by noting that, though conversational participants actively work to achieve and sustain understanding, much of the time this work is invisible and only its products are displayed in the form of sequentially fitted next turns at talk. However, in sequences of other-initiated repair, the work involved in the maintenance of intersubjectivity rises to the surface. On these occasions, we can see and thus describe what participants do to achieve and sustain what they take to be adequate understanding. In our data, which consist of video recordings of casual conversations among Vietnamese same-generation peers, participants continuously display an orientation to relations of relative seniority through the selection of terms used to accomplish interlocutor reference. This pervasive orientation is also reflected in practices of repair initiation. Specifically, seniors regularly initiate repair with so-called "open class" forms such as "huh?" and "ha?" which display a minimal grasp of the talk targeted, require little effort to produce and, at the same time, push responsibility for resolving the problem onto the trouble source speaker (i.e., the junior member of the dyad). In contrast, juniors often initiate repair of a senior participant's talk by displaying a detailed understanding of what has been said, either in the form of a repeat or a reformulation, and inviting the senior to confirm. We suggest then that this asymmetry in the distribution of initiation practices reflects a "division of intersubjective labor". We conclude with some thoughts on the theoretical implications of our findings and relate them not only to the theories of Marx and Durkheim but also to the writings of feminist sociolinguists who sought to describe the way in which women seem to be burdened more than men with what Fishman called "interactional shitwork."

The gift of democracy: a Tibetan experience with democracy in exile

Instituting democracy was one of the foremost engagements of the Dalai Lama in exile. The intricate connection drawn between democracy, the nationalist goal and the Dalai Lama gives a unique flavour to Tibetan democracy. Considered as a ‘gift’, democracy is conferred a sacred character by the Tibetan people which immunises it from the usual aspects of everyday democratic functioning of which discussion, dialogue, differences and dissent are an integral part. Drawing on theoretical concepts from the anthropological literature on democracy, gift and the public sphere, and putting them in conversation with the primary data obtained from field research, this paper first examines the complex relationship between democracy and Tibetan nationalism, and how democracy came to be constituted within a nationalist rhetoric. It then shows the characteristics of a Tibetan public sphere considered as a source of trouble within the complex web of democracy and nationalism in exile.

On the Structure and Accumulation of Realist Content

Ever since the heyday of the Vienna Circle, scientific realists have worked hard to document and clarify the structure and growth of truth content in theoretical descriptions. Today, this trait is particularly intense among “selective realists” – realists focused on theory parts with high empirical corroboration rather than whole theories. From their perspective, theories with posits systematically deployed in corroborated novel predictions are, with high probability, descriptively true or contain a proper part that is. Unlike traditional realists, selectivists acknowledge that (a) radical conceptual change is a recurring scientific phenomenon and (b) empirical theories have poor reliability records at the most profound ontological level. At the same time, they point to significant descriptive continuities at intermediate theoretical levels between successful theories and their successors – i.e., a false theory can (and often does) contain parts that succeed as correct descriptions. Selectivists seek to identify those parts. Their approaches limit ontological commitment exclusively to highly confirmed theoretical descriptions; unfortunately, the selection criteria they use seemingly support many regrettable choices. One source of trouble is that extant approaches leave unclear the ontology described by the selected parts. Historical cases and scientific practice gesture toward a functional resolution of this difficulty, but the clues could be more transparent and need elaboration. Otherwise, selectivism has improved in consistency over the last three decades. Current projects emphasize the continuity of well-established scientific content (relating to how entities and processes effectively behave within a specific regime or descriptive level) instead of just the continuity of “structure”. This paper provides some clarifications that arguably clear the road for realist commitment toward functional and effective theoretical content. The proposed functional/effective turn is checked against some plausible objections.

Пушкин. Семья. Деньги

Alexander Pushkin wrote that “spirit of literature” depends, at least in part, “on writers’ financial situation.” These words can justly be applied to Pushkin himself. His life largely depended on material conditions on his marital status and financial relations with his relatives. The article studies this side of his life, which until recently has not received due attention. As a young man, Pushkin enjoyed substantial support of his parents. Before Pushkin’s marriage, his father passed 200 peasants over to his son. Pushkin pledged these peasants obtaining 40,000 roubles as a loan. Of this money, he lent 11,000 roubles to Natalia Ivanovna Goncharova, his future mother-inlaw, to provide her daughter, Natalia Nikolaevna, with dowry. Later, the Goncharovs granted to Natalia Nikolaevna only minimal financial support. Pushkin never saw his loan returned. A constant source of financial troubles in Pushkin’s family was his brother, Lev. Pushkin was on friendly terms with his sister, Olga, however, her husband, Nikolay Pavlishchev, constantly pestered him with financial demands. Pushkin endeavored to settle his family’s money problems trying to manage his parents’ estate in Boldino, but without much success. Goncharova’s sisters, Ekaterina and Alexandra, since 1834 lived with Pushkin’s family. They received money from their brother and partially compensated living expenses. Georges Dantès, who married Ekaterina in January 1837, got 10,000 roubles as his marriage portion. Pushkin’s income consisted of his civil servant’s salary, peasant servage and his earnings from literary and publishing activity. The article demonstrates that Pushkin’s living expenses and family spending were approximately 429,000 roubles. Undoubtedly, lion’s share of this money was spent after Pushkin’s marriage. During his last years, Pushkin was constantly under the stress caused by money matters. Astonishing as it may seem, under such difficult conditions he managed to create great pieces of literature.

Displaying epistemic stance through same-turn self-repair in Chinese civil courtroom interaction.

Repair, or conversational repair, frequently appears in court proceedings as a vital mechanism sustaining effective communication. Our study presents a conversational analysis of the choices of different operations in the same-turn self-repair and shows how judges, plaintiffs, defendants, and their lawyers deploy those operations based on a model of epistemic stance. The data were drawn from the top five most-viewed videos of Changsha civil courtrooms from March to May, 2019, totaling more than 50,000 words. In the courtroom interaction, replacing and inserting are the most frequently used operations for all participants. In the courtroom cross-examinations, interlocutors use discrepant same-turn self-repair operations to achieve single or multiple communicative goals, such as improving precision, increasing credibility, highlighting their points, skirting questions, and confirming information. Additionally, when the epistemic stance of the trouble source is [K+], speakers employ most same-turn self-repair operations to keep their [K+] epistemic stance by improving precision and increasing credibility of their utterances or use reformatting or inserting to downgrade epistemic stance to [K-] by decreasing the certainty of their utterances. These findings shed light on the understanding of same-turn self-repairs in the institutional interaction, particularly in Chinese civil courtroom interaction.

The Image of Children in Roald Dahl's Matilda

his research aims to explore the image of the children as it is constructed by the educational institution particularly by the teachers in the novel Matilda. This research is a descriptive qualitative study with applies the theory of imagology by Milan Kundera and the image of the child by Loris Malaguzzi. This research used the close textual analysis method to describe and analyze the meaning, structure, and function contained in the text. The result of this research shows that the different images of the children constructed by two teacher characters of the novel. The image of the children constructed by Miss Honey is that the children are innocent, potential, and dependent. While the image of the children constructed by Mrs. Trunchbull is that children are a source of trouble, disgusting, disturbing, and should not exist in the world. Based on the image of the children constructed by Miss Honey and Mrs. Trunchbull, these two teacher figures show different behaviors when they interact with children. Miss Honey tends to pay special attention to children, teach them new things in a fun way, and be open to children. While Mrs. Trunchbull shows abusive behavior in children such as shouting, cursing, and giving harsh punishments to children. Therefore, based on the results of research conducted, it can be concluded that the image of children is not always the same in the eyes of everyone and the image they construct in children affects the way they treat children.

A monstrous account of non-deictic readings of complex demonstratives

ABSTRACT Complex demonstratives are often seen as a source of trouble for the idea that demonstratives are directly referential. Several authors have provided an array of counterexamples that preclude us from treating complex demonstratives as devices of direct reference, since they could hardly be considered rigid designators. In this paper I argue that a revision of the classic theories can accommodate all the counterevidence from non-deictic uses of complex demonstratives. Namely, I argue that the two chief objections that have been posed to the traditional picture, the so-called ‘quantification in’ and ‘no demonstration, no speaker reference’ problems, can be given a unified solution by treating them as instances of monstrous quantification into the character of the term.

Sequential Standoffs in Police Encounters With the Public

Research on interactions involving police officers foregrounds the importance of their communicative practices for fostering civilians’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Building on this research, we describe a pattern of conduct that is a recurrent source of trouble in such encounters, which we call sequential standoffs. These standoffs emerge when two parties persistently pursue alternative courses of action, producing a stalemate in which neither progress in, nor exit from, either course of action appears viable. They are routinely resolved by officers (re)casting civilians’ pursuit of one course of action as constituting resistance to the officers’ proposed course of action, and thus as warranting officers’ use of coercive violence to resolve the stalemate. In some cases, however, officers resolve standoffs cooperatively using sequentially accommodative methods. We consider how these findings advance approaches to communicative dilemmas in policing, and their broader significance for scholars of social interaction, and of the interactional organization of conflicts.

On the affective threshold of power and privilege

AbstractHigher education is facing increasing calls to engage in a process of intellectual decolonisation. This process necessitates that we take time to consider both the content of our curriculum and the pedagogic practices used to facilitate its understanding. Drawing on discussions of both intellectual decolonisation and its underpinning principles of epistemic justice, I consider the implications of these ideas for the threshold concept framework. These implications are likely to relate to both the identification of potential future threshold concepts and the experience of engaging with them. As threshold scholars, we may need to reconsider our ideas about who the experts are within a discipline or practice in our efforts to identify candidate threshold concepts and consider alternative sources of evidence in support of this. In addition, we need to reflect on how the learning experiences that arise as a result of encounters with thresholds that have emerged as a result of the privileging of knowledge and ways of knowing from the ‘global north’ might serve as a source of epistemic trouble to learners from the ‘global south’. Such learning experiences are likely to be highly emotive and represent a significant source of troublesome learning.

Linguistic features of self-repair strategies of Arab Speakers of English language

Self-repair occurring in the same turn of speaking has been subjected to analysis in studies involving first language and second language users. However, in the context of English spoken as a foreign language, the information might still need further attention. This study is conducted to first report on the self-repair strategies employed by the Arab speakers of English in the same turn of speaking and second, to describe the linguistic features of self-repair produced by the speakers. Adopting the quantitative and qualitative approaches, data for this study come from a number of videos capturing conversations in English involving Arab speakers. The conversations in the videos were later transcribed orthographically and following this, instances of self-repair were identified. Framework of self-repair strategies provided by Emrani and Hooshmand was adopted to guide the data coding while the linguistic features of self-repair in the same turn of speaking were described by looking into its context of occurrences. The first finding has shown that repetition is the most frequent type of self-repair strategy to be employed by the Arab speakers of English. This is followed by replacement, insertion, abandonment and deletion. On the other hand, the self-repair that takes place in the same turn of speaking (where trouble source can be found as well) can be marked through a number of linguistic features namely prosodic features, the presence of fillers and the repair item that comes immediately after the trouble source item. The findings have provided insight into the speakers’ ability to monitor troubles in their speech, repair the troubles and features of their self-repair which can benefit the theoretical understanding and language classroom practices.