This philosophical-pragmatic paper discusses several forms of irony which rest on other figures of speech contingent on overt untruthfulness, namely the figures arising as a result of flouting the first maxim of Quality. It is argued that an ironic implicature may be piggybacked on another implicature, called “as if implicature”, originating from flouting the first maxim of Quality occasioned by metaphor. Metaphorical irony, which is subject to the irony-after-metaphor order of interpretation, exhibits a number of manifestations depending on the nature (...) and scope of irony, and the scope of the subordinate metaphor. On the other hand, rather than giving rise to an as if implicature distinct from the irony-based one, hyperbole and meiosis, which are inherently evaluative, most typically overlap with ironically evaluative expressions, promoting meiotic and hyperbolic irony, frequently (wrongly, as will be claimed here) considered by researchers to rely on flouting Quantity maxims. However, cases of independent use of hyperbole or meiosis in ironic environment are also possible. Such invite two levels of untruthfulness and two implicatures. (shrink)

A campaign to pass city council resolutions opposing an American invasion of Iraq in the Fall of 2002 and Spring of 2003 provided an opportunity to examine contrasting styles of public argument. This paper examines an extensive set of news and editorial articles as well as the actual deliberations before city councils. An argument’s style constructs a relationship between the speaker, audience, and issue through the strategic use of language. Two conflicting styles of argument were apparent in these deliberations: a (...) protest style and a dissent style. Each style operated within a different normative frame that managed tensions between unity and division, participation and its lack, and inclusive and exclusive reasoning. While protest and dissent styles conflict, each frames important relationships for public discourse and deliberation. (shrink)

We propose that emotion psychology would significantly gain from including narrative(s) and the conversational negotiation of appropriateness. Using the example of anger, we argue that narrators need to construct plausible narratives of emotional events to achieve validating responses by listeners. We argue first that narrators attempt to demonstrate that the appraisal conditions for their emotion are given so that the emotion fits the narrated events. Second, we argue that this in turn explains why narratives of specific emotions exhibit specific forms. (...) Third, we argue that coping with emotional experiences is helped by narrating such that the fittingness of emotions is demonstrated. We conclude that narrative plays an important role for identifying, processing, communicating, and eliciting emotions. (shrink)

Sensorial access to products in shop encounters constitutes a crucial aspect of the appeal to customers. This paper examines sensorial engagements with products in a specific ecology with a focus on the possible opening of a shop encounter. When passers-by stroll from one stand to another, open to local findings, unplanned discoveries, and emergent opportunities to buy, they orient to the sensory appeal of the products, becoming possible customers, stopping in front of a counter and engaging in a social interaction (...) with sellers and other customers. The analysis focuses on multisensoriality in action, studying how customers and sellers treat the sensorial qualities of the products, the relevance of the sensory engagement of the customer with their materiality, and their involvement in the social encounter with the seller, including normative expectations related to sensing and buying. It includes a discussion of how under Covid-19 sensorial access to products was restricted and the sensorial, interactional, normative, and economic consequences of these restrictions. Based on video recordings of market encounters, and on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of multimodality and multisensoriality, the paper reflects on how appealing to the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste is methodically orchestrated, and its consequences for the interaction with the seller, the sensorial experience, and the economic transaction. (shrink)

This paper examines public meetings in the Netherlands where experts and officials interact with local residents on the human health effects of livestock farming. Using Conversation Analysis, we reveal a ‘weapon of the weak’: a practice by which the residents resist experts’ head start in information meetings. It is shown how residents draw on the given question-answer format to challenge experts and pursue an admission of, for example, methodological shortcomings. We show how the residents’ first question functions as a ‘foot-in-the-door’, (...) providing them with a strong basis for skepticism. By systematically challenging the expert responses, the residents exploit the interaction’s sequential organization, with the effect that the goal becomes them being convinced rather than being informed. Consequently, the withholding of consent becomes the residents’ ‘weapon’. Finally, we argue that in an age where expertise is increasingly contested, it is crucial to understand how, and to what end, this contestation may occur. (shrink)

This article focuses on sequences of classroom talk, in which Swedish junior high-school pupils engage in reproaches of absent parties or, to use an established gloss, `gossiping'. This kind of talk makes up a significant part of the off-task talk that pupils engage in when working in small groups. In order to initiate and participate in gossip interaction, pupils need to master sophisticated social competencies. The study focuses on these competencies and on one major function that gossip can be seen (...) to perform for the primary gossiper: gossip as remedial action. (shrink)

In everyday conversations, people put forward versions of events and provide supporting evidence to build a credible case. In environments where there are potentially competing versions, case-building may take a more systematic format. Specifically, we conducted a rhetorical analysis to consider how in child mental health settings, families work to present a credible ‘doctorable’ reason for attendance. Data consisted of video-recordings of 28 families undergoing mental health assessments. Our findings point to eight rhetorical devices utilised in this environment to build (...) a case. The devices functioned rhetorically to add credibility and authenticate the case being built, which was relevant as the only resource available to families claiming the presence of a mental health difficulty in the child was their spoken words. In other words, the ‘problem’ was something constructed through talk and therefore the kinds of resources used were seminal in decision-making. (shrink)

This discourse analytic study integrates theories of stance and membership categorization to investigate one online discussion thread initiated by a woman who asks for diet and health advice on behalf of her boyfriend, an interactive move we term ‘asking for another’. Posters to the thread, in relatively explicit ways, construe the original poster as a ‘nag’ and ‘mother-figure’ and her boyfriend as a ‘victim of nagging’ and ‘childish’. Our analysis illuminates how two features of the asking-for-another post evoke these identities: (...) extreme case formulations, created via adjectives and adverbs, lead others to view the woman as inappropriately involved and controlling and her boyfriend as immature, and details about the boyfriend’s diet, provided via nouns and adjectives, index cultural ideologies of food and identity. This study illuminates the ambiguity and polysemy of the move of asking for another, contributing to research on identity construction and health-related advice-seeking online. (shrink)

This article examines three divergent constructions about the salience of legal gender in lay people’s everyday lives and readiness to decertify gender. In our interviews (and survey data), generally participants minimised the importance of legal gender. The central argument in this article is that feminist socio-legal scholars applying legal consciousness studies to legal reform topics should find scrutinizing the construction of interview talk useful. We illustrate this argument by adapting and applying Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) ‘The Common Place of Law: (...) Stories from Everyday Life', ‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘against’ typology to interview talk about legal gender, and critique their cognitivist approach by offering a constructionist alternative. In our analysis, we offer a detailed discursive explication of three key legal consciousness themes. These themes offer a balanced representation of a dataset problematically ‘skewed’ towards sex-based rights feminist perspectives, namely that ‘before’ legal gender is an anti-decertification account, decertification would be risky for natal females; a ‘with’ legal gender construction is neither for nor against decertification per se, though the impact of decertification is produced in accounts as limited and unimportant; and ‘against’ legal gender is a pro-decertification classification, as not abolished legal gender is constructed as harmful to already marginalised groups. In concluding, we explore the reasoning for the lack of readiness for decertification currently, and return to the value of examining the construction of lay discourse about legal matters as talk is a form of social action. We suggest that applying discursive analysis to themes in legal consciousness studies enables a refocusing on the how rather than purely the what of divergent legal consciousnesses, and that this approach is a fruitful addition to feminist socio-legal studies. (shrink)

The experience of loss of agency is one of the reasons for clients to go for psychotherapy. Enhancing clients’ agency has been considered a fundamental factor for successful treatment in psychiatry and psychotherapy, yet few studies have investigated the interactional realization of how therapists do this in authentic psychotherapeutic encounters. Drawing on audio-recorded talk-in-interaction between clients and psychotherapists in cognitive behavioral therapy encounters at a mental health center in China, this paper uses the method of conversation analysis to demonstrate how (...) therapists ascribe agency positions to clients by issuing formulations of what the clients have just said. Two types of formulation were identified: affirmative formulations and challenging formulations. In the first type, the therapists highlight the positive aspect of the clients’ description of their experiences and ascribe an agentic position to the clients. In the second, the therapists challenge the clients’ implausible views and their non-agentic positioning of themselves. This study shows that the therapists’ formulation could be employed to manage the epistemic difficulties associated with claiming knowledge about the clients’ inner states and assessing their feelings. In this sense, the formulation is a robust interactional device in negotiating epistemic problems in addressing the clients’ experiences and promoting their agency in therapy. However, it is noteworthy that in the challenging formulation, therapists claim privileged access to the clients’ knowledge domain and challenge their prior epistemic status, which might run the risk of engendering clients’ resistance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea in small boats has become a common sight in the media, particularly since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. The number of boats crossing the English Channel between the French and UK coasts has been increasing as other migration routes have been closed down. This article reports the findings of a discourse analysis of 96 UK newspaper articles published in December 2018 when the daily crossings were referred to as a ‘major crisis’. Adopting a (...) broadly critical discursive psychology perspective, we identify the use of three main interpretative repertoires used within the media reporting. Firstly, a ‘secure the borders’ repertoire which positions the UK’s borders as porous and easily breached, secondly, a ‘smuggling is immoral’ repertoire which works to position smugglers as to blame for the current ‘crisis’ and removes responsibility for the crisis from the Government, and finally, a ‘desperate people’ repertoire which worked to position the refugees themselves as vulnerable and in need of protection, but also as people who will engage in risky behaviours. We suggest that the use of these repertoires ultimately functions to obscure the need for safe and legal migration routes to the UK. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Extreme Case Formulations in multiple-party TV programmes in two different languages: Spanish and English. I examine the role of ECFs in Spanish pre-electoral debates and in English panel interviews. English data is 77 minutes and 58 seconds long and comprises nine different panel interviews of political, socio-political and social issues and Spanish data is 78 minutes long and includes four political pre-electoral debates. The results will disclose that the number of ECFs found in the Spanish (...) and in the English corpora differs considerably. And in relation to the type of recording, the data will reveal that interviewers and interviewees deployed many more ECFs in political recordings than in socio-political or social recordings ; and politicians used more ECFs than any other type of interviewees. (shrink)

We study the life story of a former SS Leibstandarte soldier and we focus on the way the narrator deals with face threats by negotiating his identity constructions. The interviewee positions himself as a sportsman and an ignorant soldier, thus constructing denial of knowledge of and agreement with Hitler's ideology. These identities can be considered to be complementary, but they are built in quite different ways: the narrator explicitly presents himself as a sportsman, but mitigates his implicit construction of ignorance. (...) Given the social and historical context, this contrast in degree of explicitness is expected since the ignorance claim has been the subject of many previous discourses and debates of this subject. (shrink)

We examine the British newspapers' coverage of the death of Princess Diana and its immediate aftermath. Our main focus is on how the press dealt with the issue of their own potential culpability, as a feature of news reporting itself. The press deployed a series of descriptive categories and rhetorical oppositions, including regular press vs paparazzi; tabloid vs broadsheet; British vs foreign; supply vs demand ; and a number of general purpose devices such as a contrast between emotional reactions and (...) considered judgments. The study has two major aims: to analyse the textual workings of the press, as a medium of factual reportage operating within a range of normative requirements for factual objectivity, public concern, responsible journalism, meeting readers' demands, etc.; and to contribute to a generally applicable discourse analytic approach to how factual reports are assembled, used, and undermined, in an interplay of description and accountability. (shrink)

Integral to the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is the initial assessment through which the existence of a ‘problem’ is first ascertained. Despite this, there remains limited research on this early part of the diagnostic pathway. In this article, we utilised conversation analysis to examine relevant issues in relation to the practitioner–family interactions that take place within this initial assessment context. Our findings illustrated that parents typically first raised the possibility of the presence of an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis through (...) ‘building a case’, which professionals were then able to ratify or negate. Furthermore, we found that the assessments unfolded sequentially and clinical decisions were typically reached through a distinctive pattern of interaction. These findings have important implications for clinical practice, including for the study of autism spectrum disorder assessments and diagnosis. (shrink)

In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to (...) the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts. (shrink)

Using Harvey Sacks’s concept of membership categorization devices, this article examines the help-search sequences in which Japanese rehabilitation team members use a set of categories to locate the availability of stroke family caregivers. Specifically, based on an analysis of audiovisual data from rehabilitation team conferences in Japan, the article illustrates the ways in which participants at the meetings: evaluate the expectable behaviors of various category incumbents; classify which category of person is proper to turn to for help; and arrive at (...) the conclusion that no one is available, and so the patient must be institutionalized. Analysis shows that participants routinely choose co-resident family members to fulfill the caregiver position. However, the position is not guaranteed unless the selected incumbent can satisfy additional criteria, especially physical strength and time availability. By exploring the ways in which participants use categories to negotiate discharge destinations, the article adds to Sacks’s analysis by illustrating methodical activities for deciding whether someone is unavailable to help. Moreover, it considers the applicability of Sacks’s notion of MCDs to Japanese data. (shrink)

This study presents a critical discourse analysis of YouTube comments below five videos of the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial, which was live streamed by the platform in April and May 2022. The analysis examines the discursive resources used by commenters to construct domestic abuse. Commenters draw on three interpretive repertoires: ‘Perfect Victim’, ‘Mutual Abuse’ and ‘Dangerous Women’. The analysis explores the way these repertoires are used to rebut Heard’s allegations of abuse by mobilising the perfect victim repertoire to (...) refute any claim she has to this experience, and the mutual abuse repertoire to implicate Heard in the abuse and minimise blame for Depp. Through establishing gender-symmetry in domestic abuse and drawing on traditional gender norms for each party, commenters construct the dangerous women repertoire to depict Heard as crazy, pathological and violent. The key implication of this study is that public constructions of domestic abuse can directly impact the attitudes and treatment of both victims and perpetrators. In this instance, they serve to maintain the oppression and control of women within anti-feminist narratives of female dominance, currently led by men’s rights activists and conservative outlets. (shrink)

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge and power, normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a (...) systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying knowing, while attending to concerns about symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training. (shrink)

B-events are matters which are better known to listeners than to speakers. This paper studies the detectives’ use of B-event statements in two different environments in their interactions with suspects/witnesses. The first type of environment are relatively co-operative sequences during which the aim is the reconstruction of events and constructing the record; here, B-event statements are realised as confirmation seeking questions. The second type of environment, a hostile interactional environment, is composed of argumentative sequences in which detectives aim to determine (...) who are the perpetrators of crimes; in these sequences, the detectives’ B-event statements are realised as accusations. While performing the two activities, the detectives signal different epistemic levels and stances at the turn level. Thus, the former B-event statements are mostly epistemically downgraded, while the latter are mostly upgraded, in order to facilitate undertaking these different activities during police questioning. (shrink)

During a call, telemarketers sometimes solicit respondent’s opinions about a product or service. This turns out to be a query with multiple implications, and respondents are alive to them. On the one hand, the recipient orients to a local preference to evaluate the telemarketer’s product positively. On the other hand, a positive assessment may result in expectations and commitments that survive the sequence and that are relevant for the call’s outcome. The recipient is faced with two types of preference structures, (...) one grounded in the sequence and the other one in the course of action it is part of. The preferences may be incompatible. Analysis shows that the shape of response turns with congruent preferences is observably different from response turns with cross-cutting preferences. In the latter case, the dispreferred character of the response to the caller’s ultimate purpose – that is, making a proposal for a commercial transaction – dominates over the response to the opinion query as just an opinion query in its own right. To generalize, the analysis shows that preparatory sequences in standardized courses of action in institutional settings are a special type of presequence. The participants develop a course of action through ordered series of preparatory sequences. Although locally responding to initiatives of the interlocutor, each response shows an orientation to both the local contingencies of the ongoing sequence and to the overall course of action it is contributing to. (shrink)

Reasons play an important role in social interaction. We study reasons-giving in the context of request sequences in Russian. By contrasting request sequences with and without reasons, we are able to shed light on the interactional work people do when they provide reasons or ask for them. In a systematic collection of request sequences in everyday conversation, we find reasons in a variety of sequential positions, showing the various points at which participants may orient to the need for a reason. (...) Reasons may be left implicit, or they can be made explicit. Participants may make reasons explicit either as part of the initial formulation of a request or in an interactionally contingent way. Across sequential positions, we show that reasons for requests recurrently deal with three possible issues: providing information when a request is underspecified, managing relationships between the requester and requestee and explicating ancillary actions implemented by a request. By spelling out information normally left to presuppositions and implicatures, reasons make requests more understandable and help participants to navigate the social landscape of asking assistance from others. (shrink)

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the structural features (...) of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. (shrink)

During the course of this article, we examine the use of membership categorisation practices by a high-profile celebrity public social media account that has been understood to generate interest, attention and controversy across the UK media ecology. We utilise a data set of harvested tweets gathered from a high-profile public ‘celebrity antagonist’ in order to systematically identify types of antagonistic formulation that have generated different levels of interest within the social media community and beyond. Drawing from classic ethnomethodological studies of (...) banner headlines and other means of generating public interest and ‘making sense’, we respecify high-profile antagonistic tweets as category formulations that exhibit particular and regular membership category features that are reflexively bound to potential antagonistic readings, interest and controversy. In conclusion, we consider how such formulations may be understood to represent resources that constitute ignition points within antagonistic flows of communication and information that can be metaphorically understood as ‘digital wildfires’. (shrink)

The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has drawn attention to the reasons why people risk desperate journeys to seek safety. However, less research has focussed on what happens to those on the move once th...

Drawing on a corpus of telephone conversational data, this study examines a collection of self-deprecations in Korean conversations. Detailed analyses of self-deprecations in larger fragments than minimal adjacency pair sequences illustrate the multifaceted nature of self-deprecation. Self-deprecation entails not only deprecatory assessments, but complaint or trouble talk about one’s shortcomings, reenactment of experiences or moments that support the deprecation, and discussion of how to remedy problems. The study further shows that self-deprecation is not a solitary but an interactionally organized practice. (...) The speaker’s repeated self-deprecations elicit a series of different responses from the recipient, such as positive reframing, downgrading the deprecator’s problem, and recommending solutions to the deprecator’s problem. Many instances of self-deprecation suggest that it can be an important resource for building motivation, responsibility, and a sense of affiliation and solidarity with other social members. (shrink)

This paper discusses a study examining how mentors in nurse education make professional judgments about the clinical competence of their pre‐registration nursing students. Interviews were undertaken with nine UK students and 15 mentors, using critical incidents in practice settings as a focus. The study was undertaken for the English National Practice‐Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This paper reports on the conversation analytic thread of the work. The mentor role with pre‐registration nursing students is not only (...) supportive but involves formal assessment. Central to the relationship is communication. In professional education, communication is seen as a skill to be applied and assessed in practice settings but is also the medium mentors and mentees use to talk about the relationship. Analysis of excerpts of conversation in the interviews shows that episodes of communication are used as topics of conversation to establish professional identity. It also reveals that judgments about the extent of professional capacity of both students and mentors are grounded in everyday behaviours (for example, enthusiasm, indifference and confidence) as well as professional competence. In addition to focusing on clinical issues, mentors can and do use mundane communication as a resource for judgments about competence. (shrink)

Using conversation analysis, this study investigates how Japanese rehabilitation team members use their geographic knowledge to search for long-term care facilities for stroke survivors in multidisciplinary team interactions. The study uncovers the orderly use of decision rules during discharge planning activities by exploring the following two questions: What decision criteria are discursively used? In what order are the criteria handled through sequential operations? The data comprise 65 video-recorded rehabilitation team meetings and ethnographic information regarding local care facilities and patients’ residential (...) addresses. The analysis shows that the participants deal with decision criteria in an orderly manner. They identify the type of facility and location preferred by the patient’s family and search for a facility accordingly. Moreover, they routinely select facilities closer to the patients’ and their families’ homes. However, these rules are modified if the family’s choice is inappropriate, or when a facility in a different location is preferred by the family. The study contributes to the conversation analytic understanding of interprofessional decision making and prioritization through the analysis of orderly methods of search procedures interactively accomplished by participants in ongoing medical team interactions. (shrink)

The realism-social constructionism debate has been consequential over the last several decades. Silverstein’s vocabulary of micro-/macro-contexts aids in understanding why the tension can be a useful epistemological heuristic for discourse analysts. Narratives were collected in focus groups of Ethiopian-Israeli college students. Five narratives were selected for ethnic mentions and found to have a particular ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ – recurrent storylines and settings – across tellers and telling events. ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES of being sent away to a majority-White (...) elementary/secondary school, socially isolated and denigrated. How are we to understand it when a particular plotline and setting recur in our corpora? I argue that although each story and storytelling is unique, they all borrow from a larger-than-single-telling, already existent trope, that is, a budding master narrative. Taken together, a unique view of a particular socio-cultural process – in this case, something of what it means to be an Ethiopian Israeli – emerges. (shrink)

Memory is a central epistemic resource, yet the interactional organization of shared remembering is largely unexplored. Drawing on a large corpus of video- and audio-recorded interactions in English and Russian, we examine a collection of over 50 cases in which participants are engaged in the activity of co-remembering. We show that memory formulations are commonly used as an evidential method to legitimize or support a claim or point of view in contexts of challenges, objections, disagreements, skepticism, resistance and when alternative (...) positions are on the floor. Our study indicates that in deploying memory formulations, interactants rely on the robust character of excavatable shared past experiences to provide an upgraded epistemic claim to support a contentious stance toward an alternative position. (shrink)

In research interviews, interviewees are usually well aware of why they were selected, and in their narratives they often construct ‘default identities’ in line with the interviewers’ expectations. Furthermore, narrators draw on shared cultural knowledge and master narratives that tend to form an implicit backdrop of their stories. Yet in this article we focus on how some of these master narratives may be mobilized explicitly when default identities are at stake. In particular, we investigate interviews with successful female professionals from (...) diverse geographical contexts. We found that the interviewees deal with challenges to their ‘successful professional’ identities by drawing on categorical narratives or categorical statements. As such, the interviewees talk into being a morally ordered gendered worldview, thus making explicit gendered master narratives about their societies and workplaces. In general, this article shows that categorical narratives and statements can bring master narratives to the surface and that these can thus contribute to the narrators’ identity work. (shrink)

Examining discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987) in two transcribed discussions of controversial issues in an undergraduate 'critical thinking' class, we note frequent uses of 'I'm just saying' and related metadiscursive expressions (I'm/we're saying, I'm/we're not saying, etc.). Our central claim is that these 'saying' expressions are pragmatic devices by which speakers claim 'all along' to have held a consistent argumentative standpoint, one that continues through the discussion unless changed for good reasons. Through close analysis of a series of discourse examples, we (...) show how these discourse markers are used to display continuity, deflect counterarguments, and acknowledge the force of counterarguments while preserving continuity. In a concluding section we reflect critically on the use of these continuity markers with regard to four pragmatic functions that they potentially serve: to specify and clarify argumentative standpoints, to acknowledge a presumption of standpoint continuity, to acknowledge a normative expectation that discussion participants should have standpoints, and to avoid overt disagreement while saving face. (shrink)

This article addresses a vital concern in current society by showing what participants themselves may treat as ways to transcend their differences. Actors’ shared understanding has been of longstanding interest across the social sciences. Conversation analysis treats the procedural infrastructure of interaction as the basis for participants to manage intersubjectivity. The field of dialogue studies has made occasions in which people transform their relationship by discussing their differences, central to their research project, and called them “dialogic moments.” This study draws (...) on CA to investigate “dialogic moments,” but now through the eyes of participants themselves. Using single-case analysis, we argue that such moments require participants to go against normative orientations in talk promoting social solidarity and progressivity, by soliciting differences to understand and transcend them. This “going against the interactional tide” may explain both why dialogue is difficult to achieve and why it is appreciated by participants as dialogue. (shrink)

Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and uses (...) of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness. (shrink)

We use conversation analysis and a research design modeled on speed dating to examine college-aged speed daters’ assessments of their experience of this activity. In getting acquainted, participants solicit and provide accounts of the experience that treat it delicately and impersonally. Further, participants collaborate to claim a shared naivete toward speed dating, thereby presenting themselves as ordinary college students having a new experience. Non-standard assessment sequences throw such patterned practices into relief, and feature the disclosure of personal troubles occasioned by (...) the experience. Our findings have implications for the study of assessments, impression management, acquaintanceship, and relationship initiation. (shrink)

A great deal of research has examined computer-mediated communication discussions in educational environments for evidence of learning. These studies have often been disappointing, with analysts not finding the kinds of ‘quality’ talk that they had hoped for. In this study we draw upon elements of discursive psychology as we oriented to what was happening in the talk from the participants’ perspective in addition to what should be happening from the researcher/instructor perspective. We examine the talk of undergraduate nutrition science students (...) within web logs, exploring ways in which the students, when asked to make blog posts on their beliefs about and experiences with dietary supplements, display knowing in dynamic and fluid ways. We analyzed 152 blog posts students were asked to make prior to attending the lecture on the topic. Our findings point to how students negotiate and at times resist doing being a knowledgeable student, using disclaimers such as ‘I don’t know’ and script formulations to minimize accountability for their posts. Our findings highlight how students oriented to the blogs as a venue for institutional talk, responding to the required academic task while simultaneously managing their identities as students. (shrink)

When plastic surgeons meet with new cosmetic surgery clients, they routinely try to get patients to `sign up' for elective surgery without forcing or pressuring them to do it. On rare occasions, they face a prospective client who, in the course of interaction, signals possible legal or medical risks, thereby calling on the surgeon to screen the client more vigilantly to determine whether embarking on cosmetic surgery will be reasonable. Grounded against nine-month field work at a cosmetic surgery center, combined (...) with 30+ hours of videotaped data of initial consultations, this article investigates a unique situation in which a 74-year-old woman seeking rhinoplasty and rhytidectomy is perceived as a difficult customer. Why this moment was interpreted and emerged as difficult is the analytic focus of the article. Using action-implicative discourse analysis, the analysis describes five communication challenges the plastic surgeon faced in the course of the 60-minute encounter. In the article's conclusion, I reflect on what seems to be a central issue for plastic surgeons: to act as gatekeepers of a fully elective and pricy surgery in a service-oriented business. (shrink)

Critical evaluations of the current movement of corporate social responsibility commodification have neglected an important question: How do CSR professionals manage the tensions resulting from the search for both profit and social responsibility? This article addresses this question by analyzing the discourse of CSR consultants with the aim of understanding how they deal with such tensions through identity work. Our findings suggest that people who claim, or who are ascribed, paradoxical professional identities may engage in ‘paradoxical identity mitigation’ – a (...) process whereby the concomitant and paradoxical use of linguistic strategies is aimed at simultaneously embracing and distancing oneself from contradictory identity demands. In uncovering how CSR professionals discursively manage the tensions engendered by CSR commodification, our results also advance current knowledge of CSR by shedding light on the underlying processes whereby new ‘hybrid’ identities are constituted and mobilized by actors to make sense of their professional activities. (shrink)

Given the rise of populist parties in Germany and the charge that multiculturalism is dead, the present research examines how everyday Germans formulate an account of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. We employ a critical discursive psychological analysis and focus particularly on the arguments used to criticize cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Asynchronous online interviews were conducted with eighteen native-born German citizens. The data analysis shows that participants criticized cultural diversity and multiculturalism by deploying ‘Leitkultur-style’ nationalistic discourses and normalizing the hierarchical relations (...) between immigrants and Germans. Participants also questioned multiculturalism as an ideology and everyday practice and moved back and forth between diverging accounts. These discourses reinforce dominant ideologies that place immigrants’ responsibility to assimilate and adopt German cultural norms and values. Our findings suggest that there are critical, flexible, and contradictory social markers of multiculturalism that have significant ramifications for policy and to everyday people who face the real task of living with cultural diversity. (shrink)

The persistence of traditional monarchies in modern societies, which are otherwise characterized by democratic and egalitarian values, remains a paradox in the social sciences. In part this is attributable to the lack of psychological investigation into the relationship between subject and sovereign, and in particular the ways in which the political and social values of the citizenry shape understandings of a hereditary monarch’s right to represent a national community. Adopting the qualitative analysis methods of discursive psychology and grounded theory, the (...) current study examines vernacular accounts of nationhood and monarchy in England in both formalized conversational interviews and impromptu street interviews. Focusing on accounts of Prince Charles’s recent proposal to change the role of the monarch, from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faiths,” those in favor treated it as a positive step towards reflecting a diverse community, bringing the monarchy into line with current concerns of pluralism and upholding values of personal choice and individual rights. Participants who rejected the proposed change in title construed it as antithetical to these values in terms of reflecting personal stake and interest, an abuse of power, or an imposition on other faiths. In all accounts, the prime concern was in safeguarding the political and social values of the citizenry. In conclusion it is argued that the study of subjects’ relationship to the monarch, its function and legitimacy, can provide an opportunity to examine how values can characterize a national community and facilitate national diversity. (shrink)

When there is no immediate response after a proposal and normally the silence is longer than 0.2 s, the proposer would take subsequent actions to pursue a preferred response or mobilize at least an articulated one from the recipient. These actions modulate the prior deontic stance embedded in the original proposal into four trends as follows: maintaining the prior deontic stance with a self-repair or by seeking confirmation; making the prior deontic stance more tentative by making a revised other-attentiveness proposal, (...) providing an account, pursuing with a tag question, or requesting with an intimate address term; making the prior deontic stance more decisive by making a further arrangement, closing the local sequence, or providing a candidate unwillingness account ; and canceling the prior deontic stance by doing a counter-like action. Additionally, these trends inherently embody a decisive-to-tentative gradient. This study would penetrate into the phenomena occurring in Mandarin mundane talk with the methodology of Conversation Analysis to uncover the underflow of deontic stance. (shrink)

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages, this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct. Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct. When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, (...) they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation, and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld. (shrink)

On some occasions of self-reference there can be two equally viable forms available to speakers: individual self-reference and collective self-reference. This means that selection of one or the other in talk-in-interaction can — akin to the selection of terms for reference to non-present persons — be guided by such considerations as recipient design and action formation. As a strategy for investigating the selection of self-reference terms, this article examines repairs to self-reference that change the form of reference from individual to (...) collective and vice versa. We first identify two repair operations found in the domain of self-reference: aggregation and extraction and then we track the use of both operations across a range of positions in the repair initiation opportunity space. Finally we consider some of the interactional uses of aggregation and extraction repairs in resolving sources of troubles associated with speaker epistemic authority and responsibility for described actions. (shrink)

Using 20 video recordings of Emergency Room treatment and over 5 years of Emergency Room fieldwork data, this study elucidates how interactional processes serve as resources for generating a cultural script of death in Japan called ‘Mitori’. A sudden death at a hospital, in which a patient is removed from their social network, is often considered as the opposite of a ‘good home death’. This study shows how hospital deaths in Japan are strongly interrelated with family participation. After showing the (...) point where medical professionals decide to terminate resuscitation attempts, the analysis depicts interactional steps that shift the definition of environment from a place for treatment toward a place where ‘Mitori’ occurs; that is, a family encounter occurs with a dying patient. Conversation between a doctor and a family member consists of a step-by-step evidence- building story. The final section displays both conversational and physical resources used to establish ‘Mitori’. (shrink)

Pro-anorexia is an Internet-based movement that provides advice and support for the development/maintenance of an eating disorder. The movement is sometimes framed as a religion, with rituals, psalms, creeds and the invocation of a deity who personifies the ED. The latter aspect is likely to influence identities and behaviours as well as providing emotional support and motivation for community members. However, there is little sustained empirical analysis of how members themselves orient to and self-position within the religious discourse. Here, we (...) apply the concept of interdiscursivity to examine the construction of Ana as god. Drawing on a body of online interactions from one pro-ana website over a 47-day period, we discursively analyse members’ constructions of Ana and their relationship with her. With reference to biblical texts, we consider how these constructions directly reference concepts of Christian religion and faith. Implications for understanding pro-ana and interdiscursivity are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe increasing recognition of the negative impact of income inequality has highlighted the importance of taxation which can function as a redistributive mechanism. Previous critical social psychological research found that talk about restricting the welfare state, that is funded through tax, is formed of ideology that supports the maintenance of income inequality. Therefore, this research explores how speakers use talk about tax to justify income inequality during a UK BBC radio discussion, ‘Moral Maze: The moral purpose of tax’ which involved (...) public figures discussing the role of tax. This programme was analysed from a critical discursive psychological perspective. It was found that two contrasting constructions of tax were presented: tax as a collective responsibility or tax as an individual burden, whereby speakers drew on social justice and individualistic ideology respectively. Arguments for high tax rates are problematic due to the acceptability of inequality in a meritocracy. By presenting wealthy individuals as more deserving than the less affluent, arguments for higher tax come to be challenged. (shrink)

This paper is a qualitative usage-based treatment of merism from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considered a minor or non-basic figure of speech, especially if compared to the master tropes, m...

The present study investigates the ways in which Japanese speakers negotiate their opinions in conversational interaction. On the one hand, speakers are apt to exaggerate a particular aspect of a given issue in asserting their opinion, on the other hand, they may also incorporate a self-qualification admitting a potential problem in their claim. By expressing their awareness of the problem before it is pointed out by the co-participants, the speakers seem to get license to proffer an exaggerated or overgeneralized claim (...) and to increase their chance of receiving an affiliative response. This study explicates the mechanism through which such a self-qualifying clause emerges in the development of opinion-negotiation sequences. Further, as a contribution to a growing body of research on "interaction and grammar" (Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson, 1996), this study explores the use of "contrastive" markers, -kedo and demo, in constructing turns and sequences in opinion-negotiation. The data demonstrate these two structurally different types of markers play distinct roles in differentiating and yet conjoining the speakers' assertion and self-qualification. (shrink)