This article begins with some reflections on the notion of genre as used in discourse analysis and aims to make a distinction between two types of genre — conversational genres and instituted genres. Varying levels can be distinguished in the range of instituted genres: from genres deprived of any authorship to genres in which a single author partly defines the frame of the communicative event. However, this article deals mainly with a genre-based analysis of an instituted genre, a report on (...) the thesis defence meeting, as practised in French academic institutions. This genre is interesting for discourse analysts, not only because it is closely linked to scientific research communities, but also because it implies an original configuration of authorship and triggers indirect interpretation strategies. (shrink)

This article describes word meaning negotiation in online discussion forum communication, a form of computer-mediated communication. WMN occurs when participants who are engaged in a discussion about a particular topic remark on a word choice of another participant, thus initiating a meta-linguistic sequence in which a particular word is openly questioned and the meaning of that word is up for negotiation. By closely studying the process of WMN and focusing on the practices of the participants engaged in it, this article (...) empirically explores how situated meaning in concrete utterances is established by participants who are in disagreement about word meaning. Routine ways of entering into a WMN sequence are identified, as well as typical ways of contributing to the negotiation once the discussion has shifted focus from being on topic to being on word meaning. The article highlights the context-sensitivity of word meanings and illustrates how participants engaged in WMN orient toward both semantic properties of the words themselves as well as to relevant aspects of the conversational context. (shrink)

Different areas of child welfare work call for psychometric measurement to replace professionals’ judgements with objective numbers. Using data from a national Swedish evaluation of interventions for abused children, the present article investigates child interviewees’ resistance to constraints in psychometric questions. The article contributes to studies of how psychology operates in institutional settings; it looks into the discursive production of the interviewee’s position in the struggle between the principle of recordability and ‘sensitive’ interviewing. The findings suggest that interviewees resist questions’ (...) structural restrictions in the service of telling the interviewer about their lives. Thus, the function of their misalignment is affiliative; it cooperates both with the institutional goal of eliciting information and with the interviewer’s interest in them. However, the interviewer’s solutions to children’s problem presentations remain focused on generating recordable answers. The article concludes that the narrow focus on recordability neglects important opportunities to talk about children’s experiences. (shrink)

The present investigation studies buying and selling encounters in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. It is a conversation-analytic study that shows aspects of the institutional character of these interactions, their overall organisation and sequential structure. It suggests that the core sequential structure of these encounters consists of two base adjacency pairs, buying and selling. In particular, the analysis describes the preparatory characteristics of the pre-expansions that precede the product request formulations, the linguistic composition and sequential positioning of request formulations, (...) the insertions of the buying adjacency pair and the sequencing of the commercial exchange which is described as the climax of the institutional event. The designs of the first pair part of the selling adjacency pair and the product request formulations are presented as clear instances of the referential framework or common ground shared by seller and customer. (shrink)