Alessandra Fasulo

Mutual apprentices : The making of parenthood and childhood in family dinner conversations

Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian children in dialogue on normative behavior and ways that their discursive contributions shape the structure and thematic content of parental talk that ensues. Parental responses to children’s normative transgressions socialize them also into the language of transgression. The children we studied supply and elicit accounts from others that attempt to justify or explain transgression.

Children's socialization into cleaning practices: a cross-cultural perspective

Focusing on everyday hygiene and household cleaning tasks, this study examines the socialization practices and parenting strategies that foster familial and cultural values such as autonomy, interdependence and responsibility. Through the micro-analysis of videotaped family interaction in Los Angeles and Rome, this article looks at actual practices and activity trajectories to reveal the ways in which families organize themselves, attach values to different aspects of activities, and build diverse perspectives on authoritativeness. The comparative analysis points to differences across cultures, families and activities in the style and amount of parental control over cleaning tasks, and the number of options given to children in the process and sequence of tasks. Examinations of diverse parenting and conversational strategies reveal how particular practices may lead to the construction or limitation of childrens agency.

Planning a Typical Italian Meal: A Family Reflection on Culture

The paper addresses the issue of cultural descriptions as they are perceived and used within mundane conversation. We analyze a discussion of an Italian family about a future formal occasion (a party) in a foreign country (Austria), with foreign participants, in which they shall produce a typically Italian meal. The analysis shows how cultural descriptions are both a resource and a constraint when they must orient a practical activity which must be publicly acknowledged for its cultural typicality. Discrepancies are highlighted between cultural descriptions and ordinary practices, but it is also shown how culture (or ‘cultural preferences’) gets produced, at a less explicit level, within discursive practices, through turn-taking filtering, sequential architecture and selection of differentiated addressees. The socializing import of the discursive situation for the younger participants is also discussed, with reference to the relevant conversational devices.

Assessing mutable objects: multimodal analysis

The article examines assessments of objects with which participants are currently engaged. Through the analysis of evaluative activities around the production of a clothing item in a fashion atelier, we illustrate the embodied components of both assessments and their responses, and argue that embodied actions (such as embedded phases of appraisal through observation and manipulation) are central to the understanding of both the meaning and the temporal unfolding of the assessment sequence. Furthermore, we show that negative assessments of mutable objects can function as proposals, as revealed by responses doing acceptance or refusal. Finally, we consider the matter from the point of view of the person receiving the assessment. We argue that the speakers choice of particular forms of verbal assessment, together with their use of gestures to express negative components of the evaluation, can be especially useful resources for recipients who are directly responsible for the object under evaluation.

Learning to Argue in Family Shared Discourse: The Reconstruction of Past Events

The aim of the study is to identify both modes of children’s participation in family disputes and types of argumentative moves adopted, particularly in the act of opposing (problematizing) others or defending oneself. The corpus consists of twenty-seven dinner conversations of ten middle-class families living in Rome and Naples, each with one child between three and six years and at least one older sibling.

My selves and I: identity markers in work meeting talk

This paper is concerned with the indexical meaning of the pronoun ‘I’, in its marked use, in Italian work-meeting conversation. The hypothesis driving the study is that, in a context in which situated identities are manifold, marking the pronoun is a device to highlight the most official of ones selves, thus changing the status of the utterance containing the marker. A typology of I-marked utterances is presented and the relative frequency of use is shown to vary with the organizational role of the participants. Detailed analysis of epistemic and performative I-marked utterances shows how role-identities are variously manipulated and mitigated through conversational devices such as self-repair, word delay, and metaphorical work. The discussion highlights how indexical meaning is a property of situated conversational practices and how marked pronouns can foreground selected identities in the cluster of selves that members of a work group can present to each other.

We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation

The past years have seen an increasing debate on cooperation and its unique human character. Philosophers and psychologists have proposed that cooperative activities are characterized by shared goals to which participants are committed through the ability to understand each other’s intentions. Despite its popularity, some serious issues arise with this approach to cooperation. First, one may challenge the assumption that high-level mental processes are necessary for engaging in acting cooperatively. If they are, then how do agents that do not possess such ability (preverbal children, or children with autism who are often claimed to be mind-blind) engage in cooperative exchanges, as the evidence suggests? Secondly, to define cooperation as the result of two de-contextualized minds reading each other’s intentions may fail to fully acknowledge the complexity of situated, interactional dynamics and the interplay of variables such as the participants’ relational and personal history and experience. In this paper we challenge such accounts of cooperation, calling for an embodied approach that sees cooperation not only as an individual attitude toward the other, but also as a property of interaction processes. Taking an enactive perspective, we argue that cooperation is an intrinsic part of any interaction, and that there can be cooperative interaction before complex communicative abilities are achieved. The issue then is not whether one is able or not to read the other’s intentions, but what it takes to participate in joint action. From this basic account, it should be possible to build up more complex forms of cooperation as needed. Addressing the study of cooperation in these terms may enhance our understanding of human social development, and foster our knowledge of different ways of engaging with others, as in the case of autism.

Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity

Abstract Drawing on a set of workplace interaction corpora, both dyadic and multiparty, we present three narrative forms departing from the established notion of storytelling. These have been called Rewindings, collaborative reconstructions of yet-unknown past events; Fictions, the creation of imaginary scenes; and Templates, condensed versions of experience providing information on unexpected outcomes or controversial occurrences. Without denying specificity to narrative discourse, we extend its definition here to the displacement of the described actions. We propose that, similarly to what is done in other social and human sciences, conversational studies ought to take into consideration the description of events that are not fully known at the onset of narration and that are partially or entirely suggested by the narrators. The study also contributes to the field of workplace studies, providing an illustration of the functioning of distributed cognition and situated knowledge by showing how narrative is a collaborative enterprise facilitating problem solving and the dissemination of competence.

A valid person: non-competence as a conversational outcome

Over the past few decades new ways of conceiving the relation between people, practices and institutions have been developed, enabling an understanding of human conduct in complex situations that is distinctive from traditional psychological and sociological conceptions.

Other Voices, Other Minds: The Use of Reported Speech in Group Therapy Talk

This study analyzes the different types and uses of direct reported speech in the context of psychotherapeutic discussions. The data are drawn from four sessions of group therapy. The participants were 6 men, doing a program of recovery from drug addiction, and a psychologist. The entire sessions have been videotaped and transcribed.