Harrie Mazeland

Turns and discourse units in everyday conversation

Abstract Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) have described how conversationalists construct turns at speaking and how they allocate them in a systematic way. In this paper, we shall describe how certain larger projects are produced. These larger projects include stories, jokes, extended descriptions, pieces of advice, and so on, and are here called Discourse Units (DUs). We shall distinguish between Closed DUs and Open DUs. Closed DUs are activities larger than one turn-constructional unit and are accomplished by a Primary Speaker holding the floor through the course of their production. We formulate some restrictions which operate on Sacks et al.s turn-taking model when a Closed DU is being produced. Whereas closed DUs are projected as DUs from the beginning of their production, open DUs are not. They develop as a DU by virtue of negotiation on the type of conversational unit underway. That is to say, whether or not the turn will be built into a larger project is more dependent upon recipient as is the case for Closed DUs. We try to show that the recepient design of turn construction not only operates through syntactical projection of a possible completion point, but also action-sensitive devices have to be taken into account.

NEGOTIATING CATEGORIES IN TRAVEL AGENCY CALLS

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses how negotiations between a travel agency employee and her customer are realized by categorization work. It is clear from the analysis that participants, by subtly negotiating categories, collaboratively try to arrive at descriptions — and thus holiday bookings— that satisfy both parties. The scaling-up operation and the operation of attribute transfer are the two methods by which an employee and a customer collaboratively achieved transition from one category to another and, thereby, negotiated a description that could satisfy the wishes of the customer and the possibilities of the employee. The chapter describes how the sales woman tried to dislocate the customers destination to be able to offer her a trip. To be able to realize this dislocation, the sales woman had to scale up the target region of the customers destination. By means of the scaling-up operation the, sales woman could realize the transition to another category out of the collection of city names.

Responding to the Double Implication of Telemarketers’ Opinion Queries

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.

Kodierentscheidungen. Zur Kontrolle interpretativer Prozesse bei der Kommunikationsanalyse

Viele Verfahren zur Analyse von Kommunikation uberfuhren die untersuchte kommunikative Wirklichkeit in mehreren typischen Schritten in ›Daten‹, die ihrerseits nach verschiedenen mesbaren Verfahren einer Auswertung unterzogen werden konnen; aus den Ergebnissen der Auswertung erfolgen Anweisungen oder Empfehlungen fur die Umgestaltung der Praxis.[2] Der Applikation ›analytischer Begriffe‹ auf die kommunikative Wirklichkeit, gleichgultig, unter welcher theoretischen Konzeption, kommt in einem solchen Prozes der wissenschaftlichen Erforschung von Kommunikation eine zentrale, jedoch wenig geklarte Rolle zu.

Die Kontextualität minimaler Redeannahmen im Arzt-Patient-Diskurs

Ausgangspunkt der Analyse ist die Beobachtung, das nee in Nicht-Antwort-Positionen spezifische sequentielle Funktionen erfullt, jeweils abhangig davon, ob die vorausgehende Auserung ebenfalls eine Negationsmarkierung enthalt oder nicht. Weil diese Ergebnisse interessante Moglichkeiten hinsichtlich der Beziehung zwischen den lexikalischen Eigenschaften unterschiedlicher Typen von Redeannahmen und der Auserung, auf die sie sich beziehen, aufzeigen, untersuche ich in einem nachsten Schritt, ob ja-Empfange eine vergleichbare Korrespondenz herstellen konnen. Aufgrund dieser Beschreibung versuche ich schlieslich, einige Merkmale von mhm-Rezeptionen kontrastiv herauszuarbeiten — insbesondere im Hinblick auf einige Verwendungsweisen dieser Form im Arzt-Patient-Diskurs.

Pragmatic Aspects of the Use of Pronouns in Wh-Questions

Abstract. This paper focuses on the ways Dutch speakers use pronouns in order to refer to the topic entity of wh-questions. It appears that, when they have the choice between a third-person pronoun or a demonstrative pronoun, they prefer the latter; however, in the answers given to wh-questions, the same discourse entity is normally referred to by means of a third-person pronoun. This phenomenon is usually accounted for by the recency principle, which predicts that a speaker accomplishes topical continuity by using a third-person pronoun. However, even when a discourse entity was already thematic over a long stretch of talk, speakers normally refer to it by means of a demontrative pronoun if it is the topic of a wh-question. Therefore, it is argued that the sequential function of the utterance as a whole may govern the selection of the coding devices through which reference is made to discourse entitites. This hypothesis would explain why the topic entity of a reported wh-question is usually referred to by means of a third-person pronoun.