Jack Sidnell

Introduction: Multimodal interaction

Abstract That human social interaction involves the intertwined cooperation of different modalities is uncontroversial. Researchers in several allied fields have, however, only recently begun to document the precise ways in which talk, gesture, gaze, and aspects of the material surround are brought together to form coherent courses of action. The papers in this volume are attempts to develop this line of inquiry. Although the authors draw on a range of analytic, theoretical, and methodological traditions (conversation analysis, ethnography, distributed cognition, and workplace studies), all are concerned to explore and illuminate the inherently multimodal character of social interaction. Recent studies, including those collected in this volume, suggest that different modalities work together not only to elaborate the semantic content of talk but also to constitute coherent courses of action. In this introduction we present evidence for this position. We begin by reviewing some select literature focusing primarily on communicative functions and interactive organizations of specific modalities before turning to consider the integration of distinct modalities in interaction.

Coordinating Gesture, Talk, and Gaze in Reenactments

In this article, I examine the coordination of talk, gaze, and gesture in the production of reenactments in conversation. Reenactments involve re-presentations or depictions and are thus distinct from tellings, which are primarily descriptive. A basic question I address concerns how recipients are able to parse a larger telling into those parts of it that narrate or tell about the events being described and those that reenact them. Analysis of several instances suggests that speaker gaze plays a crucial role in this respect. I discuss the relation between reenactments and direct quotation (Holt, 2000) and demonstration (Clark & Gerrig, 1990) as well as the significance of the analysis for current understanding of multimodality in interaction.

Language Diversity and Social Action A Third Locus of Linguistic Relativity

The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape the contexts produced in speaking that language. In this article, we propose a third locus of linguistic relativity. Our argument is based on recent work in conversation analysis that has shown how the resources of a given language provide the tools for accomplishing basic actions in interaction. To develop our argument, we consider the way in which the resources of three different languages (Caribbean English Creole, Finnish, and Lao) are deployed by speakers to agree with a prior assessment while at the same time claiming greater epistemic authority over the matter assessed. Our case study indicates that the language-specific tools used to accomplish this action (the lexicogrammatical resources) introduce collateral effects and in this way give the action a local spin or inflection.

Conversation analysis : comparative perspectives

Acknowledgements. Transcription Conventions. 1 Talk. 2 Methods. 3 Turn-Taking. 4 Action and Understanding. 5 Preference. 6 Sequence. 7 Repair. 8 Turn Construction. 9 Stories. 10 Openings and Closings. 11 Topic. 12 Context. 13 Conclusion. References. Index.Introduction 1. Comparative perspectives in conversation analysis Jack Sidnell Part I. Repair and Beyond: 2. Repetition in the initiation of repair Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu 3. The site of initiation in same turn self repair Barbara Fox, Fay Wouk, Makoto Hayashi, Steven Fincke, Liang Tao, Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Minna Laakso and Wilfrido Flores Hernandez 4. Repairing reference Maria Egbert, Andrea Golato and Jeffrey D. Robinson Part II. Aspects of Response: 5. Projecting non-alignment in conversation Anna Lindstroem 6. Answers to inapposite inquiries Trine Heinemann 7. Gaze, questioning and culture Federico Rossano, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson 8. Negotiating boundaries in talk Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-eun Yoon Part III. Action Formation and Sequencing: 9. Alternative responses to assessments Marja-Leena Sorjonen and Auli Hakulinen 10. Language-specific resources in repair and asessments Jack Sidnell 11. Implementing delayed actions Galina B. Bolden Conclusion: 12. Commentary Emanuel Schegloff.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we “repair” and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute – anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology – this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

There’s Risks in Everything: Extreme-Case Formulations and Accountability in Inquiry Testimony

Drawing on the video record of a recent inquiry into the causes of water contamination in a small town in Ontario, Canada, this article presents an analysis of evasive strategies. The analysis focuses on the use of ‘extreme case formulations’ such as ‘there’s risks in everything’ and ‘every meeting of Cabinet or Cabinet Committee is important’ (Pomerantz, 1986; Sacks, 1995). Within the context of inquiry testimony, such formulations allowed the thenpremier of Ontario to avoid having to account for possibly blameworthy actions.

Declaratives, Questioning, Defeasibility

Synthesizing much of the work he and colleagues have done over the past 10 years or so, in the two articles collected in this volume Heritage gives us a dynamic sociology of knowledge that recognizes not only the centrality of social interaction but, moreover, the crucial role that knowledge asymmetries play in its organization. Schütz (1964) wrote “Knowledge is socially distributed and the mechanism of this distribution can be made the subject matter of a sociological discipline.” (p. 121). I take it that Heritage would agree with this but would suggest that it is the “interactional consequences” rather than the “mechanism” that should draw the attention of conversation analysts and other scholars of language and social interaction. In the first article Heritage (2012b/this issue) shows that participants rely on an understanding of “epistemic status”—a presumed-to-be-preexisting distribution of knowledge and knowledge rights—in discerning what “action” a given turn is meant to accomplish. In the second article, Heritage (2012a/this issue) shows that turns that index knowledge asymmetries or imbalances routinely drive both adjacency pair sequences and their expansions. Relatedly, talk that indexes knowledge symmetry engenders topic attrition and eventual closure. Taken together, these articles show that participants in interaction maintain a detailed “scorecard” or “ticker” of who knows what not simply as a means to outdo one another (though there is evidence for that as well) but more fundamentally as a prerequisite to understanding what the other is up to. In order to competently participate in conversation, a person not only needs to know something (in order to have something to say, for instance) but moreover must be ever attentive to what others know (or don’t know) as this will shape both the production of her own talk and her interpretation of the talk of others. Over the course of the two articles, Heritage develops a “systematics” of the kind Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) provided for turn taking. Just as the turn-taking article allowed subsequent researchers to see a whole range of phenomena that would have been invisible without it (e.g., rush-throughs, pivots, trail-offs, and the various interactional work accomplished through them), so too, these articles should open a wide variety of phenomena for future investigation—indeed, if epistemics was previously uncharted territory, these articles provide

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Conversational repair and human understanding: an introduction

Any serious effort to contend with the real time production and understanding of human actions in everyday interaction can scarcely avoid noting that they are characterized by the routine occurrence of troubles, “hitches,” misunderstandings, “errors,” and other infelicities. Indeed, these phenomena – and participants’ efforts to contend with them – are so ubiquitous that very few approaches within the human and social sciences have avoided commenting on, or contending with them, in some way. In many approaches within the social sciences, researchers looked past these phenomena altogether, treating them as epiphenomenal to the proper object of study (however that is defined) or as matters to be reduced, remedied, or otherwise overcome. More recently approaches from various disciplines have recognized their import in different ways, thereby raising the more nettlesome issue of just what is to be done with them or what can be done with them. Here, approaches vary considerably: some have simply incorporated these phenomena into the larger domain of human conduct being investigated (whether it is the psyche in psychology, ritual and culture in anthropology, or social structure in sociology), conflating a range of matters that are more profitably treated as distinct from one another. In many such cases, however, scholars interested in learning about the mind, self, language, society, and culture have treated these phenomena as special – as even more informative than other types of conduct. For these approaches the ubiquity of such troubles (and their management) makes them especially attractive since their occurrence in the stream of conduct impacts on virtually every aspect of it. The perception that such troubles are special derives from a belief that they entail (or reveal) an authenticity obscured by more “practiced” behavior, or that they offer a window into the mind, or the depths of personhood, identity, and social relations, otherwise obscured by socialization, experience, or politeness. In these respects we might say that such approaches “exploit” such troubles insofar as they are not interested in them as such, but for how the apparently “unpracticed” character of such hitches, or the apparently revealing character of errors and the like, has

Proposals for Activity Collaboration

ABSTRACT This article examines two common ways that speakers propose a new joint activity—“Let’s X” and “How about X”—in an examination of video recordings of children playing. Whereas Let’s constructions treat the proposed activity as disjunctive with the prior, How about constructions treat the proposed activity as modifying the ongoing activity. We rely on distributional as well as turn-design evidence including phonetic and bodily resources of turn design. We also analyze deviant cases where we argue that speakers are working to either increase or decrease the distance between the new activity and the prior activity. Data are in Canadian English.

The problem of peers in Vietnamese interaction

In Vietnamese, address (second-person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin term regardless of whether the talks recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin terms encode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are no reciprocal terms akin to English ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; rather, a speaker must select between terms such as ‘older brother’ (anh) or ‘younger sibling’ (em). Since generation is normatively associated with a difference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address. This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and also self-refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system and thus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use of true pronouns in address and self-reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self-reference; (3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self-reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms in address. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self-reference, by showing how speakers deconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggest that although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differences of status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.