Johanna Rendle-Short

The Academic Presentation: Situated Talk in Action

Contents: Series preface. Transcription Conventions Introduction Transcribing video data The presentation as monologue Doing the academic presentation Showing structure within the academic presentation Doing deixis Interacting with objects Conclusion References Index.

‘I’ve got a paper-shuffler for a husband’: indexing sexuality on talk-back radio

Indicating one’s sexuality is performed regularly and easily within everyday interaction, or more specifically, on talk-back radio to thousands of Radio National listeners across Australia. Such information is not simply gleaned indirectly via contextual references; rather it is referentially or directly indexed through other-person reference to wives, husbands or partners. Analysis of 20 talk-back radio programmes shows that callers index their sexuality even when sexuality is not the topic of conversation. Of 249 callers to Radio National, 34 referred to husbands, wives and partners, with 28 of these callers indicating that they were apparently in a heterosexual relationship. The following article initially analyses the way in which callers index their heterosexuality. This is then contrasted with the way in which nonheterosexuality is indexed on talk-back radio. By so doing, it demonstrates the way in which participants, callers and hosts orient to normative heterosexuality within everyday talk.

The Address Term Mate in Australian English: Is it Still a Masculine Term?

The concepts of mate and mateship have been held up as quintessentially Australian, encapsulating all that it might mean to be Australian, including such ideas as having a fair go, camaraderie, working together. Although the address term mate (as in How ya going mate?) is generally included in discussions of mate and mateship, very little analysis of how it is actually used in Australian English has been carried out. This preliminary study focuses on the vocative use of mate through a survey of 698 respondents in which they were asked whether they use mate when addressing other people, whether they are addressed by mate, who they predominantly address as mate and whether they like mate as a term of address. The results show that there seems to be a shift in terms of how mate, as an address term, is used and understood. Whereas mate has traditionally been understood as a male solidarity term used ‘by males and for males’, this preliminary survey shows that more young women, aged between 18 and 29 years, are reporting their use of the address term mate compared to women aged over 50 years. The preliminary study seems to suggest that instead of mate being characterized as a neutral term used by men to show equality and egalitarianism, young women now see mate as a friendly and fun term that, along with many other address forms, is available to show intimacy.

A Conversation Analysis View of Communication as Jointly Accomplished Social Interaction: An Unsuccessful Proposal for a Social Visit

Conversation analysis (CA) focuses on the language, practices and competencies by which people accomplish social actions to create and understand ordinary social life. CA uses naturally occurring data, examining micro-detailed transcriptions from recordings of ordinary interactions. This paper highlights some principles, methods, and insights of CA. We consider a short segment of transcribed phone conversation in which one participant proposes a social visit to the other. We see just how the talk develops as it does, and examine the details of language-in-use that the participants themselves draw upon to construct and make sense of what it is they are doing, of what is going on. How does a ‘proposal’ for a social visit arise from a course of talk, and how is it fitted both to its recipient and to the moment it occurs? How is the proposal understood to be ‘unsuccessful’? We show how turns at talk always emerge and are understood within the rich sequential context of a developing trajectory of interaction that is jointly developed by participants. Linguists are well placed to study communication as naturally occurring talk, and such study can in turn inform linguistics by developing knowledge of the nature and use of language.

Aligning in and through interaction: Children getting in and out of spontaneous activity

Spontaneous play, important for forming the basis of friendships and peer relations, is a complex activity involving the management and production of talk-in-interaction. This article focuses on the intricacies of social interaction, emphasizing the link between alignment and affiliation, and the range and importance of verbal and nonverbal interactive devices available to children. Analysis of the way in which two girls, one of whom has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, engage in spontaneous activities demonstrates the potential for interactional difficulty due to the unscripted nature of the interaction. The article argues for further research into how improvised, unscripted interactions are initiated within moment-by-moment talk, how they unfold, and how they are brought to a close in everyday contexts in order to understand how children create their social worlds.

Speaking to Twin Children: Evidence Against the “Impoverishment” Thesis

It is often claimed that parents’ talk to twins is less rich than talk to singletons and that this delays their language development. This case study suggests that talk to twins need not be impoverished. We identify highly sophisticated ways in which a mother responds to her 4-year-old twin children, both individually and jointly, as a way of ensuring an inclusive interactional environment. She uses gaze to demonstrate concurrent recipiency in response to simultaneous competition for attention from both children, and we see how the twins constantly monitor the ongoing interaction in order to appropriately position their own contributions to talk. In conclusion, we argue for the need to take twins’ interactional abilities into account when drawing linguistic comparisons between twins and singletons. Data are in Australian English.

Ser and "Estar": Corrective Input to Children's Errors of the Spanish Copula Verbs.

Evidence for the role of corrective input as a facilitator of language acquisition is inconclusive. Studies show links between corrective input and grammatical use of some, but not other, language structures. The present study examined relationships between corrective parental input and children’s errors in the acquisition of the Spanish copula verbs ser and estar. Spontaneous speech production data from 10 Chilean children (mean age 2;6, age range 1;10–3;4) interacting with their main caretaker at home were analyzed. The study focused on whether parents provided corrective input when their children produce erroneous ser and estar forms and whether it was beneficial for children’s acquisition of the copulas. Results revealed that parental corrective input was positively linked to grammatical copula use by children, although it was not linked to the number of errors, or to the children’s age. The findings suggest that corrective input is a potential source that may constrain the grammatical acquisition of the Spanish copulas.

Dispreferred responses when texting: Delaying that ‘no’ response:

Socially, people find it difficult to say ‘no’ to requests or invitations. In spoken interaction (face-to-face), we orient to this difficulty through the design of our responses. An agreement response (preferred) is characteristically said straightaway with minimal gap between request and response. A disagreement response (dispreferred) is characteristically delayed through silence and by prefacing the disagreement turn with tokens such as ‘well’, ‘uhm’ and ‘uh’ or with accounts as to why the recipient cannot accept the request or invitation. The question for this article concerns what occurs when requests or invitations are made via texting. The results from 329 texting interactions showed that if responses to a request or invitation were delayed by more than 1 minute, it was much more likely be a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes’ response (p < 0.001). In other words, preferred responses were sent quickly; dispreferred responses were delayed. Understanding texting as social interaction is increasingly important as the range of communicative options continues to widen (e.g. Facebook, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Instant Messaging (IM), email). This study shows preference organisation similarities between spoken interaction and texting with texters orienting to social norms concerning delayed responses. Further research is needed to understand in what contexts a person might choose one communicative medium over another.

Taking an Interactional Perspective: Examining Children's Talk in the Australian Aboriginal Community of Yakanarra

Understanding how children of different ages and different cultures design and organize their talk allows us to better understand how children demonstrate intersubjectivity, how they structure their social world, and how they orient to social and cultural practices. Although researchers are beginning to re-examine interactionally some of the previous observational claims concerning adult Aboriginal conversational style, less focus has been given to Indigenous childrens interactional style. Previous observational claims concerning Aboriginal conversational style include increased toleration of silence, increased occurrence of interruptions, reluctance to respond to questions, and the tendency to enter a conversation without attending to the talk of others. One of the aims of the paper is to examine instances of childrens interaction against the backdrop of these observations concerning Aboriginal adult conversation style in order to understand how Indigenous children interact with others within the multilingual environment in which they find themselves. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper analyses the talk of two children from Yakanarra in order to show (a) how the children under analysis responded to a request to do something, and the sorts of techniques used to mobilize such a response; and (b) how the children monitored the surrounding adults’ talk occurring within the same interactional space. The analysis, presented against the backdrop of what has been observed to date concerning adult Indigenous conversational style, demonstrates the importance of examining the detail of talk, taking all aspects into account (including prosody, pauses, overlap), in order to understand how two Indigenous children living in Yakanarra interact within their social and cultural worlds.

Name-Calling by a Child with Asperger’s Syndrome

This chapter focuses on one aspect of social interaction that is directly relevant to maintaining friendship, mental health and well-being, and supportive peer relations. The single case study is of a 10-year-old child diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and her use of derogatory address terms, part of a wider pattern of behaviour evident in this child’s interaction that resulted in behaviour that might be thought of as impolite or lacking in restraint. Analysis of these derogatory naming practices throws light on how conversational participants pursue affiliation and intimacy from a perspective of language as action. The chapter contributes to understandings of the difficulty in pinpointing, with precision and with clear evidence, what counts as a ‘social interaction difficulty’ due the context-specific nature of interaction. This chapter responds to the call in the literature on children with Asperger’s syndrome for finer micro-level analysis of social behaviours in naturalistic settings with familiar peers (Macintosh & Dissanayake, 2006; Sterponi, de Kirby, & Shankey, Chapter 15, this volume).