Per Linell

Discourse across boundaries : On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse

Discourse across boundaries : On recontextualizations and the blending of voices in professional discourse

Moving in and out of framings: activity contexts in talks with young unemployed people within a training project

This paper is concerned with talk activities in and through which parties simulate another talk activity. Data are drawn from a social and vocational training project for young unemployed people involving talk activities of multiple ambiguous kinds. In particular, we analyze simulated job interviews in which the young people are supposed to learn how to behave in real job interviews, but the parties seem to orient to several other goals simultaneously. Participants do not sustain a unified definition of what is going on and activities involve complexities and hybridities on several planes. This allows us to probe issues having to do with concepts like context, frame, activity type, and genre. In terms of theory, we challenge some approaches to context as developed within Conversation Analysis.

Expert Talk in Medical Contexts: Explicit and Implicit Orientation to Risks

In medical contexts, parties often have reasons to focus on risks: risks of developing diseases or of having children with congenital diseases, risks involved in taking drugs or in using a particular type of therapy, and so forth. In such risk-implicative contexts, doctors and nurses deal with the risk topics sometimes directly, at other times quite indirectly. In this article, we discuss results from studying 5 different health care contexts. We discuss contextual factors that might account for some of the considerable differences in risk talk. Our claim is that the different explicit versus implicit orientations are linked to where and how the different health care experts position themselvesvis-á-vis scientific risk formulations and everyday risk perceptions. Our data on the implicit orientations to risk cast doubt on theories of discourse that would hold that all relevant understandings in discourse are made verbally manifest.

The Courtroom Hearing as a Middle Ground: Speech Accommodation by Lawyers and Defendants

A criminal court trial may be characterised in terms of interactional asymmetry and by largely conflicting goals and interests on the part of the principal actors. It is also an arena where different linguistic varieties and modes of interaction meet. In this paper, we analyse Swedish court hearings as a middle ground where actors, defendants as well as legal professionals, attenuate a number of differences in their respective discourse styles, e.g. as regards vocabulary and information density. Despite what defendants claim in interviews, they themselves attenuate their colloquial jargons when they speak to judges and lawyers in courts. At the other side, legal professionals routinely change their language considerably as they move from the monological phases of the trials to the rather informal dialogical phases (hearings), in which they directly interact with defendants. Furthermore, professionals are also shown to accommodate to the linguistic styles of individual defendants (as regards level of information density). Results are interpreted in terms of speech accommodation theory and provide support for the validity of the theory for authentic interaction in real social life.

Episodes: coding and analyzing coherence in multiparty conversation

Episodes in Conversatum are topically and interactionally defined. They are boundaried sequences at a structually intermediate level, that is, above the level of utterance/turn but below that of th ...

Discourse of blame. Courtroom construction of social reality from the perspective of the defendant.

Discourse of blame. Courtroom construction of social reality from the perspective of the defendant.

Dialogical Tensions: On Rommetveitian Themes of Minds, Meanings, Monologues, and Languages

A persistent theme1 in most of Ragnar Rommetveit’s writings has been his wish for a “social–cognitive” integration of different approaches to human action, cognition, and communication—on the one hand, more cognitively oriented, representational–computational approaches to human cognition and communication, and, on the other hand, a hermeneutic-dialogical paradigm that stresses the dynamic and interactive nature of the individual mind as embedded within a cultural collectivity (e.g., Rommetveit, 1983, 1992, 1998). To a large part, these two epistemologies represent natural science explanation and humanistic understanding of man, respectively (Rommetveit, 1998, p. 215). If there is a desire for integration or reconciliation between these perspectives, there is also, in Rommetveit’s work, a clear preference for the latter perspective, that is, a dialogically based approach to language and mind (Rommetveit 1990, 1992, 1998), something that may seem to exclude the integration desired. If all this, taken together, represents a tension or oscillation between two different stances, it is rather typical for dialogism more generally (Linell, 1998; Marková, in press; Heen Wold, 1992a, 1992b); the tension between, on the one hand, dialogism as the only overall epistemological framework, and, on the other hand, the acknowledgment of monologues and dialogues as both existing (and interacting) in a dialogically constituted world. In this essay, I elaborate on this as the “big” tension in dialogism, but I also discuss some other ambivalences in the work of Rommetveit and other dialogists.2 In the course of my journey across some Rommetveitian themes, stories, tropes, and metonymies, I comment on four issues in particular: (a) the so-called double dialogicality as applied to the partial sharedness of meaning, (b) double dialogicality in relation to the roles of the concrete other and the generalized other, (c) the place of praxis in relation to the situational versus sociocultural dimensions of sense making, and (d) the place of monologue and monologism within dialogism. My approach is thoroughly dependent on Rommetveit’s insights (and the same MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 10(3), 219–229 Copyright

Admission of guilt as a communicative project in judicial settings

Abstract Admitting, or denying, that one has done something is a prototypical example of a so-called speech act (Searle 1969, 1975). Searle conceives of speech acts as doings by individual speakers. For example, admitting guilt would be something enacted by one single-person, the perpetrator, who thereby assumes responsibility for a particular, possibly unlawful, action performed in the past. In this paper, we will look at data from two judicial contexts, criminal court trials and police interrogations, in which admissions (and denials) obviously constitute significant, and institutionalized, elements. In opposition to speech-act theory, we will demonstrate that admissions or denials of guilt are communicative acts, performed in collaboration between two parties, i.e. the professional interviewer (judge or police officer) and the person, defendant or suspect, who allegedly had to admit or deny responsibility for a criminal action. In a comprehensive corpus (70 court trials and 30 police interrogations) we will study the sociolinguistic variation in the communicative acts involved.

Routinization and Sensitivity: Interaction in Oncological Follow-Up Consultations

The empirical data of this study were gathered in the form of audio-taped recordings of dialogues between 21 patients, who had had operations for testicular cancer and three physicians during follow-up consultations. The aim is to inquire into how routine practices affect the goals of checking up the medical conditions and providing patients with reassurance, and how practices affect the treatment of sensitive topics and the patients’ possibilities of bringing up their own problems are affected. The results show that the routines built up by the medical care programme are used as recurrent opportunities for the parties to confirm that the situation is under control and as resources when they talk about the sensitive topics of sexuality and fertility. How the routinization affected the patients’ possibilities of bringing up their own problems cannot be fully determined. Of the 50 initiatives by patients to present their problems, only nine did so solely on their own initiative.

NEGOTIATING TERMS IN SOCIAL WELFARE OFFICE TALK

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the work of street-level bureaucrats in their dealings with clients seeking social welfare subsidies. It also focuses on how people use language to handle problems of immediate concern to them, in the micropolitics of sorting out social problems in dialogues between social workers and their clients at social welfare offices. To negotiate is to confer with view to compromise or agreement. It involves some sort of interaction with the goal of reaching some kind of a deal. Almost any kind of verbal interaction, in speaking or through the exchange of written texts, amounts to doing work in and through language, and this can be called negotiating. However, there are cases where the concept of negotiation is used in a more significant sense. These might involve diplomacy, business, employer-employee negotiations, and many kinds of institutional interaction such as court trials, police interrogations, job interviews, doctor consultations, social welfare office talk etc.