Trine Heinemann

Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

Addressing epistemic incongruency in question-answer sequences through the use of epistemic adverbs.

Addressing epistemic incongruency in question-answer sequences through the use of epistemic adverbs.

Realization as a Device for Remedying Problems of Affiliation in Interaction

This article investigates the use of the Danish response token nåja in naturally occurring conversation. The article shows that nåja functions as a change-of-state token with which a speaker claims to have just now realized matters relevant for the prior talk. Whether caused by the speakers recollection, recognition, or understanding of relevant matters, the realization token functions as a claim that (a) there were problems in the speakers prior turns due to her lack of understanding, and (b) that these problems are now solved due to a change in the speakers epistemic access. The realization token can therefore be used to remedy prior turns that are potentially or actually disaffiliative in a way that minimally involves questions of character or relationship.

Good Enough: Low-Grade Assessments in Caregiving Situations

Drawing on prior research on how the sequential negotiation of upgrades and downgrades in the intensity of assessment terms are used to display agreement, make epistemic claims, or segment courses of action, this study explores low- and high-grade assessments in domiciliary elderly care in Denmark and Sweden. The data consist of video recordings of home visits where home help providers assist senior citizens with personal hygiene and domestic tasks. Low- and high-grade assessments are differentially distributed in this data. Low-grade assessments are routinely used to achieve closure of a practical task performed by the home helper on behalf of the senior citizen. High-grade assessments are rare, and they are specifically not used in sequences that target the services rendered by the home helper. Our analysis of assessments in sequences that achieve task closure reveals an interactional metric where “good enough” rather than excellent (or awful) is oriented to as the benchmark for evaluation of task outcome. This finding contrasts with prior research on ordinary conversation, which has shown that assessments tend to be upgraded in intensity over the course of the sequence.

Collaborating to restrict: a conversation analytic perspective on collaboration in design

This paper applies a conversation analytic perspective to illustrate how workshop participants collaboratively introduce design restrictions. Whilst many workshop activities are grounded in the (noble) ideology of democracy and equality that underlies the Scandinavian tradition of participatory design and participatory innovation, we demonstrate how such ideal(s) can be overridden in practice, because participants orient to a more general, interactional social order in which the preference for agreement and progressivity prevails. The paper will illustrate how collaboration, from the perspective of the participants in workshops, is thus not about ensuring that everyone contributes equally, but is rather focused on avoiding disagreement and maintaining progressivity within the activity engaged in. In turn, we argue that this orientation by the participants has a restricting effect on the possibility of exploring design alternatives in workshops that are otherwise, on ideological grounds, designed to accomplish exactly that.

Getting the point: The role of gesture in managing intersubjectivity in a design activity

Abstract This paper illustrates the complexity of pointing as it is employed in a design workshop. Using the method of interaction analysis, we argue that pointing is not merely employed to index, locate, or fix reference to an object. It also constitutes a practice for reestablishing intersubjectivity and solving interactional trouble such as misunderstandings or disagreements by virtue of enlisting something as part of the participants’ shared experience. We use this analysis to discuss implications for how such practices might be supported with computer mediation, arguing for a “bricolage” approach to systems development that emphasizes the provision of resources for users to collaboratively negotiate the accomplishment of intersubjectivity rather than systems that try to support pointing as a specific gestural action.

Registering revision: The reduplicated Danish change-of-state token nå

Reduplication is a phenomenon that can be applied to various linguistic units. In this article, I determine what action the reduplication of the Danish change-of-state token nå accomplishes in interaction. Following previous research on reduplication and using the method of Conversation Analysis, I show that reduplicated nå serves to register that the previous turn at talk implemented a larger course of action, namely that of revision.

Throwing the baby out with the bath water? Commentary on the criticism of the ‘Epistemic Program’:

It is timely and important that new developments in conversation analysis (CA) become the subject of principled debate. John Heritage’s recent papers on the role of epistemics constitute one such development, and by re-analysing excerpts from this work, the articles in this Special Issue reveal some significant problems with a programmatic approach to epistemics. This commentary agrees with the critics that there are dangers in an overemphasis on epistemics and in using isolated utterances and proposing abstract scales and terms. But the commentary also warns against totally rejecting epistemics as a domain of inquiry in CA and points to places where the critics exaggerate their criticisms in a way that makes them unnecessarily hostile.

Opening Up Codings

We welcome Tanya Stivers’s discussion (Stivers, 2015/this issue) of coding social interaction and find that her descriptions of the processes of coding open up important avenues for discussion, among other things of the precise ad hoc considerations that researchers need to bear in mind, both when doing formal coding and when doing more “traditional” conversation analysis research based on collections. We are more wary, however, of the implication that coding-based research is the end result of a process that starts with qualitative investigations and ends with categories that can be coded. Instead we propose that the promise of coding-based research lies in its ability to open up new qualitative questions.

The Alignment of Manual and Verbal Displays in Requests for the Repair of an Object

In this study we explore request sequences at an American shoe repair shop. We investigate the methods through which customers at the shop present objects for repair or alteration, focusing on the fine interplay between their verbal requests and their manual manipulation of these objects. Our analysis shows that customers coming to the shoe repair shop enact an epistemic stance toward the object they have brought in for repair. We argue that the verbal utterances and manual manipulations are fitted to one another with regard to the epistemic stance individual customers display: Customers whose requests are formulated, for instance, as problem descriptions or as inquiries into the repairability of an object manipulate the object only very minimally, if at all; whereas customers whose requests are formulated as solution specifications manipulate the object in ways that also evidence the problem and/or its solution. The data are in American English.