Vassiliki Markaki

Embodied orientations towards co-participants in multinational meetings

The interactional organization of meetings is an important locus of observation for understanding the way in which institutions are talked into being. This article contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on turn-taking and participation in business meetings, approached within conversation analysis in a sequential and multimodal way. On the basis of a corpus of video-recorded corporate meetings of a multinational company, in which managers coming from several European branches convene, the article takes into consideration the embodied orientations of the participants as they address each other, as they turn to particular addressees or groups in a recipient designed way while describing, informing, announcing events and results, and as they make relevant specific participants’ identities – especially national categories – and, in this way, display specific local expectations regarding rights and obligations to talk and to know.

Book review: Samia Bazzi, Arab News and Conflict: A Multi-Disciplinary Discourse Study (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture series, Volume 34). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2009. xiv + 224 pp., 115 (pbk)

alterations to speech which, unlike overt repair, are done in such a way as not to draw attention to them as corrections. They are thus recognizable only by the interactional work that is being done, which is changes in action type (e.g. from challenging negative observation to non-challenging question) and in speaker stance. The four chapters all follow a similar pattern. After providing necessary background and a general overview of the environment/function that is the focus of the chapter, Betz presents a detailed analysis of a number of instances, representing different sub-types of the function in question. The chapter then ends with a brief general discussion of the phenomenon. The final chapter of the book summarizes the findings, presents implications of the study and suggestions for further research. The bulk of the monograph is thus taken up with micro-analysis of a relatively large number of conversational fragments. While this book will clearly be most easily accessible to those with a background in CA, Betz does not assume familiarity with CA on the part of the reader, and provides what I think would be sufficient background on the environments and functions she outlines so that readers unfamiliar with the framework could follow her discussion. The book’s origin as a PhD thesis is clearly observable in its structure and organization, but this does not detract from its value. Overall, the book is a highly readable contribution to the study of grammar and interaction in German, and the detailed analysis of the phenomenon of pivot construction was so interesting that as I was reading I was itching to start searching for them in my own conversational data, to see how frequently they occur, and in what environments, in languages of Indonesia that have a much looser syntactic structure than spoken German. Additionally and importantly, as Betz points out in her closing chapter, this study provides clear evidence of the orderliness of spoken language, and of the divergence between the grammar of spoken language, exemplified by German, where pivot constructions are a coherent unit, and its written counterpart, where a construction like the pivot construction is impossible.